Jun. 23rd, 2009 02:35 pm
Romancing Miss Irving (1/?)
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savvyliterateTitle: Romancing Miss Irving, or The Angel Who Loved Me (1/?)
Series: Tales of Symphonia
Characters/Pairings: Kratos/Anna
Rating: PG-13 (for now)
Summary: There were a great many things occupying Kratos Aurion at the moment. Like the fact that he'd manage to alienate everyone he knew. And he lost the key to the Tower of Mana ... again. And, most disturbing of all ... he was falling in love with Anna Irving.
Spoiler Alert: This fic is the sequel to "Birthday" and lies in the same universe as it and "Longing." It's not a tale of Kratos springing Anna from the Asgard Ranch. Really, if you want that, there's lots of fics that deal with the subject. I highly recommend "Shifting Destiny" and "Adbertos." This story is meant to be a light-hearted adventure between two adults falling in love, in the days after the escape from the ranch and before Lloyd is born. The title is an homage to Julia Quinn's novels. If you enjoy romance novels, you can't beat hers. They're fantastic and witty.
Chapter 1: In Which Denial Isn't Just a River, or We Get Acquainted with the Status Quo
There was a great many things going on in the mind of one Kratos Aurion these days. A lot of them, much to his dismay, centered around his 16-year-old companion that he had just kissed three weeks earlier. Okay, three weeks, two days, 17 hours and 37 minutes, but who was counting? He most certainly wasn’t. Not at all. There were far more pressing concerns on his mind. Like making sure he and said companion didn’t get themselves caught by Kvar, the Desians, Yuan, or the Renegades. Some days, it felt like even the local sorcerer guilds were after them. Oh, wait a minute, they were. At least, the one in Asgard. Somehow, they didn’t seem to care that Kratos happened to “borrow” one of their oldest tomes about objects with magical properties. He was going to give it back … eventually. Maybe. When he was done with it.
Then, there was the mission. The mission that he had set out to achieve upon learning Mithos’s twisted plans for the Age of Lifeless Beings, and one that had briefly gotten thwarted when he made the oh-so-bright decision to spring one Anna Irving from the Asgard Ranch. He still wondered what had possessed him to do such a thing. Oh, sure, there were noble intentions. Anna’s exsphere fully becoming a Cruxis Crystal? That would rank really high on the scale of “Very Bad Things To Occur.” But, the problem was … what to do with her? He couldn’t exactly just dump her in the nearest town. So, Anna stayed with him. For now. After all, his mission wasn’t one that could be shared. It was a solitary journey, and a burden he had to bear on his own.
She’d been with him for three months now.
Okay, so maybe the whole solitary thing hadn’t quite worked out the way that he’d planned it.
So now, here he was. A 4,000-year-old angel who’d managed to somehow fall in love with a mere human girl. That most certainly hadn’t been on his agenda. Now he was stuck among wanting to kiss her again, going back to the Asgard Ranch and using Kvar as a pincushion, telling her everything about him, and his mission to find a way for a human to wield the Eternal Sword.
And if that wasn’t enough, he’d also lost the key to the Tower of Mana.
Damn it.
“Just what are you doing?” An amused Anna lay on her stomach, legs absently kicking in the air as she watched Kratos turn their travel bag inside out, his fingers running over the lining as he tried to see if there was a small object that had gotten caught between the layers of leather and fabric
He didn’t exactly hear her, as he was too busy muttering under his breath. “I’m positive I saw that key about 500 years ago,” he mumbled. “Damn it, I thought I’d thrown it in here. Yuan led the last Chosen of Sylvarant, I bet he still has it. I told Mithos we needed an extra key made, but did he listen? Not that it’s a new thing, but …”
“Hello! Anyone home?”
He glanced up to see Anna raising an eyebrow at him. “I’m looking for something.”
Anna nodded slowly. “I see … unfortunately, I don’t think you’ll find what’s left of your brain in the lining of the bag.”
He merely frowned at her and turned the bag right side out.
Anna pulled herself into a sitting position. “What are you looking for anyhow?”
“Something that will greatly aid us in our journey,” he replied and dropped the bag.
“Right.” Anna leaned over and lightly poked at a rolled up piece of cloth that had something green and fuzzy growing on it that had fallen next to the bed. “By the way, just how old are those socks anyhow?”
Kratos glanced down, furrowed his brow. “Oh, so that’s where they are,” he muttered.
“They look several thousand years old.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are they safe to pick up?”
He wasn’t quite sure about that.
