Page 11 of A Guard and a Gardener

“Please don’t blame him. I was quite convincing.”

Why that made Jiron start and pull closer to me, laying a heavy hand protectively on my shoulder, I didn’t know. Why I found it so hot was much less of a mystery.

I used it as an excuse to slide my fingers into his and tug him towards the outer palace walls. His skin was already dry from the sun.

“Come,” I murmured.

No more dancing around. I’d been dropping hints his way since that first day we’d met, and the man was refusing to take them. I saw the flicker of interest in those amber eyes whenever he looked at me, and surely he wouldn’t have been so eager to press his body against mine just now if I was reading him wrong?

I didn’t know what was holding Jiron back, but today I was going to find out. I wanted him to make me his.

And if he rejected me? If he left me empty and unfulfilled and humiliated?

I refused to think about that.

*

Chapter Seven

Wyatt’s small hand crept along the wide handle of the basket towards mine, proving that he wasn’t really bearing any of its weight. Not that I minded. I was used to taking care of Ren, a man who gladly ceded all responsibility for physical exertion to me – other than between the sheets – and would not have hesitated even for a moment at letting me carry the heavy picnic basket, even going so far as to order it if I hadn’t moved quickly enough. I was still adjusting to serving Mathias, who was his husband’s polar opposite and would have stubbornly attempted to do it himself, not asking for help even if it killed him.

But Wyatt was an interesting balance between the two, gracious and pragmatic in a way neither of the royals were. He’d listened to my offer to help, agreed it made sense, and then gallantly looped his own fingers around the handle from the other side in a token gesture of support.

A gesture I was now suspecting the motives of when his little finger hooked over mine and began to stroke it. A far from innocuous act, but Wyatt didn’t offer the sly smiles and overt comments I was used to from Ren. Was I misunderstanding his intentions? Was I reading something into it – intous– that wasn’t there?

Compared to the boy’s lithe grace, his delicate features, and happy, relaxed nature, I felt brutish. Ungainly. Huge andawkward and sullen, and surely that wasn’t anything that interested him.

I was so afraid of crossing any lines, of straying past his tolerance for my company, that whenever I dared dream about expressing what I truly felt for him, I became sick at the thought of losing what we had now. What if I scared him off? What if he not only spurned my clumsy advances but began to avoid me because I had so obviously misunderstood the pitying offer of friendship he’d made to the lonely, fucked-up man lost in his own trauma?

“I should take you with me to the kitchens more often,” Wyatt remarked, and how was he able to keep his tone so calm when we were touching like this, skin to skin, his warm fingers against mine? “They gave ustentimes the amount of food than usual, and it can’t all be because your stomach is larger than mine.”

He shot a sideways glance at me, eyes raking from my boots up to my face. Was it an appreciative look, or was he just trying to hide that my size intimidated him like it did so many others? Usually I relished that feeling, pleased that I could warn potential troublemakers away from my king and his consort with my presence alone, but now I cursed my bulk in a way I hadn’t done since my body started filling out as a child.

“Little Consuela’s sweet on you,” he continued, accompanying the words with a faint laugh. “Are there many people I will have to fight for your attentions?”

Attentions? Like attentions, orattentions?

My tongue became lodged in my mouth as it sought guidance from my brain about what thatmeant, only to be met with further uncertainty from that direction too.

“You don’t talk much,” Wyatt said. “I like that.”

Now I was even more confused. Did he genuinely like it, or was he making a complaint through sarcasm like Mathias and Ren did?

“It’s nice, you know? To feel like you’re being listened to rather than competing for breath,” murmured Wyatt, and the smile was still on his face. Beaming, glowing. “I probably talk too much.”

“You don’t,” I said immediately, grateful that my tongue had begun working again to be able to offer him the assurance. “I like listening to you too.”

His smile became impossibly,perfectlywider.

“We can stop whenever you want,” he offered, flapping his other hand at the bushes around us. Unlike the immaculately trimmed gardens inside the palace walls, the grasses and trees out here were wilder, less tamed. The nature reserve cut a swathe through the city, a strip of greenery amid the rows of stone and wood buildings that formed Máros, and half a year ago would have been filled with the homeless. But the work our new rulers had been doing with social assistance had given them more palatable places to rest their heads for the night; not a perfect solution, as nothing was, but something better than what they’d had before. And it had reinvigorated these city gardens into what they were meant to be, replacing the tents and makeshift beds with wide open spaces where children could play, and winding, secretive paths to seek moments of peace within the dense foliage.

“Wherever you like,” I said to Wyatt, and I wasn’t just repeating the words I had to speak so often in my role as king’s guard. I truly meant it, happy to be led by the boy at my side as he walked with such a spring to his step that he was almost skipping. The wind plucked at loose strands of his blonde hair, whipping them around his face and flushed cheeks, and I longed to join it –to run my fingers through it with the same joyful abandon and revel in its softness.

Softness I’d briefly felt tucked up behind him with his wet hands in mine, daring to brush my chin against the top of his head.

Softness I’d probably dream about tonight.

What was the rest of him like, I wondered? Inexplicably shirtless like he was today, I was getting to see so much more of him than usual, but to my shame, I was greedy for even more. I wanted to slip my fingers beneath the waistband of his trousers and explore lower, feel the angles of his hips and the shape of his cock, watch how his hole responded to my touch as I traced his opening...

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