With one sleepy eyebrow quirked, I made my voice suggestive. “Working at a bachelor’s door…in the middle of the night… If you have plans in that direction, I’m willing to entertain them.”
I didn’t have to force the expression of pure lust onto my face. It seemed to always be there in the background when it came to her, roaring at me for fulfillment.
“Not like that!” She was indignation incarnate. “You know what I mean!”
I snorted. “If that’s what you call working, you’re very bad at it.” Another hurtful lie. She was incomparable. “You should leave.”
“Why?” Her head turned fully now, her eyes catching the light and flaring sparks of green and gold.
“Because I’m not safe.” It was a hasty, unpolished reply, but it contained all the warning I could without showing her the hell I lived in.
I stepped forward, hands lifting without permission. My fingers brushed her upper arms through the fur—just enough to persuade her to walk back toward her room.
“Careful.” Her laughter was as gentle as a feather falling to the ground. “I think this is officially no longer safe, dangerous even,” she teased as she walked ahead of me. She’d seen me cut a man in two, so I’d expected her to scream and shrink away from my touch. Yet, her voice was a remarkably calm whisper.
I’d most definitely underestimated Isca’s resilience.
Her eyes flicked down to my hands, where I was still touching her. “You’re shaking, Lord Prince.”
“Cold,” I lied.
Even through the robe, her heat burned into my hands like a sacred brand. That thought had me second-guessing every move I made. I was so touch-starved that it had apparently warped my descriptive abilities into something overly fanciful. The poetic way of thinking had to be a symptom of my celibacy. I’d stopped pursuing women a decade ago.
But it was there when I touched her, the searing, reverent kind of awe that felt like a religious experience.
I couldn’t allow her to face me again. Couldn’t look at that face, those eyes, thoselips, and retain all my faculties. I needed her gone.
So I gently steered her toward her room’s doorway. By the time she stepped across the threshold, it felt as if my palms were burned down to the bone.
From where I stood filling the space behind her in the doorway, my shoulders blocked the firelight from the torch behind me, casting her small form in half-shadow.
I reluctantly pulled my hands away from her shoulders and curled them into fists at my sides. “I don’t need another Assembly puppet crawling through my home,” I said, forcing cold into my voice, though the lingering warmth of her magic was still a pleasant tingle on my skin. “Pretending to heal what can’t be healed. I forced the last one to leave so I wouldn’t kill him.”
Even as I said it, I hated myself for it. No one else had ever managed what she’d donethrough a door. But hope was too dangerous. It would make her stay, and I couldn’t protect her from me if she stayed.
“I didn’t come to pretend,” she argued, still turned away from me. All I could see was her glorious hair, the back of her head dipping with her rising chin.
She turned, and I nearly lost my footing.
“I came to help, Prince Emrys. Or at least, I intend to. But perhaps your brother has misrepresented you to me. Perhaps you do not truly want peace?”
I dreamed of peace more than anything. But I gritted my teeth, not ready to give up the fight even after she’d delivered that sucker punch. “This is a warning. You don’t know what kind of hell you’re walking into.”
I stepped closer. Still not touching her, but close enough to feel the warmth of her skin, the slow thrum of her magic like a spring rain. She smelled of lavender and reminded me of perfect summer evenings watching the sunset—but I’d always been alone for those.
“I apologize for using magic on you without your permission,” she whispered.
An apology? For giving me a reprieve from the monster? For giving me a moment of silence inside my own skin? I never wanted that feeling to stop.
What she said next nearly froze my heart. “Show me your hell, Prince Emrys.”
I liked the way my name sounded on her lips.
My heart became a war drum in my ears, and every breath threatened to crack me open anew.
She tilted her head up to meet my eyes, calm despite my trembling form mere inches from her. “I can’t know what you experience if you always have a wall between us when you’re around me.”
She wanted to see into the hellscape of my inner world? I couldn’t bring myself to even consider the idea of letting her near that again.
