Page 53 of The Courting of Bristol Keats
“It’s getting late. I should go. The king is expected at festivities,” he repeated.
And yet he stood there, hesitating.
He wanted to stay. She was certain of it.
For a few seconds, he looked lost. Not a king or a powerful knight. Only a man caught in someone’s crosshairs trying to figure out if he should run left or right—or maybe stand his ground.
The distant music whirled around them. She fingered the metal cuff in her hand. Even in the face of his horrific confession, did he feel the music’s pull the same way she did? Would he—
But she waited too long to ask. Her chance vanished.
“I need to go. Guests are waiting.” His tone turned cool, and he left before she could reply. Out of the crosshairs, back into the haven of distance. He walked away, but just before he was swallowed by the shadows of the grove, he paused and glanced back at her. He was too far away for her to see his eyes, but she imagined them softer.
And then he was gone.
Bristol looked at the silver cuff in her hand, wondering about the apprehension in Tyghan’s eyes as he tossed it to her. It didn’t fit with his personality. He had another side he was very good at hiding. She braided the cuff into her hair, pondering what he said.My recovery came with challenges.He picked through his words carefully like each one was a wasp, words he didn’t want to touch.
It was surprising he took the risk to share with her at all, though she had probably caught him off guard with her direct question. Or maybe he just wanted to share withsomeone? An outsider. Bristol knew that feeling, the need to step outside her own suffocating circle into another one, the need for connection and a fresh perspective. That was what pushed her to enter into Mick’s circle, even if it ended up being a huge mistake. Venturing into new territory carried unknown risks. It took a different kind of courage she was just beginning to understand.
She smiled again, remembering his backhanded compliment. Good to know she wasfairlybrave and not stupid. He definitely needed practice in that department. Maybe he would smile about it later too. Assuming he gave her a second thought.
When she was finished with the braid and the cuff was secure in her hair, she stood. Closed her eyes. Lifted her arms, swayed. And stepped outside her world.
She left the day behind her the way she did within the dark confines of her bedroom when she needed to shed who she was and be someone else, if only for a few minutes. Dancing was a different language she didn’t need all the words for, something that wrapped her in its forgiving world of dips and twirls. There were no missteps.
Tonight she imagined she wasn’t dancing alone in the dark but around a campfire, the way she did when life was simpler. At least, when she thought it was. Dancing with her sisters, with her parents, or with—someone.She turned, dipped, swayed, but the beat of distant drums hummed beneath her skin in a new way.
This music.
It made something primal pulse inside her, something hungry and addictive. The song knit into her bones, and damp beads sprung to her temples. She raised her palms over her head, and a current of air flowed up from the cliff against them. Her heart galloped. She stepped closer to the bluff’s edge, seeking the cool breeze—but then suddenly the cool became searing warmth, her palms burning like another pair were pressed to hers, skin to skin, only a thin veil between them.
She opened her eyes, but only saw stars and forest around her. Still, heat burned against her palms, and as she turned, she felt the warmth of a back shadowing her own—and then the brush of hot fingertips dragging across her palm, igniting fire in her as they met again, and again.
What was happening?The amulet isn’t working, she thought in a burst of panic, but in the next moment, she didn’t care. She closed her eyes again, never wanting the feeling to stop. Maybe that was Tyghan’s plan, trick her with a false amulet, seduce her with this world so she could never leave. But the thought vanished almost as quickly as it came. If she was enchanted, she wanted to stay enchanted forever.
The hazel trees faded, and the starry sky dipped low with its glittered magic and brushed her face. A thousand lights tingled over her skin. The music became more than sound, it was her breaths, her blood, all that she was and wanted to be. Sometimes her feet didn’t seem to touch the ground at all, like she was lifted up, dancing on currents of air. The hands she couldn’t see brushed closer, lingering,needing, the same as her, and then the drums paused, beat after beat held back in a fist, a taut keenness hanging in the air like a summer storm waiting to unleash.
She wanted it to unleash. Rivers of heat spread through her belly.Hewas there. Impossibly close. She was certain. A breath grazing her jaw. A muscled chest. The scent of leather and crisp cotton. The warmth was his. The hands were his. She wanted to whisper his name.Tyghan.
But she didn’t dare speak, because she didn’t want to break the spell. She understood the safety of invisibility, the need for distance from the demons that stalk us. Sometimes invisibility was about survival—maybe it always was—and she didn’t know what he was still trying to survive.
The dance continued until her back was damp and her lips parched, and the need in her so ripe she thought she might split open with the want, until finally, when the hour was late, she found she had danced her way to Sun Court, where there was food and more dancing, but then it was not with the sense of an invisible back against her own.
She danced with Julia, Avery, and the other recruits, Tyghan suddenly appearing and watching her from a distance, his face glistening in the moonlight, his brow damp like her own.
She continued to dance far too late and woke bleary-eyed in the morning to more magic lessons, and more field training, where Tyghan pushed her to her limits, showing no mercy or even recognition of their time together, and she wondered if the night before was only part of some needy delirium within her.
But then the next evening, and the next, when she was there once again, dancing beneath the hazel trees, the magic happened all over again, invisible hands mirroring her own, and she didn’t care what it was—delirium or truth. She just didn’t want it to end.
CHAPTER 37
Pay the toll.”
Bristol froze on the path, wondering if she should turn around, but it was the only way she knew of to get to Ceridwen Hall.
“There wasn’t a toll yesterday,” she said, feeling brave to challenge the creature at all. The eight-foot beast that vaguely resembled a man only repeated his demand and then grew even larger.
“Pay the toll,” he demanded. His crooked teeth became bigger, his mouth wider, his nose knottier, and his enormous hands curled into fists.
