Page 31 of Heart's Escape

Her voice fades, and her shoulders tremble.

I lean down to kiss her forehead. “You are so beautiful,” I say. My trembling voice makes my words into a growl.

She turns away, toward the window, and the light catches on a tear tangled in her lashes.

“I like you,” I stammer, and then I clench my hand into a fist as I realize how stupid I sound. “I mean, you’re incredibly attractive. And brave, and funny.”

She blinks, and the tear falls to her cheek. I lean forward, then brush it away with my thumb.

“But I don’t want to kiss you unless we have all night,” I say.

Alindra looks up at me again, her dark eyes wide. My cock pulses against the laces of my pants, howling in frustration, but I ignore the bastard. Because if I’m going to make love to this beautiful, brave woman, I’m going to take my sweet time. I don’t want our first time together to be an explosion of sexual tension crammed between running for our lives from the men hunting her and trying to sneak into some sort of magical fortress.

No. When we do this, I’m going to do it right.

I bend down, kiss her gently on the lips, and then slide out from beside the bed as gracefully as I can manage.

“You take the first bath,” I say. “I’ll give you plenty of time.”

I open the door, then slip into the narrow hallway before Alindra can say something that will shatter my tenuous grip on my libido and have me throwing her across the bed, all my good intentions cast down into the deepest of the nine hells. Then I take a heaving breath, weave my human illusion, and move away from the door, my heart still pounding in my ears and my aching cock cursing my name all the way into the void.

The inn’s common room is starting to fill with a crowd of humans. I try to immerse myself in their conversations to keep my thoughts from wandering back to the room at the end of the hall. Luckily, I’ve had a lifetime of chatting with people in various stages of intoxication; it mostly boils down to knowing when to nod and when to smile.

“That looks like trouble,” the ruddy-faced man I’ve been idly chatting with says, with a snort.

I nod even as I realize my mind has once again completely left the conversation. I was thinking about the bath down the hall. And the woman in it.

“Pardon?” I ask.

“Never a good sign when the ears start sniffing around,” the man replies, in a sort of growl.

“Ears?” I repeat, not sure I’ve heard him correctly.

In response, the man makes a vicious grunting noise, like an angry pig, glares through the wide front windows of the inn, and wraps his fist around his beer like someone’s going to try to wrestle him for it. I follow his scowl through the window.

And my body goes cold. There, in the courtyard of this nothing little human inn, is the man who tried to murder us with fire in the canyon.

He’s the man who’s hunting Alindra. And he’s found our inn.

Chapter17

Alindra

NOTHING HERE BELONGS TO OUR WORLD

Isink slowly into the soapy tub of warm water, lowering my head until my sigh comes out as a long string of bubbles. My entire body feels like a clenched fist, and my mind churns like a stew pot at full boil.

Stars. I close my eyes and submerge my head, letting the water swirl above me. When I come up, gasping for air, I’m greeted by birdsong and the scent of flowers from the secret little garden at the back of the inn. I let my head rest on the polished wooden tub and close my eyes, trying to imagine a life here. Serving meals, carrying buckets of warm water for baths, tending to the flowers in that little garden.

But my mind is filled with Phaedron, and flitting fantasies about the life I might build for myself in this strange place feel as insubstantial as mist. All I see when I close my eyes is Phaedron’s pale, dancing gaze and the curve of his full lips. The way he looked at me when he said he wanted us to have all night.

I shiver, sloshing the water in the tub. All night? Balmyr never said anything like that. Sure, he told me I was beautiful, that I’d cast a spell over him, that he couldn’t eat or sleep or even think until he’d had me.

But then he had me, and that was that. After that stolen afternoon in the armory storage room when he showed me pleasure I’d never even dreamt about, I hadn’t seen Balmyr for months. Until the next time he appeared, like magic, whispering that he’d thought of me every night we’d been apart, leading me to the bushes at the end of the archery range and hitching up my skirts.

And here, in this room, I practically threw myself at Phaedron. I offered him exactly what Balmyr had taken every single time.

And Phaedron said no.

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