A Duke by Default (Reluctant Royals #2)(41)
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.