“Honestly, you need to take better care of your things.” Anna rolled off the bed and grabbed the bag. She wandered around the room, gathering the items that he’d dumped out of the bag in the effort to find the lost key. “I’m not sure what you did before you rescued me. Some times, I think you sprang me so you’d gain a keeper, not to piss off Kvar.”
He grinned at that, but quickly schooled his face back into an impassive look. Anna didn’t know about the mission - mainly because it would involve a lot of explanation that he didn’t think she was quite ready for. Ever. His explanation, as he hid her in a Desian laundry sack and had her hauled out of the ranch, was that he didn’t agree with the Angelus Project and wanted to keep her from Kvar’s hands. He would get her to a village and that was that.
But when Kratos and Anna had arrived in Asgard, he proclaimed that it wasn’t safe enough for her. Neither was Luin, her hometown. Or Palmacosta. Or Hima. Or anywhere else really. No, the best way to keep Kvar from getting his hands on Project A012 once more was to keep it by his side. Not to mention that Anna didn’t seem particularly inclined to leave him anyhow. So, they wandered through the countryside - the mercenary and the girl who looked like a street urchin in the castoff clothes that he procured for her before springing her from the ranch. They performed mercenary work and visited every single library that Kratos could think of. For the past three weeks, they’d been in Palmacosta while he combed through the academy’s collection looking for anything that could help him on his mission to find a way for a human to wield the Eternal Sword.
Anna thought he had a book fetish.
He didn’t correct her.
Anna’s favorite activity lately was trying to guess what Kratos’s ultimate goal was. He hadn’t exactly thought of a cover up, and so had settled on the old standby - it was none of her business. He did have to admire her … imagination when it came to guessing what he was really up to. Today’s suggestion had been that he was really a dwarf that had stumbled into an experiment gone wrong and he needed to find a cure for his horrifying condition.
“By the way,” Anna said as she finished packing their bag, “have you finished reading all the books in Palmacosta Academy yet?”
“I haven’t read all of them,” he corrected her. “Just merely browsed through them.”
“I see. And?”
“We need to go elsewhere,” he replied. Unfortunately, elsewhere needed to be the Tower of Mana. Or, actually, he really needed to go to Tethe’alla. That would be an explanation and a half to provide to Anna. Kratos frowned at the supply bag. If the Tower of Mana didn’t have the books that he needed, he was stuck. There was nowhere else in Sylvarant where he could find the research and knowledge needed to find a way for a human to wield the Eternal Sword.
“Where are we headed?”
He sighed. There was nothing else for it. “Have you ever heard of the Tower of Mana?”
Anna’s brow furrowed. “Not particularly.”
“It’s one of the stops that the Chosen must make during the Journey of Regeneration. One of the seals the Chosen has to release is there. There is a great library there, filled with books that make the ones in the Palmacosta Academy seem like basic primers for children. If I can’t find what I’m looking for here, we need to go there.”
“Okay,” Anna agreed and didn’t ask further. She settled back on the bed with a book that she had nicked from his bag. To his surprise, Kratos saw that it was a basic book of herbology. He didn’t remember acquiring that. Maybe Anna had grabbed it from the library. She flipped open to a place where she’d stuck a piece of leather as a bookmark and quietly began to read.
Something about her lack of protest, and questions, disturbed Kratos. She was normally full of them. Why did they have to go here? Surely she was safe settling there. Did he really need to guard her like an overprotective dog? Speaking of that, Kratos glanced at Noishe in the corner. The protozoan had become Anna’s number one fan. He swore that at times she stuck around more for Noishe than for himself. Kratos found himself fiddling with one of the straps on the bag. It’d been seven months. It was time to let Anna go. Maybe he could take her to Izoold, Triet, or Iselia. No, not Iselia. There was a ranch close to there. The desert. That’d be a good place, and maybe Yuan could even be convinced to have the Renegades keep an eye on her. That way, he could go to Tethe’alla and complete his mission and that would be that.
Kratos stared at Anna and wanted to kiss her again.
——-
“My life is weird, Noishe,” Anna confided in the protozoan as she walked beside him, lagging a couple yards behind Kratos. Noishe gave a whine and nuzzled her hand a bit, and she smiled. She ruffled his fur affectionately, leaning slightly into his bulk as they kept a leisurely pace.
