“Dashing,” I reassured him. “Definitely dashing.”
He eyed me. “You’re lying.”
“Just a little. You’re not quite a sexy pirate, but also not a bridge-dwelling crack addict. More . . .”
“A swashbuckler?”
I wrinkled my nose. “More someone who was in a bar fight and lost a tooth.”
“Lovely.” He made a face that turned to a frown when I wandered over to bounce on one of the three cots in the cell. “What are you doing?”
“Testing out the mattress to see if it’s soft or hard memory foam. Seems pretty decent.” I stretched out on it, feeling myself sink into it. “Ahhh. Nice.”
“What about me?”
I gestured toward the other two beds. “Take your pick.”
“You’re not going to tend me anymore? That dab at my lip and the vicious jerk on my nose was the sum total of you nursing the wounded?”
There was outrage in his voice, righteous outrage. I sat up, unable to hold back a little giggle. “You don’t need tending, do you? I mean, you’re immortal. The bleeding has already stopped on your mouth, the swelling around your eye will go down in probably less than an hour, and I’m willing to bet you that the bones in your nose are already knitting back together.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a little sympathetic care,” he said sulkily.
That just made me giggle more.
“I would remind you that I suffered these grievous wounds when a full score of men descended upon me as I attempted to protect you from them!”
“A full score? Ha! It was a dozen at most.” I didn’t let on that I was impressed he had handled himself so well with all those guards. I suspected he’d just get a fat head if I did. It would be far better to turn his attention. “I didn’t need protecting, anyway. I just objected to being imprisoned a second time in so many days.”
He maintained an injured silence for about a minute, then rose and stumbled over to one of the comfy cots, saying, “No doubt you were imprisoned for some illegal act your mother performed.”
I glared at him. “No cracks about my moms, either of them. And for your information, Mr. ‘I’m the Watch and I Know Everything,’ neither my moms, Mrs. Vanilla, nor I did anything deserving of imprisonment. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Mrs. Vanilla?” He lay back on the cot, groaning in relief as he did so.
I sat up to assess whether or not he really was hurt to the point where he needed healing. Most people of the immortal persuasion had self-healing abilities, some more powerful than others. Perhaps Travellers had a harder time healing up their wounds? “She’s a mortal, one of my mothers’ clients evidently.”
“Ah, the old woman they kidnapped.”
I made a face, but he didn’t see it since his eyes were closed. Quietly, I moved over to stand next to him. Blood from the broken nose was giving him two black eyes, although the swelling around the one abused eye had gone back to normal. The split on his lip had also healed, and I assumed the empty socket for the missing tooth had sealed up as well. “You look like a raccoon,” I told him, bending over to brush a bit of dried blood off his chin.
“Thank you,” he said without opening his eyes. As I stood up, he grabbed my wrist and gently pulled me down so that I was half sitting and half draped across his torso. His eyes opened. My stomach went a bit wobbly at the clear blue depths of them, made especially noticeable by the dark purple and black mask resulting from the broken nose. “Why do you have two mothers?”
I had to drag my attention off his mouth and chin and the warm, solid chest beneath my breasts. My skin tingled where it was pressed against him. “Because they fell in love. Why do you have a mother and a father?”
“What makes you think I have a mother and a father?”
“Most people do.”
“True. I did, as a matter of fact, but they weren’t together because they were in love. Theirs was an arranged match. They didn’t much like each other, and they parted ways soon after I was born.”
“How sad for them. And you. I much prefer being raised by two mothers who love each other and me.”
“I would prefer that as well. Why did your mothers kidnap a mortal woman?”
“You’re just full of questions, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Here’s another: would you object if I kissed you?”
I thought about that for a minute. Although every instinct in me told me to keep him at a distance, both emotionally and physically, I couldn’t help but admit that there was some sort of magnetism between us. I didn’t want to get up off his cot, even though I knew I should. I wanted to touch that golden hair, and stroke my fingers down his jawline, now bearing blond stubble that made my legs feel shaky. But most of all, I wanted to kiss him ever so gently on those tempting lips, not hard enough to hurt his mouth if it was still tender, but enough to let him know that he’d been kissed.
“No. You cannot kiss me,” I said firmly.
His eyes grew grave.
I leaned down and gently, oh so gently, nipped his lower lip. “I, however, will kiss you.”
“I’m not normally aroused by bossy women,” he warned as I feathered little kisses along the edges of his mouth. His hands slid down so that they rested warmly on my waist.
“Who says I’m trying to arouse you?” I asked as I licked the tip of his nose.
His eyes crossed. “You’re doing a damned good job of it if you’re not. Are you going to stop teasing me and kiss me properly?”
“Now who’s being bossy?” I didn’t let him reply. I just leaned in and let my lips do what they’d wanted to do ever since the moment I’d seen him on the cliff. His mouth was warm and soft and infinitely pleasing, but when his lips parted in a happy sigh, my pleasure in the kiss went into overdrive. I touched the tip of his tongue with mine, then retreated. It was such an intimate gesture, it shook me for a moment or two, and I felt the need to give him time to adjust himself to the invasion.
Gregory obviously did not share such thoughts, because before I could tell him that he was an extremely good kisser, his tongue was there in my mouth, being just as bossy as he had claimed I was. I didn’t have long to think about that because not only was his tongue laying siege to my mouth—in a way that made me feel as if my toenails were steaming—but both hands had moved up along my sides until they were cupping the undersides of my breasts. That was pleasant, very pleasant indeed, but when Gregory sent his thumbs into action in the form of soft little sweeps across my nipples, I pretty much stopped thinking and just wallowed in a delicious world made up of Gregory and his magic mouth and hands. And chest. And I had a feeling that the rest of him would be pretty damned fine as well.
“All righty, ’ere we go with dinner, and a few visitors to—oy!”
It took a couple of seconds for Al’s voice to penetrate the thick fog of desire that had rolled over me, but Gregory’s stiffening beneath me did a lot to bring me back to my senses.
I sat up, my mouth feeling strangely bereft, my breasts very much protesting the removal of his hands from their premises.
“Oh,” I said, staring at the two guards who held trays bearing food. Behind them stood three people, one of whom held a camera. “Um. This isn’t what it looks like.”
“Yes, it is,” Gregory said, and crossed his ankles as he put his hands behind his head.
The guards—Herbert and another man—looked at each other.
“I can’t see!” a voice squeaked from behind them. Al opened the door wider, gesturing for Herbert and his buddy to set down the trays of food. The others behind them spilled into the cell. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like a man and a woman having sex,” a thin, rat-faced woman said and took a picture of us. “Henry, I’m shocked and appalled by this. It isn’t at all what I thought we’d see in a dungeon.”
“This is hell, dear,” a short, round man said softly. “I expect that’s the sort of thing they get up to, here.”
“We are
“Not yet, anyway,” Gregory added.
I glared at him. He winked.
