To Catch a Queen by Shanna Swendson

too close for her to make a clean escape. “Traitor,” she muttered to the bulldog before she plastered a smile onto her face and turned to Michael.
    Then she completely forgot any witty comeback she might have had prepared because he looked really, really nice. Emily was right, he did look much healthier than he had the last time she saw him. She hadn’t realized just how ill he’d been then until she saw the contrast with the way he looked now. He was fair-skinned, but there was a big difference between the gray pallor he’d had before and the light pink of tonight. He still had lean features, but he was much less gaunt than before, and his clothes fit him far better, like he’d gone back to the weight he’d been when he bought them. Under a classic khaki trench coat he wore dark jeans and a sweater that looked touchably soft in exactly the same mossy green color as his eyes. Snap out of it, Sophie, she told herself sternly.
    She noticed that he was holding a diaphanous shawl that had to be of fae manufacture. What did he want with that? She doubted he was doing some early Christmas shopping at the fairy market. Pulling her wits about her, she quirked an eyebrow and said, “That’s a lovely shawl. The color really brings out your eyes.”
    Her remark threw him off balance enough that instead of saying whatever he was confronting her about, he glanced quizzically at the shawl, as though he’d forgotten all about it. He shoved it into his messenger bag.
    While he was momentarily discomfited, she took advantage of the opportunity to put him on the defensive. “What brings you here tonight?” She mentally kicked herself for asking a stupid question. She, of all people, should know what he was doing. She was mostly surprised that he’d known to be here. She’d made sure he couldn’t follow her to the market this time by staying away from anywhere he might be. Then she made the mistake of remembering the last time, when she’d hauled him home, nearly unconscious, and held him through the night until he recovered from the shock and pain. If her thoughts showed on her face, this could get awkward.
    “You know what I’m doing here,” he said, closing the gap between them. The crowd was too dense for her to back away and maintain a comfortable distance.
    “Not really,” she shot back. “At least, I don’t know what you think you’ll accomplish. You weren’t going to do something foolish like try to get into the Realm and get to Jen, were you?”
    His expression told her she’d struck home, but he looked defiant rather than guilty. “And what are you doing here?” he asked.
    “I’m working on it.”
    “Don’t you think I should be brought into the loop on that, seeing as how it affects me directly?”
    “I’ve got it under control,” she insisted, glancing around for an escape route. He was awfully close now, close enough that the green in his dark eyes was so vivid that it drew her hypnotically, and that was dangerous.
    “Care to share some details? Like a status report so I know what you’ve been doing? And then I can tell you what I’ve found, which is pertinent, which you’d have known if you’d been willing to talk to me .”
    He sounded truly angry, and his eyes flashed with fury. She understood why he was angry, but she couldn’t tell him why she’d been avoiding him. That would only make matters ten times worse. She could just imagine his reaction to hearing that she hadn’t been telling him what she was doing to return his lost wife because she was afraid she was falling in love with him and even more afraid that she could make him fall in love with her, which would ruin all chances of saving his wife, and she had to avoid him for both their sakes. “I’m sorry,” she said simply, not bothering to make excuses. “What do you have to tell me?”
    He deflated a bit, as though he’d been prepared for her to fight back and didn’t know quite how to deal with a calm response.