Anna’s life truly was strange. A year ago, she’d called it a true hell. She’d been plucked from Luin when she was 12 during a raid. A year later, she’d had her original exsphere ripped out of her chest and a new one placed there. She was suddenly dubbed part of the Angelus Project, which even to this date she wasn’t quite sure what that was all about. It had garnered her solitary quarters and food that was even slightly edible. Other than that, she was poked, prodded, questioned and tested until she’d had quite enough, thank you. When she was told that man representing Kvar’s boss was coming to examine her, she decided to make her feelings known. When the door to examination room opened for the emissary, she dumped a full chamber pot atop the man’s head.
Thus, Anna Irving met Kratos Aurion.
He didn’t kill her as she’d expected. Instead, he grabbed her arm as she tried to run for it and hauled her back into the room. He’d ordered her to sit and spent the next 10 minutes trying to dry out his hair. Neither one of them acknowledged the slightly funny smell that clung to him during the resulting examination that followed. Oh, and she had to fully scrub down the room from ceiling to floor afterward.
Kratos wasn’t what Anna was quite expecting from an emissary. He was extremely quiet; giving her weird looks as he took notes and studied her exsphere. She talked because otherwise the silence was oppressive. After a month, he started replying in grunts. Then one-word sentences. Then she discovered he could actually communicate with humans and had real conversations with each other. He was reserved, but actually quite pleasant to talk to. And look at. After eight months of this, Anna discovered that she was actually starting to trust the man, and that fact disturbed her greatly.
Then, Kratos did the one thing that Anna never expected him to do - he set her free.
He’d arrived with a bundle of used clothes in his hands and ordered her to change. Then he had her climb inside of a Desian laundry sack. She hid there for hours until she was dumped out of the bag to find Kratos in dark clothes and a large green and white dog standing over her. They’d run after that, first to Asgard where Kratos managed to piss off the local sorcerers and Kvar nearly captured them. They almost headed to Luin, but instead they went to Palmacosta. Now they were headed to the Tower of Mana, the latest step in a quest that Anna had yet to figure out and that Kratos wasn’t about to enlighten her on.
Not long before the escape from the ranch, Kratos did admit that Kvar’s project greatly disturbed him. Not that he was willing to give Anna any answers about why the project bothered him, or what the end result would be. Well, Anna was smart enough to know that her death was imminent. And that she had a special exsphere that seemed to be slowly mutating. She lightly poked at the stone on her chest, just protruding through her top. The only way to make the exsphere not kill her was through a dwarf. Unfortunately, Kratos hadn’t known of any that weren’t aligned with the Desians.
Thus, Anna decided, her life was weird. In the year she’d known Kratos, she’d yet to figure out his true motives. Not that she didn’t spend considerable time trying to puzzle it out. She knew he betrayed the Desians when he rescued her. She figured that whatever Kratos was trying to research, it had to do with the Desians. She wanted to help, but wasn’t quite sure how. She couldn’t exactly go out on her own either. As much as it pained her, she couldn’t go home. Her family was gone, and the only person likely to find a dwarf to build a Key Crest for her was the one she was currently trailing. Besides, it wasn’t like life was that horrible. It’d even settled into a comfortable pattern. They’d travel and Anna would ask questions until Kratos finally had to answer. She got to see the world, and that was something she never thought she would do. While Kratos did his research, Anna explored their surroundings. She didn’t consider what she would do when they parted ways, because the possibility wasn’t even on the horizon.
“You’re lagging behind,” Kratos suddenly commented, and Anna was startled out of her thoughts.
“Oh, I was just thinking on things,” she replied and hurried to catch up.
“You need to be more vigilante. We’re about to our resting spot for the night, and there could possibly be Desians visiting the House of Salvation I want to stop at.” Kratos frowned down at her. “You’ve been trailing behind me a lot lately.”
“Maybe I’m just checking out your rear,” Anna commented lightly. And she had been. Just a bit. She gave him a cheeky grin and was surprised to see him blushing. Her grin widened. “You’re blushing.”
“I do not blush.”
“Yes, you do.”
“When do I blush?”
“You did on my birthday.”
Now they bother were blushing as they remembered cake and … a kiss. An awkward, but wonderful kiss that made Anna’s chest swell and her hands and feet tingle every time she thought of it. It’d been gentle and extremely unexpected. No matter what thoughts Anna had brewed in the intervening months, nothing quite compared to suddenly being kissed by a man she once assumed had the emotional range of a rock. She really did want to kiss him again. Just to see if it still felt the same way, like she was going to float away from giddiness.
