Page 30 of Seduced

“You…” She seemed unable to talk past that one word.

“Exactly,” Alexei said. “As you so eloquently put it, Hades at your service, ma’am,” he bowed his head, for he was seated.

“I remember you, Your Excellency,” she said, “but you…”

“Oh, you thought I didn’t know it was a woman underneath those clothes?”

“Yes, I thought you didn’t know,” she said. “I am used to being invisible, or at least uninteresting. No one ever sees me.”

His spine shuddered.

“Well, someone did,” he said. “Me. And I was not too happy with what I saw.”

“What do you mean—?”

“The way you fell against me that day,” he said, swallowing past a sudden lump in his throat. “Did you think that after catching you in my arms I would continue to idiotically think you were a man? I mean, I am quite stupid, we seem to have established that, miss…”

“Wyatt,” she said, her voice wavering, unsure. Much as her other, boyish voice had gotten on his nerves, this one infuriated him. He hated it, and whoever had put that weakness, that hesitation in it. “Persephone Wyatt. But I am called Poppy.”

The irony was not lost on him. Hades and Persephone. He laughed, harshly, but he did not have time now to pursue that line of conversation, much as he would enjoy the implications that would fluster her and make her squirm. But there were more pressing matters at hand.

“Well, Miss Wyatt, answer me, if you please, why are you barely able to walk? Are you hurt?”

“I have a limp, remember?” A spark of her old spirit was back, and he felt at once relief and frustration.

“It didn’t seem to stop you from traipsing up and down London with me at your heels, a few nights ago. I could barely catch up to you, and only found you in time to rescue you from the Thames.” He said that last part on purpose, watching her closely, hoping that she would respond the same way she had then, when she had bristled at the very idea that he might have rescued her or the cat.

She remained silent.

Alexei wondered if he was meant to live the rest of his days with a piercing headache as his constant companion.

“Will you not answer me?” he said, much more gently than he had intended.

“I am not in the habit of answering to kidnappers,” she said, and Alexei couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face.

There you are. You’ve come back.

“Why are you limping?” he asked her again.

She just looked at him, mute.

“Answer me.”

Nothing.

“I know you are lame,” he said quietly, with what he hoped sounded like well-suppressed rage. Because it was—well, maybe not that well-suppressed. “But you walked and ran and…and weresoannoying that night. So bloody annoying. You wouldn’t shut up. And now you barely talk, and you can’t even walk, and you won’t resist my men when they are accosting you…” He tugged at his hair. “Let me see.”

And, without thinking too much about it, such was his need to find out what the hell had happened to her, he lifted her skirt.

No, he hadn’t thought about it at all.

If he had, he would have realized what a horribly bad idea it would be to come face to face with her soft, supple skin, her slender limbs, her…

Wait.

“What the hell is this?”

His fingers touched something hard and dark coming out of the skin on her calf. There were several more all around it, but it didn’t feel soft like a sickness would. It was rock-hard, and the skin around it was raised, bruised, tortured.

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