Cold Iron by D. L. McDermott Read Free Book Online Page A

used the only weapon at hand—the glass of wine—to break his hold on the blond Amazon. Loyalty was a quality the Fae admired.
    He must have been mad to let such a prize go in Clonmel. She watched the tall beauty leave and wheeled on him, all angry, flashing eyes and outrage. Her body carried with it the scent of evening, fresh from outdoors, a pleasing contrast to the poisonous miasma rising off the strange carpets and too-bright walls. It offended him, this building. It shunned the earth and the trees and sealed out the moving air.
    “You tricked me,” she accused. “You didn’t want Helene at all.”
    “Not really. No. But I enjoyed your reaction to the thought.”
    She flushed. He knew she was sensual, but guessed also that she was not awake to her own nature. “I’m not like that,” she said, unaware of all the signs that told him exactly what she was like: the flutter of her pulse at her neck, the swell of her breasts in the confines of her gown, the color suffusing her pale skin. The signs of arousal. “It’s your voice,” she insisted. “You can make people feel things.”
    He laid his fingers gently over the delicate bones of her wrist and tugged her hand free of the pocket hidden in her gown. Her pulse sped beneath his touch. He lifted her hand and held it up between them, careful not to let the iron key dangling from her fingers touch his own. “My voice can’t compel you while you touch cold iron. And you have been clutching that in your pocket since you crossed the room to confront me.”
    He felt the shock ripple through her. “Oh,” she said, licking the lips he looked forward to moistening with his own tongue.
    “Why are you here?” she asked.
    “Would you believe me if I said I came for you?” It was partly true.
    He could see her thinking. She wanted to believe that, but she didn’t. Interesting. She had been surprised by his attention in Clonmel, seemed not to realize her appeal. He’d been awake long enough to know that this was an age glutted with images of sterile beauty. Hollow loveliness, with a tiresome, cloying sameness that blunted weak-minded men’s ability to see beauty like hers.
    But Beth was not weak-minded, not stupid enough to compare herself to such empty images. If she did not think herself beautiful, it was because a man, a man who could only see what others pointed out to him—Frank, no doubt—had convinced her so.
    That should have made her an easy mark, ripe for flattery and seduction, but she was too intelligent for that. “No,” she said at last. “You let me go in Clonmel. No matter what Mrs. McClaren says about your kind, I don’t believe you would have pursued me after I refused you.”
    Her faith elicited an unfamiliar emotion. He recognized it through the haze of memory as shame. Because he was not entirely certain she was right. His vanity told him he never needed to pursue a reluctant woman, but his conscience told him that not every woman he had taken over the years believed she had a choice.
    “I came for the sword.” He was surprised to find himself admitting it, but something about her made him want to deal honestly with her. “I hoped you had taken it because you wanted to be chased.” He remembered how his pulse had quickened at the thought, how very alive it had made him feel. Hungrier than when he had hunted the deer. He took a step closer to her, so she could feel the heat of his body, the velvet of his coat brushing her bare shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “Because you understood the old ways,” he said. “Because you wanted me to run you to the ground and take you on the forest floor. Like this.”
    He used their connection, her hand in his, skin to skin, to flood her mind with images. For a second they shared one mind, and she was in the woods, running, breathing hard, fighting her own dark desire. She wanted to be caught. A current of pure sensation slid through her body, a wave of dark pleasure, like the crest of a