Читать книгу Resurrection - Lisa Childs, Lisa Childs, Livia Reasoner - Страница 5

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.