“Damien, please!”
“Ah, begging—that’s more like it.”
“Oh, this is so embarrassing!” Amma was so red she was nearly purple as she dropped her head onto the table.
He let her wallow there for a moment as Quaz knocked her empty stein onto the floor. “But,” he said, wiggling a finger beneath her chin and lifting it, “there is nothing to be embarrassed by now.”
“You just told me I failed to seduce you. Twice!”
Damien grinned back at her distress. He would have liked to tell her that, if she’d done those things sober, they would have gone quite differently, but that might not have been true, the talisman being what it was.
Then something changed, her gaze on him sharpening, and like she used arcana to do it, the alarm drained out of her face, and he felt it flooding into him.
“If that time in the karsts wasn’t a dream,” she said carefully, a blonde brow arching upward, “then that means all those things you said to me—”
“Maybe we do need more mead.”
As Damien went to stand, Amma glommed onto the sides of his face with her hands and kept him still. “Oh, no you don’t. You saidthingsto me, Damien. You said—you said I made youfeelstuff, and that,”—she gasped as if it had just come back to her—“youcareabout me.”
“Of course I care for you,” he said, heart beating madly, tongue swelling, sweat breaking out on his neck. “Surely I’ve said something to that effect recently…the talisman’s still in you, after all.”
She made a thoughtful sound and screwed up her face. “You said I made you feel like you were falling through the Abyss or something? That doesn’t sound good, but I remember it being good. It’s all a little fuzzy now since I didn’t think it was real, but you definitely said we could talk about it.”
Trapped in her grasp, he teetered on the edge of his seat. Damien had told her he felt as though he were falling interminably through the Abyss every moment he was not burying his cock in her, and also that her incessant kindness had broken him and made himgood.Or something like that; who could really remember? It was not as if it were written down in some tome, and he could flip to chapter sixteen to repeat it. “I do not know how you expect me to recall my words when at the time all of my blood was in my…pulsing manhood.”
Amma grinned at that, gripping his jaw and pulling him closer. “Actually, I think you called it your—” But then her head snapped quickly away. “Erick!”
“Well, I definitely didn’t name it Erick,” he groused, glancing through the smudged window at their side.
“I mean Lord Solonedy.” Amma leaned over Damien so that she could see to the street beyond, practically crawling once again into his lap but with none of the lusty longing of the times before. “He’s the baron’s youngest son. He might actuallyknow something that could help us, something better than local gossip.”
Damien grit his teeth, looking on the group of men passing by, well-dressed and clearly noble but walking with little concern for possible threat around them, much like how he might stride through Aszath Koth.
Amma put a hand to his chest and snorted, her gaze overflowing with frustration. “That sadistic god’s getting an earful when I finally meet them.” Then she tugged him away from his seat, calling to Quaz and Vanders to follow.
The four were back out on the road as evening began to fall around them.
“Do I look all right?” Amma asked, maneuvering them to a fountain.
“Yes, always.” He watched her splash her face. “Why are you so concerned?”
“Well, it’s been quite a few moons, maybe closer to a year, and he may not recognize me.”
He would have asked her what she hoped to get out of this, but she was moving too quickly, slipping around the villagers who were finishing up their purchases and closing their stalls. In the busyness of the street, Quaz scaled Damien’s back and sat himself on his shoulder, Vanders nestled into the cat’s fur, and Amma only put more space between them. She was so nimble, she actually slid between two of the men in the noble entourage, a thing even Damien would have advised against, placing herself right before them and falling into a perfect curtsy.
“Lady Ammalie!” a bright voice called from the group. Of course she was recognizable even in her dirtied travel clothing with all that golden hair and her brilliantly blue eyes, sparkling as she greeted the man. He took the hand she offered and clasped it in both of his. “But you were—and you’re—well, you’re alive!”
“Yes, thanks to Damien.” She gestured to the blood mage, and four heads turned back to him.
Damien tried to smile, but he was sure it came off as a grimace. The men were all hulking, at least his height or taller, their chests definitely wider, and they each sported nearly identical, roguish stubble on boxy jaws as if they were some band of bards.
And then the fucker holding Amma’s hand actually smiled back. He was handsome—too handsome—and, worse, he wasnice. Damien could tell immediately since he had been around so much earnest kindness lately, and it radiated off of the man like an arcane hum. So, Erick Solonedy was handsome, he was kind, and he was still holding Amma’s hand.
And Damien had to be nice back.
Lord Solonedy quickly bustled them off the street and into an establishment with a back room that was emptied for them, his retinue of men standing guard outside the door. In the privacy of the warm chamber, Amma delicately explained that she was neither abducted nor dead, but she had escaped a marriage she was not interested in with a man who had nearly destroyed her home. Erick slapped his thigh, proclaiming that he knew it all along.
“That bastard Caldor,” he said and then apologized to Amma for swearing. “I knew he was never to be trusted.”
