in spite of it all. Here, have a sandwich. They’re safe, I promise. My aunt made them. I had nothing to do with it, except getting interrogated while she sliced the bread.”
Deven wasn’t even sure what he’d said to get his aunt to leave him be and let him go before he was late. He had the sinking suspicion he might have given away more than he liked, even though he’d told her the barest minimum he could manage about Fiora.
Fiora took a delicate bite of his sandwich, and his eyebrows went up. His next bite was more of a ravenous gulp, and the rest of the sandwich disappeared. He washed it down with a small sip of the ale, and immediately reached for another sandwich.
Deven grinned and followed suit, and the sandwiches vanished in minutes.
Why had he never lain in grass before? It was glorious. Soft beneath his back, but textured in his idly shifting fingers. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the whole clearing lay in deep, blissfully cool shade. The sky spread above him like a translucent canopy, endlessly pure and clean.
Gazing at it had the added benefit of taking Fiora’s eyes away from Deven’s nearly-naked body.
“Did my books ever get there last night?” Deven asked, interrupting a silence that had stretched, uninterrupted but for the stream’s bright babbling and a few cranky squirrels in the spreading oak above them, for longer than Fiora could quantify. “I glanced in your study earlier when I came looking for you, but I didn’t see the trunk.”
“It’s on the chair by my desk,” Fiora said. “You might not have seen it from the door.”
“Good,” Deven said, with a sigh that sounded like relief. “I know they’re not much, compared to that splendid library of yours.” His voice had taken on a defensive note. “But they’re mine. And I’ve read and reread every one of them.”
Fiora understood, far more than Deven could possibly imagine. The foolish, impulsive urge to spill his own greatest secret welled up, and Fiora smacked it down in horror. He couldn’t trust Deven. No matter how enticing his long, strong, tanned limbs and the soft-looking scattering of golden-brown hair on his muscled chest, and no matter that he’d taken Fiora on a picnic. And given him his clothes. And stroked his scales, and called him beautiful…
“I promise they’re safe,” he said, his throat scratchy. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to your books.”
“Thanks. There are some really good ones in there, even though they’re a bit battered. I don’t mind that, actually. It shows they have history. Have you ever read The Three Swordsmen?”
Deven’s words struck Fiora like a barrage of arrows to the heart; another little bit of the armor he’d tried to keep in place chipped off and fell away, revealing the tender center of him. Like he was a piece of marble at a sculptor’s mercy, he thought dreamily — only not the mad anti-genius who’d inflicted his creations on the Marlow family, and by extension on Fiora. Someone skilled. Someone who’d shape Fiora with careful, expert hands…
“Yes,” he whispered, his chest so tight it felt like it might burst. “I have.”
“I love it,” Deven said. “That part where they’re eating lunch with arrows falling all around them? Fucking wonderful. I tried to run off and join the army after I read it for the first time. Luckily I was only nine, so I didn’t get far. Actually, you know those buggering rabbits? They came from a farm a couple of miles outside of town. I made it that far, and it was that farmer who caught me sneaking through his field and loaded me in a wagon to bring me home…”
Deven went on, telling that story and then another related one in which he played a prank on the butcher, and continuing from there, with more openness than Fiora had ever heard from him. There was something guarded about Deven, despite his veneer of charming bonhomie — something that slipped away completely as he told Fiora tale after tale of his boyhood mischief.
Fiora listened, and savored the sound of Deven’s voice forming each word, even as he missed the meaning of half of them in his state of drowsy pleasure. The ale had done its work, and he was nearly boneless, melting into the lush greenery of this perfect, hidden place Deven had found for him.
He drifted, picturing a shelf bearing one more copy of The Three Swordsmen than Fiora currently possessed.