Page 86 of By the Orchid and the Owl
Silence quivered between us. I frowned down at the orchids.
“They’re dead.”
“What?” Coen looked startled.
“The orchids… they must have just died. I can’t hear them anymore.”
I pressed a kiss onto the canopy of petals, muttered sorry, and tossed the bouquet over the gate, watching it spiral down until it hit the ground below. I had a feeling Emelle wouldn’t want their wilting corpses anymore anyway.
Coen was staring at me as if he’d only just noticed me. His eyes dragged down from my face, paused at my breasts, and swept down to my feet.
I thought for sure he’d comment on the dress, then, something snarky or coy or anything to fix this… clumsiness between us, but he just grabbed a fistful of his hair and said, “Listen—I wish you were a Mind Manipulator right now.”
“Excuse me?” I felt my eyebrows furl.
“Not permanently,” he rushed on. “Just in this instance, so that you could feel how… guarded my heart is after her.”
Heras in Kimber. I didn’t particularly want to talk about Kimber right now, but I’d told him to stay out of my head for a bit, so of course he couldn’t know that.
“After we broke up, I swore to myself I wasn’t going to get involved with anyone,” Coen said softly. “At least not until after I’d passed or failed my Final Test.”
I tried to smile. “And then I showed up with a mystery for you to solve.”
Because even if he didn’t love me… he was definitelyinvolvedwith me, right? Or did all this kissing and touching and hanging out mean nothing to him?
Coen surprised me with a firm, “No.” When I cocked a brow at him, he repeated it. “No. It was before that. When I wanted to test the limits of my magic on my first official day of being an Institute prince. I invaded every new mind in that courtyard, and I was absolutely… astonished when I hooked onto yours.” Finally, he ran a hand down my arm, and I closed my eyes at the touch. “Beneath all those layers of fear and worry and self-doubt, Rayna, your mind… it’s the most beautiful and compassionate thing I’ve ever seen.”
I opened my eyes to find Coen leaning closer to me. There was no hint of mockery in the smoky quartz of his eyes, nothing but the rippling reflection of my own face as I stared back at him.
“I wanted to sink into your mind right then and there,” he said. “To lose myself inside you.” I didn’t miss the innuendo, though I wasn’t sure he’d intended it this time. Still, my thighs clenched as he went on. “But of course, that would have been ridiculous, to reach out to a first-year when you didn’t even know me, all because I’d found your mind infatuating, so I refused to even look at you longer than that first glance… until you nearly blasted your tent apart and… well, became a mystery for me to solve.”
The hint of a smile played on his face at that.
I reached up to brush a snowflake off his hair. “And do you feel like you’ve solved me yet?”
Now Coen’s smile lit up his face with a familiar wicked delight.
“Not even close.”
I closed the gap between us, rising up on tiptoe to take his lips in mine.
He responded with a deftness that scared me, cupping the back of my neck with one hand and my thigh with the other, lifting me an inch off the ground so that he could take my kiss fully.
We melted into each other, then, like we had so often these last few weeks—only now it was out in the open, beneath the sky that poured enchanted snowflakes and in front of anyone who wanted to goggle and gossip about it.
The way he wasn’t hiding me anymore—it meant more than any words.
Coen, however, knew just the right words to say anyhow. He dragged his lips to my ear and whispered through my hair, “I wouldn’t have picked that dress for you if I’d known how badly I would just want to rip it off.”
I pushed him away, attempting to roll my eyes, but he yanked me back and pressed his forehead against mine.
“You’re slowly becoming everything to me, Rayna Drey.”
Before I could think of a response to that, a series of commotions stirred behind us. People were jumping up from their seats around the various fires and rushing toward the ladder—not in fear, but in excitement. As they went, I could make out fragments of their conversations.
“A fight downstairs—”
“Someone tried tripping—”
