Page 22 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 22

Aubrey

Ass.

So very much bare ass.

Smooth and round and just...oh boy. Kit Moonstriker was too sexy for anyone’s own good, especially mine. I did not need to get an erection before trying to change into the sweatpants he’d bought me.

I turned away from the epic view and busied myself with dressing, focusing less on his mass of creamy smooth skin and more on how utterly humiliating it would be to have to stand there with an erection when he was so...so cool and unaffected by everything.

Okay, maybe it turned out he wasn’t that cool and unaffected by everything, but he was still a thousand times smoother than me.

Smooth and so very hot.

I cleared my throat as I tugged the sweats up over my hips and returned to a sitting position, then started rolling up my dirty clothes to put...somewhere in the pack, hopefully not touching the clean ones. “My mother would have been annoyed with me for pretending I wasn’t hurt yesterday. She used to call it my masculine instincts steering me down the stubborn path.”

Kit laughed at that, shaking his head. “Seriously, she sounds kind of great. But I’ve also got masculine instincts that sometimes make me act like a stubborn ass, so it’d be rude of me to poke you for it. Especially since, you know, that’s basically what I’ve been doing since we met.”

What he’d been...“No, that—I mean, maybe, yeah, but it wasn’t just you. I saw you that first day at the chalet and my first thought was...well, something about how you looked like the kind of guy who belonged at a place called a chalet.”

“Arrogant and good at skiing?” he asked, but there was a mischievous grin on his face when he did it. “Definitely yes to the first, but I’ve never cared for skiing, if we’re being honest.”

“I thought you were dressed as a duelist.” When he seemed confused and started to respond, I shook my head and held up my hand. “Like as a costume. Not that you were actually a duelist. It struck me as...”

“Rich dilettante playing a role he thought was cool and clever?” He wouldn’t have been the first rich asshole who thought pretending to be a duelist was fun. Some of them had gotten themselves killed doing it over the years.

I winced, but nodded. “Yeah, basically. Sorry. That’ll teach me to make assumptions. Grandma used to have a saying about the roots of assumptions being asses.”

He laughed again at that, and his laugh was nice. I’d half expected it to be slinky and a little sly like the rest of him, but instead, it was just honest. It felt like maybe...maybe it was something he didn’t share with a lot of people.

“Honestly, it sounds like you dodged a bullet, avoiding being raised by Oberon at court. Even Titania was a bit of a mess for most of those years because of first her father being an ass, and then her brother’s death. The Sunrunners of the previous generation were constantly high and didn’t bother to show up for anything. Delta was rigid and cold as the solstice in the arctic. Dawnchaser...well, he was always a monster.” A strange look crossed his face at that, and I caught a moment of pain in it before he turned away.

Odd.

“You worked with him for a long time, if he was just a monster. I don’t think I could have done that.” I pretended distraction, focusing on putting my socks on over the bandage wrapped around my ankle, and didn’t look up when I saw motion from the corner of my eye.

“He...I did, but he was a monster. He was awful to his kids. And his cousins. And strangers. He hated almost everyone he came into contact with at some point, and when he hated you, he was cruel.”

That stymied me for a moment. I was sure I’d seen pain, but that was a rather definitive statement, wasn’t it?

Except no.

There was one person Kit hadn’t mentioned in all that.

“But he didn’t hate you.”

He slumped heavily against the tree next to him, sighing. “He tried to kill me, the last time I saw him as a free man.”

Okay, that didn’t make any sense. “But he didn’t hate you?”

“No,” he admitted, like it was something shameful. “He was trying to kill me to hurt my father. He...he never hated me. I might have been one of the only people he thought was too dangerous to piss off. So he wasn’t cruel to me. I think...I think in some ways, he saw me as an equal. Or at least, as exactly like him. So he treated me differently than everyone else.” He slid down the trunk of the tree, until he was sitting back on the ground, staring off into the middle distance. “I want to say he was wrong, but...was he? I’ve also spent the last ten years dismissing everyone’s suffering because none of it mattered to The Plan. Only The Plan was important to me. Just like only his plan made any difference to him.”

I scoffed aloud, and his eyes snapped to mine. “Sorry, you’re going to have to forgive me if I’m being ignorant here, but his plan was to take over the world and rule it, right? Killing everyone who was in his way?”

He pursed his lips, nose scrunched like something smelled awful, and nodded.

“And your plan was to save that same world from almost certain destruction? Save everyone possible?”

He sighed, his head lolling back to smack against the tree behind him, and I winced at the noise. “Basically. But it’s not like it’s selfless. I live in the world, you know. I was saving myself as much as anyone.”

