Why couldn’t he just read her mind? (Not that it was any less confusing in there.) But no, Miles was hanging on her answer, which was overdue, and simple, and also really, really complicated.
“Sure.” Shelby was blushing. She needed a distraction. She reached for the baseball cap. That way he’d stare at it instead of her red cheeks.
“The reason I asked about your bonnet,” Miles said before she could give him the cap, “is because I found these in the market tonight.” He held up a pair of buff leather gloves with white tabbed cuffs. They were beautiful.
“You bought those? For me?”
“Traded for them, actually. You should have seen how much the glove maker flipped over a little pack of gum.” He smiled. “Anyway, your hands were so cold all day, and I thought they’d match your bonnet.”
Shelby couldn’t help it. She started cracking up. She doubled over and banged on the ground and hooted. It felt so good to let go of all that pent-up nervous energy, to release it into the Valentine’s Eve air and just laugh.
“You hate them.” Miles sounded crestfallen. “I know they’re not your normal style, but they were the same color as that bonnet and—”
“No, Miles, that’s not it.” Shelby sat back up and sobered when she saw his face. Then she started laughing again. “I traded the bonnet to get you this.” She held up the Dodgers cap.
“No way.” He reached for it with the air of a kid who couldn’t believe that the presents under the Christmas tree were really his.
Silently, Shelby held the gloves in her hands. Miles gripped the cap in his. After a long moment, they tried their gifts on.
With the cap tugged tightly over his blue eyes, Miles looked like his old self again, the boy Shelby recognized from a hundred lectures at Shoreline, the boy she’d first stepped through the Announcers with, the boy who was, she realized, her closest friend.
And the gloves—the gloves were amazing. The softest leather, the most delicate design. They fit her perfectly, almost like Miles knew the exact shape of her hands. She looked up to thank him, but his expression made her pause.
“What’s wrong?”
Miles scratched his forehead. “I dunno. Would you mind, actually, if I took the cap off? I realized today I could see you better without it, and I liked it that way.”
“See me?” Shelby didn’t know why, of all times, her voice chose that moment to crack.
“Yeah. You.” He took her hands. Her pulse picked up. Everything about that moment felt really important.
There was just one thing that was wrong.
“Miles?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you mind if I take the gloves off? I love them, and I will wear them, I promise, but right now, I—I can’t feel your hands.”
Ever so gently, Miles tugged off the leather gloves, one finger at a time. When he was finished, he laid them on the ground and took both of her hands in his again. Strong and reassuring and somehow totally surprising, Miles’s grip made her grin from the inside out. In the bough of the laurel tree behind them, a nightingale trilled sweetly. Shelby swallowed. Miles took a slow breath.
“Do you know what I thought when Roland said he was going to send us home tomorrow?”
Shelby shook her head.
“I thought: Now I get to spend Valentine’s Day in this incredibly romantic place with this girl I really like.”
Shelby didn’t know what to say. “You’re not talking about Luce, are you?”
“No.” He watched her eyes, waiting for something. Shelby felt that dizziness again. “I’m talking about you.”
In her seventeen years, Shelby had been kissed by a lot of frogs and a few toads. And every time it got to this moment, the boy would always make the ultimate loser gesture, saying, “Can I kiss you now?” She knew some girls thought that was polite, but to Shelby, it was just a huge pain in the butt. She always ended up saying something sarcastic back, and it always just annihilated the mood. She was terrified that Miles was going to ask if he could kiss her. She was terrified he wasn’t going to ask if he could kiss her.
Luckily, Miles didn’t leave her too much time for terror.
He leaned in very slowly and cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. His eyes were the color of the starry sky above them. When he guided her chin closer to his, tilting her face ever so slightly, Shelby closed her eyes.
Their lips connected in the sweetest kiss.
Simple, a few soft pecks. Nothing too complicated; they were just starting out, after all. When Shelby opened her eyes and saw the look in his—the smile she knew as well as her own—she knew she’d been given the best Valentine’s Day gift there was. She wouldn’t have traded it for the world.
LOVE LESSONS
THE VALENTINE OF ROLAND
ONE
THE LONG AND BLINDING ROAD
Roland rode hard for the city’s northern gates. Though his route would take him past the scene of the worst moment of his life, he did not detour. He was on a mission.
His horse, a stranger to him until a few hours ago—when he’d lifted her from the lord’s stables—adapted intuitively to his needs. She was a snow-white Arabian who looked fine in her black leather knight’s tack. Before Roland had found her, he’d had his eye on a dappled plowman’s horse with ample flanks—a working horse could travel longer than a nobleman’s horse, and on less feed—but Roland didn’t feel right stealing from the peasant class.
