Heart Fortune

Eyeing the duffle, she figured out the opening mechanism was a simple slip-tab spell and ran her finger down the seam, saying a soft spellword. The bag yawned wide and showed a lot of unfamiliar items. Taking up a third of the area was a small no-time food storage unit. Glyssa stared. Her own personal no-time. She’d bet the last silver sliver of her salary that it was fully stocked. Amazing.

She took out the top object, four round sticks about the length of her hand with a wrapping of gossamer material. Heavy Flair spells clung to the thing, but she had no idea what it was or what to do with it.

More than the sun made her hot. She knew people were watching and the flush of embarrassment and irritation rose to her skin. Her cheeks must be red. She fought back tired, cranky, feeling- stupid tears.

Her HeartMate wanted to pretend they were strangers.

Six

Jace accepted claps on his shoulder and congratulations at saving the fox—and intense looks of envy that he’d been down again into the ship. Then Del Elecampane crisply asked for volunteers and people left him for the new communications equipment or for their own business.

His gaze went to Glyssa again and he saw Raz T’Elecampane walk away from her.

Jace was torn. He wanted to see—and put his hands on—the new equipment. But he also wanted to spend a little time with—and put his hands on, a lot—Glyssa Licorice.

And, yeah, he’d like to see what was in that duffle from Outside Outfitters, probably the latest in camping equipment. With his usual curiosity, he wondered what that looked like. Maybe he needed to know—a good rationalization.

Emotions churned inside him, aided by the dump of adrenaline in chasing the fox down to the corridor of Lugh’s Spear, the discovery of the rooms, the near loss of the fox and the triumphant return. Maybe that’s why his pulse surged when he’d seen her.

He wasn’t quite sure what he felt about her being here. Resentment that she’d shown up as if she were following him? Couldn’t be. She hadn’t appeared last year. Though he—they?—had been having those sex dreams.

Eh, he didn’t want to think of his emotions, he’d figure them out later. His gaze was drawn to her, probably something that would happen often since her hair shone red and coppery in the sun.

When she stared flushed and furious at the small package she held, shaking the compacted pavilion in her hands, he sauntered over. She sure did smell good.

“Can I help?” he asked.

She scowled at him, her prettily arched cinnamon brows wrenched down. Her lips flattened—they looked so much nicer when she smiled—before she said primly, “Yes, please.” She angled her head as if she suspected he was laughing at her.

He kept his smug smile from showing and held out his hand.

He must not have been as expressionless as he’d thought since she smacked the sticks and the thin gauze into his palm.

“Not done much outside living?” he asked, unrolling the gauze from the Flaired set-up sticks. Such compact equipment. Nice.

“No,” she said.

“This is your pavilion.” He bent down and tapped one stick into the hard ground with an anchor spell.

“That!”

She sounded so disbelieving he glanced up at her with a smile. “You need to get out of your library more often, Red.”

She sniffed, tapped her foot, then crouched down beside him. “Tell me how to help, and how it works.”

“We’ve got curiosity in common,” he said, rising and unrolling the line of gauze to the next stick. A lot of gauze, a huge pavilion.

“Yes.” She followed him, and smiled. The tension line between her brows released. Maybe she liked looking at him as much as he liked looking at her.

“This is a Flaired pavilion, built mostly of magic.”

“Hmmm.”

“You noticed how much Flair it contained?”

“Oh, yes, my hands tingled.”

“I’d say the spell is funded for at least a year.”

“A year!”

He cocked a brow at her. “Someone wanted to make sure it didn’t fail. Good security spells, too, so you’ll be safe. Someone imbued it with a lot of power.” He took the next stick from her and tapped it down.

“That would be GreatLord Laev T’Hawthorn,” she said. Jace scowled at the idea of another man doing so much for her—until he saw her staring at his backside.

“GreatLord T’Hawthorn?” Jace prompted. This had to be her FirstFamily noble connection, and what a connection—with one of the richest men on the planet.

“Um,” she said, then smiled shyly at him, palm out for the third stick. “Can I unroll it?”

“Sure. You call him Laev?” Jace couldn’t let the mention of another man stand as it was.

She began to unroll the gauze on the ground, stopped every few steps to make sure it was perfectly straight. Looked like the pavilion was a boring rectangle to Jace. He’d have gone for an octagon or something.

“Laev is one of my best friend’s husband and HeartMate,” she said. She bent down to move a rock out of the way of the gauze. “Camellia Darjeeling.” Again Glyssa smiled. “More like a sister to me.”

He finally recognized the name in connection with Glyssa. When he and Glyssa had spent that long weekend together, they hadn’t talked much. But she had mentioned her friends, like now. He’d forgotten their names.

He recalled that he and Glyssa had just had sex and ate and slept a little and had sex again. No. Don’t think of that. Don’t think of this nice large pavilion that must include a private bedroom, or what kind of bedsponge she might have.

She was taking twice the time to run the line of gauze than he had. Usually he’d get impatient, and was a bit surprised that he wasn’t. He enjoyed her company, just being with her, not quite soothing, but she didn’t irritate him with excessive energy, either. They seemed to match.

She stopped. “Did we put the door on the south? I don’t like a south-facing door. I prefer an east-facing door. I like morning sunlight.”

Jace grit his teeth as he stared at the lines they’d run. He knew enough about Flaired gauze to understand it had to be handled carefully. Even top-of-the-pyramid stuff, like this.

“If you set the door to the east, you’ll face the Elecampane’s tent and not the main path through the camp,” he said.

Her chin set stubbornly.

He gestured to the gauze. “And working with that stuff, winding and unwinding, can get messy. One of the reasons the Elecampanes went with old-fashioned Flaired-canvas.”

She pouted. “Oh.” But she didn’t go on unrolling the line, just looked at what they’d laid out.

Jace suppressed the urge to walk away and let her deal with the setup on her own. “I don’t know about the latest in these sorts of pavilions, but I heard that the best have an option to determine windows as needed.”

“Oh!” She brightened, sighed a little, then shook her head. “Laev bought all the gear. We Licorices do not believe in spending such gilt on our persons.”

Her Family had been nobles since the second generation of colonists, they must have money, and they didn’t use it to make their lives more comfortable? Jace’s brows rose but he kept his mouth shut.

Glyssa looked toward her duffle that must contain wonderful stuff. “There should be instructions in there on how to make windows.”