Heart of Steel - Meljean Brook [55]
“A great tragedy,” Archimedes echoed gravely.
The resounding noise behind him might have been a groan.
Yasmeen woke, aware that she wasn’t alone in the room. Hopefully it was only Archimedes. Her knees hurt too much to relish a fight with anyone else.
Her eyes immediately adjusted to the dark. Archimedes sat slumped in the chair opposite the bed, wearing a linen shirt with tails pulled free of his lime breeches, legs extended and crossed at the ankles. Even relaxed, the muscles of his calves were strongly defined. A dusting of hair covered his skin, and his feet were heavily callused. When they’d met, the sun had burnished the hair on his head with streaks of gold, but winter had darkened it. The same shade roughened his jaw.
She wanted to rub her cheek against that dark stubble. To climb into his lap and feel his body hard against hers. He’d burned like a furnace. He’d probably keep her warmer than the bed, and as long as he was that, she wouldn’t care if he didn’t touch her again.
For a while, anyway. She liked to be touched, loved the slow curl of sensation over her skin that followed a hand smoothing over her stomach, the flex of fingers down her spine. She trusted very few men to do it, however—and now one of them was holding back while he fell in love with her.
Foolish man. No good could come of it. Sense told her to stop him. But she suspected that if she tried, Archimedes would only be encouraged. He wasn’t a man who took the easy path. No, he sought the more difficult ones.
Which meant there was nothing to be done. The only way to discourage him would be to make herself easy—and a woman didn’t come any easier than she’d been last night.
Perhaps he heard her stifled laugh, or saw the gleam of her grin in the dark. His head lifted. “Are you awake?” he asked softly.
She came up onto her elbow. “Awake, and wondering why you aren’t in Iceland, trying to pry apart the frozen thighs of the virgin cults. They pose much more of a challenge than I do.”
“If all I wanted was to fuck, yes. But I’ve lusted before, and that’s not what I desire now.” He reached for the lamp, filled the room with a soft yellow glow. She watched as his gaze slid over her. She’d slept in one of his long shirts, and the untied neckline had slipped down her arm. Unbound for the night, her hair curled over her bare shoulder. He paused only briefly on her ears before meeting her eyes again. “I also want to be certain that I’m not confusing lust with love.”
Yasmeen had done that before. “Perhaps there’s no difference. Or perhaps you can only know if you’ve satisfied one, and the other remains.”
“Then I will soon be a very frustrated man.” He drew a deep breath. “Also, we are married.”
Yasmeen grinned. She hadn’t been that drunk last night. “Caught by the boardinghouse matron, were you?”
“I know where a sketch is.”
Her humor vanished. She jolted up to sitting. “What? Where?”
“With Temür Agha in Rabat. There is also a rumor that my debt is settled.”
Oh . . . oh, fuck. She did not care for money that much. Vengeance was another matter. “Is it the forgery?”
“I don’t know. I hope it is not. If Temür discovered that the debt was settled by a fake . . .” He drifted into a laugh, shaking his head.
Temür would be enraged. But it wouldn’t matter, because if he had the forgery Yasmeen would kill him. “We have to see it.”
Archimedes nodded. “To that end, we are to join an airship expedition that will eventually take us to Rabat, and my friend Hassan will help us past the trading gates.”
Ah, good. That would have been the most difficult part. Though the Horde-occupied territories traded with the New World, few merchants and officials were invited past the port gates and into the cities—and Rabat wasn’t easily approached from another direction like England, which was shielded from zombies by the surrounding water and often cloudy enough to fly an airship over, unseen.