She inhaled an audible breath and drew closer to Cededa. A new tension made the air around them almost thrum. Her fingertips grazed the edges of key markings tattooed across his throat and partially revealed by the open edges of his tunic. Her eyes had turned dark, the pupils so large they nearly encompassed her irises. The tip of her tongue glided across her lower lip as she stared at the path her fingers traced. “You are a pleasure to touch,” she said in a voice deepened by desire. “A gift beyond price.”

The slow poison of her affections inflamed him, and he stood for a moment, docile under her caress as her bane surged through his body, igniting his insides so that the numbness instilled by the Waters burned away entirely. Imogen of Leids was the pinnacle of contradictions – sensual innocence and a death touch that made him feel so alive, he feared he might combust from the euphoric effect.

They strove together toward disparate goals—she to live a normal life, he to die a normal death. They had agreed on a process to attain both. She touched him as often as she pleased, and he bled the curse out of her by taking it into himself. He’d been the one to present the idea, and she readily agreed.

A fine plan except Cededa didn’t count on his body awakening so fiercely under an onslaught of sensations long forgotten. Imogen’s demand that he teach her the fine art of coupling combined with her forthright honesty in her pleasure at touching him raised his lust to fever pitch. If she didn’t leave him be for now, he’d either burst into flame or take her on the filthy floor.

He grasped her wrist and forced her hand to her side before stepping out of reach. Desire, lust, anguish, fear—they surged through him on a relentless wave. This woman had no place with him. He had nothing to offer beyond the lifting of her bane.

“Don’t touch me, Imogen,” he ordered. “Not here. Not now. Not in this place.”

She flinched away and turned her back to him, but not before he caught the shame and hurt stamped on her elegant features.

The tether holding his control in place threatened to snap. He fled, leaving her in his dusty chambers with their lurid frescoes and the ruins of his humanity.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

For the first time since her arrival at Tineroth, it rained. Unlike the low fog that encased the city each morning and left moisture dripping off the buildings and ivy, this was a true thunderstorm. Lightning flashed to the southwest, and rain fell in sheets, pounding on the palace roof and against the windows.

Most of the time Imogen could predict a storm. Niamh had taught her the old sailor's trick of a morning’s red sky heralding a storm, but in Tineroth the sky only changed with the passing of hours, its filtered light dimming with oncoming night.