Free Return (Lady of Toryn trilogy) by Charity Santiago Page A

actually enjoying his solitude, which meant she had no problem heading down the stairs and over to where he was sitting.
     
    "Hiya, Drake," she said snidely, plopping down next to him and using one hand to shield her eyes from the sun. "How's it goin'?"
     
    "Have you already tired of researching with Aik?" he replied, evading her question with all the subtlety of a punch in the nose.
     
    "Duh. He may be fifty-something years old, but I'm only twenty-three, and I'm pretty sure I have no business sticking my nose into a book that's at least twice my age." She pulled one knee up, propping her elbow on it as she stared openly at Drake.
     
    Deep breath. Wow. He may have been a bastard, but she'd never get tired of looking at him. His scarlet eyes seemed to hold secrets that no one would ever uncover.
     
    "So it's probably been a while since you've been back here to see the Eternal Flame, huh?"
     
    He nodded. The flame reflections danced across the sunlit, angular planes of his face, shards of light upon light, as he glanced at her. "I have had no desire to travel since Lord Angelo‘s defeat."
     
    She waited for a moment, wondering if he would continue, but in true Drake form, the cryptic sentence was all he was saying. It was hard to stay mad at Drake in the flesh, she realized, and wondered just how dangerous it would be to stay around him this time and have to say goodbye again afterwards.
     
    "I know what you mean," she said finally. "I really wanted to settle down, too, find a place where I could just . . . relax for a while. Take the time to find out what I want to do with my life, who I want to be."
     
    Ashlyn sighed, drawing her knee up closer so she could brace her chin against the heel of her newly-healed hand. "At least you've found peace, right? And you're what, eternally twenty-eight? That means I can hope to figure out my life sometime in the next four years, if you're any example to go by."
     
    "I'm not," he said.
     
    "Not what?"
     
    "An example to go by," he said patiently. "I've done some things I'm not proud of."
     
    "Oh." She paused, deliberating. He was expecting her to say something about his past, which even after all this time he obviously still hadn't come to terms with. But Ashlyn wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of sympathy.
     
    "Yeah, I'm definitely not going to look to you for fashion advice, that's for sure. The vampire guise is kind of freaky, or at least it was for me until I got to know you. Maybe you should think about changing your look or something. You might be scaring off potential customers at your weapon shop."
     
    Expecting at least half a smile, Ashlyn deliberately chose not to acknowledge what she thought he was really talking about - his years as one of Lord Angelo‘s Spartan assassins, his affair with an Angel, Lord Angelo‘s discovery of the betrayal…and more recently, the years he spent pining in a coffin after he thought he had killed his own lover, the Angel named Loritta.
     
    Ashlyn was one of the few that didn't feel sorry for Drake and never had, and although it might have seemed callous, she suspected that eventually he would appreciate her flippant attitude towards his somewhat freakish past.
     
    Her ridiculous ramble got what she'd been looking for. Drake threw her one of his rare grins, more genuine than anything she'd seen before because she knew it was real, and as always, it was like dawn breaking on his face. Ashlyn grinned back, pleased with herself.
     
    "How did you know I owned the weapon shop?" he asked.
     
    "Word gets around. Well, actually, it gets around by way of Restlyn, but I'm sure anyone else would have told me."
     
    She remembered the cold, rainy night that she and the others had faced Lord Angelo and defeated him, the painfully void expression on Drake's face when he had discovered that Lord Angelo had been responsible for Loritta’s demise. She recalled in explicit detail the agony that rang in his voice when he realized out