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Here you go - quick, grab a drink with a weeny umbrella in it (cabana boy optional) and settle right down. Leave a comment to go in the draw for a free copy of GUILTY AS SIN.
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Michael’s bad, bad, bad - all the way to the bone. A single heated encounter with the master thief and level-headed Liseriel the Gray has never been so furious - so intrigued - in her life.
Neither has Michael. Danger’s always been his drug of choice.
With his huge bronze wings and sweet serious smile, Daxariel the Burnished is everything the thief is not—a shining spirit and an honest soul.
Lise and Dax are both so godsbedamned good, Michael can’t wait to debauch and defile, to make his Aetherii beg. It’s the only way he knows to win—and win he must, because there’s something about wings and tails and trust freely given that has him reeling.
Exquisitely trapped between wicked temptation and steadfast love, everything Lise believed about duty is dust on the wind. How can she crave two men, different as night and day?
When the three are thrown together to rescue a group of slum kids from Hssrda slavers, someone’s going to get caught. Who will it be?
Ah, that Michael, I keep seeing him with a black leather jacket and a big purring motor bike. Shame Phoenix is a sword and sorcery world!
The Prince’s Palace, Sere
She didn’t think she’d ever seen such a pretty man - or one more accomplished. Vastly entertained, Liseriel the Gray stepped deeper into the shadows and folded her arms, watching him flirt with a plump matron encased in gold-shot velvet while his eyes carried on an entirely different conversation with her bulky, four-square husband.
This was the master thief Jan had spoken of, she was sure of it.
Michael.
That was all they knew of him, his name. And that he’d been an assassin once. Her lip curled. Likely he still was.
Brilliant. Light-fingered. Deadly.
“You’re the most observant person I know,” Jan had said. “All our intelligence indicates he’ll be at the Prince’s birthday celebration tonight. He won’t be able to resist. He has expensive tastes, this Michael.”
His hard mouth had curved without humor.”Find him for me, Lise. The Prince has finally lowered himself to ask the Winged Envoy for help. It’s an important breakthrough in the trade negotiations.”
As Head of Security, Janarnavriel the Noir was the Winged Envoy’s to command, and for his second officer, Jan’s word was law. So Lise had merely nodded in her usual cool manner, concealing her pleasure at the offhand compliment.
Which was why she was currently lurking in a window embrasure in the main ballroom of the Palace, her gray wings furled about her like a cloak of shadows and her tail curled neatly around one booted calf, watching the Grounded flirt and plot and drink themselves insensible at the Prince’s expense. The Aetherii were by nature a spectacular race, still enough of a novelty in the mountain city of Sere to bring passersby to a dead halt in the steep cobbled streets, mouths open, but Lise prided herself on her ability to be unobtrusive. It was as much her stock in trade as her eye for detail and her hard-won warrior skills.
The man appeared to be a gilded youth, the line of his jaw clean and beautiful, his hair a thick golden blond that gleamed with health. Lise narrowed her eyes. A wig, but a very good one. Human hair, she judged. There were rings flashing on his slender fingers, sapphire drops in his ear lobes. He’d spared no expense, she had to give him that. A perfect little lordling, and all in excellent taste. So what if she could see the hard disks of his nipples beneath the ultra-fine silk of his shirt? Or if the merchant was darting discreet glances at the taut ass cupped so lovingly by the satin breeches required by court etiquette?
Michael was wearing makeup, expertly applied - not unusual for men at the Sereian court. Coupled with the classical purity of his features, the fine elegant shape of cheek and nose and skull, it gave him a disturbingly androgynous air. He looked… She had to think about it…
Available. Deliciously, dangerously available.
He was deceptively lean. Lise measured the width of his shoulders and her gaze dropped to consider the muscle in his thigh. Oh yes, there was power there all right, coupled with perfect, almost unnatural control. His purpose kept him on a tight leash, this thief.
Her quarry detached himself from the merchant couple and drifted over to delight a group of half a dozen bright-eyed society ladies. With no little amusement, Lise observed the fluttering of lashes, the imperceptible tilt of their bodies toward him. They made a delightful picture, all youth and firm smooth flesh, colored silks and sparkling stones.
Lise’s brows drew together as Michael offered his arm to a dainty dark-haired piece wearing a small fortune in emeraldas. Green fire dripped from her ear lobes and flashed in her cleavage.
In the minstrels’ gallery, the orchestra struck up a fanfare and the Prince’s party paused in the vaulted entrance to acknowledge the spatter of polite applause. The Prince of Sere was respected, but not greatly loved. Lise watched his thin lips curl the slightest bit as he raised a languid hand in acknowledgement.
Rip the Veil, Michael had disappeared! Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the pale gleam of his golden head, passing through the tall carved doors out onto the dimly lit balcony, his palm resting lightly on the back of the girl’s waist.
By the gods, he was good! But so was she.
