Maybe that’s exactly what she thought. They had to work to get along on their best days, and he had given her enough reasons to dislike him. But getting into an argument now would end with her stomping out to the garden, and that wouldn’t make Gray happy.

Theran scratched his head and resisted the temptation to pull out some hair. “Look, it’s like this. Gray is putting together a surprise for you, and my part of the task is to keep you occupied for a few hours.”

Her face tightened, the pleasure of learning Gray was planning a surprise gone before it had been fully realized. She took a step back.

He almost asked why she was acting that way when he considered what he’d said and where they were.

“Not that way,” he growled.

“That’s good, because the sun will shine in Hell before that happens.”

She didn’t need to be so vehement about it. He gave a good accounting of himself in bed.

He bristled. Before he said something about the amount of work a man had to do in bed being in direct proportion to the attractiveness of his partner, he remembered why he’d come to Cassidy’s suite to begin with.

“I thought we could go into town—not for an official visit or anything like that, but to . . . I don’t know . . . shop . . . or whatever females do.”

“ ‘Whatever females do’? Haven’t you ever spent an afternoon with a girl when you didn’t want sex?”

His temper slipped the leash, and he didn’t try very hard to rein it in. “I grew up in the rogue camps in the Tamanara Mountains, not in some comfortable village where girls flirt with boys in order to have a packhorse for the afternoon’s shopping.”

“Girls don’t need packhorses, you brainless ass,” Cassidy snapped. “We’re perfectly capable of carrying our own packages. You’d know that if you spent any time talking to women.”

“There weren’t many women in those camps, and there certainly weren’t fancy shops. We were there to fight, to protect Dena Nehele, to escape being enslaved by a Ring of Obedience and made useless to our people. So I don’t have town manners, Lady. I didn’t need them in the mountains, and Talon didn’t waste time teaching me anything I didn’t need.”

He saw her effort to pull back, to assess. And he saw something he hadn’t expected—and didn’t want: pity.

“My apologies, Prince Theran,” Cassidy said quietly. “I didn’t realize you had such a difficult life.”

“I had a good life,” Theran snapped. “I survived. A lot of men didn’t.”