Even though the charade they were perpetrating had seemed to demand it, there was just something innately unsettling about giving licence to what his most private desires had often painted behind his eyelids. Her lips, plump, soft, warm, heavenly, did not at all tally with how his mind had said they would feel. They felt so much better than he could have ever imagined, and for a heartbeat, he was almost overwhelmed by the desire to repeat the motion but thankfully his better judgment chose that moment to intervene. Abrax, he had to see to their steed. Granted Senu and her brothers were more well-versed with lumbering pack animals that fine pureblood stallions ridden by the Captain of the Royal Guard, but the fact was that to those who knew how to look but who did not know him, the connection would likely be easy to make. After all, the fugitive royal protector and the princess accused of planning an attempt upon the queen regent’s life would have been the new of the kingdom, spreading through the settlements and oases as swiftly as the carrier pigeon flew or the tireless hooves of the desert messenger’s steed raced across the interminable dunes, news weighing down his saddle bags. It was then, as he carefully sliced away at the stallion’s mane that a terrible realisation occurred to him. A revelation potentially so devastating that he all but ran back to the princess’s side.<br/><br/>It would have been the height of foolishness to expect her to take to the trio of desert jackals just because they shared a childhood bond with her ‘husband’, and as only a man who spent his daylight hours watching discreetly as individuals both royal and menial unfolded their lives before his watchful gaze, Odi was made immediately aware of Nanu’s hidden unease. “My desert rose has exquisite taste,” he mused tenderly as he watched her engaging the deceptive street merchant cum thief, “alas she had the misfortune of falling for one such as I, a mere guard without the means to give her the world he would like to.” Senu rolled her eyes, something she had been often wont to do around him from a young age. “Stars above but you do know how to pick them, my dear. How have you not realized by now, my well positioned friend that every woman has exquisite tastes? Even when she blushes and makes excuses for her husband’s tight purse string, she is really counting the secret ways in which she will make her frugal fool pay, one way or another.” Odi’s mouth sprang open to register his mock outrage but he had no need to. Truly, he thought, trying his hardest to hide a smirk from his face, Nanu could bandy words with the best of them. In spite of himself, he could see Senu was impressed, the princess’s act of a demure but sharp-minded peasant girl clearly earning her approval. “Well perhaps I might not be able to whisk her away upon a magic carpet and show her the world,” he said, somewhat sardonically, “but I am certain I have coin enough to supply my fire on a cold night whatever she may desire from your uh, emporium.” As expected, the mention of money sparked something sparkling in the eyes of one who had grown up as he had done in poverty. “Ooh very well then, oh and just because I knew you before you could say my name, does not mean you’ll get a discount!”<br/><br/><br/>Sighing theatrically, it came as something of a surprise when a nondescript runic, sand cloak and head and face gear was chosen for him by the princess in hiding. Discerning her intentions, Odi took the proffered change of clothes and proceeded her towards the allotted changing rooms. Tucked discreetly out of sight of the rest of the shop, the room reserved for trialing a potential purchase’s wearability had evidently been something of a small store room that had been somewhat cheaply expanded. Perhaps it was a mark of his more elevated living standards that Odi found himself raising a disapproving eyebrow at the meagre furnishings. The moment they were alone, he dropped the act. “Your desire, Princess?” he whispered, eyes trained upon her. Nodding, using the subtle signals of comprehension and assent that he had picked up as part of his training to become a member of the palace elite Odi took in her words. “Ah, yes, of course.’ He knew better than to mention the fact that he would readily lay down his life in her defence, that her having to resort to her favourite blades was tantamount to a failure on his part. He had watched her train, sparred with her on many an occasion. He knew perfectly well what a formidable fighter she was in her own right. “Ah yes, the Nubian lioness is never without her claws,” he grinned, using one of the few childhood nicknames they had for each other, a shiver of pleasure at the memory of the encounter that had earned her that moniker. Handing her the weapon in question, he snorted amusement as she ducked behind the hasty partition between them. Despite the fact that they had grown up virtually together, Odi had never before had the experience of being separated from her by a single sheet of fabric and in spite of his private promise not to do so, found himself glancing over to where her silhouette was vaguely etched like a piece of shadow puppet theatre. Even though he had no way of seeing it, he felt it when her gaze caught his, or rather his gaze lingered at where hers would have otherwise been, hidden behind the wall of coarse cotton.  While he had indeed seen her when she did not need to shroud  the telltale face of her true identity behind a fabricated façade of fabric, never before had he beheld her figure in quite the way he now did. Unlike some of the noble women whose bodies swelled with the abundance of their pampered lifestyle, lounging upon perfumed couches, Nanu had always had the physical frame of an athlete and while her silhouette told him of the curves he could otherwise observe, knowing she stood there, mere feet away was sufficient for him to lose his breath. Averting his gaze almost instinctively, Odi backed away a little as though distance would help tame his galloping heart, devoting his focus to donning the attire that would identify himself as nothing more than a simple delta farmer. Clothed now in his civilian ‘finery’, he was in the midst of stretching to truly inhabit the person he was now supposed to embody, when she raking hiss of a mass of fabric being pushed aside caused him to turn around.<br/><br/>There she was, the girl that none of the public knew, the girl only seen by her family, her personal handmaidens, and her handpicked bodyguard detail. Once again Odi was visited by an unsettling truth, that somehow Nanu was even more beautiful without her accentuated artificial beauty. “I… you look… beautiful, my lady, I mean, my darling.” Even Ra’s sacred orb, descending below the line of perception, ushering in the darkness of night could not have rivaled the scarlet sheen warming his cheeks at that moment. Pretending to be her husband had just become that much more difficult.