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I really was an idiot. When he’d carved that flower into his vakta on Halloween, he’d glanced at the ink on my arms and I’d kind of thought...
I’d thought it maybe had something to do with me. That at the very least he’d maybe gotten inspo from my tattoos or something.
God help me, I moaned internally. Am I a narcissist? The dude is so homesick he even misses the flowers he used to hate and I somehow managed to turn it into something about me.
And then I had kissed him. When he most definitely didn’t want it.
“I’m sorry, Dalk,” I said suddenly, my cheeks and eyes so hot I could barely see. “About the New Year’s Eve thing. I never should have kissed you.”
“What?”
Dalk had lapsed into silence, seeming to be mostly lost in his own thoughts during the pause in our conversation. But at my words his gaze cut back to me like a knife.
“It was a mistake,” I said quickly. “I’m really sorry. That won’t happen again.”
Jesus Christ on a cracker. I wanted to melt into the fucking floor. Instead, I just kept on walking. Dalk stalked beside me in furious silence, and when I dared a glance his way, I found his dark brows heavy over his eyes as he stared straight ahead, tension bunched along his shoulders and tail. Some raw, unnamed emotion poured off of him in poisonous waves that made me want to run and hide.
Bloody hell, I thought miserably as we finally caught up to the others and strode into the vast, open hall. I have really fucked this up.
CHAPTER THREE
Dalk
Skin me alive and feed me to a krixel, I thought sullenly, glowering as Fiona rejoined the other new women and began handing out the rest of the Valentine’s Day cards. Somewhere with her, I have stumbled.
Maybe it was when I literally stumbled just now. Or, rather, when I nearly ran full-tilt into a blasted boulder. I’d been bemoaning the state of the Deep Sky men’s brains and then I tried to walk right through a solid wall. If Gahn Fallo had seen me – one of his finest warriors! – behaving with such foolish incompetence, then no doubt he would have doled out some inventive and deeply unpleasant punishment for me.
I wished it had been Gahn Fallo who’d seen it instead of her.
Anything my Gahn came up with would not be half so bad as humiliating myself in front of a soft, pretty female with eyes like sun-warmed rocks in pools of Lavrika’s blood and flowers on her skin.
No punishment could make me feel the way Fiona just did when she told me kissing me had been a mistake.
Maybe it wasn’t walking into that absurdly-placed, hateful chunk of rock at all. Maybe I’d done something wrong at the very moment of the kiss. Maybe I’d... put my lips against hers wrong. Maybe one of my fangs had poked her. Maybe I tasted too much like that disgusting pee-tzaw. Although, I rather thought that should have been a point in my favour, considering she seemed to love the abhorrent stuff.
Maybe it wasn’t the pee-tzaw at all. Maybe I just tasted bad.
What did a Sea Sand male taste like to a new woman?
What had I tasted like to her?
Her tongue hadn’t even touched my lips, though. Perhaps it was not taste at all but smell. Or feel.
Did it feel bad to touch her mouth to mine?
“What is wrong with you? You look like you want to hurl somebody off that ledge,” Oxriel remarked, sidling up next to me.
“Unless you want to be the one falling to your death,” I muttered blackly back at him, “then you will tie your tongues together and be silent.”
No doubt sensing himself in imminently mortal danger, Oxriel left me to my own unspooling thoughts. I ate a little of the Deep Sky meat, though I barely tasted it. Mostly, I watched Fiona as she handed out more pay-pur hearts with her friends, many of them going with a smile to Deep Sky men whom I thought very, very hard about skewering with my blades.
I was a strong male. A warrior of will. I could control myself. I would not kill a man just for accepting a gift from her...
Probably.
Oxriel was right. Now I really was thinking about hurling men right out of the hall. There was no guard wall, just dawn-spangled, temptingly open air beyond this space. Outside, the other mountains gleamed, the deep blue of them glazed with morning sunshine.
It was not long before the morning meal was done and most of the pay-pur hearts had been handed out. The rest, I heard Tilly say to Zakkar, were for Gahn Thaleo’s tribe.
