Free Angel's Assassin by Laurel O'Donnell Page B

believing you.”
    Damien stepped closer. “You are too trusting,
I’m afraid.” It was not a statement of recrimination, just a simple
fact. “Everyone is capable of deception,” he told her. He looked
straight into her eyes. “Everyone.”
    His black tunic made him almost indiscernible
as he moved toward her. His skin gave him away, darkly tanned, yet
lighter than the darkness surrounding them. “Even you?” The thought
was almost too much to bear. In the short time she had known him,
she had come to trust Damien. To depend on him without the
slightest reservation or doubt.
    “Everyone,” he said.
    “You would deceive me?” she asked, wounded
deeply.
    “It is as I told you. People will do what
they need to do to survive.” He looked at her. “Even you.”
    “I would never harm another,” she insisted.
“No matter what.”
    “No?” Damien wondered. “What if someone had a
sword to your father’s throat and told you that if you did not
poison…” Damien searched for a name. “…me, your father would
die.”
    She tilted her head, wondering how many
people had harmed him to so taint his soul. “I would never hurt
you. How could I when you twice saved my life?”
    “It’s easy to say in the dark, when your
father is in no danger.” The candle he held flamed to life,
spreading light in a circle about her bed. Damien raised it higher
and the flickering flame illuminated his strong face with a golden
glow. “But in the light of day, if the danger I portrayed to you
were true…we might see a different side of you.”
    Aurora lifted her chin. “It would kill me to
have to make such a choice, but I would never hurt you. Not even
for my father’s life.”
    Damien scowled slightly. His gaze searched
her face, touching every corner of it, looking for something. He
lowered his eyes. “I am your bodyguard now. Your father is paying
me to keep you alive and well.”
    Her eyebrows shot up. With his statement came
a strange thrill that warmed her in places she had never felt such
heat before. She had implored her father, but never thought he
would hire Damien. She took another drink of ale, and the golden
liquid now tasted like an elixir of forbidden excitement. She
looked around. Except for the sleeping guard, she and Damien were
alone. “My father must trust you if he allows you into my
room.”
    “You put too much faith in trust,” he said.
“He is paying me to keep you alive.”
    She turned away from him and placed the mug
onto a table near her bed. “And tell me, Damien, what is it you
believe in?”
    Damien fingered the handle of the dagger in
his belt. “I believe in the power of this,” he said. He jangled the
coin pouch attached to his belt. “And these always do what you
expect them to do.”
    Material things. “You have no faith in
people. It must be a very lonely life you lead.” She swung her legs
from the bed, steadying herself for a moment. “Do you find solace
from the cold steel of your blade? And what of love? Do you search
for that in your pouch of coin?”
    “Love?” Damien scoffed. “Love is the ultimate
trust, and therefore the ultimate illusion because it does not
exist. To search for it is a complete waste of time.”
    Aurora’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped
open. Damien stood stoically before her, half in shadow, half in
light. “Some do not have to search for it. I feel the warmth of
love from my people, and the protection and kindness of my father’s
love every day. To think love does not exist is a sad, lonely
mistake.”
    Damien shifted his stance, lowering the
candle to set it on the table near her bed. The shadows consumed
him as he stepped back. “The only love my father gave me was to
sell me into slavery. Otherwise he probably would have beaten me to
death.”
    Her heart twisted. She peered into the
blackness, trying to see Damien, but it was as if he had melted
into the shadows. Slavery? Beaten? No wonder he did not believe in
love. She put some weight