To Dance with a Prince by Cara Colter

because somethingsmoked in his eyes when he talked of making her his prisoner.
    What had she started? And could she really handle it?
    Kiernan stooped and came up with his big hand full of mud. He squinted at her thoughtfully, drew back his arm and took aim.
    She began to run an awkward zigzag pattern through the sucking mud. The dark sludge he hurled whisked by her head.
    â€œHa-ha,” she called over her shoulder. Meredith ducked, picked up her own mud ball and flung it back at him. But he’d had time to rearm, too.
    Their mud balls crossed paths with each other, midair. His hit her solidly on the arm, with a warm, soft splat. It was like being hit with a dollop of just-out-of-the-oven pudding. Her missile wobbled through the air and went straight for his head.
    Despite the fact he raised his arm in defense against the slow-flying projectile, it exploded against his raised bicep, and particles of it landed on his cheek, blossoming there like the petals of a mud flower. She drew her breath, shocked by her own unintentional audacity.
    â€œI’m so sorry!” she called.
    â€œNot nearly as sorry as you’re going to be,” he warned her.
    He stopped, carefully wiped the muck off his cheekbone, and glared at her with mock fierceness. But Meredith saw there was nothing mock about the fact he did now look like a warrior! Of the barbaric variety that painted their faces before they went to battle.
    He let out a cry worthy of that warrior and came afterher, stooping and hucking mud as fast as he could fill his hands with it.
    In moments the glade rang with his shouts and her playful shrieking. They threw mud back and forth until they were both covered in dark blotches, until their hair was lost under ropy dreadlocks of sludge, their hands were like mud mitts at their sides, and their clothes had disappeared under layers of smelly black goo. Finally, only his teeth and the whites of his eyes still looked white. Andy’s shirt was probably beyond repair.
    The glade filled with the sounds of their laughter and playful insults, the sounds of them gasping for breath as they struggled to run through the sucking mud to escape each other’s attacks.
    â€œTake that, Molly!”
    â€œYou missed! Andy, you throw like a girl.”
    â€œ You missed. You throw like a girl.”
    â€œBut I am a girl!”
    â€œA girl? A mud monster, risen from the deep! Take that!”
    They were laughing so hard they were choking on it. It rang off the rocks around them, rode on the mist.
    Despite the noise, the chaos, the hilarity, something quiet blossomed in Meredith. Something she had felt, ever so briefly on that horse yesterday, but other than that not for a long, long time.
    Joy.
    The quiet awareness of it knocked her off balance. With Kiernan hot on her heels, his raised hand full of mud rockets, she slipped. She went down in slow motion, somehow managing to twist so she wouldn’t go into the muck face first. The mud cushioned her fall, and she fell on her back with a sucking splat .
    She watched as Kiernan, too close, tried desperatelyto stop, but his arms windmilled, and he fell right on top of her, saving her from the worst of his weight by bracing his arms around her.
    She stared up into the face of her warrior prince. His eyes were alight with laughter, looking bluer than she had ever seen them look. His smile, against the backdrop of his muddy face, was brilliant, white as snow against a stone.
    She had never felt anything quite so exquisite. She rested in a bed of warm mud, her skin slippery and sensuous with it. And Kiernan, equally as slippery, held himself off of her, but there were places their bodies met. His hard lines were pressed into the soft curves of her legs and her hips.
    She touched him every day. But his guard had always been up.
    Hers had been, too.
    Only something, delicate and subtle, had shifted between them.
    The laughter died in the air around them, and was replaced with a