Page 31 of Tusk Love

There was a major drawback, however: It smelled absolutely horrid, a cloying blend of incense and bitter herbs and musk. It was a thick, oily, yellowish concoction that trapped her sweat…and there had been alotof sweating in the oppressive humidity of Labenda.

The end result was that she currently felt about as attractive as the troll Oskar had killed. She smelled much worse, too.

Oskar was no help at all. After Guinevere instructed him to nothold her so closely while they were riding because she stank, he teased her mercilessly, leaning in whenever she least expected it, burying his nose in her neck and taking deep breaths, smirking every time she squealed and pushed him away. She was becoming quite cross with him, although she had to admit that his cavalier attitude got her to see the humor of the situation. Got her to laugh at herself when she would have normally wanted to die from embarrassment.

They were almost to the Amber Road, by his estimate, when she heard the not-so-distant roar of water. She cast him a beseeching look, and he wordlessly steered Vindicator off the Byway and into the forest, Pudding trotting close behind. A few more minutes, and then Guinevere was letting out a gasp of delight as the undergrowth gave way to a glade so beautiful that it might as well have been enchanted. Here the river that snaked through the woods coursed over shale terraces in curtains of white froth and spilled into a lake the bright blue color of melted fine-grade turquoise. The water’s glassy surface scintillated with diamond pinpricks of reflected sunlight, bordered by the garnets and topazes of Fessuran. It was a surfeit of jeweled radiance, rendered further dreamlike by the lilt of birdsong that thrummed through the clearing and mingled with the rush of the cascade to form a wistful lullaby.

Oskar helped Guinevere dismount, and he set the horses to grazing while she ducked behind some bushes and stripped off her clothes, carefully tucking away her totem amidst them. Even though she was outdoors, there was no room for hesitation—not when she thought about getting clean the way a starving man thought about eating. And, for her, there was no lovelier feeling in the world than slipping into that cold, fresh water, letting it whisk away the sweat and the dirt. She might have moaned a little.

Guinevere splashed about happily for a while. But a fair bit of the salve still clung to her skin, and she swam over to the far shore where Oskar was standing with his back to her, arms crossed and feet slightly apart.

“Oskar,” she said sweetly.

He grunted.

“Could you hand me the soap? It’s in my pack.”

He didn’t move. “You should have brought it with you.”

“I forgot.Please?”

He huffed out an exasperated breath, then went over to Pudding and rifled through one of the rucksacks dangling down the mare’s dappled side. When he returned to Guinevere, it was with soap in hand and topaz eyes looking everywhere but at the water…eyes that he squeezed shut, with all his might, when he crouched down and held the soap out to her.

Guinevere would have liked to blame Teinidh entirely for the wicked impulse that surged through her just then. But it was more accurate to say that she was the one who came up with the idea and Teinidh pounced on it and crooned in delight, and the flames of mischief built and built until they roared like the terraced waterfalls behind her.

She would never have done this to anyone in the Shimmer Ward. She would never have done this, period. Out here in the open wild, though, where the sky was endless and the trees were vast and the air was clear—well, there was no better place to not be herself.

Or perhaps to truly be yourself,Teinidh hummed.Or ourself.

What do you mean by that?

The wildfire spirit didn’t respond, so Guinevere forgot all about her. She wrapped her eager fingers around Oskar’s wrist and tugged him into the lake.

Chapter Twenty

Oskar

One minute he was balanced precariously on grass-bordered shale; the next, the world was tilting at a sharp angle and he was coughing up water.

Why, that little—

Oskar righted himself, sputtering. Guinevere giggled as she treaded water by his side, wet and naked, so gloriously naked beneath the neck-deep, rippling turquoise surface. He desperately glued his eyes to her face, refusing to let them travel any lower.

She blatantly found his predicament hilarious, and a man’s pride could take only so much. It was pettiness that spurred him into peeling off his wet tunic and tossing it onto the banks. Followed by his boots, his trousers, his underwear.

Her laughter died at some point during all this. She was studying him with eyes so big and violet beneath heaps of wet silver-blond hair. Unlike him, she wasn’t doing a great job of keeping her gaze at a decorous level. He remembered how responsive she’d been when he kissedher in the swamp, and if the blood in his veins hadn’t already been rushing south at the mere fact that she wasn’t wearing any clothes, it was certainly doing so now. With haste.

She finally looked at his face long enough to see the menace there, and her lips quirked against another giggle as she started backing away.

Oskar followed, padding on the lake bed until it dipped far below his feet. “I can put up with a lot of things for you, Gwen,” he said softly, “but I’m not putting up withthis.”

She burst out laughing. Again. Ah, but he sort of missed those first few hours when she’d been afraid of him. For her impudence, he sliced his arms through the water, sending a wave her way. It hit her and she shrieked, vengefully splashing him back before swimming toward the waterfalls, as quick as a fish.

The soap that had been pried from his grasp during his ignominious plunge into the lake now bobbed at the periphery of his vision, a pink slab, roughly flower-shaped. He retrieved it before giving chase to Guinevere—a chase that did not last long, for she reached the lowermost fall, which was as good as a dead end. She stopped swimming and spun around, the turquoise currents shifting over her copper skin, and she faced him with a wide smile, breathless with mischief.

The lake had shallowed again. Oskar’s bare feet touched lightly over smooth rock as he advanced on his quarry. He held up the soap with what he hoped was a threatening glint in his eye. “Time to finish what you started, princess.”

“Have mercy,” Guinevere not-so-earnestly implored him, almost doubled over from the force of the mirth that shook her slim shoulders.

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