intensity. “Please.”
Rhyian never said please or thank you. At least, the Rhyian she’d known hadn’t. He’d disdained mossback manners, along with rules of all kinds, and she’d once found that exciting about him. She’d also suffered because of it. Extracting her fingers, she folded them into her palm, where they burned with longing. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I don’t get why you’re all so upset with me,” Astar’s voice rose in the background, Stella and Zeph hushing him.
Rhyian’s gaze didn’t even flicker in their direction. They held hers fast, the blue drowning deep in his wildly beautiful face. “One dance. Isn’t it a night for letting go of the past, for new beginnings?”
“So I’ve been informed,” she answered drily. “Repeatedly.” Her little sister, Bethany, had babbled on at length on how the crystalline moon made it the perfect night for falling in love. Well, Lena had fallen in love once and still had the bruises to show for that brutal fall. Never again. Certainly not with Rhyian, who’d been the one to shove her off the cliff.
“One chance is all I ask,” he said with hushed intensity. “Just for tonight. Can we pretend to be friends again?”
“It would still be a pretense,” she warned, absurdly tempted to say yes. But then Rhyian had always been able to tempt her into going against her better judgment.
He smiled, slight and more than a little wicked, as if he knew the effect he had on her. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“One dance,” she breathed. It didn’t have to be about love or the past. Just friends. And in the morning she’d be gone, back to her desert and her work, where he’d never follow.
“One dance—with potential for more,” he qualified, smile widening.
And there he was, the old Rhyian in fine style, teasing and pushing for just a little bit more than she wanted to give. Well, she’d learned her lesson. She hoped. “We’ll see,” she replied loftily, and turned her back on him.
~ 5 ~
Rhy watched Salena glide away, her caramel hair falling down her back like an inverted flame, emphasizing her narrow waist and the graceful curve of her hips. His mouth had gone dry, and he didn’t have any idea what had possessed him to say any of that to her. Except that he felt like a lust-filled and awkward lad again, which had come as quite a shock. Tossing back the mjed, he sent an earnest prayer to Moranu—something he was normally careful never to do, as he didn’t care to awaken the goddess’s interest in him—to keep him from making the biggest mistake of his life.
Or at least, not one to knock all the others out of the top ten.
“Rhy,” Astar complained, “you were supposed to wait to drink until we all toasted, to seal the good luck and the goddess’s blessing.”
“A pointless superstition, Willy, my boy,” he replied easily. “Especially when, thanks to Jak’s delusions of grandeur, we have a cask big enough to fill the glasses of everyone in Ordnung for a week. Anyone else need a refill?” he asked as he went to the cask.
“I do,” Jak and Zeph chimed together, coming to join him.
Zeph kissed him on the cheek while she waited. “Well done,” she whispered. “We have your back.”
“Don’t meddle, Zephyr,” he muttered under his breath, sliding a look to Salena, who watched them with that serious, pensive look she got when she was thinking about rules instead of fun.
“What meddling?” Zeph widened her eyes in shocked innocence. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jak handed Zeph her refilled glass. “It’s not delusions of grandeur when you deliver,” he pointed out.
“Seems to me like Astar and I delivered, while you acted as our valet,” Rhy taunted him.
“Please come do Astar’s ceremony,” Gendra called, “or we’ll never get out of this room.”
“It’s tradition,” Astar protested, “not my ceremony.”
The three of them returned to the group at the table, making a loose ring around it and setting their full glasses down.
Astar, happy that they were all finally going along with his plan, beamed at them. “I wanted us all to have a private ceremony before the main one at midnight. You each have two pieces of paper, one for the past and one for the future. Once you’ve all written down your own regrets and wishes, we’ll have a toast to each other, to ask Moranu to set Her hand on our friendships to endure.”
An uneasy feeling crept down Rhy’s spine, one that