“It’s an act, Cora. All a big show,” he told her.
“Maybe so, but if it is, from what I’ve heard, it’s a good one.” She leaned his way where she was sitting beside him at the dinner table. “And Noc, okay, she helped save the world. That was a big deal. But Frey explained to you what they gave her in the queen’s study. In our world value, it’s worth millions.” She leaned closer. “Maybe even billions. No joke.”
“She put her ass on the line, babe,” he returned. “And maybe she needs it.”
“Perhaps the furs, some coin.” She shook her head, moving away and tipping her eyes back to her plate. “But all that?” She kept shaking her head, speared a buttered, herbed new potato and looked back at him. “She’s a member of a House. In Lunwyn, they take care of each other in aristocratic families. She’ll have an allowance. And that allowance will be handsome. You can’t know this, but her clothes are of superb quality. She clearly has more than one maid, the way she’s tended to. She wasn’t hurting before. Her taking all that, well, I don’t need to know her to know it’s greedy, Noc.”
“I’m a cop, Cora, I read people for a living. And I’m tellin’ you, that woman who walked into that room today is not the woman that woman is.”
“I know,” she muttered, lifting the potato to her mouth. “You told us all that before she showed.”
She ate the potato, and Noc looked to his own plate to spear one too because this world might be crazy, but they had great food, and he didn’t know how those potatoes were made, but they fucking rocked.
“Maybe she was, I don’t know…playing you,” Cora suggested softly.
Noc turned his eyes to her. “I don’t get played.”
“From what I hear, she’s a master.”
“I don’t get played,” he repeated.
“Okay, then maybe she’s more likeable when she’s drunk,” Cora tried.
Noc chewed and swallowed his potato then turned fully to the gorgeous princess at his side, his dinner partner, as Cora explained, something that was important in any seating arrangement in this world.
Crazy.
“There’s more to that woman than meets the eye,” he stated.
Her head twitched. “Are you…I mean, I thought…uh, well, you know, you and Circe seem like…are you…do you…?”
He put her out of her misery by sharing, “Circe and me, that was what it was, and what it was was between us. She’s an amazing woman. We’ll keep in touch when we go back to our world. But she doesn’t want that and I’m not looking for it either. We both knew that going in. We both knew what we wanted going in. We both got that. And that part’s done.”
“I don’t actually get any of that,” she admitted.
Noc gave her a grin that he hoped took any sting out of his next words. “Not yours to get, babe. That’s what I’m tryin’ to say.”
“Right,” she replied.
“And straight up, different time, different world, I’d be into Franka,” he glanced up at Cora’s phenomenal, thick, shining, dark-brown hair, looked back to her and winked. “She’s my type.”
And she was.
He’d dated gold, and Circe was a blonde.
But he knew the one he’d pick in the end would be a brunette.
Cora had great hair, but Franka’s was even more thick and shining and a deeper, richer brown.
Not to mention the woman’s eyes were fucking amazing. That deep blue. Goddamned gorgeous.
She also had a beautiful neck.
No, not beautiful.
Slim.
Delicate.
Elegant.
But it was her mouth that drew him. She was what a cosmetic surgeon would use to create a million different sets of lips. Pink. Full. They looked soft, even pillowy.
Noc had to admit it’d suck, leaving this world and not being able to put his mouth to those lips.
But he was not going to kiss those lips.
He wasn’t about to get in deep with a woman from this world and he knew himself; the way she looked, her manner, the way she was both before and after they got drunk last night, she’d draw him in.
But he’d already done that and it got his ass in a sling in a variety of ways, including him being magicked to a parallel universe, dropped onto some remote island in order to face down three witches who wanted to take over the world and wouldn’t have hesitated to wave their wands or snap their fingers (or whatever witches did) and waste him like blowing out a match.
He wasn’t going to go there with Franka.
That was why he knew they were all wrong about her.
It wasn’t her playing him. It wasn’t her being drunk.
It was that she loved the man who’d been killed by those witches and she’d done it deeply.
The woman they all described didn’t feel anything deep, except for herself.
But the pain behind those blue eyes of hers, she could try to hide it, but it was so immense, that was impossible.
The thing was, Noc didn’t get why he cared so much what they thought.
They’d talked about how much they were giving her, doing this way overkill because they wanted rid of her for good and sneered at the fact she’d take it.
He’d told them she wouldn’t, and the way they’d been when they disagreed was not ugly or mean, just definite.
Then she’d taken it.
He was not that guy who always had to be right and he’d only spent a few hours with the woman.