What was worse was the heightened color tingeing the sharp angle of his cheekbones and the slight widening of his eyes at the words tumbling from her lips.
A smart person would cease speaking at that clearly taken-aback expression, but Evie was not smart. Or rather, Evie was smart, but her brain and her mouth seemed to have a swift detachment from each other.
“Nobody was naked,” she said with a confident finality, rocking back on her heels.
Nobody. Was. Naked?
His eyes flashed, and her twisted imagination had the gall to see something burn there, for just a moment, before they shuttered again. He cleared his throat and scratched the back of his head, seeming a little unnerved.
Seeing him lose any ounce of his impeccable composure gave Evie far too much satisfaction.
“I was not referring to your nighttime imaginings, Sage.” His throat bobbed as he walked around her to look out at their surroundings. The Manor was in a part of the forest that was so thick with foliage, no one would think to stumble this way. Every village in Rennedawn was intentionally built over natural large gaps in the trees, almost as if the gods created the map of their lands by hand.
But Massacre Manor was the exception, living encased by its surroundings, like an armor.
The boss braced his hands on either side of the stone pillars. Evie knew his shoulders and back would be tensed beneath his cloak if it wasn’t obscuring her view.
“Sage?”
Oh, he’d been talking, hadn’t he? She’d been too busy ogling him as if he were the last piece of pie.
“Oh yes, I…agree.” She nodded emphatically, rocking back and forth, doing her best to mask her confusion with a false confidence.
“Is that so?” He whistled low and raised a hand to rub the perfectly maintained stubble at his chin. “Well, with your agreement in mind, I’ll begin the arrangements to have you married off to one of the river gremlins to allow us safe passage for our shipments from the southern kingdoms.”
“What?” Evie gasped “Sir, I— No, I wasn’t— You can’t be serious!” But he could be. Evie had seen him do far worse to other employees who weren’t cooperating, and she’d arranged most of them. Her heart was pounding, blood rushing through her ears, making everything sound muffled.
Without realizing it, she’d brought herself closer to him, searching for any ounce of humanity in his black eyes. Anything that might take pity on this magicless human with a terrible attention span.
But instead of humanity, she saw his eyes squint and crinkle at the corners. Evie took a large step backward to better observe the picture. His lips were curled up at the sides, and when Evie caught sight of them, she yelped.
“Was that a joke?” She almost cringed at the blatant shock in her voice, but her reaction to something so unpredictable could not be contained.
His smile widened further than Evie had ever seen it, and a single dimple on his left cheek poked free.
“And you have dimples?”
He rolled his eyes, and the dimple disappeared. “Just the one. Now that I have your full attention—”
“Was that your first?” Evie interrupted, unable to process all this new information in an efficient manner.
The boss’s head knocked back in surprise. “My first what, you little tornado?”
“Your first joke.”
He grunted and opened his mouth to speak, looking quite outraged, if she were being honest. “Of all the—” He paused to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Sage, do you honestly think me incapable of humor?”
“Of course I don’t think that,” she said earnestly. “You hired me.”
Letting loose a long-suffering sigh, he pushed a strand of dark hair meticulously back into place. “I speak to you for less than three minutes, and I’m more turned around than the interns during my favorite day of the week.”
“Metaphorically speaking, of course, as I am not shooting arrows at you.” Evie gave him a pointed look to reiterate how she disapproved of his “self-defense” training for the poor souls who came here on “internships.” Cast-off noblemen’s children, people who owed gambling debts, and other general reprobates alike applied for the entry position all the time.
Massacre Manor was a far cry from the kingdom’s capital, the Gleaming City, where most of the interns had stumbled in from. The decadence and abundance so different than the squalor of their new place of employ, for most of them their first place of employ. Evie had been to the city once as a child. It had been an entire day’s ride north from her village, when the forest was still considered safe to travel. She had been too little to remember much, but she recalled the contagious energy of it vibrating the air. Remembered vaguely meeting a magical specialist with her parents, and, just like the stories children in her village had told her, he had been kind and helpful with seemingly endless knowledge to share.