Page 59 of Earth Dragon
She looked back up at him. “I wish I knew,” she said. “I’ve gotten by on a day-to-day basis for so long that it’s difficult to think of the future like that.”
He leaned forward then, his gaze growing intense as he said, “Nothing is going to happen to you while you’re within the walls of this castle. Nothing is going to happen to you if you choose to leave them either. I’ve already promised you that.”
“I can’t choose to leave,” she remarked.
“Do you think that we’ll keep you here if you help us stop your father?” Ewan asked, eyebrows raised. “Of course, you will be free to go.”
Her inner dragon perked up, sending tendrils of dragon fire through her veins in grateful response to that declaration. Shannon glanced down at herself, shaking her head a little, but granting him a smile, nonetheless.
She would be free to go.
The implications of leaving the city made her eyes catch on his, the green of them seeming to hold the depths of all the forests put together. She would never find eyes like those again.
“Would you like me to go?” she asked.
“No,” he said, the response coming out so quickly that it took them both by surprise.
“No?” she asked, leaning forward to mirror him, bringing her mouth mere inches from his.
“I mean, you will be free to do as you please,” he said.
She couldn’t keep a smile down. “Yes, but I asked what would please you, my lord.”
At the ease of that innuendo, her mouth began to grow dry, her insides quivering with a growing yearning for him to reach out across the short distance and graze her hand with his fingertips.
“Why did you ask me to be yours?” she asked, unable to stop herself.
“It was a sound arrangement,” he murmured, as lost in her gaze as she was in his.
“Was that all?” she asked. “Or did you spend the year thinking of me?”
“No,” he mumbled, his mouth half an inch closer than it had been a handful of seconds ago.
She could barely breathe, her hands clenched so that she could keep herself from wrapping them behind his neck, pulling him close. This had to be his choice. She could not force it or seduce him into it. He had to want it because he had seen the truth of her out there in that square.
And because he had carried her around with him ever since Fawha, the same way that she had carried him in her hearts.
“Did you spend the year thinking of me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation.
His eyebrows rose at that, and the moment was broken as he pulled back. He was observing her, not with suspicion, but with real wonder.
“Was that why you agreed to the arrangement?” he asked.
“No,” she said and meant it. “You told me you were having feelings for me,” she challenged.
“You told me not to speak them,” he said.
“Because I was torn between…” She trailed off, hearing the mess she had made of it all and not wishing to revisit it, but of course he wasn’t about to leave it there.
“Torn between what?” he asked. “Loyalties?”
“I was going to run away,” she said, his eyebrows dipping into a frown. “Before my father arrived, I was going to go through with it. I thought that… maybe we could… I don’t know what I thought, but when he arrived, I resolved I had to run away. Like a coward,” she continued. “I was going to warn you. Leave a note. Something. And then I was going to take myself away from any loyalties.”
“And go where?”
“I had not decided.”
