Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
I start to weep.
It’s impossible to define the precise emotions, the complex mix of gratitude and pain too much for me to understand—or control. Covering my face with my hands, I try to muffle the sounds as flashbacks from the goddess’s sculpture twist my head and memories of the officer in the cell freeze my bones—
“Sorrel.”
At my name, I drop my palms. Merc is kneeling by the tub, his beautiful black and white eyes searching my own.
“It’s all right now,” he says softly. “Whatever you see in your mind, that’s the past. You’ve lived through it. You must let it go.”
He brings a soft cloth into the warm water, and then he wipes my face gently. “Remember what I told you. Always forward … never back.”
“Sometimes I can’t help it.” I wipe my eyes and wonder if they’ll ever stop with the leaking. “The images come and I’m back where I was—and it’s never good.”
“You will train your thoughts away from all that just as you’d learn any other skill. With practice.”
I reach out and take his hand. “Will you tell me something you run from?”
Merc strokes my face, and lingers with his thumb brushing my lips. Then he looks away with a defeat that is wholly inconsistent with all that I know of him.
“I don’t run from what ails me,” he says in a low voice. “Wherever I go … there I am.”
Eighty-Five
Reunion.
Merc stays beside me while I have my bath, stroking the warm, dripping cloth over my hair, over my freckled shoulders, over my arms, and eventually, my tears ease. With the crying passed, I lean against the side of the basin, and rest my cheek on the curved lip. On the inside, I continue to weep, but I keep that to myself.
I just feel so powerless.
“Would you like me to wash your hair?” he asks me.
When I nod with gratitude, he retrieves a bar of fragrant soap from a small dish. It’s what he smells of, and he puts aside the cloth and lathers up his hands.
“Tip back for me,” he says. “So that all is wet.”
I’m grateful for the job, and focus my thoughts on getting my head all the way under the water. As the level goes over my face, I hold my breath and look up through the wavy pool of warmth at the black-haired man who looms over me.
If I saw the shape of him like this and did not know him, I’d swear he’d been sent to kill me. Instead, I have a sense of security and safety. He’s already proven all that he’s willing to do for me.
And I’ve done the same for him.
Thus we have fought for this peaceable moment right here, our reward this short time of communion which is so much more precious to me than any kind of material payment.
When I emerge from the depths, I come up chin-first, my breasts breaching the surface thereafter. His eyes go to them, and the stark hunger in his scarred face shifts the energy in my body away from the strange despair that’s gripped me … toward something that is so much more preferable.
“Just look at you,” he says in low voice. “Woman … you are a beauty in any light.”
As I flush, I sit forward and brace my hands under my seat to hold myself as very nearly float. There’s a fragrant explosion as he passes his palm over my hair a couple of times and then he’s massaging the soap into my scalp and down the lengths. Suds form and propagate around me, tickling my nipples as they play hide-and-seek with Merc’s hot stare.
“So we leave on the morrow and head north,” he says.
It’s hard for me to connect to his words when his voice has gone to that deep, low place that thrills me. But the translation filters through all the sexual charge.
“Ah, yes.” I clear my throat. “Please.”
“And when we get to Prosperitus, what then?”
“I shall have to speak with the King.”
Merc’s laughter is a balm to my nerves. “Good thing you ask for nothing much at all, woman.”
“Well, I do believe in starting modestly.” As our banter evaporates in the warm, humid air, I exhale with exhaustion. “If I can get to a Queen who refuses all audiences, surely I can find my way to a ruler who actually rules.”
“And what would you be speaking to him about?” When I don’t immediately answer, Merc says, “Would it be the demons, then, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So that’s why we came to the warrior Kingdom. You want to protect that village of fools who’d sooner have killed you from something that stalks them in the dark. And now that you’re here, you see that there’s only shadows of the past in this castle, and no one who’s willing to help.”
“Something like that.”