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She was naked but for her undergarments, curled up against an equally near-naked Wilder Hawthorne.
They lay on their sides, atop a pile of clothes, beneath his cloak, with Thea tucked under the warrior’s bearded chin. One of his muscular legs was draped over her lower half, trapping the warmth around her, the weight of it pressing her to his —
Desire pulsed between her thighs, and Thea fought the urge to move beneath him, so that she might…
What was she thinking? Was a muscled body and a warm embrace all it took for her to forget why she was here in the first place?
Hawthorne stirred, more of his nakedness brushing against her.
Thea stiffened in his arms.
‘It seems we’ve come full circle, Princess…’ His voice was thick with sleep.
He was right. They had been here before, and yet they had not. Not like this, not with him as her enemy.
She scrambled away from him, scanning the floor for her clothes in the light of the dying fire. They were spread out on the opposite side, and she snatched them up, the fabric cool but dry on her warm skin.
Hawthorne rose onto his elbows and blinked sleepily, the cloak dangerously low around his hips. ‘Are you alright?’
Thea laced her shirt with more vigour than she intended. ‘We need to get moving.’
Realisation dawned on the warrior’s face. ‘You went into shock,’ he said. ‘From exposure to the cold. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you. I hope you know that.’
Thea couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Regardless of what she believed and didn’t believe about the fallen Warsword, she knew in her bones that he would never do that.
‘We need to move,’ she said again.
No matter how hard Thea tried, she couldn’t reconcile the two men she had known. The fierce, hardened warrior who had betrayed his guild, his people, and the man who had told her he was hers, who had fought at her side and chased her nightmares away.
She turned her back as Hawthorne stood, letting the cloak fall as he reached for his clothes.
‘Thank you,’ she said, facing the jagged cave wall. ‘For what you did.’
‘Couldn’t let you die without your vengeance, Princess.’
Thea tensed at the nickname, hating how it made her toes curl, even now. She distracted herself by picking up the cards Audra had given her from where they’d been left in a neat stack. She ran her thumb over the bleeding words on the top card:Strong of mind, strong of body, strong of heart…
‘I’m decent,’ Hawthorne told her.
But when she turned around, he was still buttoning his shirt, much of his golden skin still on display.
Thea started as his manacles rattled.How’s that possible?How had he removed his clothing with the irons linking his wrists? Was she imagining things? She tried to remember whether he’d been wearing them when they’d awoken, but her mind was fuzzy. She fumbled in her pocket. The key was exactly where she’d left it. She was still delirious from the fever, she decided. But it was his scar that caught Thea’s gaze next. The scar she had given him with her arrow. The satisfaction she expected to feel didn’t come.
‘Admiring your handiwork?’ Hawthorne asked, tugging his shirt in place.
Jaw clenched, Thea scooped his cloak up from the ground and thrust it at him, but he caught her hand at his chest, his fingers gripping her palm firmly.
‘It was real,’ he breathed. ‘All of it.’
It was an echo of something that had passed between them the night before, but the memory was just out of Thea’s grasp, lost amid the remaining fog of her fever. She made to pull back, but the warrior held firm, his silver gaze molten as it pierced her own.
‘Tell me you don’t want me, Thea. I need to hear you to say the words.’
He was close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from him, the same heat he’d offered her in the depths of her cold exposure. Yet despite the furnace of a man standing before her now, she shivered, digging deep for the power of will.
‘I don’t want you,’ she told him, knees buckling.
‘I don’t believe you.’ He closed the small gap between them, still clutching her hand. ‘My shirt smells like you,’ he murmured, the sound a low rumble in the shell of her ear. ‘I still have yourmarks on my back from our last night together. You claimed me long ago, Thea. You don’t get to say I’m not yours now.’
