Resurrection. Lisa Childs
mission. He stepped back, releasing her so abruptly that she dropped to her knees on the sand again. Then he raised the spear. If his people had any chance of defeating the invaders, this sorceress could not live.
She lifted her face toward him. Tears shimmered in her light blue eyes; one broke free and trembled on her thick black lashes. “Don’t kill me. I’ll do anything…you want me to…”
He had never seen such beauty. Her hair, her face, her body…she seemed too perfect to be of this world. To be real. Unable to help himself, he reached out to touch her hair again. Soft pale gold tendrils tangled around his fingers; he clenched his hand in her hair.
She turned her head, and her lips glided across his forearm. “I’ll do anything…”
She reached out, sliding her hands up his thighs to the loincloth under which his erection throbbed. Her fingers closed around him, and he jerked.
“I can be your woman,” she offered. “I can pleasure you…” Her golden brows drew together over her light eyes, her unshed tears turning from terror to frustration. “You don’t understand me…”
Even if he hadn’t been able to comprehend what she was saying, her actions spoke louder than her words. She pushed aside the buckskin and leaned forward, brushing her lips along the length of his shaft.
His fingers, still clutching her soft hair, fisted. A woman had not touched him—in so long. And never like this…
As passion flooded him, his grip on the spear eased, and he buried the tip deep into the sand. As he wanted to bury himself inside her.
She closed her mouth around him, her teeth scraping over his most sensitive skin. Then he felt something else sharp, the point of a weapon at the base of his shaft.
She pulled back her head and lifted her face to his.
“You may not understand me, but you’ll understand this,” she said, her eyes glittering with determination and desperation as she increased the pressure of the weapon?literally threatening his manhood.
His body tensed even more as anger surged through him, along with the passion. She might not be a sorceress, as the Wise One had warned but the woman was definitely dangerous.
Chapter Two
With the taste of him on her lips, in her mouth, Anya struggled to focus. Her hand trembled, and she nearly dropped the weapon—the one she always hid beneath her gown, bound to her thigh with a leather thong. She kept it just in case she couldn’t reason or threaten her way out of harm.
“I will kill you,” she promised, tightening her grip on the weapon. “Or I will make you wish you were dead…”
“I have wished myself dead many times,” he told her—in a deep voice and in her language.
She jerked with surprise. “You can understand me?”
He stared at her, his gaze dark and penetrating. “Every word.”
She lost herself in his eyes. Perhaps he understood more than her words. She did not end lives. She resurrected the dead.
“Do it,” he advised her. “Kill me.”
Her hand shook, and she tightened her fingers around the crudely carved handle of the dagger that Nana had helped her fashion, as if knowing the dangers Anya would one day face. But Anya could not drive the blade into him. She could not stain his beautiful skin with blood. Her voice cracking with fear, she pleaded again, “Let me go…”
“Back to the men who will fight us tomorrow, trying to steal what is ours?” he asked. He shook his head, sending his hair falling around his handsome face. “The only way they can triumph is if you are on the battlefield with them.”
“H-how do you know?” Did he have the same gift as Nana? Could he see the future? What did he see as her fate—death at his hands?
He gestured around at the woods and stream. “Like you, our land is special, has herbs and flowers that can be eaten and then empower the one who eats them. That is why your warriors want our land.”
She nodded her admission. “True.”
“Yet how will they know,” he asked, “which herbs will empower and which will kill them?”
“I—I don’t know…”
Distracted by his words, by his ability to speak in her language, she didn’t notice when he moved. His hands wound around her wrists, yanking her to her feet and knocking the dagger from her grasp. Shackling both her wrists in one big hand, he reached into the sand and extracted her weapon.
“You travel with warriors, yet you know not how to fight,” he taunted her as, like with the spear, he ran the tip of her dagger from her cheek, down her throat to where her pulse pounded madly with the rhythm of the war drums.
“I am not a warrior,” she admitted, although he could have no doubt that she did not possess the killer instincts of the men with whom she traveled. Or of fearless warriors like him.
“My name is Anya.” She had distracted him once with feminine wiles she had not been aware she possessed. Guided by those same instincts, she ignored the knife at her throat and leaned forward, so that her breasts, bared by her torn gown, pressed against the wall of sinewy muscle that was his chest. “I am a woman.”
His voice a guttural groan, he agreed, “You are a woman.”
“I can be your woman,” she said to tempt him. She told herself she only offered her body in order to save her life. But her pulse quickened as excitement coursed through her. His body, all dark skin and hard muscle, fascinated her as no other man’s ever had. And she was around men, warriors, all the time now, since she had been taken from her family.
“My woman?” he asked. As if by magic, a flower appeared in his hand, replacing the dagger. The white petals were luminescent against his dark skin. He lifted the flower to her mouth and rubbed the silken petals back and forth across her lips.
Anya’s heart slammed against her ribs, then raced. She stared up into his face, fascinated, too, by the strong features. The nose, which was nearly as sharp as the blade of his spear. The deep-set eyes, and cheekbones that looked as though they had been carved from teak. Then his image began to waver in and out of focus, and her head felt light.
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