“One ends poorly for you,” she pointed out.
“Then do it.”
“Y-you are not in a position to issue commands, sirrah.”
But he was. Even with a blade held against his throat, he was a mighty presence, and her hand was growing sweaty around the hilt.
Her breath was coming too fast, her heart hammering too hard, her hand—the one she’d punched him with—throbbed as if she’d punched a wall, not a man. Steel before and stone behind, she was, most literally, between a rock and a very hard place.
He was all wild thing, untethered and unafraid. His hair had been shaved close on the sides and back, growing long down the middle, banded at the base of his neck, so he looked familiar and yet utterly foreign. His face was all cut planes of male fury, hard cheekbones, dark brows above the ice-blue eyes pinned on her. She felt like she was staring at a flame burning inside a shard of ice.
“The blade is exceptionally sharp,” he assured her, his voice a rumble of cold, calm advice. “If you press the slightest bit, you shall see results.”
“Then stop pushing me,” she almost begged.
“No.”
She began to tremble outwardly. The rush of fury was fading; fear would soon settle in. Terror would come on its heels. And then, sanity, sense, reason, restraint.
The column of his neck, strongly muscled, pressed against the blade. Sheer hard will was the only thing that kept her from lowering it, for the moment she did, she was a dead woman.
His icy gaze roamed her face. “I see ‘I shall do it’ in your eyes.”
Her hand tightened on the slippery hilt. “Indeed I shall.”
“Ah, but I see a thousand ‘I shall do its’ in your eyes, and yet, you do not.”
Swoosh. The blood coursing through her body washed cold, then hot. How had he done that, seen straight through to the heart of her?
“Are you going to drop it?”
“Are you going to kill me?”
Another mad smile. “Drop it and see.”
She squeezed the blade tighter, because that was terrifying.
Then, God save her, he leaned in closer yet, until she felt his breath on her cheek and he put his mouth by her ear and said, “I dare you.”
Dare? “To what?” she whispered back, as if they were in secret council and this was his whispered advice.
For a beat of her heart, he remained still. Then, like some animal, like some untamed, unbroken, undaunted sensual being, he ran his tongue across her ear, his breath hot and male.
She felt struck by lightning. Burnt, charged, dangerous. Whatever had been coursing through her before became a flood. Hot and raging.
She flung her head and leapt backward, but there was nowhere to go, and as she rebounded between his rock-hard body and the stone wall, she dropped the blade.
In a single move, he kicked it away and clamped a fist around her wrist, pinning it to the wall high above her head. He caught her other wrist and held it low beside their hips, their bodies still pressed together. Then he went suddenly, absolutely, terrifyingly motionless.
She felt the beat of his heart against her chest—it was not racing as fast as hers, but it was a strong, hard beat. She saw the vein on his neck thudding.
She had no idea what a warrior might feel inclined to do at such a moment—hanging; a simple, swift beheading—but none of them occurred. Nothing happened, nothing but the tension slowly rising through her body the way a flood tide rises on a riverbed. She was awash in awareness of him, pinning hers from chest to knee, in the way he was watching her with inscrutable eyes, in the hard, absolute motionlessness of his body.
She was doomed. Walter had been saying it for seven years, and now all the predictions were coming true.
Boots sounded on the stairs, then stopped short. A loud male gasp sliced through the stony entry chamber. “Dear God in heaven.”
Walter.