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Looking at him, it was easy to imagine him as a boy, all those years ago, full of heartbreak and regret and pain.
I reached out to him, no more than my hand on his knee.
His face was at once open and closed. A guarded, brittle hope softened his mouth and eyes. I had found him bleeding out on the battlefield, but I had never seen such vulnerability until this moment.
“Wendel,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I won’t lie. When I first discovered my talent for raising the dead, I was…unhappy.”
“You were just a boy.”
“Not yet old enough to appreciate my magic. Necromancy is fascinating.” His velvety voice brought shivers down my spine. “With it, I can recover long-lost memories. I can speak to the dead who left this world days, weeks, even centuries ago. There’s a certain repulsive elegance to being a necromancer.”
He tilted his head as if noticing, finally, that my hand rested on his knee. He curled his fingers around mine. I expected him to pry my hand away, but he held me there instead, his grip strong yet gentle.
“And yet you keep touching me,” he murmured.
He looked deeply into my eyes, searching for my innermost desires. My heartbeat pounded against the cage of my ribs like a trapped bird seeking freedom. I ached for more than just a touch of his hand.
When he lunged across the distance between us, I gasped.
Bending over me, his arms caged me against the seat. He captured me in a fierce kiss. His mouth devoured mine with the desperation of a starving man. Desire flooded me in an instant and scorched away any sorrow. I clung to him with my hands in his hair.
Silk. His hair was like silk. It contrasted with the hard muscles of his body.
Fuck, his muscles weren’t as hard as his cock. I arched my hips and ground against him, rewarded by a grunt low in his throat. I wanted to free his cock and see it jutting against his princely black clothes.
“Ardis.” The gravel in his voice turned it into a growl. “You’re playing a dangerous game.”
“That’s exactly why I want you.”
He grabbed me by the wrist before I could touch the bulge of his cock. “Because you want to manipulate me?”
“No.”
“You’re lying to me. Again.” He curled his lip. “The archmage sent you?”
“No!” I sucked in an unsteady breath. “I’m a mercenary for the Archmages of Vienna, but I’m not a whore.”
My own mother ran a brothel in Chinatown, San Francisco, for Christ’s sake, which was enough to convince me to never enter that line of work. I preferred killing strangers to fucking them, as mercenary as that sounded.
“Aren’t they paying you?”
I glared at him. “To bring you back alive, not to fuck you.”
“Who says I would fuck you?”
“Your cock says otherwise.”
He laughed darkly. “I’m tempted to slide my fingers into your sweet pussy and find out just how wet you are right now.”
Drenched. That was how wet.
I locked stares with him. “Only if I can find out just how hard you are right now.”
11
His quick intake of breath gratified me. His pupils widened until darkness swallowed almost all of the green in his eyes. He stroked his hand along the nape of my neck. Necromancy shivered like icy fire from his fingers.
