Embers by Helen Kirkman Read Free Book Online

tangled with the jewelled belt, lying discarded in the grass, glittering in the sun like a gold-crusted serpent.
    "Changes of fortune come with no warning at all. Like regrets."
    "Regrets achieve nothing." She picked up the bowl. She did not spill a drop.
    Dealing with the wound took a long time. She hated every moment. She had to stitch it. She was aware all the while of how he watched her, despite the pain and the mess and the sheer unremitting awful-ness of what she did to him. It was as though she were on trial.
    She thought at first that the test was the obvious one. Whether she planned harm or healing. So she was quite careful to show openly what she did, how she touched him, what herbs she used.
    But there was something else. Something she had not fathomed and which she had neither the strength nor the will to think about.
    It was all she could do to endure.
    How he endured it, how he could even begin to think while all that was being done, how he could possibly have the ability and the sheer will to assess her, she did not know.
    All she saw was what she must have known instinctively from the first, that his formidable strength lay not in the hard-chiselled muscles, but deep inside. The thought frightened her.
    By the time it was over, she was sick to the stomach and every separate one of her muscles, already stiff from the long hours of riding, was shaking from the tension.
    But it was finished, and in the end he had let her do what she would.
    She had used all the skill that lay within her power and it would do no good.
    She crawled away and left him. In case she was sick before she could get to the mead flask she had found in the saddlebag. She could not possibly stand up.
    He needed the mead.
    She crawled back towards him, holding out the hardened leather bottle. But all of a sudden it seemed very slippery. There was a scattering of dark spots in front of her eyes that she would swear by all the saints had not been there before.
    "Here, give me that." A large hand took the flask out of her grasp and removed the stopper. "Drink."
    'It is for you." She could not spare any more words than that. The spots in front of her eyes were getting too large. She hoped he could grasp the logic.
    "I am next. Do it."
    "But—" She choked.
    "Wrong moment to try speaking. Happens to a lot of us. Swallow."
    She spluttered, which was the nearest she could manage but some of the mead went down. It tasted like heaven. It had a glow fit to banish black ice. The dancing spots receded.
    He was holding her head. His hand was a far, far greater bliss than the mead. It had more warmth. He had more warmth.
    She was half lying on him.
    That was him underneath her body and her aching shoulders and her neck. Her face seemed to be buried in him.
    "You drink it," she said to a patch of very rich golden skin dusted with darker gold hairs.
    She could feel him swallow. It made tiny, delightful rippling movements.
    She should not be able to feel that.
    She tried to scramble up. Her limbs would not work.
    "For pity's sake, keep still, woman. You cannot stand up straight. In all probability neither can I."
    "But I cannot—"
    "Exactly," he said, with his brutal English logic. She digested this.
    "But…" Her arm flailed. But her limbs were so leaden with fatigue she could not lift them properly. Her hand slid with a kind of appalling slow deliberateness across the naked skin of his belly. Like a caress. Fear at the way such an action would look and feel to him gathered at the back of her mind. Fear and the familiar helpless, terrible longing.
    He did not want her touch. And then she felt it, the hidden, wildly enticing shiver in the heated flesh beneath her hand. Buried need tore her.
    She stopped moving. Her breath came in shallow unsteady pants like a wounded beast's. She felt his muscles tighten beneath her. She knew it was just an involuntary physical reaction, nothing to do with her, Alina. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps it was just his