Fading back into the darkness, Lise stepped across the window sill. Half-spreading her wings, she drifted across the courtyard garden, no more than another shadow in the night. Small creatures froze instinctively, trembling with terror, as her shadow passed silently over their heads like a highhunter on the prowl. She glided to a gentle landing on a rustic path behind a thick bush, aware that all the small rustlings and squeakings had stopped.
Michael wasn’t pushing the pace, she noticed. The young woman’s hand rested lightly in the crook of his arm, her skirts frothing over the steps as the couple descended the curving stair down to the short swathe of velvet lawn. They looked pretty together - as if they were meant to be - the blond head bent attentively toward the dark.
He slowed to a halt as they reached the path. “The stars are beautiful tonight,” Lise heard him murmur. “Look.” With gentle fingers, he tilted the girl’s chin up, brushing a cascade of ringlets back behind her ear as he did so.
In that, he was right enough. Lise glanced up at the Veil of the night sky. The single moon of Phoenix shone like the thinnest of sickles, sharpened to a razor’s edge. Over its shoulder, glittered a scatter of pinpricks - what the Grounded liked to call stars. To the Aetherii, they were rents in the Tattered Veil, glimpses of the all-consuming fire that was the primeval cosmos.
Michael indicated a small gazebo, situated a few yards farther on down the path and bowered in an exquisitely perfumed climbing vine. The blooms shone like tiny ghostly faces.
“Come sit with me a moment.” His voice was a light, beguiling tenor, full of warmth and promises unspoken.
The young woman tilted her head back, her profile perfectly presented to his gaze. “Sit?” Her gurgle of laughter was throaty, enticing. “Is that what you call it?”
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Today I’m over at the Bandit Lair with the amazing Romance Bandits fending off the cabana boys (not to mention the mad rooster) so I can chat about emotions and empathy in romance - and, of course, THE LONE WARRIOR! I’m also giving away a copy to a lucky commenter. Come and join us! Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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Thanks everyone for helping me celebrate the release of THE LONE WARRIOR. And the winner is… DRUM ROLL…Email me with your snail mail and I’ll put your copy of THE LONE WARRIOR in the post.
In the meantime, there are still opportunities to win. You can subscribe to my newsletter - there’ll be an easy contest in the next issue, coming soon.
Or… you can enter the Goodreads Giveaway. All ya gotta do is click!
Giveaway ends May 15, 2011.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
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“Show me,” said the baron of Lonefell Keep.
Shaking with terror, the midwife placed a small warm bundle in his arms. Reflexively, he tightened his grip and the babe squirmed, mewling. The baron stared down at the skin of her cheek, palest ivory and roses, and examined the slender fingers and long bones. Then he looked for an endless time at the body of the tiny, olive-skinned woman lying twisted among the bloodied sheets. She had been his cousin, and there was a strong resemblance between them.
Finally, he lifted his gaze to the window. Outside, in the barrack square, his sergeant of the guard drilled Lonefell’s soldiers. The man had journeyed an unimaginable distance from the far north to join the baron’s service. A light breeze fondled his long braids, so fair as to be almost white. Sunlight caressed broad shoulders and long, straight limbs.
A film of ice formed over the baron’s heart, for he had been foolish enough to love his pretty young wife.
He thrust the child at the trembling midwife and ripped open the door. His captain stood outside, awaiting his lord’s pleasure. With a jerk of his chin, the baron drew the man to him. “Kill the northern barbarian!”
When the man’s face went slack with shock, he snarled, “Now!”
He strode away without a backward look, dismissing the child from his mind and his life.
After a week, the midwife, nonplussed, named the babe Mehcredi, for that had been her sister’s name. Then she handed the infant over to a passing maidservant and departed. The squalling bundle passed from one exasperated maid to another until one more ruthless than the others set the child aside in a distant storeroom. She considered it a politic move, for after all, hadn’t the baron made his disinterest clear? In any case, the life of a single girl child was a cheap and easy thing.
Mehcredi would have died, save for the merest chance. A few days later, the keep’s laundress was brought to the bed of a stillborn son. That in itself was not such an unusual occurrence, but the loss affected the woman strangely. She fell into a deep melancholy, complicated by milk fever. By the time her best friend bethought herself of the abandoned babe, the child was almost too weak to suck.
But suck she did, with an avid desperation, and the washerwoman recovered. But the melancholy lingered like an evil spell. Mehcredi had reached the toddling stage when the woman drowned herself in one of the deep stone tubs in the laundry, her hair floating like weeds among the baron’s sheets.
The child grew wild and dirty, scavenging like a little animal, her fingers always clawed, ready to snatch, her strange, light eyes stretched wide. As the seasons passed, she shot up like a sturdy sapling, pale as a snow birch seeking the sun. No one spoke to her, save in passing. No one touched her, save for an absentminded buffet if she were underfoot.
