Page 28 of Threadbound

Two tall solders, one a white lord, the other a ghillie du like her king, bent to hear their king’s wishes.

“Kill him.”

Chapter

Fifteen

It had been nearly two weeks since Bran had left him at St. Andrew’s Square with his fish and chips, and Jamie had replayed the conversation in his head at least a hundred times. Because even though he could rationalize in his mind the fact that Bran clearly wasn’t interested in him—or at least not enough to explain why he wasdrawn toJamie—Jamie couldn’t stop thinking about him.

He especially couldn’t stop himself from wishing he hadn’t asked Branwhy me?

Because maybe he’d still be wondering about the answer to that question… Hewasstill wondering about the answer to that question. But if he hadn’t opened his big, stupid, American mouth, maybe they’d have enjoyed a nice meal, maybe they’d have spent the evening talking, discussing old herbal remedies and charm lore the way they had after sushi.

Jamie sighed, forcing himself to stop staring off into space and look back down at the lines of careful notes he’d taken in archival pencil in his notebook about the manuscript he’d been studying—the one he’d been talking to Bran about on their good date.

If it even had been a date. Because… Jamie hadwantedit to be a date, but in retrospect, it really wasn’t clear that it had been.

But despite the fact thatwhatever-it-wasprobably hadn’t been a date, Jamie just couldn’t stop thinking about Bran. About the slightly sardonic smile that would flash across his lips. About the flash in his mossy green eyes. About the sharp lines of his jaw and neck and shoulder…

Stop it, Jamie.

Jamie shook his head to clear it.

Then he forced himself to refocus on the page in front of him and the scrawled loops of fifteenth-century handwriting that was stained and faded and barely legible in places. He was trying to get enough of it down that he might be able to cobble together what the fuck this page wasfor. He was guessing from one of the drawings that this was supposed to contain bog myrtle, which made him think it was probably tied to fevers. There was also a spiky little thing that might be a thistle and might be burdock, and a flower he thought might be dandelion. Or maybe that was a thistle?

With a sigh, Jamie did his best to copy down the lines of the crude sketches, but drawing was definitely not his strong suit, and he grimaced at the flora monstrosities he created—that were so much worse than the originals, and therefore even less likely to help him identify the actual plants.

Agitated, he fidgeted, his knee bouncing under the table and the fingers holding his pencil see-sawing the implement back and forth. He was polite enough to the other people in the reading room not to tap the pencil on the table, but he was getting glares from the student at the next reading table anyway—probably because he wasn’t sitting still and the rustle of fabric and creak of the wooden chair were irritating her.

He needed to concentrate on this stupid page.

And he couldn’t.

His mind kept going back to Bran. His knee kept bouncing. His pencil wiggling.

His skin was starting to feel tight and itchy, a kind of odd fog wrapping his mind so that it felt like he could barely make out the loops of brownish ink.

Clearly, this was an exercise in futility.

He hadn’t gone for a run that morning. That must be what was making him so restless he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.

He’d all but decided to pack up, but then guilt hit him. Hehadto at least finish transcribing this page over.Hadto. He’d been making little enough progress over the past few weeks, so he needed to at least get this done so that he’d have something to work on for the next few days.

He should have gotten at least five pages down, and he’d barely made it halfway through one. There was no way he could leave yet.

So he forced himself to stay, increasingly restless and anxious, his stomach churning and energy buzzing through him like electricity.

The woman at the next table gave up with a huff a few hours later, shooting glares at him as he painstakingly forced himself to try to copy out the last few letters—or what he guessed they were, anyway. He was probably writing the whole thing down horribly wrong, because the damn scrawl might as well have been made by a mad chicken running around on the page for all he was able to actually focus on the shapes of the letters.

It was nearly seven when he finally managed to get the whole page done, and he noted where in the volume he’d stopped so that he could come back to it next week. On a day when he’d gone for a good long run and had the ability to actually concentrate.

As he left the library, his phone buzzed.

Curry and beer?Trixie sent to both him and Rob.

Normally, Jamie would have been all about curry and beer.

But he hesitated before replying with a smiley face or a thumb’s up. He wasn’t good company for anyone right now, not just fellow scholars trying to work through manuscripts. And he’d been out of sorts for a while—Trixie and Rob were far more likely to actually be able to enjoy themselves if his irritable ass wasn’t there dragging the whole social outing down.

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