She smiled and held her own just above his palm, a fraction of an inch from touching him. Painted clematis and brier rose twisted around her knuckles. “No—don’t,” she warned when he leaned over her hand to kiss her fingers. “Please, Malden, for your own sake—”

His lips touched her skin with the gentlest of pressures. Had he only breathed upon her hand she would have felt it more.

“Oh, what are you doing?” she asked, her eyes wide. “Kissing me! Malden, once I tried to kill you with a kiss.”

“I’ve faced less sweet dooms since,” he told her. “I’d rather die on your lips than on the point of Bikker’s sword.”

“You . . . you speak words of love to me.”

Malden shrugged. “Are you surprised? I’ve felt something for you, Cythera, since the first time I met you. Tell me that was just a spell. Some charm your mother cast on you, to make you irresistible to men.”

“No,” Cythera said.

“Then what I feel is real,” he said.

For a moment they only watched each other, like duelists preparing to begin. He knew she felt something as well. She must! Yes, it was complicated. Yes, it was dangerous. But he’d been leading up to this for a very long time.

She took a step back. “One rough kiss would be all it takes to release the magic in my painted skin. It would destroy you.”

“I’m not afraid of the curses you’ve stored up,” he said. “A rough kiss would set them off, you say. Yet a gentle kiss is harmless, as we’ve seen.”

She laughed, delighted. “You are quite nimble, aren’t you?”

“I could show you just how deft I am,” he told her. “If you have an hour before you must return.”

“Malden, you dare much.”

“Do I offend? Then slap me across the cheek,” he told her, daring more.

He touched her wrist with one finger and traced a tattooed creeper that ran up toward her elbow. He kept his fingertip barely in contact with her skin, but enough so. He had lived among whores long enough to gain some basic knowledge of the erotic arts. For instance, he knew that a feather-soft touch on sensitive skin could be more maddening and arousing than a rough caress.

“Croy—” Cythera said, but then closed her mouth as a shudder ran through her body. “Croy—”

“Is not here,” he told her. He placed a soft kiss on the inside of her wrist. “How long has it been, Cythera, since you were touched like this?”

“Too long,” she said.

“But you remember how it feels, don’t you?” It was a careful way of asking an important question.

“Yes,” she said. “Before I met Croy, there were . . . others. They were brutes, for the most part. Too quick to take what they wanted, or they were cruel and wanted what I did not wish to part with.”