This one—he was calling her Blackie after the single dark splash on her nose—had whinnied and reared when he first mounted her, but after a few discreet turns around the muddy path near the sheepfolds, they were friends. He had always had a knack with animals, especially horses. Animals could hear the music in his voice more clearly than humans. Roland could whisper a few words to a startled filly and calm her like sunshine after a tornado.
By the time Roland passed through the mayhem of the marketplace, horse and rider were a seamless partnership, which was more than he could say for his armor. The set he’d nicked from the lord’s son’s armaments chamber in the castle did not fit him. It was long in the leg and narrow in the chest and it stank of sour perspiration. None of these qualities agreed with Roland, whose body was accustomed to an hauter couture.
As he clipped past the gates, careful to skirt the lord’s line of sight, Roland had simply ignored the citizens’ alarmed looks and their conjecturing murmurs about what battle he was riding into. This formal armor—with its damned mail vest, girded with a twenty-pound embellished belt, and the stifling steel helmet that wouldn’t sit straight because of his dreadlocks—was worn solely for fighting; it was too conspicuous and cumbersome for casual travel. He knew that. He felt it absolutely with every shuddering stride of his horse.
But this suit was the only thing Roland could find that would obscure his identity to the extent that he required. He hadn’t come all this way to be bothered with mortals attempting to seize and imprison a demon they mistook for a Moor.
He needed a disguise that would not hinder his attainment of one goal: keeping Daniel’s medieval past self out of trouble.
Not Lucinda. Daniel.
Lucinda Price, Roland believed, knew what she was doing. And even when she had no idea what she was doing, she always did the right thing. It was impressive. The angels who followed Luce into the Announcers—Gabbe, Cam, even Arriane—did not give Luce enough credit. But Roland had first noticed a change in her at Sword & Cross—a strange heedless certainty that she’d never possessed in any of her earlier lives, as if she had finally glimpsed the depths of her old soul. Luce might not have known what she was doing when she stepped through on her own, but Roland knew she would figure everything out. This was the endgame, and she needed to play her part.
That was why it was Daniel who worried Roland.
It would be just like Daniel to blunder into Luce and ruin everything. Someone needed to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid, which was why Roland had followed him through the Announcers in Luce’s backyard.
But finding Daniel had been harder than he expected. Roland had been too late in Helston, just missed him at the Bastille, and likely wouldn’t catch him here, either. If he were being smart, Roland would just skip out and try to intercept Daniel in one of their earlier lives.
If he were being smart.
But then he’d spotted the two unchaperoned Anachronisms baldly scheming at the well—in broad daylight, in the center of the city, in their bad clothes and worse accents.
Did they know nothing?
Roland liked the Nephilim well enough. Shelby was a solid, decent kind of person, and not bad to look at. And Miles—he had a reputation for getting too close to Luce at Shoreline, but … wouldn’t any guy in Miles’s shoes have tried? Give the kid a break, was Roland’s gloss. Miles was all golden heart and very little badass.
Roland understood that the Nephilim kids were here out of pure goodwill. They had a soft spot for their friend Luce. And it was clear that Shelby and Miles had high hopes for romance at the Valentine’s Day Faire—for Luce and Daniel, and maybe even for themselves.
They probably don’t know that yet, Roland thought, and grinned.
Mortals could rarely recognize their true feelings before those true feelings hit them in the face.
It happened this way for many couples who spent time basking in the glow of Daniel and Lucinda. Roland had witnessed it before. Daniel and Lucinda were emblems of romance, ideals that every mortal and some immortals needed to believe in, whether or not they themselves were capable of making a connection so true. Daniel and Lucinda were an idea that informed the way the rest of the world fell in love.
It was a powerful spell under which to find oneself.
Of course, Roland had to razz the Nephilim for stepping through into one of Lucinda’s medieval lives. They should be where they belonged, in their own time, where their actions wouldn’t cause any historic catastrophes.
So he’d chewed them out a little. It would keep them in line until he returned to escort them safely home. Traveling with them was the only way he could ensure that they wouldn’t wind up somewhere even farther away from Shoreline.
But first? He could indulge them. Track down Daniel and make sure he got his sullen self to the Valentine’s Faire. Giving Daniel and Luce a moment of happiness was no sweat off Roland’s back, and besides, it gave him something to do.
And in this particular era, Roland needed something to do.
To keep his mind off other things.
In the cold February gloom, Roland rode past a glebe, where serf-tended crops padded the pockets of the local clergymen. He rode past a Gothic church, with its pointed arches and thorny spires. God’s house. He couldn’t stop the thought from entering his mind. It had been a long time since he’d been in one of those. He crossed a high bridge over the swollen, muddy river, and turned his horse toward the knights’ stronghold he knew was about a half day’s ride to the north.
It was not a pleasant journey: rough road and ugly weather. Blackie kicked up high splashes of mud, painting her flanks a dingy gray-brown. And the cold caused the hinges of Roland’s armor to stiffen into near-immobility.