Okay, I was gonna get you started with something like a knife made with stock removal, but we’ll do this American style. ‘Go big or go home,’ or whatever it is you tossers say. We’re forging a longsword.”
Tav stood beside the forge, hands on his hips and swagger in his voice to hide his nerves. Yes, nerves. It was fucking ridiculous. He could forge with his eyes closed—or at the very least while squinting. But even prepping the forge had felt odd, like he was using someone else’s hands to gather the lengths of metal and wood, and to light the fire. That was mostly because someone else’s gaze was on him. Portia’s.
She stood before him now, tablet and electronic pencil in hand, diligently taking notes as he spoke. She was dressed rather casually, for her: a loose gray scoopneck T-shirt and black leggings. Both were made of soft fabrics that hugged her curves, and he was fairly certain that despite their casualness, they were both pricey designer items.
“Isn’t stock removal the more common technique?” she asked. “Tracing a pattern onto the steel and then grinding away the excess, leaving a blade?”
“Aye, but grinding away for hours requires a certain level of stamina.”
Portia’s studious gaze softened to something decidedly naughty. “I would imagine so.” She shook her head and laughed. “It’s going to be really hard to avoid innuendo today, isn’t it?”
Tav chuckled, felt the mood lighten a bit. “It’s a hazard of the job I’m afraid. Don’t worry, I can handle it.”
“Well, since the other hazards involve accidentally cutting a finger off or burning myself with molten metal, I’ll take Innuendo for $1,000, Tav.”
“In that case, here’s my eighteen-inch length of steel,” he said, pulling the thin flat metal from the worktable.
“Dear Lord,” Portia said, then pressed her lips together.
“Hey, you’re the one who pressed for these lessons, Freckles.” Tav gripped the steel and pointed it at her. “You had to have some idea they’d be like this.”
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 . . .”
He noticed she seemed sad when she mentioned her sister, and wondered if it had something to do with being a twin. In every movie he’d seen, twins shared some weird bond. Or one was good and one was evil. He realized he shouldn’t base his knowledge of twins on movies; he’d miss Jamie if he were in another country, twin or no.
Portia glided a fingertip over the smooth center of the blade. “I always wanted to go to that room, and my parents assumed it was because I liked the armored horses on display. Really, it was because I liked the weapons. I used to imagine mounting up like Joan of Arc and riding into battle, being strong enough—good enough—to defend my family from anything.”
Tav could imagine it, too. Her thick curls resting about the bevor and pauldron, then flying out behind her after she raised her sword and charged. It was a magnificent fantasy, but then the real Portia’s smile twitched and collapsed, rising again but as if buttressed by sheer willpower.
“After Reggie got sick, I would go sit in that room for hours—I skipped school, went there on the weekends. I spent more time there than the hospital. It was easier . . . reading all the curated information, over and over again.”
Tav felt a sick embarrassment as he remembered doubting her knowledge of weaponry. Is that how she knew so much? Christ.
“Mostly I’d just sit and imagine being someone else, in another time, able to fight off the things that wanted to hurt the ones you loved. But a sword isn’t the most efficient tool against a brain virus.”
Her sadness resonated in Tav like a blow against the anvil. He’d been obsessive about Jamie’s safety, those early years when Bodotria hadn’t been studded with cafes and boutiques. And Portia was a twin. He couldn’t imagine the fear and pain that must have caused her, seeing a part of herself—a reflection of herself, really—on the brink of death.
She sighed. “Some sister I was, huh? Hiding in a museum while Reggie was trapped in a hospital bed.”
“Portia,” Tav said. He tugged at his gloves but his gaze was focused on her face.
“Sorry for the Dr. Phil shite.” She shook her head and gave him that forced smile again. “I’d just completely forgotten about that. And holding the sword I remembered it. Is this some kind of fairy magic you forgot to warn me about? Is that the real reason you kept putting off the training?”
She was trying to act like what she’d told him didn’t matter much, but her voice still shook. That was the thing with creating something; you put some bit of yourself into it, if you did it well, but fuck if you could control what bit of yourself that was.
“Sounds like something traumatic happened, you dealt with it as best you could, then blocked it out,” he said. That was when Tav realized that his hand was resting on her shoulder.
When had that happened?
