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We need ea
ch other.
And she had just consigned herself to yet another, longer absence.
Raul held out his hand. Hers found it without conscious volition.
“What about…”
“Don’t worry,” he said.
He led her back to their tent. Ilse almost cursed him for predicting this moment, but instead she laughed softly as they ducked through the opening. Raul turned and with a quick movement, untied the cord holding the flaps open. Darkness fell over them. The air turned warm and close.
He drew her close and nuzzled her hair. “I love how you smell.”
“Of mud and sweat and…”
“You.”
His mouth closed over hers in a kiss.
Oh. Oh, I had forgotten.
Forgotten how warm and insistent his kisses were. How he liked to pull her tight against him, so that she lost her breath for a moment. And how he drew back, just enough so one hand inevitably traced a path from her hair to her neck to her breast, where his palm cupped her flesh gently.
“Raul…”
His answer was a mumbled laugh, a cry.
“Raul, I must tell you something. It’s about Osterling.”
“Not tonight,” he said hoarsely. “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. It was a promise and a warning.
He touched her cheek with his fingertips. Ilse drew him close into a warm kiss, soon followed by another. Their kisses turned into a hungry feast of caresses, of mouth against skin, until they had shed their clothes and locked themselves in a bubble of passion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS A return to their early days in Tiralien—before the affairs of the kingdom intervened and Markus Khandarr executed Dedrick Maszuryn. Before they conceived their separation. If she could put a number to those days, she knew it would be no more than three or four months from the time when they admitted their love, to when Dedrick first approached Raul about spying in Duenne’s Court, and yet to memory’s eye, the interlude seemed an endless ribbon of pleasure and passion and contentment, which curled back upon itself and so continued forever.
We were Anike and Stefan, she thought. Two ordinary people without any concerns for the empire or magic.
Remembering those days, Ilse insinuated her arms around Raul and drew him tight against her chest. His smooth skin—unlike any other man’s—was like fire-warmed silk. His heart beat swiftly against hers, a mirror of her own painful emotions.
“I love you,” Raul whispered into her ear. “I always have.”
“Impossible. You loved Dedrick.”
Dedrick, once Lord Kosenmark’s beloved. Then his friend and spy. Now dead because of that love. For many months, Ilse had not been able to mention Dedrick’s name. Nor could Raul.
We were too new to love, in this life. We had to learn how to trust all over again.
Raul rolled onto his back, a familiar movement that brought her, by habit, to settle under his arm. It was like one puzzle piece fitted to its mate, one word linked to its proper companion.
“No,” he said. “I meant that first time in Andelizien. You were Sonja and I was Andreas. Or at least, that is the first I remember us together. Later, I came to Zalinenka from the emperor as an emissary to the court of Károví. You and he were prince and princess together. I was nothing but a messenger, stupid and young and homesick, but you were kind to me. I thought I would kill myself from desire.”
Her skin prickled at this host of images from her life dream the night before. “You were there? You remember?”
