She had gone utterly still, her breath coming fast in shallow little huffs. She seemed impossibly fragile, as though she had grown smaller – because she had. She shrank from him.

She looked vulnerable. So small and vulnerable, like prey flushed from its hiding place and bared to the hunter. It called up the memory of her voice saying, I was no more than a timid mouse. A mouse he wanted.

He dropped his hands from her as though burned and stepped back. She looked at him, but for once there was no clear message in her face. She trembled all over, but he thought it was not fear. No more was it lust. Then his eyes found her hand, the knife clutched in fingers that shook, the first time he had ever seen her grip unsteady.

A protest hovered on his lips, a defense against the accusation she did not make. She had wanted it. She had kissed him.

And he had taken what she gave and more, not content with only a taste freely given. Her look damned him, made him one of those men in the king’s hall who had made sport of her, who stole a touch and demanded her body, because they could.

He turned away, unable to bear the mixture of confusion and fear and courage swimming in her eyes. There was nowhere to go, but he strode away through the trees. He must go anywhere at all so that she did not look like this. Anywhere that he might forget the sight of her unsure hand trembling around her only defense.

Chapter Eight

––––––––

She watched him disappear behind the trees at the edge of the clearing, her mouth bruised with kisses, her body burning. She wanted to call him back. She wanted to bury the knife between his shoulders.

She wanted to stop wanting him.

Her fingers would not let go of the knife, and yet she had no memory of taking it from her belt. To be sure, she had had no thought of using it in defense against him. That had not been in her mind at all. It was she who had kissed him, even knowing that her mouth made him think of hot sin. It was her body that asked for more. He only answered.

Why then – why did she feel like this?

Once, years ago, she had watched as a boy was pulled from a lake, gasping for air. Don’t you never go out so far in deep waters, her mother had warned them as the boy coughed and wept.

Deep waters. This was how it felt to be saved from drowning, to have the suffocating waters recede and leave her dazed on the shore, struggling to learn how to breathe again.