“Nope. If that was the plan, it would have been easier for you to plan for how to survive the explosion. Make a nice bunker filled with canned food, that kind of thing. That’s a way easier plan than yours. I mean, who even thinks ‘hey I can stop that volcano from exploding’?”

That actually pulled a smile out of him, but then he shook his head, as though I were wrong. “I did say I was stubborn, right? Besides, I knew before I started planning, that no one I loved would go hide in a bunker with me. So that was never an option. Frost would never forgive me if I let everyone die without trying to stop it. So it’s not like I’m secretly a good guy.”

“Apparently it’s so much of a secret that not even you’ve figured it out,” I joked.

It made him smile again, but he shook his head. “I mean, you said it yourself. You thought I was a fake duelist, because someone like me would never be a real one. But I wasn’t faking it. I’ve killed more than twenty people in duels. Some of them because Dawnchaser ordered me to.”

For a moment, I just watched him. It was clear enough that part of him expected me to be angry. Maybe even wanted it, or he wouldn’t have continued pushing, pointing out all the ways in which he was deficient.

Was he looking for absolution? No, that didn’t make sense. He was too smart to think I could give him that, even if he wanted it. So instead, he was looking for the opposite. He fully expected me to turn on him, angry, and lash out because he’d done terrible things in his quest to save the world.

“You became a duelist because of your plan. Because it was the way to get close to him, to be able to stop him. Right?”

He looked away, nodding.

“Was there another way to get close to him?”

Sighing, he shook his head. “Not reliably, no. The only thing he wanted added to his life was someone to kill the people he found inconvenient. But does that excuse the fact that I did it?”

Part of me wanted to dismiss it all. To tell him that anything he did on his quest to save the world was justified, but...well, it wasn’t that simple. He knew it and I knew it, and if they were bad enough, the things he’d done in his plan were going to haunt him for the rest of his life.

A life that was hopefully going to be nice and long, thanks to his efforts.

“You’ve been deferring how you felt about it all, because why worry about the things you feel bad about before you even know you’ll succeed?”

“No point,” he agreed, staring up at the sky through the forest canopy. “If I’m going to be dead, what difference does it all make? I...I thought sometimes, maybe that would be better. I could die doing this, and then I’d never have to deal with it all.”

I stared at him in silence for a second, blinking, a yawning pit opening in my gut at the idea of him dying on this quest. I didn’t know him well enough to give some passionate speech about how people would miss him, and that no, that wouldn’t be better at all, but in the moment, I couldn’t relate it back to his family or any other loved ones I didn’t even know.

I just thought...I barely even knew him, and if he got himself killed, I never would.

A few days ago, I’d have accepted it without much thought.

Today . . .

No.

“Absolutely not,” I told him. “That wouldn’t be better at all. And if you go trying to get yourself killed, I’m going to kick your ass, duelist or not. Even if I have to train in order to do it.”

He lifted a brow at that, finally raising his head to look at me again. For some reason, it made me sigh in relief when he stopped staring blankly at the sky. “I’m the best duelist in the Summerlands. Not to be an arrogant dick?—”

“Of course you are,” I agreed. “The Dawnchaser wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t, so you had to be.”

He sighed and nodded at that, finally stretching and then pushing back to his feet. Part of me uncoiled at the motion, even though I knew the conversation wasn’t over. But he was moving forward, not just fixating on the question of whether he was supposed to live through this quest of his.

He was.

He had to. I didn’t know why, but suddenly, that was the most important part of this whole disaster for me. He’d always planned for me to live, because I had to bond the mountain, and that didn’t help anyone if I died. But he’d only cared about his own life insofar as he had to survive to see his plan through.

I saw a sudden flash of Delta Moonstriker in my mind’s eye: the woman who’d raised him as her son. Whom he said was cold and rigid. Whom I had yet to see acting any way other than rude and selfish.

My mother would have hated her. I kind of hated her, in that moment, because she’d taught Kit that was acceptable. His life didn’t matter, only the goal.

I was, I decided, going to give her a piece of my mind when we got back to the chalet safely. She was a jerk, and it seemed like people didn’t tell her that often enough.

Shoving myself up and then grabbing the sleeping bag, I started rolling it up to reattach it to my pack. It slid apart in the center as I started to curl the end up and...what the heck?

In a moment, Kit was behind me, his hands on mine, guiding my motions. “It’s harder than it looks,” he said, his breathy voice brushing against my ear as he spoke. “It only looks easy because I’ve done it a thousand times. I lived rough for a few years when I first left home.”

Homeless, he meant. He’d been homeless. And I’d made such an insensitive comment the day before?—

“I was just grateful it wasn’t supposed to rain while we were doing this,” he added. “Getting rained on in your sleep sucks.”

A rich dilettante, I’d thought him.

I’d been so willfully ignorant.