Page 72 of A Lady’s Guide to Fae Kings
“That’s not the game.”
“Hmph. Did you make your class recite their dissertations on Black Annis in the village square? In iambic pentameter? And naked? True or false?”
“True. How else were they to learn how to avoid cannibal goddesses? And they weren’t naked. Though I thank you for the suggestion.”
“It was not a suggestion,” she pointed out. “Why Medieval Folklore?”
“I always liked the language of it, and the art. There’s a certain unexpected whimsy to it.”
“There is?”
“Medieval marginalia are unparalleled. Battle snails. Cats tilting in full armor. Monks complaining about their hangovers.”
She smiled. There was something unexpected about him too.
It might not be a normal wedding night, but it was intimate in its own way.
“Why books?” he returned.
“It’s always been books,” she replied. “But after my parents died of fever, I was left with a great-uncle, and there was a library in the village. I liked the idea of being surrounded by books but also keeping them safe. Even as a child, I knew the Library of Alexandria was a very great loss.”
“Is that part of the tests for being a Librarian?” Lachlan asked. “How angry one gets at the mention of the Library of Alexandria?”
“No, but it should be.” The actual tests included far more memorization, and also battling trolls. And putting out fires.
She had not excelled at that one.
“Were you the one who set fire to that Librarian’s hat?” Lachlan asked.
She wrinkled her nose. “Yes,” she admitted. “But I did it on purpose,” she confessed. “With a plain old candle. No magic required.”
He raised a brow. “Miss Cavendish.”
That scolding, stern tone. Her thighs clenched.
“He tried to grope me.”
Lachlan stilled, the teasing glint hardening. “Pardon?”
“He wasn’t the first.” She allowed herself a small, smug smirk. “But he was the last.”
Not the last to bully her, of course. But the last to be untoward in that way. She had burned half of his hair right off his head.
“And who was this?” Lachlan asked.
She blinked down at him, the primal, animal part of her alerted to the change in his stillness. “Why?”
“No reason.”
“I would have thought a Fae king who kidnaps Librarians would be a better liar.”
He attempted a look of innocence and failed. Majestically. And that was before he answered. “I only want to see if he can swim without arms. And legs.”
“That is called murder.”
“Justice.”
“Murder.”
