Embers by Helen Kirkman Read Free Book Online Page B

of someone who worked for their keep in a true house devoted to simplicity and usefulness.
    She fought for her voice. "Oh, that. That was just an accident. I fell over and scratched my hand."
    There was only the quietness of the glade, the faint sound of clear falling water. Running water was so strong. But its pure sound had only one shape in her mind.
    Liar.
    "It seems fated to be your weakness, this hand."
    The coldness stabbed ice through her. He had never mocked at the accident that had disfigured her hand. He was the kind of person whose instinct was to deal with what was, not what should be. She envied that. It was the quality above all others that had scored through the barriers she had set against trust.
    He turned her hand to the sunlight. Her muscles tightened in a denial that went all the way back to childhood. Yet his action did not hold the mockery every instinct expected. It was different: an assessment that was filled with deliberation, quite relentless. That was not something she had associated with him.
    She had no right to expect anything else.
    She could tell from his breath, sense through the fiercely intimate touch of his body against hers, the implacable distrust of all that she said.
    She waited. He still had hold of her hand. The warmth of his flesh invaded hers.
    "Alina?"
    She could not speak. She had broken his trust long ago and the connection between them was severed beyond any possibility of redemption. But he held her hand. Her body. She could not stop him. Neither could she stop her powerful awareness of him. It trapped her as surely as the physical force he was so capable of.
Her father had trapped her mother, in just such a way
.
    But it could not have felt like this. Not such warmth, warmth that blossomed on the inside just from the touch of one body against another. A warmth that was frightening, yes, but at the same time intoxicating. A warmth that filled her with a longing so deep it would kill her.
    "Naught but a chain of accidents. Is that the way of it?" His voice was as deceptively gentle as his hold on her. Just as seductive. "So many things are not what they seem."
    "Aye."
    Like you, like the way your body feels to me, the way your arms feel around me, as though carnal desire and trust could exist together.
    It was not possible.
    "Sometimes I would rather there was only what seems, and not what is—" She shut her mouth. That was the mead talking. Or her longing.
    Or her fear.
    She was trembling inside. All from the alien touch of male flesh. His flesh. So full of mysterious strength. A vitality that was so uniquely his. A strength that could rend and destroy.
    Or be destroyed.
    She would not be able to bear that She had to say what she must, and then she could be free of him. Now. Somehow. She had to think, even though all her mind could focus on was the strangeness of lying on the earth with a man. And all she could see was their joined hands coiled on his lower belly.
    She had never lain like this with any man and his body was so beautiful, the chest solid, the abdomen a tight, flat line of muscle over the hipbone. Everything she felt was so different in shape and texture and composition, the thick smoothness of the skin, the soft-rough feel of body hair. She craved him so much that it was like a pain. A pain that burned her on the inside, the way the touch of his skin scorched hers with its heat.
    The heat
    The heat was unnatural.
    The danger was not just from the wound to his flesh. The flames were inside. She knew them. Knew them for her own. She would rather they consumed her inch by inch than him.
    "The wound is fell."
    She felt him start, felt the small change in the rhythm of his breath.
    "What do you mean?"
    The words were bland, expressionless. But she knew that the whole of that sharp intelligence was focused on her.
    "I mean that it is powerful." She paused. They were strange words to use for a wound: fell, powerful. But they were how she felt. She sought to express it