Page 65 of The Winter Princess

“You weigh all your words?” Damn.

She sits up and takes a breath, holding her cookie like a silver tennis trophy. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry about what I said in Marie’s office,” she says. I glance up.

“The goblin crack.” There. It’s out.

She nods. “The goblin crack.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.” As soon as the words leave my mouth I want to feed them into an incinerator. I told her our kiss wasn’t a big deal. My designated snack drawer is making a very good case that it was.

“It’s a big deal if I ruin our working relationship.”

Is that what she’s worried about? “We don’t have to love each other to work together. We just completed a successful Pixy Live without fighting.”

She frowns. “We accidentally highlighted a medieval codpiece, and you didn’t look me in the eye.”

Stultes es.It’s harder hiding a thing she’s already noticed. “No one is giving me directions. I’m an art restorer. I can scrape rabbit skin glue for eight hours straight. I don’t know anything about being telegenic.”

“You know,” she mutters.

I carry on, hardly hearing. “If I forgot to look at you, I’ll do so next time.”

“You know it’s more than forgetting to look at me.” She takes another bite of cookie and leans against the table at my side. She breaks off a piece and I take it unthinkingly, tossing it into my mouth, chasing the crumbs with the back of my wrist.

Yeah. I know.

“I hurt your feelings and I’m trying to say sorry. The least you could do is let me.”

I steal another piece of the cookie so that she’s left with a small bit, pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “I’m a grown man. I’m too old to feel hurt when people call me names.”

“Is anyone too old for that?” The last bite disappears, and when she swallows, she tips her head.

“Why goblin?”

She looks away, her cheeks pink. “Oh, you know. There was that row with the janitorial staff a couple of years ago and names got tossed around the staff meetings.”

I don’t see Rik calling me a goblin.

I open my mouth to follow up, but she says, “What was it about? The row, I mean.”

“Rik discarded a stack of old canvas scraps, thinking they were junk, but they’re priceless for conservation work. I spent an hour in the dumpster unearthing them again. We might have exchanged some words when I banned them from cleaning the restoration studio.”

She breathes a laugh. “I’m sorry for calling you names, especially when you’re making it easier for me to be in front of a camera.” She chews her lip. “I’ll do it without mangling your hand next time. You’ll lose a finger.”

I hold my hand up. Intact. “It’s fine if you need to hold my hand.” How careful I’ve been with my words.

Her expression shifts so slightly that few people would see it as the smile it is. “Thank you. It helps.”

“We can’t have you passing out in the galleries.”

Her lips twitch, an acknowledgment that we aren’t fighting anymore. “Until the end of the year, let’s go all in on being in front of the camera, on working out the details of our posts, on doing whatever song and dance Erik the Boy Wonder—”

An unwilling laugh breaks from me.

“—tells us to do. They’ve signed us up for a lot of traveling, but we can be a team. We travel together. We make this work. And you’ll promise to stop frowning at me every time I walk through the door, and I promise I won’t call you a goblin. I promise you—I promise you on theHerzollen—that I won’t ask you for another thing after New Year’s Eve. You won’t have to hold my hand again. You won’t have to see me in your studio, not even when I’m desperate for a cookie. Do we have a deal?”

Stultes es.I clasp her hand, liking, as I always do, how it feels in mine.

“Herzollen?” I ask, clearing my throat.