Re: The Companion/The Regret-me-not
Bright color spread up her throat to her cheeks. Another man might have thought it was the cold, and another might have tried too hard for more things to make her blush. He was neither. Plain girls, girls like Charlotte were often overlooked, they were intelligent, and they could either turn sharp with that knowledge, or -- there was a faint curl to the corner of his mouth. "Not a big smoker?"
What little of her snipped cigar he could smell before it was torn away by the wind was tobacco spicy. Mike shook his head. "Wasn't asking for one, Miss." And if she truly felt that bad about it, she'd offer to share, but he suspected she said it more out of manners than truth. It was like being nice, a facade of manners to cover up all manner of things better kept under dust sheets and locked in basement closets.
His lips were rosy with the shear of the wind, faint splotches of red beginning at the tops of his cheeks. The cold was enough to start making the bones in his feet hurt, ice sinking into them as if they could transform him from liquid water to a solid state. "It is bracing." He laughed with the comment. "We're all naked under our clothes. Doesn't matter who we are, kings, queens, presidents, a dude out in the snow," he said with a grin and a little lift of his shoulders. And once the game ended, they'd all be food for the worms and those little gray roly polys.