The Reluctant King

“Are you Ok, E?” I asked, rushing over to her. I tried to keep my voice low so I wouldn’t embarrass her anymore, but I was worried.

“Avalon, I’m fine,” she laughed off. I heard the nervous tones in her voice and wondered if anyone else did.

“Eden, Love, is something wrong?” Kiran was at her side in a second, looking from me to her for an explanation.

“I’m fine, babe, Avalon’s overreacting,” she shot me a sideways glance that was…. angry. Why was she angry?

“E….” I warned. She stomped discreetly on my foot.

“I don’t like peas,” she whispered to Kiran, pretending like she didn’t want to offend Amelia.

She did like peas. Kiran should know that and realize something was wrong. I wasn’t going to say anything, it wasn’t my place. But Eden shouldn’t be keeping things from any of us.

“You don’t? I’ve seen you eat them before,” Kiran commented, his forehead creasing in concern. Good man, Kiran. I was happy he wasn’t oblivious. Something like that could have gotten by Eden if the tables were turned, but the rest of us were observant.

“Uh, I don’t like canned peas,” she adjusted her lie. Only this one could be bought, since the entire dinner had been thrown together from a collection of canned foods. This was a trick any of us in the original Resistance could have done and I had to wonder how a pampered princess like Amelia had been able to pull it off.

“Oh,” Kiran relented, not looking convinced.

“You guys worry, way too much!” she sighed and then got up to empty her still mostly full plate.

I stood with Kiran watching her walk away.

“Avalon is she telling me the truth?” Kiran whispered in a hoarse voice.

“I don’t know. Does anybody like canned peas?” I deflected.

“I guess that’s true,” Kiran mumbled and then followed Eden upstairs where presumably he was going to get to the bottom of this.

What’s going on, Eden? I growled. Be honest with me, I’ll know if you’re lying.

Avalon, it’s nothing. It’s just left over from healing Titus today. The same kind of stuff used to happen after I healed people with the King’s Curse. She explained patiently, but she sounded exhausted. I felt as she gathered stuff for a shower and knew this would be a short conversation. Very short.

Not the exact same. I reminded her.

Well, I didn’t heal Titus from the King’s Curse, did I? she snapped.

It wasn’t like her to get irritable either.

If it happens again, then we’ll worry about it. For now, let’s just assume it had something to do with Titus, alright? She asked calmly this time.

Ok, fine. I agreed and then left her head completely. She was getting in the shower to avoid me and to avoid Kiran.

Something was going on.

Chapter Twenty

“Is Eden ready yet?” I asked impatiently. She had been taking her sweet time getting ready to leave and she was driving me crazy. Since she had completely blocked our telepathic communication when my nagging had gotten maybe a little extreme, I had to resort to asking her husband, who was equally as unamused with me.

I had two nights in Paris with Amelia. What had turned into an emergency stopover was now a diplomatic visit. It had been decided that Eden, Kiran, Sebastian, Amelia and I would stay at the Cartier’s house and do a proper visit while we waited for Titus to get back to full strength.

Everyone else was staying at the cottage and planning out our next step. At first I was maybe a little upset about the living arrangements…. It physically hurt me to walk away from a mission to go endure diplomacy in a stuffy house with stuffy people.

Then Amelia had called me a petulant child, and immediately my attitude changed.

This wasn’t going to feel like suffering through monotonous duty, this was going to be a challenge. I had two days to make that girl fall for me.

Well, one and a half and I was losing that half the longer Eden took.

“Avalon if you’re so anxious to get into town why don’t you take one of your cars and

we’ll follow behind when Eden’s ready,” Kiran offered. I could tell his patience with me was running thin, but I suspected it had more to do with how worried about Eden he was than my whining. “Either Sebastian or Amelia can ride with you. Or go by yourself, Bianca and Jean are expecting you.”

“Excellent idea!” I beamed. I should have thought of this thirty minutes ago. Argh.

I walked outside and threw my backpack in the trunk of the Fiat and then went on a mission to hunt down Amelia. The moon was bright overhead, full and huge. It lit up the countryside so luminously I barely had to use any magic to see through the darkness. I knew she wasn’t inside the house and so I went on a search for her on the property.

The field of sunflowers lay behind the cottage on rolling hills. I surveyed the area with a mixture of distrust and hope. Girls loved that Gabriel bewitched the flowers to bloom all the time. Even now their large, flowery heads tilted toward the light of the moon. But honestly, they creeped me out. Flowers were supposed to die. Everything had a season, born to this world and then eventually taken from this world. And Gabriel had defied the natural order of things with his bewitchment.

I paused when I saw Amelia’s figure standing in front of the stretching field. Her hair whipped around behind her in the breeze. She pulled it over her shoulder, tying it in a ponytail to keep it out of her face. I watched her slender shoulders rise and drop with a long sigh. The nape of her neck was exposed to me and I wondered if she knew what revealing that kind of perfect skin and silhouette could do to a man?

