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“I do not.”
“I can assure you, dearie, you do. I had half a mind to come in there last night and smother you with that frilly pillow I gave you.”
Belle, hardly pink with ladylike blushes at being heard doing something she can’t help whatsoever, loses her ire at being teased so mercilessly by the Dark One at that, at his last statement of desiring to smother her snores.
She turns to him, eyebrows high. “You were outside my room, in the dungeons? We have no prisoners at this current time, Rumplestiltskin.”
He falters, hand outstretched, and mouths at her for a moment, before curling his fingers back in on his palm, like a snail shrinking back into its shell at the threat of a bird.
“Merely…checking the accommodations,” he tells her, though his twitter is a little lacklustre. “Prisoners come and go.”
“In the middle of the night?”
She knows she has him, knows that he had been outside her room for reasons that she’s certain he will not reveal any time soon, if at all, and she’s unsure why she is comforted by this.
She has a protector, she realises, as he turns away to gulp at his steaming tea, even if it is the same man who had dealt for her to stay here.