Chapter 6

Roxie's POV

The room they gave me sat at the top of the east wing, one door down from Kaelan's.

It was larger than the entire ground floor of my father's packhouse. Gilded cornices. Windows two men high, silk drapes tied back with pearl ropes. A four-poster bed drowning in goose down. Even in my last life, when I'd lived in Vincent's palace as his Luna, he had never given me anything like this.

I'd expected to toss and turn my first night here, but instead I slept soundly.

I woke before the sun, which was an old habit I hadn't managed to kill. Second morning. New plan.

Downstairs, the dining room was already being laid for breakfast. A girl in palace grey was setting out fruit, and when I asked her where His Highness took his mornings, she blinked at me like nobody had ever asked her a question before.

"His rooms, Miss. But his Healer comes at seven, and he doesn't—"

"Perfect," I said. "I'll be quick."

A treatment schedule was already built in my head—the nightshade out, the new blend in, doses timed around the moon phase instead of the equinox, because the phases were what the wolf actually answered to. And if half of what I suspected about Marcus was right, the timing would matter as much as the—

I knocked. Nothing.

I knocked again, harder, because he was a man who had an episode yesterday that nearly killed him and there was no world in which I was standing in a corridor waiting politely on ceremony.

Nothing.

"Your Highness. It's Roxie." Still nothing. A thread of real fear went through me then, sharp and cold, and I stopped caring about anyone's protocol.

I opened the door.

The room was warm and the curtains were half drawn, and the bed was empty, and the door to the bathing room stood open with steam coming off it.

And Kaelan Valemont came through that door with a towel around his waist and water still running down his shoulders, and the towel was doing considerably less work than it had been hired to do.

I stopped dead.

He stopped dead.

Somewhere between the two of us, the steam curled up through the light like it was being paid to be dramatic.

For two seconds neither of us moved. Then I noticed Kaelan was holding himself very still—jaw tight, expression unreadable, clearly determined to look unaffected. His ears, however, had gone red.

"*Roxie.*"

"Your door was open."

"That is —" He stopped and visibly reset. "I didn't hear you knock."

"I knocked twice."

"It's six in the morning."

Which was, I noted, not actually a refutation.

I should have said sorry and left. I know that now. Any sensible woman in the capital would have murmured an apology and been gone before he finished the sentence. But I'd been married for three years to a man who'd taught me that retreating was how you lost rooms, and my mouth had already decided to be brave without checking with the rest of me.

"So," I said, and leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, and let my eyes go somewhere above his collarbone with enormous visible effort. "This is the arrangement, then. Because I should warn you, Your Highness — after the wedding we'll be sharing a suite. This is going to happen again. Statistically."

Kaelan didn't answer right away. He just looked at me with that unreadable patience, the towel still in his hand, water still drying on his shoulders. "You sound almost eager."

"Don't flatter yourself."

He turned his head away and looked at the wall. His ears had gone faintly red again. "Sit in the other room," he said, his voice studiedly even. "I'll be five minutes."

"Take ten," I said. "You'll want to dry your hair. It gets cold in the mornings."

"*Out.*"

I went, grinning at the carpet like an idiot, and left the door open behind me on purpose.

I heard him exhale through his nose — the sound a man makes when he's decided not to laugh and isn't fully in command of the decision.

Good, I thought, and sat down to build my treatment plan on his sofa, and counted the whole thing a considerable victory.

He kept his word about the ten minutes, which I chose to treat as a sign that he was the sort of man who took instructions well.

I had my book open and my dosage table spread out across his low table when he came out dressed — dark trousers, white shirt, cuffs undone, hair still damp and pushed back from his forehead. He'd shaved. I noticed because I'd been trying not to notice anything, and the trying had been going badly since the bathing room.

"Ready," I said, and turned the page like a professional.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and started rolling his sleeve without being asked, which was when I understood that he'd done this before. Not with me. With everyone else — the palace Healers, the ones who came and went and wrote him prescriptions that were killing him by degrees.

"Left shoulder first," I said. "I want to see the damage before I say anything about anything."

He turned. He unbuttoned his shirt, revealing his chest.

His face was devastatingly handsome. His chest was broad and solid, all cut lines and moving muscle. It was attached to some other things that were also outstanding, and I was not going to think about any of them, and that was a decision I made with my whole chest.

Up close it was worse, because up close he was warm. Not fever-warm. Just warm, the way a person is when there is a great deal of them and all of it is alive, and every time I leaned in to clean the edge of a furrow I got the smell of him — soap from the bath, and under that something heavier and quieter that belonged to no soap in this palace.

I eased his shirt open a little more. "The wound's healing nicely."

My hands slid down over his ribs to the old scars and the whole flat plane of his stomach, and I felt the muscle jump once under my palm. He said nothing.

Healing, I thought. You are doing healing.

The problem was that the stopping never worked for long, because the light kept landing on the flat panels of him, and below that the long lines that ran down toward his hips in a V that pointed somewhere I was not going to look, and below *that*, at the low waist of the trousers, a dark line of hair started and disappeared under the trousers.

I pulled my hands back an inch before I trusted them and reached behind me for the silver probe, and I did not stand up properly. My heel found the edge of the rug and the rug rolled, and every part of me went forward at once.

"Careful!" Kaelan said.

My face came down to within two inches of his, and my knee came down between his on the mattress, and for one long second I was not standing, not lying, not anywhere except bent over Kaelan Valemont with both hands on him and my weight tipped onto his body.

Everything stopped.

His strong hand came to rest on my waist, and one slow breath went through him that I felt all the way down my own spine.

My right hand landed on his chest. My left went out for balance and found his thigh.

His skin was hot through my palm and his heart was going hard under it, and this close I could hear his breath change, the amber had gone dark and hot around the edges, and there was a small muscle moving in his jaw.

And under my left hand, low on his thigh, through the thin cotton — unmistakable, the length of him, hard and already answering a question nobody had asked out loud.