Princess by Gaelen Foley Read Free Book Online Page B

read his wary surrender in his eyes, an answering flicker of anticipation in her own that told him perhaps she wanted to touch him as badly as he wanted her to do so.
    “Well?” she asked coolly.
    They stared at each other in equal challenge, both riveted, both panting slightly. The moments ticked by, the mantel clock booming in the silence, the rain drumming, wind-driven, against the glass.
    Finally, he shrugged in nonchalance, as if nothing mattered a whit to him—if she seduced him or if he bled to death—but he doubted she was fooled.
    “Take it off,” she whispered.
    He lifted his shirt off over his head and held it bunched in one white-knuckled fist.
    The first thing her gaze fixed upon was not his wound, but the tiny silver medal hanging on a long, sturdy chain around his neck.
    Ohh, hell, he thought suddenly, his heart sinking.
    Now he was in for it. He had forgotten the damned thing was there.
    He held very still—trapped, unmasked, revealed to her.
    With a look of disbelief, Serafina sank down on her knees between his open thighs and captured the medal reverently in her palm, her knuckles brushing the skin between the swells of his chest. She stared at it, then lifted the violet innocence of her gaze to his, her lips parted slightly in wonder and question.
    It was the medal of the Virgin she had given him after he’d been shot like a dog right before her eyes on her twelfth birthday.
    To this day, she hated her birthday.
    She could never accept that the shooting wasn’t her fault. She had stayed at his bedside constantly. All the while he wandered in the nightmare dreamscapes of fever, he had been vaguely aware of her talking to him, whispering prayers, her soft, froggy little voice his lifeline.
    They told him later that when they had tried to make her come away from his bedside, she had gone berserk, kicking and punching, biting and scratching, rather than leave his side.
    He had never forgotten that. He had never expected that anyone would ever be that loyal to him. She had put the medal on him herself once he was out of the woods. It would protect him, she had said. And then she’d said that other amusing thing—what was it?
    He stared into her eyes, remembering that impish, little-girl whisper close to his ear.
    You are the bravest knight in all the world, Darius, and when I grow up, I’m going to marry you.

CHAPTER THREE
    “You still have it,” she said faintly, wide-eyed as she stared down at the tiny silver medal, still warm in her palm with his body’s heat.
    “Still have it,” he replied, sounding a trifle hoarse.
    Wonderstruck, Serafina searched his soulful, onyx eyes. She held her breath, not daring to overstep her bounds again by foolishly reading into this discovery some significance that was not there, but surely, surely it meant something that Darius still wore this trinket she had given him so long ago. It was all she could do not to laugh aloud and hug him.
    An indescribable glow of joy, painfully sweet, sparked in her chest and spread, flowing upward, beaming from her suddenly misty eyes. “Told you it would work.”
    He gave her an embarrassed, little-boy smile and lowered his gaze.
    For a moment, she studied him lovingly by the warm light of the sconces. His sun-bronzed face was more angular than she’d noticed before, and pale from losing blood. His eyes were sharper, more wary than ever, with faint dark circles beneath them, more tiny, careworn lines at their corners. Gorgeous as always, she thought, but he didn’t look altogether well. He was too lean, too intense, with a restless, hunted look.
    “You haven’t been eating,” she chided softly.
    He shrugged as he mumbled a denial.
    Sometimes, she knew, he even starved himself, making austere fasts as part of his self-punishing regimes in his quest for knightly perfection. Constantly he strived, piling glory upon glory as if, deep down, he did not believe he would ever really be good enough. Privately, it broke her