Anna bit down on her lip hard to keep herself from giving into impulse. Otherwise, her mercenary would find himself pinned to a tree and they wouldn’t make it to the House of Salvation that night.
Series: Tales of Symphonia
Characters/Pairings: Kratos/Anna
Rating: PG-13 (for now)
Summary: There were a great many things occupying Kratos Aurion at the moment. Like the fact that he'd manage to alienate everyone he knew. And he lost the key to the Tower of Mana ... again. And, most disturbing of all ... he was falling in love with Anna Irving.
Spoiler Alert: This fic is the sequel to "Birthday" and lies in the same universe as it and "Longing." It's not a tale of Kratos springing Anna from the Asgard Ranch. Really, if you want that, there's lots of fics that deal with the subject. I highly recommend "Shifting Destiny" and "Adbertos." This story is meant to be a light-hearted adventure between two adults falling in love, in the days after the escape from the ranch and before Lloyd is born. The title is an homage to Julia Quinn's novels. If you enjoy romance novels, you can't beat hers. They're fantastic and witty.
Chapter 1: In Which Denial Isn't Just a River, or We Get Acquainted with the Status Quo
There was a great many things going on in the mind of one Kratos Aurion these days. A lot of them, much to his dismay, centered around his 16-year-old companion that he had just kissed three weeks earlier. Okay, three weeks, two days, 17 hours and 37 minutes, but who was counting? He most certainly wasn’t. Not at all. There were far more pressing concerns on his mind. Like making sure he and said companion didn’t get themselves caught by Kvar, the Desians, Yuan, or the Renegades. Some days, it felt like even the local sorcerer guilds were after them. Oh, wait a minute, they were. At least, the one in Asgard. Somehow, they didn’t seem to care that Kratos happened to “borrow” one of their oldest tomes about objects with magical properties. He was going to give it back … eventually. Maybe. When he was done with it.
Then, there was the mission. The mission that he had set out to achieve upon learning Mithos’s twisted plans for the Age of Lifeless Beings, and one that had briefly gotten thwarted when he made the oh-so-bright decision to spring one Anna Irving from the Asgard Ranch. He still wondered what had possessed him to do such a thing. Oh, sure, there were noble intentions. Anna’s exsphere fully becoming a Cruxis Crystal? That would rank really high on the scale of “Very Bad Things To Occur.” But, the problem was … what to do with her? He couldn’t exactly just dump her in the nearest town. So, Anna stayed with him. For now. After all, his mission wasn’t one that could be shared. It was a solitary journey, and a burden he had to bear on his own.
She’d been with him for three months now.
Okay, so maybe the whole solitary thing hadn’t quite worked out the way that he’d planned it.
So now, here he was. A 4,000-year-old angel who’d managed to somehow fall in love with a mere human girl. That most certainly hadn’t been on his agenda. Now he was stuck among wanting to kiss her again, going back to the Asgard Ranch and using Kvar as a pincushion, telling her everything about him, and his mission to find a way for a human to wield the Eternal Sword.
And if that wasn’t enough, he’d also lost the key to the Tower of Mana.
Damn it.
“Just what are you doing?” An amused Anna lay on her stomach, legs absently kicking in the air as she watched Kratos turn their travel bag inside out, his fingers running over the lining as he tried to see if there was a small object that had gotten caught between the layers of leather and fabric
He didn’t exactly hear her, as he was too busy muttering under his breath. “I’m positive I saw that key about 500 years ago,” he mumbled. “Damn it, I thought I’d thrown it in here. Yuan led the last Chosen of Sylvarant, I bet he still has it. I told Mithos we needed an extra key made, but did he listen? Not that it’s a new thing, but …”
“Hello! Anyone home?”
He glanced up to see Anna raising an eyebrow at him. “I’m looking for something.”
Anna nodded slowly. “I see … unfortunately, I don’t think you’ll find what’s left of your brain in the lining of the bag.”
He merely frowned at her and turned the bag right side out.
Anna pulled herself into a sitting position. “What are you looking for anyhow?”
“Something that will greatly aid us in our journey,” he replied and dropped the bag.
“Right.” Anna leaned over and lightly poked at a rolled up piece of cloth that had something green and fuzzy growing on it that had fallen next to the bed. “By the way, just how old are those socks anyhow?”
Kratos glanced down, furrowed his brow. “Oh, so that’s where they are,” he muttered.
“They look several thousand years old.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are they safe to pick up?”
He wasn’t quite sure about that.
