Ahnna shoved away the thought and gently shook his shoulder, her voice breathy with rising panic as she said, “Wake up. Please wake up.”
He didn’t move, the bare skin of his torso so pale and cold that he looked like a corpse.
She needed to get him warm.
But she also needed to run.
“Curse you for a fool, Ahnna,” she whispered, but then started removing her clothes.
20
James
Whether minutes passed, or hours,James couldn’t have said. All he knew when he peeled his eyelids open was that he was not dead and that a fire burned bright before him.
While a different sort of heat pressed against the bare skin of his back.
James fought the urge to stiffen, for it would reveal that he was awake, and instead took account of the situation.
The woolen blanket was still over him, and as he slowly inhaled and exhaled, he felt the soft press of breasts against his back. Knees against the backs of his legs. And his hands, still bound by the belt, were pressed against the apex of a pair of thighs.
Ahnna’s thighs.
Against his will, he remembered being between those thighs. The taste of her on his tongue as she wrapped those endless legs around his shoulders, her whole body taut with pleasure.
James shoved away the thought, because they were a lifetime away from that moment.
Her arm was draped around his waist, the limpness of it, along with the steadiness of her breath, suggested she’d fallen asleep while doing everything she could to keep him alive.
I am no fucking murderer.
He flinched at the memory, and the rest of what she’d said before he’d plunged through the ice filled his head. Ahnna must have felt the motion, because she stirred and then abruptly jerked away from him.
“I see you managed to stay alive,” she muttered as she clambered to her feet and moved to put another log on the fire.
She wore only her undergarments and the same necklace she’d been wearing the night everything had gone to shit, but his eyes were all for the long legs on display, not jewels. He forced himself to stop gaping, but not before he noticed the bandage around her leg and shoulder, both wounds he’d inflicted. The one on her leg was soaked through with blood, and it struck him that if his aim had been true, she’d be dead.
“Why did you help me?” His voice sounded like it was dragged over gravel, and he coughed to clear his throat. “You could be across the border into Amarid by now.” A thought occurred to him, and he added, “Intending to use me as your hostage?”
She glared at him in disgust. “Go fuck yourself, James. I should’ve left you to die.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because Alexandra’s body count is high enough. No need to add yours to it.” Ahnna tilted her head. “Not that you believe me.”
James no longer knew what to believe. No longer quite trusted what he’d seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, so instead he said, “You’re bleeding.”
Ahnna bent down to meet his gaze, her hazel eyes hot with anger. “Yeah. Because you shot me. Twice. Thanks for that, by the way.”
Dragging a roughly made chair next to the stove, she unraveled the bandage on her thigh to reveal the arrow wound, which was oozing blood. It needed to be stitched.
“There are supplies in my saddlebags,” he told her. “Needles, gut thread, and bandages.”
“I used them on you,” she replied.
James realized then that his injured forearm was wrapped tightwith a bandage. She must have stitched him up while he was unconscious. “Thank you.”
“Take your thanks and shove it up your ass, James. I’m not interested.”
