Page 50 of Kiss of Wrath

Seeing her ducking around to stand beside Mordr, they smiled. And exposed long incisors on either side of their mouths. Like wolves or vampires.

She gasped.

“Watch yourselves,” Mordr hissed.

Miranda shook her head to clear it, and when she looked again, their teeth were perfectly straight, except for slightly longer incisors. She must be in a hormone-induced haze.

“Miranda, these are my lackwit brothers, Cnut and Harek. Lackwit brothers, this is Miranda Hart . . . my, uh, client.”

Client? Me? She nodded at them, acknowledging the introduction, such as it was. She was still stunned by their appearance. “Cloaks? Really? In Vegas heat?” she whispered to Mordr.

“What is wrong with cloaks?” Mordr asked her, not in a whisper. “I wear an identical one betimes. ’Tis a trait of our family.”

“Cloaks have many inside pockets for carrying . . . um, certain things,” the one named Harek explained.

She could only imagine.

“What are you doing here?’ Mordr demanded of both brothers.

Now that was just rude.

“What are you doing here is the better question,” Harek said. “By the looks of your lips and that bite mark on your neck, I’d say something fun.”

Oh my God! What do I look like? She put a hand to her hair and groaned. It had come loose from its clip atop her head and was hanging in ridiculous curls down to her shoulders. She didn’t need to wonder if she had whisker burns on her cheeks and neck, or kiss-swollen lips, like Mordr’s. She probably looked like a slut.

Mordr bared his teeth at Harek, and Miranda noticed that he had slightly longer incisors, too. Since he never smiled, she hadn’t been aware of that fact. She looked again. Yep, definitely a little longer than the rest of his teeth. Cute. She almost laughed when she imagined his reaction if she called him cute.

“I repeat,” Mordr said icily to his brothers. “Why are you here?”

“There is trouble,” Cnut told him. “Big trouble.”

Guess who’s coming, uh, came, to dinner . . .

“Can we come in?” Harek asked with a crooked grin at Miranda that some women might find attractive, but Mordr considered halfbrained. And Harek was the one who was supposed to have the biggest, sharpest brain of them all.

Cnut winked at her—probably to annoy me—and said in a raspy voice, the result of being nigh garroted by a slimy Saxon one time, “Pleased am I to meet you, Lady Miranda.” His gravelly voice appealed to some women, or so Cnut always bragged.

“She’s no lady,” Mordr said.

Mordr hadn’t meant that as an insult, but she chose to take it that way as evidenced by her hip bumping his side. He was momentarily shocked by her action, which bespoke familiarity, and was definitely un-lady-like. Trying for a bit of damage control, he added, “I meant, they do not use titles of nobility in this time . . . uh, country.”

“Is that an apology?” she asked.

“No. Why should I apologize?”

“Still the same suave oaf,” Harek remarked. “Mr. No-Personality!”

“Remember the time he asked Queen Edwina if she ever considered slicing off that mole on her nose?” Cnut said to Harek with a grin.

“Would you two Viking pain-in-the-arses care to step into the yard with me?” Mordr gritted out, and he didn’t intend to show them the sprinkler-fed grass, which was lush here in the front where the children didn’t trample. In fact, he warned them, “Spew out more of those jests at my expense, and we shall see how many eyes I can blacken in two minutes.”

“Aren’t you worried that I might bloody those kiss-swollen lips of yours, brother?” Cnut asked with more grinning.

“Time for an intervention,” Miranda declared with a scowl at him, even though he wasn’t the one who started the sniping. To his brothers, she said, “You can call me Miranda. Please, come in.” She stepped back to motion them in. To him, in an undertone, she whispered, “Stop behaving like a child. You’re worse than Ben and Sam.”

“I resent that.” By the runes, her lips look kiss-some.

“Big deal!”