Page 18 of Mountain Man's Muse
She tightened her grip on herself, staring at his chest where the imp had slashed through his coat. He could have been killed. “I…”
Gently, he put his hands on her shoulders. Despite what he’d been through, his hands were warm as he trailed down her arms, unwinding her grip around her belly, past the bandages at her wrists.
He flattened her hands out between them.
Her right palm was blistered from when she had grabbed the horseshoe and wrenched it off the wall.
He glanced up from the wound and said softly, “You know this because you’re one of them.”
She flinched and tried to pull away, but he didn’t let go.
“Who are you?” His tone allowed no prevarication just as his grip permitted no escape. “What kind of person gets burned by iron?”
“No kind of person.” Her voice sounded hollow to her ears. “I am fae.”
She said the last word with the flowing tones of her kind, and from the widening of his eyes, she knew he understood, on some atavistic level: She was other.
But he did not release her hands. Of course he didn’t. He had put a horseshoe through an imp’s eye. He would not be frightened off by a musetta.
She let out a long, slow breath. “You humans call us fairies.”
He lifted one eyebrow. “You aren’t pink. And where are your sparkly wings?”
She grimaced. “Did you ever read the original fairy tales? They run red with blood. Pink is the watered-down version.” She tugged at his grasp again. He resisted another moment then let her go. She paced a short distance away. “Some fae are winged, but I am musetta.”
“Musetta.” He wrapped his lips around the word in a way that made her shiver in memory of his lips on other parts of her. “What does that mean?”
“Your stories call us muses, inspiration to artists, poets and the like.”
His gaze sharpened. “That’s why you were interested in the belt buckles.”
“I wondered if you had iron,” she admitted.
“Because you knew that imp might come?”
She hesitated, just a moment too long.
His gaze sharpened another strop. “What is going on, Adelyn?” He drew out the syllables of her name just a touch, as if he questioned it.
The suspicion stung, although of course she had lied about everything else.
But how could she explain without putting him in danger? Queen Ankha had strict policies against initiating humans into fae mysteries. At least humans who weren’t trapped in the faedrealii and her bed. Turning the accusation around, she challenged, “If I had said, ‘I’m a fairy princess in need of rescue,’ would you have believed me?”
“Probably.”
The way he said it made her think he was telling the truth. Too bad she couldn’t afford to do the same.
She swallowed back the urge to tell him everything. “I don’t want you to be hurt because of me.” Merely looking at the rip in his coat, she felt as if the tear went through her own chest.
He must have heard the sincerity in her tone because his gaze softened. “I won’t let anyone—or anything—touch you.” He went to the couch and patted the seat beside him. “Was that imp after you?”
She wanted to stand on her own, but his big body with the strong crook of his arm across the back of the couch was too tempting. She joined him and curled into his chest. “I don’t know what it wanted. But nothing good.”
“Yeah, I got that part. So what next?”
“No one will come looking for it until tomorrow night. They prefer to avoid daylight when they might encounter humans who might see what they are.” She broke off.
Josh sighed. “Humans. Right. Like me. Which you are not.” He rubbed his forehead as if he could force the new reality into his skull. “And who is ‘they’?”
