Page 73 of Heartbreak Prince

His eyes roll up. “Oh, that’s perfect. Call me something else. Something naughty.”

Instead, I storm out of the room and shut the door. I return to the lean-to under pretense of checking the laundry on the line, but in reality I need to cool my flaming cheeks. I stand there trying not to picture Vawn’s cock throbbing against his palm, spilling a pearly mess of cum into his pants. Trying to ignore the answering throb against the snug inseam of my own pants.

This is what I get for depriving myself of sex for most of my final year at the Academy, and only indulging in quick trysts before that. Now that I slipped a little with Vawn, I’ve got a taste for slow, luxurious sex. His addiction to pleasure is infecting me.

After a few minutes, I go back inside and assist Gwin’s oldest daughter with the baking for the next hour. By the time we’re done, the light from the front windows has dimmed and changed color. Sunset is approaching.

I keep stealing glances at Gwin as she pores over the weave of the carpet. It looks finished to me, but she is still looping threads around its edge, perhaps reinforcing it against further damage. Her fingers are trembling, perhaps from exhaustion.

“Nearly done?” I ask.

“Yes.” She looks up with a smile. “Thank you for all your help today. If I might ask you for one last favor while I complete the final trim stitches?”

“Of course.”

“At the end of the lane, there’s a woodpile we share with three other homes. The men of those families have been so kind to let us partake in their supply since my husband’s death. If you could take the little wheelbarrow by the front gate and fetch one load of firewood, I would be so grateful. By the time you return, your carpet will be finished, and you can be on your way.”

An errand that will take me out of the house, away from Vawn? I scan her face, looking for anything out of place. She gives me a faint smile.

“It’s a difficult job for the children,” she says. “And my back has been sore lately… but you’ve done so much for us already. I’m sorry to ask.”

It feels cruel to deny her, and I have no good reason to refuse. As long as I’m quick about it and I alert Vawn to my temporary absence, it should be fine. It’s only the end of the lane. I’ll have a clear view of the cottage from there. If anyone enters it, I’ll spot them, and I can run back.

“I’ll let my brother know where I’m going,” I say. “And I’ll take the vial along with me. You’ll receive your payment when I return.”

She throws me an uncertain glance. “Take care that the vial isn’t broken.”

I want to tell her that if it didn’t break during the slide out of the mountain, or during our encounters with the spidermaws and wimmets, it certainly won’t break when I’m fetching firewood. But I simply say, “I’ll be careful,” and I head for the back bedroom.

Vawn is belly-down on the floor, shirtless, raising and lowering his body in a slow, purposeful rhythm. The exercise makes every muscle of his arms more defined.

“The carpet is almost ready,” I tell him. “Gwin wants me to fetch some firewood, and after that we can leave.”

Vawn leaps to his feet with a taut grace that makes my stomach flutter. His skin is coated with a light sheen of sweat. “You want to leave this evening and fly over the Red Mountains in the dark? Shouldn’t we stay one more night and leave in the morning?”

“I can’t explain it, but I have this feeling that we need to go. We should get out of here as soon as possible.”

He nods, tossing his hair back from his face. “Very well. I’m going to do another twenty-five of these, and then I’ll get ready.”

Part of me wants to linger and watch, but instead I buckle on my belt, checking on my knives and the glyph paint vial. Then I head back to the front room, grab my cloak from the chair where I left it earlier, and leave the house by the front door.

Wind ruffles my short hair, but it doesn’t have the teeth that it had yesterday. If the breeze weren’t so strong, it might even be too warm for the cloak. Down in the canyon the air is probably even warmer. The blood ivy will have soaked up all the heat of the sun, and it will release it slowly during the first part of the night, turning the floor of the canyon humid and luminous.

I knock wet clumps of snow off the wheelbarrow and shove it onto the lane, trundling it through mud, pebbles, and slush. At the end of the lane, past a few more cottages, stands a shelter, just half a dozen posts and a roof, erected to shield stacks of firewood from the elements. The ground slopes upward from there, rocky and jagged, rising to the lip of the canyon. Along its edge march rows of priest pines, a type of evergreen, the only tree in this region that is immune to the ravages of blood ivy. And above the pines, the mountain keeps rising, a towering heap against the gold and pink of the sunset sky.

Before I reach the shed, I turn around and scan my surroundings carefully, from the steep slope of the lane to the blue shadows of the cottages. All is quiet and still, except for another family’s laundry fluttering from their own clothesline and a handful of chickens strutting and pecking in a small yard. There’s not a single threat that I can see. No one skulking along the lane toward Gwin’s house, no one trudging through the remaining snow toward her back door.

By all appearances, we are safe.

But I can’t get my nerves to settle. I’m desperate to get on the carpet and leave this place. The faster I finish this chore, the sooner we can do that.

I set the wheelbarrow down in front of the woodshed and begin taking split logs from the lowest stack.

The weight hits me from above, brutal and bone-crushing. A man’s big body, crashing down on me from the roof of the shed with such force that I feel one of my ribs crack when I hit the ground.

He sits on my back, pressing my face into the muddy slush while I thrash and struggle. I can’t scream aloud, but inwardly I’m shrieking abuse at myself for not realizing that our pursuers might not target Vawn first. It never entered my mind that they would lie in wait for me.

I was so stupid not to anticipate this. So stupid…