He nodded curtly and turned away. Setting the notebook down on a shelf piled with white tulle, he took a long time opening to a blank page.
Rune unlaced her riding boots and took her time wriggling out of her trousers, relishing Gideon’s sudden bashfulness.
“Did you do this a lot, when you assisted your parents?”
As if he sensed that she now stood in nothing but her underwear, he didn’t turn to look at her. Only cleared his throat. “Do what a lot?”
“Take people’s measurements.”
“I only ever took Cressida’s measurements.” This answer seemed to sober him. He dragged the measuring tape from his shoulders and turned to confront her, keeping his eyes on her face. Not letting them lower even an inch. “Ready?”
“Yep.” Rune bounced on the balls of her feet, trying to stave off the chill in the air.
He stepped closer, bringing the lamp with him. “I’ll start at the top and work my way down.”
She knew what he meant, but the way he said it made her imagine him working his way down her in a … less vertical way. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one. Gideon froze, opened his mouth to clarify what he meant, and coughed instead.
He lowered the lamp down to the measuring block, engulfing her in its warm glow—To better see my scars, thought Rune—and started measuring.
His hands made quick work of it, telling Rune how practiced he was. She couldn’t help comparing those hands to his brother’s. Alex had the hands of a musician: wide palms, slender fingers. Elegant and beautiful as a song.
Gideon’s hands were strong and rough and calloused. Hands that could hold a gun as competently as they could haul a witch into a prison cell—or take a girl’s measurements, evidently.
He never fumbled or brushed her skin. As if he were trying very hard not to touch her more than necessary.
To distract them both while he measured her bust, Rune said, “I wish Alex had told me you were an accomplished tailor. If your finished garments look anything like your sketches, I would have employed you years ago.”
“Cress would never have let me work for you.”
The way he said the young queen’s name—Cress, not Cressida—made Rune feel funny.
“She wouldn’t have let me talk to you.” Gideon retreated to write the number in his notebook. “I did serve you and your friends tea once, though you didn’t notice me.” He returned to Rune, looping the tape around the smallest part of her waist this time. “It was at Thornwood Hall, during one of Cress’s parties.”
Unable to recall it, she glanced up to find Gideon’s face mere inches from hers, his attention fixed on the measuring tape. “If you were her tailor, why were you serving tea at her party?”
The tape went slack, but he didn’t move on to the next measurement.
“I was living at Thornwood Hall by then. Cress moved me there from the palace to … better fulfill her needs. The night of that party, I was being punished.” He ran a hand roughly through his hair. “For neglecting my duties.”
Rune frowned harder, about to ask him what he meant, when he cut her off.
“Hips are next.”
He didn’t want to elaborate, clearly. While the tape encircled Rune’s hips, pulling her closer into his warmth, she tried to remember it: a younger version of Gideon Sharpe, refilling her cup while she gossiped with her friends.
But she couldn’t remember him, and the guilt of it twisted in her belly.
But why should I remember him?
Her mind wandered back to that nickname. Cress. Was he the only one who called the queen that?
When Gideon left to write Rune’s hip measurement down, she asked, “I didn’t know Cressida very well. What was she like?”
He stayed bent over that book, not writing or answering for a long time. “She was … beautiful,” he finally said. “And alluring.” He seemed half-lost in a dream. “And powerful.”
Rune suddenly remembered the rumors about Cressida and her lowborn lover. Rumors she’d dismissed as silly gossip. She wondered now if there might be some truth to them.
Gideon had said he’d lived at Cressida’s summer home, and he was certainly easy on the eyes.
If dark, brooding, and brutal are your type, she thought with a scowl.
The way Gideon talked about the youngest Roseblood sister was so informal. Not at all like someone who had served her. More like someone who’d known her well.
Or been intimate with her.
Rune shifted. An uncomfortable feeling snaked through her at the thought of him sharing Cressida’s bed. If he’d been a witch queen’s lover, Rune would need to be much more careful. He would pick up on the smallest of cues.
“Are you familiar with the pitcher plants that grow in the island’s bogs?”
Though he’d turned around to face her, there were several paces between them. Rune stood in the lamp’s glow, still in her lace underwear. Gideon was in the shadows outside it, fully clothed. And yet, in this moment, he seemed to be the vulnerable one.
“Those deep purple flowers that trap and eat bugs?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Cress was like that: pretty from a distance, tempting you closer. Like a fool, you were happy to approach.” He was staring at the space over Rune’s shoulder, his expression haunted. “It was only after she’d reeled you in that she revealed her true nature. But by then, it was too late.”
He met Rune’s gaze.
“She was already eating you alive.”
NINETEEN
GIDEON
IN THE BEGINNING, THE attraction had been mutual. The first time he met Cressida Roseblood, he’d traveled to the palace with his mother to deliver a dress. While his mother spoke privately with the two eldest witch queens, Gideon waited in the hall, knowing how much rested on this moment. If the sisters liked his parents’ work, Analise and Elowyn would employ the Sharpe Duet full-time to be their dressmakers.
It would give Sun and Levi an enviable salary.
It would change their family’s fate.
Gideon had been standing against the wall when Cressida walked by with her handmaidens. Not realizing who she was, he’d done a double take, soaking up her ivory hair, bright blue eyes, and slender frame.
She had stopped and turned back. Smiling, she’d slowly approached and asked his name, then stayed to converse with him. He was completely taken in by her beauty, flattered by her flirting, and, most of all, surprised at being treated like her equal.
She only left his side when his mother returned, looking dazed, saying she’d signed the contract.
“I guess we’ll be seeing more of each other.”
Gideon still remembered the way his pulse had stumbled at those words. At the look she had thrown him before disappearing down the hall.
It started out slow. Once his family moved into the palace, Cressida invited him on walks in the gardens, or horseback rides along the shore. He started joining her at breakfast on her terrace in the mornings.
They traded kisses in empty palace rooms, hands wandering over each other.
It seemed like a dream back then. Too good to be true.
And it was.
“Gideon?”
Rune’s voice broke through the memories. For a moment, half-stuck in the past, Gideon saw not Rune Winters standing on the measuring block before him, but Cressida Roseblood. Watching him like a lioness. Contemplating whether to play with her food before she ate it, or go straight for the jugular.
His heart hammered; his palms sweated.
“Is everything all right?”
Rune’s voice pulled him fully into the present. Cressida is dead. This was a different girl standing on his measuring block.
Rune stepped down, padding softly toward him.
On instinct, Gideon stepped back.
She froze, biting her lip, as if sensing his distress but not knowing how to ease it.
Snap out of it, Sharpe.
He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Yes. Everything’s fine. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I’m the one who brought it up,” she said, her stormy gaze studying him. “If you want to talk about it—”
“I’d rather not.”
What was he thinking? This was the absolute worst person to tell his most shameful secrets to. The queen of gossip herself, who could ruin his reputation with a single whispered word.
Why had he said so much?