Only fat old cook noticed the girl, for he loved to see a body eat and Mehcredi inhaled anything he gave her, in any amount, at any time. She haunted the cavernous kitchen, for there it was warm and she could fill the emptiness inside her. But all she did was grow—and grow and grow—her long limbs straight and true, her shoulders square and well set.
The laughter of the castle children excited her almost unbearably, but they interacted according to unwritten rules she had no hope of understanding. On the rare occasions she was permitted to join in, something always went wrong, though she was never able to pin down what it was. Baffled, angry and hurt, she’d stand like a lump while the little ones pointed and complained and the older children jeered.
Chewing her thumb, she lurked in the shadows, a tall, pale wraith, staring, always staring. More than once, she pushed or kicked a smaller child, so she could watch with greedy eyes when it ran to its mother and was comforted. She had to blink back the tears every time, though she could never work out where they came from or why—or even prevent them in the first place. With a defiant sniff, she’d stamp off to the kitchens and swipe a pastry.
By the time she had breasts and a woman’s hips, Mehcredi was already taller than most men, monosyllabic and sullen. A few years later, when she stood at Cook’s graveside, she was six feet in height, her strange silver eyes shielded by thick, light brown lashes. A tangle of ice-pale hair straggled down her broad back, almost as far as the swell of her buttocks.
Before dawn the following morning, she crept into the baron’s study, levered open the lock on his treasure box and took what she thought she was owed simply for surviving . Without a word, she hauled herself onto one of the castle’s grain wagons, heading for market in Caracole of the Leaves. By first light, she was long gone.
Mehcredi discovered, rather to her surprise, that she liked Caracole, that city of sea canals and shining white towers and smiling vice, a far cry from the silence and cold unyielding stone of Lonefell Keep. When she sat idle, watching the summer breeze play chase and kiss with the blue wavelets in the canals, strange thoughts drifted into her head, tantalizing fragments of meaning hovering just beyond her grasp, eluding her by the smallest of margins. Skiffs and barges floated by, the people on board talking, laughing, arguing, or sitting in comfortable silence with their arms around each other.
She’d hoped it might be different here, away from the keep, but it wasn’t. She didn’t know how to do any of the things other folk did so naturally. When she tried, they looked at her sidelong—or worse, they laughed outright and turned away.
As if life were a cruel game and they had all the pieces, while she’d been robbed of hers before birth.
After a week of increasing frustration, grief and fury, Mehcredi betook herself and the baron’s gold to the House of the Assassins. The Lonefell soldiers made the sign of the Sibling Moons every time the place was mentioned, half in awed admiration, half in horror. If they were impressed, so was she. She thought no more deeply than that, like a child who only comprehends enough of the world to want what it wants.
Those who had the power of life and death controlled the pieces and the board, and therefore the game itself. Or so she reasoned.
CHAPTER ONE
Caracole, Queendom of the Isles
Palimpsest
Death padded in pursuit, slipping through the double shadows without a sound. Like the worst nightmare Mehcredi could imagine, except this was all too horribly real. How much longer she could elude him, the man with the hunter’s face? Panting, she glanced over her shoulder at the dark figure pacing behind. As he drifted from one patch of shadow to the next, something pale gleamed where the light of the Sibling Moons tangled in his black hair. Feathers worked into a long braid, and . . . bones?
Were they finger bones?
The shock thrilled down her nerves, making her head swim and her vision blur, but her long legs carried her away at a swift, stumbling run, lurching down a narrow alley, deeper into the reeking slum the people of Caracole called the Melting Pot. Turning to fight never entered her head. Gods, she’d barely scraped through the First Circle tests as it was, and her first real commission for the Guild of Assassins had been an unqualified disaster. No, she wouldn’t have a chance.
She couldn’t hear his footfall, couldn’t detect any movement, but his presence behind her was a tangible force. Every cell in her body sensed him with the animal instinct of the hunted—his predatory focus, the grim relish with which he anticipated her death. From her left came the frantic click of claws on the cobbles, a soft whining noise. That damn dog! She might as well wave a flaming torch above her head and be done with it.
“Get lost,” she hissed, glancing around for something to throw. “Scat!” But the little animal only skittered aside, continuing to flank her.
Mehcredi twisted and doubled back. One hand pressed to the stitch in her side, she reeled around a corner and inevitably, there he stood, waiting—pitiless. He wasn’t a great deal taller than she was, but much broader. Lithe and strong and graceful, where she was long-boned and clumsy and doomed.
She opened her mouth to shriek, to plead, but long-fingered hands fastened around her throat. As he slowly increased the pressure, digging painfully into the soft flesh under her jaw, the man smiled, lips pulling back from white teeth. The expression gave him an eerie, chilling beauty. He could have been an avenging angel or a handsome demon. Either way, those elegant brutal hands were the sure instruments of her death.
Read the rest of the first chapter…
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