Page 52 of The Wicked Prince

Robin did finally pull her leg out of his grip, only so she could shift closer, her legs brushing his as she sat beside him. She shook her head. “You have no faith in people.”

He looked up at her, her head slightly above his as she sat on her knees, holding herself up with the back of the sofa. He said, “You have too much.”

Maybe that was true.

Maybe she had too much faith in him.

Chapter21

Just when Robin thought she was getting a handle on John, he started acting… not necessarily strangely. Robin couldn’t really even put her finger on it; there was just something different after her birthday.

Things settled back into their usual routine, but Robin was thrilled that Marian was staying at the castle for a while. She was less thrilled Guy was also staying at the castle—she still had to fight the instinct to start running in the opposite direction when she saw him in the hallways—but she got to actually spend time with her cousin and not just secret visits under the cover of night.

So Robin actually spent less time with John—not much—she just wasn’t going to lose a single day with Marian while she was there, so she didn’t spend the whole afternoon working with John. He assured her that he could handle it and that she should enjoy herself. Besides, they’d still have their morning training sessions and the time they’d work in his room at night.

Two weeks after her birthday, Robin held her quarterstaff to John’s neck as she had him pinned on the ground, her knees on the ground trapping his legs between them. She said, “It’s like you’ve gotten worse. Or stopped trying at all.”

John’s hands came up and rested on the backs of her legs, just above the knee. He said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve always been this hopeless. Besides, who said I wasn’t trying?”

“If you were trying, you should have been able to pin me down by now. At least once. Even terrible fighters get lucky, not to mention your height and natural strength advantage even if you still have a lack of skill. Plus, I often leave openings for you to take advantage of on purpose and you never do.”

“Oh, so you want me to take advantage of you?”

Robin pulled the quarterstaff back and started to sit back, but John’s grip on the back of her thighs stopped her. “John—”

But before she could finish, the world flipped on its axis, and Robin’s back hit the grass and now she was staring up at John. He sat straddling her, his hands on either side of her head as he leaned over her, his face hovering above hers, and he said, “Is this better?”

Robin couldn’t think for a moment.

When she did, her palm slammed into his chest hard enough that he wheezed and she scrambled out from under him and didn’t stop running until she’d made it back to her room.

John had always been forward, but there was something different about this. There was something in his eyes when he looked at her that Robin couldn’t figure out. She couldn’t figure out what it was. She couldn’t figure out what she felt about it.

And then there were the gifts.

One night, when she’d come back into her room, there’d been a box on her dresser. Robin approached it warily and opened it to find a beautiful but surprisingly plain necklace. It was gold, but compared to all the other pieces that sat in the jewelry box Robin never willingly touched, it was plain. It was a simple, thin chain with a small pendant, a thin gold arrow.

When Robin confronted John about it, telling him they were supposed to be cutting costs, not commissioning jewelry, he hadn’t even looked up from the painting he was working on—a scene from the ball he’d held on her birthday—and said all it had cost was the price of the jeweler taking one of his mother’s necklaces and reworking it into the arrow, and he’d been paid in the leftover gold from the original pendant that hadn’t been used, so it really hadn’t cost anything.

When Robin asked why he would even think to have one of his mother’s necklaces melted down for her, he’d simply shrugged and said better to turn it into something she’d wear than let it remain something that was just going to gather dust.

“Besides, you won that first gold arrow fair and square. I don’t know what you did with it, but it was my prize to give you, so there it is.”

Robin didn’t buy his casual air.

He was up to something.

The next gift had been waiting for them at the training grounds one day. Since the day John had bested her, she’d stopped using the quarterstaff and switched back to a bow and arrows. Waiting at the targets was a new curved bow and a set of arrows with green fletching. When she’d whirled around to confront John, he’d had his hands up and said he would have just given her original bow back but the Sheriff had destroyed it, and really she should have a bow that was hers and not one of the pathetic ones from the armory. Besides, the man who’d made it had been thrilled to do it. He was now the man who’d made Robin Hood’s new bow; that was going to get him business for the rest of his life, so really they were helping him.

Now that spring was creeping closer and the nights were no longer so cold in the castle with the roaring fires, Robin’s leg no longer ached. However, they didn’t return to simply sitting across from each other and working. John still stuck by her side, closer actually now that her legs weren’t stretched out on top of him.

She jumped when the first strand of hair fell to her shoulder, and she whipped her head around to see John holding a hairpin. He simply said, “You have a headache and with how tightly your hair’s pulled back that’s obviously not helping.”

She didn’t know how he’d figured out she had a headache, but she rolled her eyes and reached up to take the pins out herself. Before she could, John had caught her hands and pulled them down. He stared at her and there was something almost desperate in his eyes as he whispered, “Let me.”

Before Robin could regain her senses enough to come up with a good reason to decline, he’d started again, and suddenly they had a new ritual. Robin couldn’t say it bothered her. She couldn’t say she despised the way it felt to have his hands in her hair, gently working the pins out so he didn’t take a single hair with him. She couldn’t say she didn’t lean back into his touch as he would run his fingers through her hair when he’d finished, letting it spill over her shoulders.

She couldn’t even pretend his soft hands didn’t have her dozing off within seconds.

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