Page 25 of Elf Prince

No, not Princess Elspeth. Essie. That was what she said to call her, strange as a shortened name seemed.

Should he have waited in the main room for her? He had tried waiting for a few minutes, but he had started shaking, his chest and stomach so tight he had barely managed a few bites of his own breakfast.

Do not think. Do not feel. He pushed his muscles until they loosened, then burned with exertion. He spun and leapt and flipped until sweat dripped down his face and trickled between his shoulder blades. Until, finally, the racing thoughts steadied enough to make him feel he could face the day.

He pushed himself for one last sprint, then flipped over the railing, landing in a crouch.

Essie was there. Right there. Just sitting on the floor of the porch, staring at him.

He should run.

He had to stay.

No matter. He could not force himself to move. She was there and she was staring and his head was back to dizzy, his stomach churning.

“I, um…” Her gaze flicked from the floor to him and back several times, as if she was not sure where to look. “I didn’t know where you were and then…you have…” Her voice lowered. “A lot of scars.”

Of course. His scars. She had stared during the wedding—everyone always stared—and the scars were making her uncomfortable now too. He swung his gaze to the floor, his skin crawling. His shirt. He needed his shirt. “I will cover them.”

As his fingers closed over the fabric, she grabbed his shirt as well. “Sorry, that didn’t come out like I meant it to. Your scars don’t bother me.”

She was just saying that, hiding her disgust.

His chest squeezed, one breath away from breaking into ragged gasps. His skin had gone past crawling to the point of something almost like pain.

He needed his shirt. He had to cover the scars. The disgust. The prying eyes scouring him.

But when he gave a light tug on the fabric, her grip didn’t budge.

He could run. He could let go of his shirt, dive through the window, and hide until she went away.

Yet he could not seem to talk his hand into letting go. He was paralyzed with the panic.

Just as he talked himself into running, Essie released his shirt, her voice quiet as she spoke. “Where I come from, a scarred warrior is honored. It means he has faced battle and death and survived. Scars are something about which the men boast and the women admire.”

Surely she could not mean that.

She was a human. And humans had a different culture and way of looking at things. He hardly dared let himself hope. He had expected her to be disgusted at his scars. Hoped that she might eventually tolerate them.

But admire the scars? Was such a thing even possible?

He gathered the last shreds of courage he had left and lifted his gaze from his shirt to her face.

Nothing in her expression—from her kind green eyes to her soft smile—indicated that she was anything other than sincere.

Not that he was a good judge of people or their expressions. She could be hiding all manner of thoughts, and he would never be able to guess them.

No, he could not keep thinking like this. Last night, he had told himself that he would try. If he was going to make something out of this marriage, then he could not doubt her at every turn. Instead, he would have to do something that went against all his instincts and trust her.

She had demonstrated a lot of trust in him in the past couple of days. He had to give her his best attempt at trust in return.

He held her gaze, struggling to think of something, anything, to say.

She leaned forward and slowly reached out.

What was she…surely she was not…Farrendel still could not bring himself to move.

Then her fingers gently, lightly, brushed his cheek over the place where his childhood scar marred his skin.

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