“Honestly, you need to take better care of your things.” Anna rolled off the bed and grabbed the bag. She wandered around the room, gathering the items that he’d dumped out of the bag in the effort to find the lost key. “I’m not sure what you did before you rescued me. Some times, I think you sprang me so you’d gain a keeper, not to piss off Kvar.”
He grinned at that, but quickly schooled his face back into an impassive look. Anna didn’t know about the mission - mainly because it would involve a lot of explanation that he didn’t think she was quite ready for. Ever. His explanation, as he hid her in a Desian laundry sack and had her hauled out of the ranch, was that he didn’t agree with the Angelus Project and wanted to keep her from Kvar’s hands. He would get her to a village and that was that.
But when Kratos and Anna had arrived in Asgard, he proclaimed that it wasn’t safe enough for her. Neither was Luin, her hometown. Or Palmacosta. Or Hima. Or anywhere else really. No, the best way to keep Kvar from getting his hands on Project A012 once more was to keep it by his side. Not to mention that Anna didn’t seem particularly inclined to leave him anyhow. So, they wandered through the countryside - the mercenary and the girl who looked like a street urchin in the castoff clothes that he procured for her before springing her from the ranch. They performed mercenary work and visited every single library that Kratos could think of. For the past three weeks, they’d been in Palmacosta while he combed through the academy’s collection looking for anything that could help him on his mission to find a way for a human to wield the Eternal Sword.
Anna thought he had a book fetish.
He didn’t correct her.
Anna’s favorite activity lately was trying to guess what Kratos’s ultimate goal was. He hadn’t exactly thought of a cover up, and so had settled on the old standby - it was none of her business. He did have to admire her … imagination when it came to guessing what he was really up to. Today’s suggestion had been that he was really a dwarf that had stumbled into an experiment gone wrong and he needed to find a cure for his horrifying condition.
“By the way,” Anna said as she finished packing their bag, “have you finished reading all the books in Palmacosta Academy yet?”
“I haven’t read all of them,” he corrected her. “Just merely browsed through them.”
“I see. And?”
“We need to go elsewhere,” he replied. Unfortunately, elsewhere needed to be the Tower of Mana. Or, actually, he really needed to go to Tethe’alla. That would be an explanation and a half to provide to Anna. Kratos frowned at the supply bag. If the Tower of Mana didn’t have the books that he needed, he was stuck. There was nowhere else in Sylvarant where he could find the research and knowledge needed to find a way for a human to wield the Eternal Sword.
“Where are we headed?”
He sighed. There was nothing else for it. “Have you ever heard of the Tower of Mana?”
Anna’s brow furrowed. “Not particularly.”
“It’s one of the stops that the Chosen must make during the Journey of Regeneration. One of the seals the Chosen has to release is there. There is a great library there, filled with books that make the ones in the Palmacosta Academy seem like basic primers for children. If I can’t find what I’m looking for here, we need to go there.”
“Okay,” Anna agreed and didn’t ask further. She settled back on the bed with a book that she had nicked from his bag. To his surprise, Kratos saw that it was a basic book of herbology. He didn’t remember acquiring that. Maybe Anna had grabbed it from the library. She flipped open to a place where she’d stuck a piece of leather as a bookmark and quietly began to read.
Something about her lack of protest, and questions, disturbed Kratos. She was normally full of them. Why did they have to go here? Surely she was safe settling there. Did he really need to guard her like an overprotective dog? Speaking of that, Kratos glanced at Noishe in the corner. The protozoan had become Anna’s number one fan. He swore that at times she stuck around more for Noishe than for himself. Kratos found himself fiddling with one of the straps on the bag. It’d been seven months. It was time to let Anna go. Maybe he could take her to Izoold, Triet, or Iselia. No, not Iselia. There was a ranch close to there. The desert. That’d be a good place, and maybe Yuan could even be convinced to have the Renegades keep an eye on her. That way, he could go to Tethe’alla and complete his mission and that would be that.
Kratos stared at Anna and wanted to kiss her again.
——-
“My life is weird, Noishe,” Anna confided in the protozoan as she walked beside him, lagging a couple yards behind Kratos. Noishe gave a whine and nuzzled her hand a bit, and she smiled. She ruffled his fur affectionately, leaning slightly into his bulk as they kept a leisurely pace.
