Embers by Helen Kirkman Read Free Book Online Page A

pain.
    "What?"
    He was all around her, everywhere she looked, everything she touched. His skin, his hair, his scent, the animal warmth of him.
    "I no longer know," she said through dry lips.
    He laughed. She felt it as much as heard it A sort of deep rumbling sound beneath her ear, and the smoothness of his flesh beneath her face rippled.
    "I shall remember this. The Princess of the Picts at a loss for words."
    But she was quite beyond words. They had no interest for her. All she could think of was him.
    He breathed. Much more steadily than her. She felt the firm rise and fall of his chest. Controlled.
    He was a wonderful seducer. At the Northumbrian palace he had been the flame that had drawn each woman's eyes, even though people said he was wild, that he was outside King Osred's favour.
    Every man had been afraid of him. Because it was said that there was nothing he would not dare.
    She had not cared. The danger had spoken to something inside her that she had never admitted. And at a level beyond understanding, it had also touched on the hurts that she had no way to heal.
    She had wanted the fierce and changeable charm of someone who lived hard and fast
    She had wanted everything a lame creature like her could not match.
    Now it was here, with her. The need to touch him, to fall under that earthy, knowing, masculine spell, to feel its danger, was stronger than ever. She needed to taste what it was like.
    Even though she was afraid.
    He moved under her body, the heavy contours of him sliding against her. The lure of him was so strong. You could lose everything, every sense of who you were just by touching him.
    She could not allow that. Because they were no longer together. Because—
    She lay with her eyes shut and tried to believe that her hands did not cling to him, that this was not just some further and more dangerous phase of his testing of her.
    She had to speak. She could not give in to the power of him. She had something to say that was vitally important, and after that she could escape. If her bespelled, exhausted, wildly unsteady brain could just work out the words.
    She opened her eyes. She was so close her eyelashes rustled against his skin. Her head swam in the delight of his faint musky scent. She tried to focus.
    The first thing she saw was a hand clutching at the waistband of his trousers. It must be hers. She stared at it. It would not move, despite the exercise of her will. It seemed not to belong to her. He seemed not to have noticed it.
    "You make a very strange nun."
    He had noticed it. He thought she was a licentious and unprincipled trollop. He doubtless thought that she was trying to practice her wiles on him so that she could regain the trust she had shattered, get him to do what she wished.
    The idea of practicing her wiles on him sent a wave of heat through her so fierce it burned hotter than the harshest fever could, so strong it would burn through her heart. She buried her face deeper in his flesh and shut her eyelids against tears.
    She felt his hand close over hers, thick and solid and strong. Twice as big and wide as hers. But he still had to work at it to prize her fingers away from the waistband of his trousers.
    "Or else you make a strange princess."
    The thick pad of his thumb slid across the tingling arch of her palm, across the base of her fin-gers…across the marring ridge of unhealed blisters, scratches from picking ripe sloes, a bruise.
    Her breath caught. What a naive, sense-besotted fool she was. There could be naught in him of the seduction she felt. Just the clever, determined paths of his mind. Coldness followed heat, like a fast shivering chill, as though the fever that touched him touched her, too.
    She stared at the scratches and the bruised nail, the more recent damage overlying the old.
    It was not the hand of a princess waiting in the discreet, hidden comfort of a convenient nunnery for her lover. It was a hand that belonged to a desperate and penniless fugitive. The hand