AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Naked?”
“Hm. It was not too bad when the sun shone, but after dark—”
“After dark?”
“—it became somewhat . . . frigid.”
I stared at him. “How old were you?”
He shrugged. “Three, perhaps four.”
“But . . . but why would anyone do that?”
“To demonstrate my fitness to the people. I was my father’s heir, an
d although he had no throne at that time to leave to me, he had absolute confidence that it would one day be his.”
“Yes, but to risk a child—”
“Life was about risk then. And there was no childhood, in the modern sense, when I was young. Not for peasant children, who started work in the fields by age seven. And certainly not for those of us in the nobility.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“Some of it was. There were puppet shows on feast days and sledding in the winter. And I could ride an unsaddled horse at age five at a full gallop, as could my brothers. Well, except for Radu,” he said, talking about his youngest brother. “He was deathly afraid of the creatures and took rather longer to come to terms with them. I should know; I taught them to ride.”
“Them?”
“He and Vlad,” Mircea said, his smile fading. I didn’t say anything, but inwardly I cursed. It was rare enough for Mircea to talk about his family, and that particular topic was almost certain to make him shut down. But to my surprise, this time it didn’t.
“Radu had absolutely no seat at all,” he said, after a moment.
“Neither do I,” I admitted. Rafe had tried to teach me, but had finally given up in despair.
“But you do not need to lead charges in battle, dulceat?a?. He did! My father finally solved the problem by tying him onto the largest horse in the stable, and promising that he should remain there until he could ride it properly.”
“And did he?”
Mircea looked up at me, baring the long line of his throat as he leaned back against the chair. It exposed a vulnerable area, a traditional vampire sign of trust. “With amazing alacrity.”
I stared down into those velvety dark eyes, fascinated by the pleased humor on the handsome face, by the crinkle of the eyes, by the white, even teeth and the glimpse of tongue behind them. Without thinking, my hand stopped combing through the thick silk of his hair and dropped to his nape, before sliding forward to curve around his throat.
Most vampires would have moved away or at least flinched. Mircea just looked up at me, eyes bright, but no longer with amusement. There was something dark in those depths, something fierce and possessive that made my breath come faster and my hand tighten over the pulse that beat strong and steady under my fingertips.
His heart didn’t need to beat, of course, but he knew I liked it, so he rarely forgot. Like he always remembered to breathe when I was around, to blink, to do all the things that made him seem human, even though he hadn’t technically held that title for five hundred years. But he was human to me.
He would always be human to me.
“You shouldn’t look at me like that when we are in public, dulceat?a?,” he murmured, stroking his hand up and down my leg. “It makes me wish to cut the evening short.”
“How short?”
Those fingers suddenly tightened. “Very.”
And for a moment, that sounded like a really good idea. Really, really good. But if I left with Mircea now, I knew how the rest of the evening would go. And it wouldn’t involve a lot of talking.
I licked my lips and stepped away a few paces. “You were telling me about your mother?”
Mircea didn’t say anything for a moment, but when I looked back, he didn’t appear annoyed. If anything, his body seemed to have relaxed, and he was smiling. “Princess Cneajna of Moldavia,” he said easily. “Tall, with raven hair and green eyes. Radu took after her, not in coloring but in a certain delicacy of feature.”
