Cassidy watched him walk toward her. A good-looking man with a strong physical resemblance to Theran, right down to the dark hair and green eyes. Family, perhaps?
A well-toned body of a physically active adult male. But his psychic scent said “youth,” even “boy,” which was a sure sign of something wrong, and that wasn’t good because inside that body . . .
Warlord Prince. Wild. Wounded.
Mine.
The thought startled her, made her heart pound because it seemed to recognize something about this man that her mind wasn’t ready to acknowledge.
This wasn’t the same feeling of recognition that she’d had with the Warlord Princes who were now in her First Circle. This was different. Personal.
So wounded inside. She could see it in his green eyes now that he was close enough. He looked like he was ready to run, and yet he kept moving toward her as if he couldn’t help himself.
“Hello,” she said quietly. “I’m Cassidy.”
He stopped at the sound of her voice, shifting his weight from one foot to another, not sure if he should get closer or step back.
“I’m Gray,” he finally said, taking another step toward her.
His eyes roamed her face. When he got close enough, he reached out, almost touching her cheek. Then he snatched his hand back, like a boy who had almost touched the forbidden.
Wondering what he saw that baffled and intrigued him so much, she touched her cheek to see if something was on her skin.
Oh. She wrinkled her nose. “You’ve never seen freckles?”
“Freckles.” He said the word softly, as if it were a fragile gift. “Are they just on your face?”
She knew her cheeks flamed with color. She also knew that, despite the man’s body, it was a boy asking out of curiosity. Still . . .
“I don’t know you well enough to answer that.”
He nodded, accepting.
He was half a head taller than she, if that. It would have been easy enough to look him in the eyes if his own weren’t so busy roaming over her face.
“Did you come out to look at the gardens?” she asked.
He cringed, as if she had scolded him for doing something wrong.
“I tend the gardens. It’s my job now. I don’t stay in the big house. I’m not in the way.”
Who said you were in the way?
His voice had risen to a kind of desperate keening and he looked ready to bolt, so she turned toward what might have been a flower bed at one time. “Well, you’ve certainly got enough work. This land hasn’t been loved in a long time.”
Something changed so suddenly, she gasped in response to that flash of strong emotion. She couldn’t decipher the look in Gray’s eyes, couldn’t get a feel for where he was now, mentally or emotionally. Which wasn’t good because even if he was diminished in some way, he was still a Warlord Prince and he outranked her. She couldn’t tell if the Purple Dusk power she was sensing was from his Birthright Jewel or his Jewel of rank, but either way, it was darker than her Rose.
And then, oddly, she had the feeling that some broken piece inside him suddenly settled back into its rightful place.
A moment after that, it was as if nothing had happened. Except that Gray seemed a little less like a boy.
“No, it hasn’t been loved for a long time,” he said.
Too many feelings. She’d come out here to walk and get away from all the feelings, to do something to settle herself before she went back to the next group of males who would be disappointed in the chosen Queen.
“Do you have a basket or a wheelbarrow?” she asked.
“We have both.”
“Good. I have an hour before the next meeting, so that’s enough time to clear a bit of ground.”
“Clear ground?”
“Weed the flower bed.”
His eyes widened. “You can’t weed.”
“Yes, I can.”
“But . . . you’re the Queen.”
“Yes.”
He rocked back on his heels, clearly at a loss.
“I’m the Queen who lives in this house now, so these are my gardens, right?”
“Yes,” he said warily.
“So these are my weeds. And since I’m the Queen, I can pull weeds if I want to. Right?”
He wasn’t quick to agree. Well, he was a Warlord Prince. They were never quick to agree about anything. Unless it was their idea in the first place.
Finally he said, “You’ll get dirty. It rained last night.”
“I know it rained. Which means the soil will be softer, and the weeds will be easier to pull.”
“But you’ll get dirty.” He frowned at the hem of her skirt, which had already picked up some moisture from brushing the top of the grass.
“I can”—she looked toward the stone shed, saw him stiffen, and looked the other way—“change clothes behind those bushes while you get the wheelbarrow.”
Not giving him time to argue, she hurried behind the bushes, vanished her good clothes, then called in the old shirt and trousers she usually wore for gardening. As she stuffed her legs into the trousers, she caught a heel of her shoe in the hem and hopped for a few steps, saying words her father pretended she didn’t know.
“Should have used Craft, Cassie,” she muttered as she finally got the heel clear of the hem. “Pass the shoe through the cloth and you’re less likely to topple over and fall on your ass.”
Once she got the trousers on, she buttoned up the long-sleeved shirt, and quickly braided her hair, using Craft to secure the end of the braid.
“Good enough,” she muttered as she hurried back to the flower bed, returning at the same time Gray arrived with the rattling wheelbarrow.
“These are a bit rusty, but I found a couple of short-handled claws that are good for loosening soil and digging out weeds,” he said. He hesitated, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he kept glancing at her face and then looking away.
Finally he said, “Your skin is very pale.”
Cassidy wrinkled her nose. “Pale skin goes with the red hair.” Unlike her brother Clayton’s, her skin never changed to that soft gold color when she spent time in the sun. It just went from milk to cooked lobster.
“Your eyes aren’t brown, but they aren’t green either.”
“The color is called hazel. Doesn’t anyone have eyes like that here?”
Gray shook his head. “Brown and blue mostly. Some green. None like yours. They’re pretty.”
A little flutter of feminine pleasure. The only man who had thought anything about her was pretty was her father, and fathers never saw daughters in the same way as other men, so Poppi’s opinion didn’t really count.
Which wasn’t something she would ever say to Poppi.
Gray took a step back, as if he was leaving.
“I know you have other work to do,” Cassidy said, “but could you stay a few minutes and point out some of the good plants?” She wanted him to stay. This place didn’t feel as lonely now that she’d met him.
Another hesitation. “You want me to help?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind.” He seemed to be mulling over a lot more than spending an hour weeding a flower bed. “You should wear a hat to protect your face.”
“Oh, I . . .” He was right, of course. But somehow in the past few minutes he’d made some transition from scared younger boy to bossy older boy. Politely bossy, but she remembered a childhood afternoon visit with her cousin Aaron, which had been her first experience with being around a Warlord Prince of any age, and she still remembered that particular tone of bossiness that no one but a Warlord Prince could achieve.