Origin (Scales N' Spells #1) - A.J. Sherwood Page 0,73
if he’s playing dense or if he actually thinks he’s fooling us,” Ravi noted to Baldewin before taking a sip from his own concoction.
“He might think he’s fooling us. I’m not sure why; he’s never really had that good of a poker face.” Baldewin sipped at his own drink and sighed. “You really are good at mixing drinks.”
“Of course I am. I get lots of practice in this group. Even Gunter treats mixing drinks like it’s a chemistry experiment.”
“I heard that!” Gunter called from the hallway. He entered the room a second later, looking like he’d just left the scene of a murder. His greyish hoodie was spattered with vibrant red, especially around the sleeves.
Alric looked him over in concern. “Do I need to go find the body?”
Gunter blinked at him, expression perfectly blank. “What? No, of course I cleaned up after myself.”
Being the patient one, Baldewin redirected him again. “What happened?”
“Oh, I had a dye bag slip out of my hands. Hit the table and burst.”
So not a dead body. Alric was relieved. You never quite knew with Gunter.
Waving this off as unimportant, Gunter zeroed in for the bar. “Why were you talking about me? And where’s my drink?”
“We weren’t talking about you, we were talking about Alric’s crush on Cameron,” Ravi denied, turning back to the bar. “And what do you want?”
Feeling like this conversation was spiraling in a direction Alric very much did not want it to go, he tried to nip it in the bud. “I don’t have a crush on Cameron. Why would you say that?”
All three men looked at him with such open disbelief Alric squirmed under it all.
In an overly patient manner, Baldewin turned to Gunter and inquired genially, “Did you observe that our king has a massive crush the size of Jupiter for our new mage?”
Gunter responded in the same manner, like a lord replying at some grand function, “I did, good sir. I daresay you could see his crush from space.”
Ravi jerked a thumb at Gunter. “Even Gunter noticed!”
“Excuse me, I’m not that oblivious.” Gunter frowned at him, affronted.
Ignoring him, Ravi brought Alric’s drink to him in his usual smooth, cat-like stride. “Alric, you are fooling precisely no one. Why are you even denying it? I mean, seriously, it’s not like this is forbidden. And Cameron is obviously interested.”
Alric accepted the drink, but he couldn’t seem to meet his friends’ eyes. There was no fooling these three. Alric wasn’t even sure why he tried, except that he didn’t really want to discuss this. Not even with these men, who were as close to him as brothers. “After so many years of looking for a mage, with so many of us wishing for a mate, I can’t selfishly monopolize him.”
“Oh, Alric,” Baldewin sighed, sounding pained. “Is that really it? That’s why you’re trying to put a lid on this?”
He had nothing to say to that. Alric sipped at his drink and avoided looking up past the rim of his glass.
Ravi blew out a noisy breath. “I want to hit him. Can I hit him?”
“No, Ravi,” Baldewin said, although even he sounded tempted to do so himself.
“But it would make me feel better,” Ravi grumbled. “Okay, let me spell this out for you, you stubborn dragon. Cameron isn’t interested in us.”
Alric’s head snapped back up. He stared at Ravi carefully, studying every whit of his expression. “But I’ve heard him compliment several of you. You especially, Baldewin.”
“I talked with Cameron about that. It turns out that your mage—”
He gave Baldewin quite the glare for that description as Cameron was most decidedly not his.
“—firmly believes people don’t compliment each other enough. He thinks it’s not healthy. He takes every opportunity to boost people’s self-esteem and compliment them when he can. And before you get it into your head that he compliments you for that reason—”
Surely Alric wasn’t that predictable. Well, alright, maybe he was.
“—he told me flat out he finds you incredibly attractive. Sex on legs, I think was his turn of phrase.”
Those words were like quicksilver in his ears. Alric dearly loved hearing them. If it was anyone but Baldewin telling him this, he’d demand verification, or to know the other man wasn’t teasing. But Baldewin clearly wasn’t teasing. Oh god, he wasn’t teasing. Did Cameron really think of him that way? So, the massage oil treatments were sincere? It wasn’t Cameron teasing him?
The click of a camera shutter sounded, and his head snapped around to see Ravi had his phone pointed at