Probably not. She probably had no idea the hold she had over me.

I cleared my throat so I wouldn’t scare her when I approached and then sidled up next to her, careful not to touch her. She stared out at the flowers, deep in thought and only acknowledged me with a lift of her eyebrow. Her arms folded around her as if to protect herself from me. And she shivered in the night breeze although I knew she couldn’t be cold.

We stood there for a while, watching the night and the unnatural sunflowers.

“These flowers give me the heebs,” I admitted, breaking our comfortable silence.

“The heebs?” she asked, her nose crinkling with the question.

“You know, the heebs, like heebie jeebies,” I explained.

She laughed out loud, the clear tone of her voice carrying into the wind. It made me smile with her. There was just something so charming and open about her personality, something that made me want to always laugh with her, or smile with her. She was smart and observant, quick and compassionate, shrewd and breath-taking all at once and she wasn’t even aware of any of it.

“How very brave of you,” she commented, her laughter dying down into an amused smile. She looked down at the flowers and crinkled her nose again. Was this her confused expression? “And why do they give you the…. heebs?”

“Probably because they don’t die,” I answered honestly. “They’re supposed to die. It’s like Gabriel froze nature here, like he stifled it, smothered it and not allowed the natural course of life to take place.”

“That’s awfully ironic,” she challenged. “Considering you fought tooth and nail for our people so that we wouldn’t have to face the natural course of things.”

I pondered that for a long moment, taking in her argument and her delicate profile that never stopped watching the flowers. “That’s not true,” I started gently, so she would know I wasn’t being defensive. “Lucan, excuse me, not even Lucan, it started with Derrick. The Kendrick line was the one that stifled our natural course, froze our people in a way of life that was foreign and unnatural for them. Nobody knows why we were gifted with these abilities and longevity, but we were. Our people were always supposed to be able to live and never die, to have incredible powers, to be separate from the human race. It was our people that changed our nature. Flowers are not meant to live forever, but we are. The chance to die was taken from these flowers, like our chance to live was taken from us.”

Amelia was silent for a few minutes, thinking over what I said. When she finally decided to answer I sucked in a breath and held it. “You’re right, of course. Life was taken from our people and you are the one that gave it back. And you’re right that in some things death is welcome, death is…. needed. But Gabriel offered to these flowers what no other flower on Earth can have and that is a chance to be immortalized. It’s not a tragedy, it’s a gift. A gift that one day you’ll give to your future wife too.”

I quickly brought my thumb to my teeth and chomped down. She was right. Very right. But more importantly was she hoping it would be her?

Or was that just wishful thinking on my part.

I nearly choked on the thought, my circulation stuttering inside of me. Marriage? Was I that far gone with Amelia already? I couldn’t be. I barely knew her.

I shook my head, trying not to have those kinds of thoughts yet. Mostly because they would freak her out, but also because they were kind of freaking me out by not freaking me out. I found myself ready to think this through, ready to think about her in that role in my life.

I was supposed to be the life-long bachelor, married to the cause. Had I changed? Or had the cause changed?

“I don’t like Jericho,” Amelia admitted so softly I thought I had imagined it. “I mean, like more than a friend.”

I paused for a while, waiting for her to say more and when she didn’t I offered, “I know,” with as much humility as I could muster.

“But that doesn’t mean I like you either,” she announced on a sigh.

“I know that too,” I did my best to hide my smile, but it was no use. It was like one of those trick geometry questions. Not liking Jericho did not mean she liked me. She liked me completely separate and apart from Jericho.

“Stop smiling,” she grumbled, which did nothing but make me smile bigger. Our magics danced around us, hers careful and tentative, mine embarrassingly aggressive. I couldn’t help it though, my magic had a mind of its own, a demanding mind of its own. Besides, the hungry clawing I felt to get to know Amelia better, my magic already felt like it did know her better and as the electricity slowly sizzled and popped around us, it almost dared Amelia’s magic not to respond.

As if she was acutely aware of the cat and mouse game our magics were playing, she shifted next to me and cleared her throat. Most of me hated that I still made her so uncomfortable and she didn’t seem to trust me or herself around me. But there was this small part of me that loved seeing how she reacted to me, how her body responded to my movements, how her magic answered mine. My hand started moving before my mind could remind it that I might not like if she rejected me and I reached out and took her hand in mine.

She didn’t reject me. Her spine straightened for the briefest moment before her hand relaxed into mine. She was all smooth, soft skin and slender fingers and my hand completely covered hers, contrasting it with my calluses and masculine strength. We stood there looking over sunflowers that were starting to change my opinion of them. She didn’t push me away and deepened the hold, slipping her delicate fingers between mine and stepping closer to me.