Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)(67)

“There must be a waterfall nearby,” Yael commented quietly.

It was the first thing that any of us had said, and the sudden sound of his voice shocked me a little bit. I stared toward the inky spill of water churning a short distance below me, and started to cry. It was gentle at first, but soon began to evolve into heaving sobs that crumbled me into a ball on the damp grass. Arms wrapped around me, holding me together as I lost myself to the grief, pouring it all out into the night until my tears ran dry and there was nothing left to give. I pushed myself away from the tangled embrace that I had ended up in—not because I didn’t want to be close to them, but because my skin was flushed, my face and neck were uncomfortably soaked in tears, and my hair was matted to the damp skin. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to tear the clothes from my body and submerge myself in the cool, churning water before me.

“Do you guys know how to swim?” I asked, taking another step closer to the water and feeling the bank give way a little beneath my feet.

“I don’t see how that question is relevant when we all know that you definitely can’t swim, which would mean that we’re definitely not going swimming right now,” Yael answered cautiously.

I almost smiled at the hint of trepidation riding his tone. My hands were already playing with the hem of my shirt, so it was barely even a conscious decision when I started to lift it. It was halfway up my torso when Rome spoke.

“It might be dark out here, Will, but we can still tell the difference between a black shirt and a whole lot of bare skin.”

“Oh good,” I answered, quickly pulling the shirt all the way off, and then slipping my fingers into the waist of the kickass fighting pants that Siret had made for me. “If you can see me, you can stop me from drowning.”

“Not going swimming.” Yael sounded disgruntled—as though he already knew that he had lost this particular fight.

“Want me to start crying again?” I asked.

He released a heavy breath, and I almost started to feel bad for him, until the breath turned into a curse as I slipped the pants the rest of the way down my legs and stepped out of both my pants and my boots.

“Maybe we should just let her get naked,” Rome said quietly. “It seems to make her feel better.”

Maybe he was right; maybe taking my clothes off did give me some weird sense of freedom. Maybe it was all a by-product of living a smothered, rule-bound existence, or maybe it was just my way of preparing for the inevitable naked accidents that came about as a result of my clumsiness.

“Don’t even pretend you’re doing it for her,” Yael snorted.

I ignored them both, stripping my underwear off and stepping away from the discarded items. I crouched down a little, trying to get closer to the water, but the dirt along the side of the bank wasn’t so much dirt as it was mud, and I didn’t so much walk down the short incline to the water as fall directly on my ass and slide down the short incline to the water.

“Now we actually have to go swimming,” I announced, as Rome and Yael cleared the slope-of-death and landed beside me in what I assumed would have been a lithe and graceful way, if I had been able to see it.

“Are you okay, Rocks?”

I wasn’t even sure which one of them had asked. It was too dark for me to see much of anything clearly, which was probably why neither of them had been able to catch me—the way they usually would have—before I went down.

“I’m fine,” I huffed out, as hands plucked me up and held me out so that I was dangling somewhat. They turned with me so that I ended up further out into the water, but facing back toward the bank. “I just have mud in places that mud should never be,” I admitted, as the hands carefully set me down again.

My feet were lowered into water this time, instead of mud. It was something they appreciated.

Yael chuckled, and judging by the proximity of the sound, he was the one to have picked me up. “We can fix that. Can you stand right here without falling over, drowning, stabbing someone or setting the forest on fire?”

“Not going to make any promises.” I sniffed.

I could hear Rome’s low laugh, then, and I turned to the side to try and make him out. It was dark, but he had been right about what he said before: it wasn’t too dark to be able to tell the difference between our arena clothing and the sudden expanse of bared skin as he swept his shirt off. I swallowed as I stared at what I could make out of the muscles lining his torso, and then I had to quickly blink and look away as he pushed his pants off and threw them toward the bank with his shirt and boots. Yael had taken a step back from me, and was pulling his clothes off, too … and now I was starting to realise why they overreacted every time I got naked.

It was … a lot to take in.

I turned in the water, my heartbeat trying to rip out of my chest, and took a hesitant little step further in.

“I said not to move,” Yael cautioned me, his voice muffled behind the clothing he was pulling off.

“How’d you even see that with a shirt over your face?” I complained. “I barely moved!”

“I just figured you would try as soon as I wasn’t holding you back anymore.”

I grumbled in response, digging my toes into the riverbed. There was a strange combination of soft sand and sharp little rocks beneath my feet. It wasn’t unpleasant, but each small prick of discomfort was enough to keep me feeling alert. It wasn’t the sort of river that you could lay down and doze off in, or the sort of river that you could lazily float through while you basked in the sun …