Page 56 of Bound

Her cheeks flushed, and she couldn’t meet his eye. “I suppose,” she hedged, feeling strangely vulnerable to make even that admission. “Mostly how you have so much time to spend here. Why you want to be my friend?” The latter was more a whisper, and she hated how uncertain she sounded.

“As I am sure you are aware,” Braum answered, a hint of a smile caught in his voice. “Trees grow on their own. Unless I have a contract, there is not always something that needs my attention.”

“Oh.”

He took another biscuit of his own. “As for your other query,” she braced herself. “Because I admire you.”

She blinked, not at all expecting that to be his answer.

She did not allow them to dwell there. For her to question what he could possibly find in her to admire. Most days felt like a kind of survival. To keep things running, to keep everyone fed and alive and do her best to simply... keep on.

Day after day.

But she tried. And maybe... maybe that counted toward something. He’d said that, hadn’t he? That it would not have occurred to his sister to even attempt some of the tasks that were a part of Wren’s everyday chores. To learn. To better herself. Her home.

“So,” Braum continued. “If you had your choice of confidences to pull from me, which would you like first?”

“I should like to know the vendor that supplies the oil for my fence.”

It came unbidden. Before she had even considered her options, what she might ply from him in exchange for talk of her family. Her birth.

And he laughed. A long, rich sound that made her cheeks burn.

While she suppressed a hapless smile of her own.

11. Dry

He’d gone home again. Because that was what he should do. He’d sat, and he’d listened, and he’d pretended that the story she’d shared with him was normal.

Because to her, it was.

Horror had filled him. Coiling in his belly, leaving a bitterness in his mouth as he...

He hurt for her.

She’d looked at him so accusingly by the end.

Waiting for his judgement. For him to rail against her father, to call him a louse and a cad. That he’d been careless.

Braum tried to imagine having a dalliance with another woman.

And what he might have done once... once he’d met Wren.

He wanted to be sick just to think it.

But it hadn’t been a dalliance, had it? He’d thought himself beyond the bond. That it was safe to create his family. And he’d been wrong.

Hadn’t Braum thought himself much the same?

But he hadn’t... he would never have...

He’d taken too long to say anything at all.

She’d picked up their empty cups and the plate full of crumbs and crossed to the sink. Her shoulders too tense and her mouth drawn into a grim line of acceptance.

Because evidently she could fill his silences with plenty of words that he’d never said. Never meant.

Was it any wonder she mistrusted so deeply? She clearly loved her father, but he’d had to leave, regardless. Her mother had not been welcomed. Not by her people, and not by his. “You can leave now,” she’d said, not turning from her place at the sink. “That’s best.”

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