Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 67421 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67421 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
She bit her lip, eyes searching his. “What did you just promise?”
“To always love you.” He clasped her hand and brought it to his chest. “My heart is yours. My axe is yours. My last breath is yours.”
Wonderingly she touched his face. “I know not what you say. But this is how I always dreamed someone might one day look at me. As if I were loved.”
“You are loved, woman.” Warrick lowered his head. “I will show you how much.”
With his mouth. With his tongue. With his hands. Until she screamed for him as she came, then whispered that she was dead. And he loved her even more when she pushed his head back down between her thighs and asked him to kill her again.
Warrick awoke.
Something was wrong.
Not Elina sleeping in his arms. Not the moonlight faintly illuminating the tent. But the dull gleam of a blade, a shadow moving past the curtains—
Warrick whipped around, grabbed his axe and hurled it at the shadow. The loud clatter of chain ended with a solid thunk.
Elina bolted up to sitting. “Warrick?”
“Shh. All is well.” Except for the bed curtains. The stains might never come out. He drew her into his arms and leaned back against the pillows. “I merely righted another wrong.”
She hummed against his throat. Already drifting into sleep again, her body soft and warm against his.
He closed his eyes and joined her.
Elina the Wedded
Darcoth
“I hardly know what to say.” Still flushed from the very thorough morning kiss that Warrick had just given to her, Elina stared at the assassin lying on the floor of her tent with Warrick’s axe embedded in his skull. “If I were Nanny Char, I might mutter that barbarians never pick up their mess. Or perhaps I should say how glad I am that my attendants no longer come in until I call for them. But all I can think is that I was not the only one you killed last night.”
Warrick merely cocked an arm behind his head and looked arrogantly pleased with himself.
“Is there a ghost in here now?” But a glance at his chest told her that there wasn’t. “I wonder if this is one of the bizarre things that Chardryn told me of. You kissed me quite ardently—everywhere—while knowing a corpse was lying there.”
When he only looked even more smug, she snorted out a laugh. Then she crawled back onto the bed and kissed his mouth. “I thank you for protecting me, Warrick of the Ghost Clan.”
All humor fled his expression. He clasped her nape and spoke roughly, fiercely. The same way he’d spoken to her last night. The same way he’d used his mouth and hands and tongue.
Elina had begun to love it when he spoke to her that way. Even better would be understanding what he said. “Today I’m going to teach you two words in my language. Kiss,” she said—and demonstrated. “Kiss.”
Warrick grinned. “Kiss.”
She rewarded him with one. “I’ll decide on the other word later. But now I’d better let Serjeant Iarthil know that an assassin slipped through his defenses.”
While riding with Warrick that day, she taught him ‘axe.’ The next morning was ‘tongue.’ Then ‘horse.’ By the time they neared Darcoth on Midsummer’s Eve, Elina could almost speak to him a full sentence about kissing his horse with her tongue while eating a raspberry in bed, and Serjeant Iarthil had almost stopped apologizing for his “blasted selfish decision to keep our perimeter open after dark, simply so that I could satisfy our curiosity about what happened with the ghost and the village.”
But it was while the serjeant was riding beside them, apologizing again, that Warrick said something that stopped him short. Which they then discussed back and forth without any translation until Elina was forced to break in with a sharp, “Serjeant?”
He looked at her, abashed. “He says the issue is not the perimeter, but how they managed to find you.”
They’d always managed to find her. “I assume my uncle lays out gold enough for the assassins to bribe people to talk.”
“The barbarian thinks it is more likely the gold crown and paint. It causes a stir and makes it easier for an assassin to follow our route.”
Which was something Serjeant Iarthil had said before, when they’d first fled Aleron and Tagdon. He’d argued that they ought to appear as wealthy merchants. Or lesser nobles, at best. Yet he’d been countered by Lady Faraine, who’d pointed out that they sought allies and protection, and most royal courts would never acknowledge mere merchants or lesser nobles. When the Radiant Queen arrived in their realm, however, they were eager to welcome her.
Though she despised saying it, Elina told him, “Lady Faraine wasn’t wrong.”
“She wasn’t,” he admitted. “Yet our circumstances are different now—you have already made allies in the realms we will be traveling through. And it is likely no coincidence that this assassin so quickly found you after you wore the queen’s face in Torrath. It had been quite some time since the last one found us…and it had been quite some time since you wore the paint.”