She glanced down at his hand, then up to his face, then back down at the hand, clearly wondering what he was doing. Tav was wondering the same bloody thing.
“You were brilliant today,” he said. “You’re gonna make a fine swordsmith, aye?”
“Probably not, but at least we made this one nice thing,” she replied breezily, looking up at him with those wide brown eyes that skewered him with want.
“You don’t have to find a reason to get down on yourself after you do something grand, lass,” he said. He didn’t know where the words came from, but he was certain he was right. It wasn’t that Portia wasn’t proud of her accomplishments—she certainly knew her strengths—it was that she had a way of blowing her failures up like a shield to block anyone from getting at the successes.
“That isn’t what I was doing,” she said. Her tone was annoyed, but her breath was coming fast and when his hand slid up the side of her neck, he could feel her pulse racing. Her hand came up and that grip of hers wrapped around his forearm. “What are you doing?”
Tav had no idea.
“Making sure there are no cracks,” he murmured. Her throat worked beneath his palm.
She closed her eyes and her grip loosened on his arm. Tav’s hand smoothed up her neck, over the soft, warm skin, and cupped her cheek.
“You’re going to mess up my skin-care routine,” she said, nose scrunching in annoyance as she tilted her head away from his hand. Tav’s senses started coming back to him. What was he doing? With his apprentice? In the courtyard?
She was right to pull away from him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, yanking his hand back.
“You should be,” she said. “I have very sensitive skin.” Then she pressed up on her toes and kissed him.
The kiss was not what he’d imagined. Because of course he’d imagined kissing her already, and in his fantasy she had been aggressive and take-charge, pulling him down and wrapping her legs around him. But this kiss was hesitant, though she’d initiated it, soft and just a whisper of sensitive skin rubbing over sensitive skin, as if she was prepared to pull away and run off at any second.
Can’t be having that, can we?
Tav’s arms slipped around her waist and pulled her up flush against him, angling his neck so that his mouth fit more firmly against hers. She moaned, and his cock thickened in his jeans and pressed against her as if urging her on.
She shifted so that her hips pressed into him—there was nothing hesitant about that motion—and her tongue slicked against his, hot and wet and searching. His hand flattened against her lower back, holding her firmly in place as he kissed the ever-loving fuck out of her. That was the only way to describe the ungainly, raw thrust of his tongue into her mouth, the groan that escaped him.
Her fingers were curled in the damp cotton of his shirt, bringing him down to her because, as in every other part of life, Portia was not one to let him think he could strut in and show her a thing or two, no matter how vulnerable she was at first. Now her hand was at the back of his neck, both stroking and drawing him down closer to her, like she was as afraid as he was that something would come between their questing mouths.
Tav hadn’t kissed a woman in a while, and he wondered if he’d forgotten how good it was—or maybe it had just never been so good. Her tongue sparring with his, resisting his advances even as she pulled him closer, sent tingles up and down his spine. The hitch of her breath made his balls draw up tight because that might be the sound she made as he thrust into her for the first time. Her nipples were hard—Christ, she’s sensitive—pressing into his chest, and he could only imagine how they would feel in his mouth and against his palm.
His hand slid hard up her back, fingertips dragging against the soft fabric of her shirt before sliding into her thick hair and holding her even more firmly as his tongue pillaged her mouth. She trembled in his arms and then he shivered because if she reacted like that to a slight tug of her hair . . .
Fuck, he thought.
“Fuck,” she moaned, then her kissing began to slow, then stopped. She pulled away and rested her forehead against his chin. “Fuck.” This time, the tone let him know something had come between them—reality.
She released him and pushed away, pupils wide and lips swollen.
“Of course, you would be a fantastic kisser,” she said, and if he wasn’t mistaken she was stressed about it.
“I’m fantastic at everything,” he said, ducking his head back down toward hers. He’d sipped from the Holy Grail, and now he needed another taste.
She hopped lightly out of his grasp—out of his reach.
“Except at being a boss,” she said firmly. “We can’t do this.” She averted her gaze. “I can’t do this. It’s not part of the plan, okay?”
“Might I suggest an amendment to whatever plan this is?” He tried to keep the words light, but fuck if he wasn’t ready to drop to his knees and beg, which meant her words applied to him, too.
He couldn’t do this.
That didn’t stop him from really, really wanting to.
“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.