Masked Desire by Alana Delacroix

Author:Alana Delacroix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-12-04T18:21:06+00:00

Chapter 25

Later that afternoon, Michaela sat at the table and nibbled on some of the flowers they’d gathered. Cormac had insisted she take it easy—medic’s orders—and for the first time in a long time, she’d simply enjoyed time passing without worrying. There were no lists. No deadlines, self-imposed or other. She’d gone for another bath in that strangely effervescent stream. Cormac had taken her for a walk and brought her almost to silence by his encyclopedic knowledge of every plant, animal, and even cloud type they’d encountered.

She even gradually became more used to the sigil on her chest. She’d demanded they do some experimentation—she hadn’t changed that much—and forced Cormac to try different emotions so she could feel them. To his credit, he had tried. She let him stop after the fifth attempt.

“I can’t do it,” he said, exasperated. “You need to actually scare me.”

Unfortunately, it had proved almost impossible to do that too. The sigil had given them such an intimate awareness of the other that it acted as an early-warning system. It wasn’t as intrusive as Michaela feared it would be, but it was definitely there.

They had spent most of the day in roving conversation, talking about nothing in particular. Michaela had told him stories of when she was a merchant and the strange things she’d witnessed. The ghost at her uncle’s house had intrigued him.

“You saw it?” he asked skeptically.

“She was in the same robes as when she’d died. She’d hanged herself with a belt.” It had been an old concubine of her uncle’s, and she’d changed the topic before he’d asked more about her life there. It was too pleasant a day.

Cormac poured her another glass of the sweet watery birch sap. “Are you tired?”

“I had two naps.”

“Like a cat in the sun,” Cormac said with satisfaction. “You enjoyed it.”

She had, too, leisurely waking to a plate of berries and cool water by her side. Cormac had been out in the woods somewhere but the sigil told her that he was fine.

After tidying up after their evening meal, they went outside again. Cormac pulled out two blankets from a chest before he followed her out. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

She pointed to a fallen log a short walk from the door. “Here. I want to watch the stars come out.”

He arranged the blankets and they settled down, staring at the sky. The soft hoot of an owl sounded deeper in the woods.

“There was a place like this near my parent’s house,” she said. “Different plants, of course, but the feeling I had was the same.”

“What’s that?” Cormac rolled over on his side and propped his head on his hand.

“Peaceful. The house wasn’t very happy for me, so I ran out of the back gardens to the bamboo grove whenever I could.”

“Weren’t you watched?”

Oh, was she. “The amahs weren’t very attentive. My father’s second concubine was kindest to me, but she died.” Suicide by poison after Michaela’s mother beat her.

“What about when you went to your uncle’s house?”

“Was sent,” she corrected.

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