“No one sent me,” clipped a high voice. The woman’s posh accent held a hint of Vellana, slight but definitely there. “Next time, plan your trysts someplace with a little more light.”
Accosting a woman was a capital offense. If she reported me, I’d meet the wrong end of a hangman’s noose. It wouldn’t matter that it had been an accident. A misunderstanding. A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.How many times had I heard those excuses cried at the foot of the dais? How many times had I ignored them?
My mind screamed for me to evanesce, but the worthless hole in my chest begged me to stay. The hollowness living inside me almost never spoke.When it did, I listened.
I flicked my wrist, conjuring a ball of flame in my palm.
Heart-shaped face. Freckles across the bridge of a pert nose. Golden curls that I could imagine slipping through my fingers. Fisting. Pulling so I could taste the nectar living on the column of her throat. Magnificent chest heaving beneath a dark cloak.
Good. Pure. Unblemished.
Forbidden.
Her ice-blue eyes reflected my dumbfounded expression. And my face.
Feck it all. My glamour had slipped. No one outside Tearmann saw my true face unless I allowed it.
“Who are you?” she whispered through full lips that turned down slightly at the corners, not in a frown but a perpetual pout.
“I am whoever you want me to be.” Her slave. Her puppet. Her prince. All she had to do was say the word and I could become the thing she wanted most.
Her eyes narrowed. “The only thing I want you to be is gone.”
I could do that too. A flick of my wrist and I could be all the way across the feckin’ country. I would’ve. I should’ve. Only the hollowness echoed for me to stay.
“I was here first.” And since I was here and she was here, we may as well be here together.
“Fine. I’ll go.” She walked away, and I had to have a serious chat with my feet to keep from following her.I wasn’t the type of man to go running after some woman, even one as beautiful as her.
“Oisin?” a grating voice hissed from outside the shed. “Are you in there?”
Eithne had the worst feckin’ timing. I couldn’t do what I needed with her with this gorgeous creature watching.I suppose Icould, but I didn’t want this stranger who tasted like roses getting the wrong idea—even though the “wrong idea” happened to be the truth. But it wasn’t the whole truth.
The hinges on the door creaked open.
Run. Run. Run.
Stay. Stay. Stay.
I grabbed the mysterious woman’s cloak and pulled her with me to the other side of a high wooden bench. “Not a word,” I whispered, my lips still burning from whatever she’d used on her skin.Damn, she was beautiful. I’d known plenty of beautiful women. This one, though. This one would be a feckin’ masterpiece stripped bare. Curves and softness and pouty pink lips.
“Oisin?” Eithne’s footsteps drew ever closer.
The soldiers. The king. I could deal with them another day. This woman? I wanted to deal with her now.
“Eithne? Where’d you go, pet?” a man called, his voice weak and gravelly. Strong Vellanian accent. He held onto the “o” in “go” a touch longer than most.Where did you gooo, pet?He sounded like an insufferable prick. No wonder she’d been so easily seduced.
Eithne grumbled a curse. Her boots thumped against the wood when she stomped back toward the door. Sounds of the town swelled, then faded.
“That was close,” I said with a laugh, relieved and, for some reason, a little nervous. I wiped my clammy hands on my knees.
Instead of returning my conspiratorial smile, the woman got up, dusted off her skirts, and started for the door.I jumped to my feet, ramming into the feckin’ bench. “You’re leaving?” I didn’t know why I’d asked. It was fairly feckin’ obvious when she slipped out the door without another word.
The shed felt empty. Theworldfelt empty.
From a crack between the wooden slats, I watched her mount a brown mare and turn toward the road leading out of town.
My fingers grazed over my lips.