Warlord Wants Forever - Kresley Cole [8]
Kristoff had seen him in many battles and agreed. “I did counter. I was used to giving orders and would take them from no one but a powerful king. I wanted my brother turned if he was dying, and trusted compatriots as well. Kristoff complied.” That wasn’t all. Wroth had asked for sixty years so he and Murdoch could watch over the rest of their living family—their father, four sisters and two other brothers.
They’d needed only three months.
“You know, I’d heard of you when you were a human. Weren’t you called the Overlord?”
This surprised him. “On kinder tongues. How could you have heard of me? Your accent isn’t from the northlands.”
She sighed. “Not anymore. I’d heard of you because I’m interested in all things martial. You were quite the vicious leader.”
He felt his expression grow cold. “We were defending. I was anything I needed to be to see it done.” He could tell by her reaction that she liked his answer. Her lips parted as she tilted her head at him. Then she sidled closer to him on the bed as if she couldn’t help herself.
Her voice more gentle, she said, “But in the end you lost.”
He stared past her. “Everything.” The battle had only been like the final blow on a dying man. Prior to that, the enemy had scorched and salted their lands. Famine followed and there’d been no defending when plague erupted.
“Wroth,” she said softly. He turned his gaze to her. Her eyes were so captivating in her elven-like face, so clear and lucid at this moment. “Let’s make a pact, you and I.” She eased open his legs to kneel between them. “Let’s vow that we won’t harm the other in this room.” She pressed him back until he lay fully on the rolled pillow. What would she do next?
When he gave her one quick nod, she flashed him a warm smile that made him feel praised in some way. Her damp hair was spilling down over his legs, and with the back of her hand, she swung it to one side, baring her tantalizing neck. A rush of the innate scent of her hair swept him up, like a drug. Sweet and subtle, just like her skin. If she smelled like this, he couldn’t imagine what she would taste like. He wished she’d bared her flesh in offer to him.
“Wroth, this is embarrassing,” she murmured in a sensual voice, “but I think I’ve caught you staring at my neck.”
“You did,” he admitted, oddly feeling no shame to be contemplating his order’s most reviled crime.
She brushed her fingertips over her skin. “Are you tempted to take a drink from me?”
In the worst way.
He wondered how many times Ivo had taken her and felt a spike of some unfamiliar feeling claw in his gut. “We don’t drink from living beings. It’s how we got our name.” It was this order’s pledge, their pact. Wroth had never tasted flesh as he drank. But then he’d never felt the smallest stir of temptation to before her.
“Why?”
“So we are never tempted to kill,” he said, giving her the official line, which was true, but the whole truth was more complicated, and they kept the details they’d managed to learn secret. Living blood, blood not separated from its source, brought side effects with it. A vampire would suffer torments from it, such as his victim’s memories. Kristoff believed these memories were what drove natural born vampires insane and made their eyes turn permanently red. As far as they could determine, the only way not to harvest them was to drink blood that had died, avoiding the evils—and the benefits.
“What if you drank from an immortal that couldn’t be killed from that?” she asked, her words lulling again. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes from hers.
A tricky question to answer without saying that the immortal would have far too many plaguing memories, multiple in number to a mortal. He answered her question with one of his own. “Do you want me to take your flesh, creature?” The mere idea of it made his words rough, his fangs ache.
At her titillated