“The plan doesn’t need amendment. And I don’t need this complication,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of a fuck-up, and I don’t want this apprenticeship to be just another mistake added to my list.”
“I hadn’t noticed that, though I notice you keep insisting on it,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “But let’s leave it at what it is. We were attracted to each other, we kissed, you humped my leg a little, and everything’s fine now.”
She gave a shocked laugh, the distress on her face driven away by the spread of her wide smile. “I did not hump your leg!”
“There was a wee bit of humping, lass,” he said. He began a ridiculous reenactment of the kiss using a drainpipe as a stand-in, complete with an exaggerated dry hump. “Just a bit of ‘Oh, Tavish, you great Highland beast.’”
“Stop it!” she squealed, playfully smacking at his arm. He obeyed her command, having accomplished his mission of making her laugh.
Maybe she wouldn’t kiss him again. Maybe she would. Either way, she needed to know that things were fine between them.
He pulled away from the pipe, dusted off his hands. “All right, now the really fun part begins—cleanup.”
They tidied the smithy, both pretending they weren’t thinking of the kiss. Or maybe Portia really wasn’t, but Tav was in full-blown replay mode, going over the kiss from every angle and in slo-mo like a particularly good goal in a Premiere League match.
“Thanks,” she said, handing him the broom when they were done.
“Just doing my job,” he said.
She nodded, then looked down to where both of their hands still held on to the broomstick. When she looked back up at him, there was that dusky rose across her cheeks.
“Back to data entry. Later!” She ran off.
“Later.”
He hoped that was a promise.
Chapter 12
Bodotria Eagle: (left) Tavish McKenzie, Master-at-Arms at Bodotria Armory, and (right) Portia Hobbs his American apprentice. Readers of the Eagle will remember the international search for an apprentice launched by Mr. McKenzie last year, and now we’re able to share the results. Ms. Hobbs made a fantastic showing at last weekend’s Renaissance Faire, captivating audiences (and perhaps Mr. McKenzie?) with her impressive knowledge of weaponry and Scottish history. We look forward to seeing how the apprenticeship turns out!
Portia snuck another glimpse at the screenshot Reggie had posted on the GirlsWithGlasses social media account.
Go, sis, go! Our favorite swordsmith in training made the Scottish papers!
The message made her happy. Seeing Reggie pronounce her love and support so plainly to millions of strangers was a new experience. Her parents had always made their feelings about her clear, and Reggie had always seemed vaguely disappointed in her, too. Portia had kept her distance—it had been safer that way. Maybe she had been wrong.
“How do you know what your sister feels if you haven’t asked her, Portia?”
Reggie’s support was one blow to her emotions, and it had been paired with another: the photo of her and Tavish taken by the newspaper’s photographer. She knew it was just silly fun, but it looked . . . perfect. His arm around her shoulders pulling her in close, both with weapons drawn in a battle stance. Tav was looking down at Portia as if he really would protect her against anything that came her way, and she was looking at him like someone had hit her upside the head with one of Cupid’s arrows. It was nothing—she’d been whispering to him about marketing—but this was before they’d kissed. Now she couldn’t help but look at it and wonder.
She put her phone down and turned her attention back to the other screen in front of her, displaying newspaper articles that were actually relevant to her work. She’d wasted enough time over the past few days thinking of Tavish when she very clearly shouldn’t be.
She’d had plenty of interesting experiences with men, but none of them had involved making deadly weapons and then getting kissed like . . . like . . . she couldn’t even come up with a good comparison. Tav had kissed her, and she’d never doubted she’d enjoy such a thing, but she’d clearly underestimated just how much it could shake her. In fact, her simple summation when she’d slunk into her text message group later that day and confessed to Ledi and Nya had been two words: I’m shook.
Of course, her friends had gone on a gleeful texting streak: there had been emojis, and GIFs, and GET IT GIRLs. She’d felt like less of a failure, even though she was one: she’d broken one of the cardinal rules of Project: New Portia—two if she was honest. But failure didn’t feel so bad when it involved Tav’s warm mouth, the scratch of his stubble against her cheek, his fingertips pressing into her hips and neck and sliding into her hair . . .
Heat warmed her breasts and she crossed her legs against the growing ache between them, making her feel like a pervert as she sat in the silent, comfortable confines of the Bodotria Library.
She could still feel his hands on her, when she closed her eyes, could even feel where his hands might have traveled if she hadn’t pulled away from him. Connecting the dots from disparate information was essential to being a good researcher, and she could only come to one conclusion: Tav knew what he was doing. Her body wouldn’t let her forget that.
Maybe it was because he was a little older—her hookups had tended toward young, dumb, and full of . . . imprecise applications of moves they’d picked up from watching too much porn. Or maybe it was because he was her first kiss in recent memory, and the first kiss in longer memory that hadn’t tasted of booze.
“Portia, you say that alcohol helps you to relax and be open with people. Can you tell me how being open without alcohol makes you feel?”
Portia had never given much weight to her drunken escapades—that had kind of been the point. The alcohol had been its own kind of armor, protecting her from caring too much about anything. Most of the notches in her bedpost were slightly out of focus, but the memory of Tav’s kiss was sharp as the blade they had forged and could cut her just as deeply if she let it.
She cleared her throat, and the librarian at the information desk raised her head from the pile of books she was sorting. For a moment, Portia was sure the dark-haired young woman knew she was having lascivious thoughts in the reference section.
“Need help with the microfiche, love?” the librarian asked. “Or a Ricola?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Portia responded guiltily, and turned back to the machine. She was totally fine. That kiss was an isolated incident, and since it would never happen again, there was no need to think about it again. She could throw all this excess energy into her research. Totally the same thing.
She was more accustomed to searching digital archives, but after a morning spent going through old newspapers, she’d gotten the hang of things. There were products to be packed and shipped—she was proud of the modest increase in sales that was resulting from her work—but Jamie had signed off on her research trip, knowing how much she wanted to get the site finished. She hadn’t asked Tav; he’d been up in his office, and the risk of being alone with him had frightened her. No, that wasn’t right—it had thrilled her.
She concentrated on the screen, scrolling through old copies of the Bodotrian, a local newspaper long since lost to the annals of time—outside of the Bodotria Library microfiche.
She was an old hand at research, but years spent on social media had prepared her for this tedious task. She scrolled by picture after picture, headlines that talked of boys going off to war and coming back, of new boats being unveiled that used increasingly complex methods of steering, of trade deals and shipping courses, and then of boys going off to war again.
She fell into a rhythm, gaze sliding over photos and words.