“She has your eyes.”
“Our mother’s.”
“I first saw them behind a hideous mask.”
The bottom dropped out of my world. “You’ve known who I am all the time,” I whispered.
His lips jerked up again in a slick smile. “From the instant youarrived, the moment when you should’ve introduced yourself but instead, stabbed me.”
The words had barely settled before my muscles coiled. Years of training sparked through me in a single, fluid breath. I drove my palm toward his sternum, pivoting into a strike meant to send him reeling.
He caught my hand with insulting ease, his fingers wrapping completely around my wrist.
“Predictable,” he drawled, though his voice had gone rough around the edges.
I was a weapon trained for more than ten years, and he was dismantling me like I was made of silk and wishful thinking.
I twisted, using the momentum to bring up my knee in a sharp arc toward his groin, only for his other hand to clamp around my thigh, halting me in midair like I was nothing more than a ribbon in the wind.
The smirk didn’t leave his face.
“Come now,” he murmured. “Surely you can do better than that?”
I shifted again, rolling my weight to break his hold, aiming for his temple with the heel of my hand. He blocked me lazily, as if he was fending off an overwrought kitten instead of someone trained to eliminate all threats.
My frustration flared hotter than my temper. I ducked low and swept my leg out to take him at the knees. For a heartbeat, I thought I’d caught him off guard.
Then the floor shifted. No,heshifted. His grip tightened, and suddenly I was airborne, the world tilting in a blur of shadow and torchlight until I landed with a bounce on something plush and soft.
His bed.
The journal slid to my side, but there was no time to grab it. He came down after me in one smooth, predatory motion, the towel that had been knotted low on his hips gone, lost in the tussle.
Every inch of him was damp heat and hard muscle, pressing meinto the mattress. His thighs straddled my hips, his weight pinning me in place. The mattress dipped under his weight as he caged me beneath him. Every breath brought me the scent of his skin, clean and male and dangerously warm.
The damp tendrils of his hair sent droplets onto my overheated cheeks.
“If you wanted me naked, Minx,” he said, and I could feel his smile against my ear, “you only had to ask.”
Heat pooled low in my belly. I was supposed to hate him. I was supposed to be immune to whatever dark magic he wielded with his voice. Instead, I was cataloging the feel of his thighs bracketing my hips, the way his chest rose and fell above me, the careful control of his grip that promised hecouldbreak me, but he wouldn’t.
Heat spiked through me, infuriating me in more ways than one.
I bucked beneath him in a desperate attempt to free at least one hand.
He shifted his weight, a swift, confident adjustment that pressed his knee firmly between my thighs. The involuntary gasp that slipped from me earned another wicked curve of his lips.
“Careful,” he said, his body a cage and a promise all at once. “Keep moving like that, and I’ll take it as encouragement.”
My breath caught, traitorously shallow. My pulse roared in my ears, a messy mix of battle-edge and something far more dangerous. I strained against his grip, but his strength appeared to be an unmovable wall, annoyingly, impossibly controlled.
“Get off me,” I snarled.
“Not until you listen.” His mouth brushed against my temple, his voice softer but no less sure. “She loves my cousin, Fenmark. While I was cautious around her at first, because heismy heir until I produce my own, which I so hope to do soon, you can trust that I didn’t kill her.”
The words vibrated against my skin, his breath stirring the loose hairs near my ear.
“I can’t trust you,” I bit out, turning my head enough to meet his gaze.