Anna’s life truly was strange. A year ago, she’d called it a true hell. She’d been plucked from Luin when she was 12 during a raid. A year later, she’d had her original exsphere ripped out of her chest and a new one placed there. She was suddenly dubbed part of the Angelus Project, which even to this date she wasn’t quite sure what that was all about. It had garnered her solitary quarters and food that was even slightly edible. Other than that, she was poked, prodded, questioned and tested until she’d had quite enough, thank you. When she was told that man representing Kvar’s boss was coming to examine her, she decided to make her feelings known. When the door to examination room opened for the emissary, she dumped a full chamber pot atop the man’s head.
Thus, Anna Irving met Kratos Aurion.
He didn’t kill her as she’d expected. Instead, he grabbed her arm as she tried to run for it and hauled her back into the room. He’d ordered her to sit and spent the next 10 minutes trying to dry out his hair. Neither one of them acknowledged the slightly funny smell that clung to him during the resulting examination that followed. Oh, and she had to fully scrub down the room from ceiling to floor afterward.
Kratos wasn’t what Anna was quite expecting from an emissary. He was extremely quiet; giving her weird looks as he took notes and studied her exsphere. She talked because otherwise the silence was oppressive. After a month, he started replying in grunts. Then one-word sentences. Then she discovered he could actually communicate with humans and had real conversations with each other. He was reserved, but actually quite pleasant to talk to. And look at. After eight months of this, Anna discovered that she was actually starting to trust the man, and that fact disturbed her greatly.
Then, Kratos did the one thing that Anna never expected him to do - he set her free.
He’d arrived with a bundle of used clothes in his hands and ordered her to change. Then he had her climb inside of a Desian laundry sack. She hid there for hours until she was dumped out of the bag to find Kratos in dark clothes and a large green and white dog standing over her. They’d run after that, first to Asgard where Kratos managed to piss off the local sorcerers and Kvar nearly captured them. They almost headed to Luin, but instead they went to Palmacosta. Now they were headed to the Tower of Mana, the latest step in a quest that Anna had yet to figure out and that Kratos wasn’t about to enlighten her on.
Not long before the escape from the ranch, Kratos did admit that Kvar’s project greatly disturbed him. Not that he was willing to give Anna any answers about why the project bothered him, or what the end result would be. Well, Anna was smart enough to know that her death was imminent. And that she had a special exsphere that seemed to be slowly mutating. She lightly poked at the stone on her chest, just protruding through her top. The only way to make the exsphere not kill her was through a dwarf. Unfortunately, Kratos hadn’t known of any that weren’t aligned with the Desians.
Thus, Anna decided, her life was weird. In the year she’d known Kratos, she’d yet to figure out his true motives. Not that she didn’t spend considerable time trying to puzzle it out. She knew he betrayed the Desians when he rescued her. She figured that whatever Kratos was trying to research, it had to do with the Desians. She wanted to help, but wasn’t quite sure how. She couldn’t exactly go out on her own either. As much as it pained her, she couldn’t go home. Her family was gone, and the only person likely to find a dwarf to build a Key Crest for her was the one she was currently trailing. Besides, it wasn’t like life was that horrible. It’d even settled into a comfortable pattern. They’d travel and Anna would ask questions until Kratos finally had to answer. She got to see the world, and that was something she never thought she would do. While Kratos did his research, Anna explored their surroundings. She didn’t consider what she would do when they parted ways, because the possibility wasn’t even on the horizon.
“You’re lagging behind,” Kratos suddenly commented, and Anna was startled out of her thoughts.
“Oh, I was just thinking on things,” she replied and hurried to catch up.
“You need to be more vigilante. We’re about to our resting spot for the night, and there could possibly be Desians visiting the House of Salvation I want to stop at.” Kratos frowned down at her. “You’ve been trailing behind me a lot lately.”
“Maybe I’m just checking out your rear,” Anna commented lightly. And she had been. Just a bit. She gave him a cheeky grin and was surprised to see him blushing. Her grin widened. “You’re blushing.”
“I do not blush.”
“Yes, you do.”
“When do I blush?”
“You did on my birthday.”
Now they bother were blushing as they remembered cake and … a kiss. An awkward, but wonderful kiss that made Anna’s chest swell and her hands and feet tingle every time she thought of it. It’d been gentle and extremely unexpected. No matter what thoughts Anna had brewed in the intervening months, nothing quite compared to suddenly being kissed by a man she once assumed had the emotional range of a rock. She really did want to kiss him again. Just to see if it still felt the same way, like she was going to float away from giddiness.
Anna bit down on her lip hard to keep herself from giving into impulse. Otherwise, her mercenary would find himself pinned to a tree and they wouldn’t make it to the House of Salvation that night.
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