Page 67 of Beds and Blades

“The mind and the body,” she said. “She is offering you both.”

I had one advantage. She needed something from me.

“And not with one man,” she said, reading something in my face and smiling again.

Her gaze flicked toward Skip’s door. Then back to me.

“The dark bond does not work that way. Everyone feels everything. Men and women both. All at once. All the time.” Her smile sharpened. “Without the ring.”

My fingers twitched once. Her eyes dropped to the movement. Then lifted again. She had seen it. Of course she had seen it.

“In another life,” she said, “before I understood the beauty of the dark bond, my name was Mira.”

The corridor went silent inside my skull.

Mira.

Skip’s claimed mate.

The woman whose ring he had removed from her finger in a field. The woman he had grieved. The woman he had loved.

Only then, with the detachment of a brain refusing to stop analyzing during active crisis, did I register the rest of her.

Small waist. Significant rear. The architecture of a woman who was petite everywhere except where she was emphatically not.

I looked down at myself. Then back at her.

Skip, I thought, had a type.

Mira looked at me with knowingness.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind her. Heavy. Armored. Purposeful.

Skip filled the far end of the corridor in full armor, hunter’s hook ready. He was breathing hard.

Then his eyes found Mira.

His face locked into absolute stillness, every trace of expression vanishing at once.

Stillness in the way a man goes still when grief steps out of memory and stands in front of him wearing a face he loved.

“My beloved,” she said.

His hand tightened on the hook.

“This cannot be,” he said.

“You left me in that field,” she said. “You removed the ring.”

She took one unhurried step toward him.

“I lost you. But I gained something else.”

“This is a deception!”

“It is no deception. Morvanna found me before I completed. I joined the dark bond.”

Skip went very still.