Though he was still firmly against exploring anything with Portia, despite the banked attraction between them, they were both adults who should be able to acknowledge it and move past it.
“Oh.” Her thin brows rose. “Is that why you kept brushing me off?”
Tav sighed. “No. I brushed you off because you were annoying and intrusive,” he said gruffly, but Portia didn’t react how she had to his previous insults. She smirked at him.
“Right.”
The cheek. He really had lost his edge.
“I think you were worried about sparks flying,” she said, then tilted her head toward the anvil near the forge. “Sparks? Get it?”
“I’m the only one allowed to tell bad jokes here, Freck.” But he felt less nervous now that they had in a way, dealt with the horny elephant in the room. Now they could just be normal coworkers. “We’re gonna start by hammering the tang, that is, the handle of the sword that’s going to be embedded in the hilt. I’ve already cut away two triangles of metal at the end of the steel, leaving a pointed handle that will fit into the hilt.”
He stopped and picked up the hammer, laying the steel down on the work surface. He’d lifted the hammer to strike the tang when she made a sound to get his attention.
“Hold on,” she said, tapping at her tablet and then pointing its camera at him. “Okay, annnnnd action! You were about to hammer the tang, Sir Tav?”
It was hard to be annoyed when she called him that—hard but not impossible. “Why are you recording this?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes, as if the answer should be obvious. “Because it will get people interested in your business. Which is one of my duties as an apprentice. I’m going to post it on social media and in the next post for my sister’s blog.”
Tav rolled his neck, tried not to show too much annoyance. “I don’t like being videoed, Freckles.”
She looked up from the screen. “It’s not going to steal your soul, you know. In case that was a concern. And why is this different than the exhibition?”
“I was performing then. And my face was covered.” He shifted restlessly. “I just don’t like the idea of people watching, making their little cool, snarky comments. I’m not entirely comfortable being reduced to a bloody hashtag.”
Portia’s stubborn expression softened a bit. “Oh, okay. The #swordbae thing freaked you out. That’s totally understandable. BUT I need to be clear that the comments on this video will not be snarky. They will mostly be, um, appreciative, if I had to make a guess. But you don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”
Tav remembered her comment from that first day he’d found her watching him at the grinder. He wasn’t the most logical man, but it stood to reason that if she thought others would appreciate watching him, it was because she appreciated it herself.
“I’ll give you thirty seconds and that’s it,” he said.
“Two minutes,” she countered calmly.
“One,” he compromised and remained stoic when she did a little gleeful jump. He kept his eyes above her neckline, too.
“Okay, and action! Again!”
Tav tried to frown discouragingly at her. She was having way too much fun with this.
“The tang. Yeah. Tang. Tangy,” he choked out, then remembered that this was for Portia, not the annoying contraption in her hand. He straightened, and fixed her with his gaze instead of the phone. “We’re hammering out the tang, aye?”
“Aye, Sir Tav!” she responded with an encouraging grin. He liked this Portia, open and teasing—the Portia he’d sent into hiding with his childish response to his attraction. He could do this silly video without complaining. For her.
“The thing with the tang, which is what keeps the blade locked into the handle of the sword for those of you who don’t know, is that the angles have to be rounded. Soft.” He ran his fingertip over the blunted edge of metal and because his gaze was on her face he saw the way her teeth pressed down on her bottom lip in response. “This is what secures the sword to the hilt. If you have sharp edges, it can eventually lead to fissures and cracks in the metal, and a sword that breaks off at the hilt in the middle of battle. And if that happens? You’re done for. Always check for cracks at this point in the process to ensure you’re crafting something that will stand the test of time.”
He turned, placed the steel down on the work surface, hefted the hammer, and went at it for approximately thirty seconds, mostly so he wouldn’t have to look her full in the face any longer.
He turned to her, slightly winded. “That good enough?”
She nodded, staring at the tablet, and he heard his own voice playing back. “Yeah. I think that’ll go over real well. I’ll do a photo collage of the progression of the sword, too.”
She snapped a pic and Tav shook his head.
“All right, enough,” he said. “Let’s see if you’ve got what it takes to do this on your first try.”
She curled her lip at him, as he knew she would. When she was in fighting form, an insult was an invitation to hand someone their arse.
While she did stop to take a photo every now and again, she was a diligent student, asking question after question, not because she didn’t understand but because she wanted to know everything. He hadn’t been wrong about that hunger in her. He’d expected to have to show her things multiple times, as he would with any student, but she was quick, picking up the subtleties in his motions and incorporating them into her work. When she finally held up the finished product, Tav felt real pride in her work, that had nothing to do with his attraction to her. She was on her way to becoming a fantastic swordmaker.
“Wow,” she said, and the reverence in her voice pierced through the metaphorical armor he’d donned before they’d begun that morning. She was his apprentice, but if he was honest, she was something else, too. There had been a part of him that kept waiting for her to laugh, to call his work silly. After all, “wow” was what Greer had said the first time he’d forged a sword here, too, but her voice had been tinged with resentment, like she’d been wondering how the fuck she’d found herself in that particular situation.
Some part of Tav hadn’t gotten past the fact that Portia—prim, proper, stylish Portia—could really respect what he did. But her face made clear that he’d been wrong about her, yet again. He’d been wrong about so much when it came to her.
The way she was looking at the sword was enough to start the stirrings of desire in him, despite the fact that he’d deck the next person who pointed out the weapon’s phallic connotations to him.
She gripped the sword by the hilt and held it out before her. The weapon was slim and lightweight, and it seemed ornate in her long-fingered grip even though the hilt was basic wood and the cross-guard lacked any ornamentation. She was enough.
“This is . . .” She carefully swung the sword back and forth, and Tav admired the respect in her slow movements and the way she looked about to make sure she wouldn’t nick anything, including him. He’d seen many a newbie hurt over the years by forgetting that a sword was a weapon. Portia’s smile was a weapon, too, gutting him as she looked up with glittering eyes.
“We made this!” she said. She was grinning like mad as she carefully placed the sword down on the forge to take a picture, then she stopped and stared at it. “You know what’s weird? When we were kids, my parents would take Reggie and me to the Met. The museum, you know?”
He knew Reggie was her twin, who ran the website where she’d been writing about her adventures at the armory. Jamie and Cheryl had told him the posts were good fun; Tav wondered if she portrayed him as a medium-or large-sized bawbag.
“Reggie liked the modern art and the Egyptian tomb. My favorite pieces were the Byzantine jewelry and the Greek statues, but there’s this huge room full of swords and armor . . .”