Page 46 of Heart’s Rescue

And I had wanted it. Hadn’t I? Wasn’t that what I was supposed to want, the role I was born to fulfill? I wanted to marry the prince; ergo, I wanted to be on my back in the royal garden gritting my teeth against the rocks jabbing my shoulder blades while the prince, his pants around his ankles, dripped sweat onto my face.

But I’d never actually asked for it. Not once had I been the first to kiss the prince, the first to move my body toward him. I’d never refused his advances, of course, but it had also never occurred to me that I might actually want them. I’d thought all the tavern songs about the innkeeper’s lusty daughter or the merry widow on Main Street were absurdist fantasy, or that I was too far above those singers and songs to ever feel something so coarse as lust.

I hadn’t known I could burn like this.

I bury my face in the fur and ball my hands into fists. Rowan's scent rises all around me, cutting through me like a knife until my entire body is hot and desperate. You don’t want this, he’d said. But what did he know about what I wanted?

Stars, what did I know about what I wanted?

Snow crunches in the distance. I roll over onto my side and pretend to sleep while the footsteps grow closer. There’s a huff of breath and the sound of dry wood snapping. Then the click and hiss of a striker hitting flint, and finally the snap of flames emerging from within dry wood. Rowan stomps off again; I roll over and watch through slitted eyes as he treks back and forth, collecting wood, pulling things from his massive pack, and spreading the canvas shelter onto the snow. He doesn’t turn toward me until the shelter is up, his pack is inside, and the fire he’d built is crackling merrily through the shelter’s open door.

“Arryn?” Rowan’s voice is soft, almost apologetic.

I wait a moment before stretching my arms over my head and blinking my eyes open.

“Mmmm?” I purr, as though I’d been sleeping this whole time.

Rowan looks at the snow under his feet. His cheeks are tinged with pink. He unfastens the cloak around his shoulders, and some traitorous part of me is disappointed to realize he’d covered his bare skin with a shirt. Without looking at me, he tosses his cloak onto the sleeping roll.

“The shelter’s ready,” Rowan says. “It’ll be warmer in there. Do you think you’re able to walk?”

Unfortunately, my indignant huff sounds more like a sneeze. I sit up, wrap Rowan’s cloak around me, and slowly extract myself from the sleeping pad. The air outside is so cold that for a moment it feels like I’d been dropped back into the river. I’m shivering by the time I shove my feet into the boots Rowan gave me back at his house, which are like blocks of ice after my little adventure in the river, and then crawl into the shelter. Rowan drags the sleeping roll after me, spreads it out by the fire, and then pointedly crawls back out the way he came in, leaving me alone in the little canvas structure.

He’s hung our wet clothes on the shelter’s ropes, dividing the small space in nonsensical, claustrophobic ways. There’s a pot nestled in the fire; the steam curling up from beneath its lid smells far better than it has any right to smell. I collapse on the bedroll, exhausted in a way I would have found difficult to believe just a few days ago. Rowan clears his throat from the other side of the canvas.

“May I come in?” he asks.

I look down at myself. My hair hangs in damp tangles down the front of Rowan's cloak. The rest of my clothes, or at least the clothes Rowan had given me an entire lifetime ago, are steaming and dripping on the snow around me. I briefly consider trying to pull them on and then, shivering, immediately dismiss the idea. Instead, I unfasten the cloak, fold it neatly, and burrow back into the sleeping roll, my bare skin whispering against fur that still smells like Rowan.

“I’m ready,” I call.

I’ve never been ready for a man before but, stars help me, I’m ready for the man who makes me laugh and looks at me like he actually wants to hear what I have to say. This man who showed me mercy, not just once, but again and again. This man who’s risking his own life to drag me through the frozen wilderness just to bring me home.

Rowan crawls through the shelter door and then tugs it closed behind him. He doesn’t even look at me as he pulls out two bowls and then begins to talk quietly about how Phaedron dries meat and vegetables for trips like this. Finally, he sets a steaming bowl of stew on the snow in front of the sleeping roll, careful not to touch me. Careful not to look at me. My heart sinks inside the cage of my ribs.

I might be ready for the first time in my life, but clearly, Rowan is not.