Page 29 of Hearts Lost

“There’s a few upstream,” she says. “They’re curious but cautious. You’re fine to swim.”

I drop my shirt and head to the river without looking back. I can feel Ithronel’s eyes tracing a path down my shoulder blades and dancing along my waist.

Damn it.

The river is bracingly, surprisingly cold. That’s a good thing, of course. It’s good in every possible way. Not only does it help clear my mind and focus my attention on the things that matter, like our voids-damned survival, it also suggests we’re getting closer to the freezing Outer Ring. Closer to the teleportation hubs that could take us back to the Crystal City. Closer to having to deal with the fact that Ithronel admitted, almost cheerfully, that she was sent here to murder the woman Orryen plans to marry.

With a groan, I wade into the shelter of an overhanging bush with broad, purple leaves, kick off my pants, and dive into the water. The cold is like a slap across the face; I come up gasping, my heart hammering, and every muscle in my body pulled as tight as a steel trap. I let the river carry me downstream, around a sweeping curve and just out of sight of the clearing where we’d spent the night, before I brace my feet against the river’s bed, stand, and dunk my head a second time. Cold soaks through my skin, and I feel something inside my body burning brighter in response.

I surface, shake the water from my hair, and clamber toward the bank, my muscles already starting to shiver. The rocks of the riverbed are smooth and slick beneath the water, so I walk slowly, trying not to fall and embarrass myself. Or to embarrass the entirety of King Galan’s Royal Guard, not to mention every single member of my extensive lineage, whose names and titles I’d been forced to memorize as a child and I still haven’t quite managed to forget. Finally, after a lot of slow, slippery progress that leaves me almost as uncomfortably hot and sweaty as I’d been before jumping in the river, I reach the bush with the purple leaves where I’d abandoned my clothes. I tug my pants up and over my wet legs, push the branches aside—

And there’s Ithronel. I freeze as my heart stutters and my brain trips over itself and splashes into the frigid water swirling around my ankles.

Ithronel is pulling her dress up over her legs. And then over the supple curves of her stomach. And then the swell of her chest. As I stand behind the bush, utterly paralyzed, she tugs the ragged fabric over her head, folds it neatly, and sets it on the grass behind her.

Then she stands and stretches, raising her arms high above her head and smiling as if she’s greeting the glowing violet light surging above the trees. As if this spot, wrapped in the steam and heat of the void, bathed by the violet light of this strange sky, is exactly where Ithronel wants to be.

By all the howling voids below, she is glorious. The curve of her breasts, the tight, dark buds of her nipples, the sway of her hips. She looks like a queen, an absolute queen of the stars descended to walk among us for a night.

And what the fuck am I doing?

Shock and arousal jolt through my body in equal measures; I force myself to close my eyes and take a soft, quiet step backward. Then another. My heart hammers inside my throat and blood throbs between my legs as my cock pushes against the damp fabric of my pants.

Stars above, what if she’d turned around? What if the assassin from the Kingdom of the Summer had turned to the side and seen me, former Acting Captain of the Royal Guard, staring at her naked body with a hard-on so obvious they could probably see it from the Worlds Above? What if she’d come over to me, with her wide smile and her soft curves, and put one of those arms around my waist—

Shit. I grind my teeth together and turn away from the river. We have to get out of here. We have to get back to the Kingdom of the Fall, where I might well have to throw this woman in jail. I can’t let my idiotic attraction to her get in the way of doing my voids-damned job.

I have to get away from Ithronel.