Free Awaken to Pleasure by Lauren Hawkeye Page B

would have provided as a courtesy, but Moira said nothing. She had no wish to prolong the encounter. Where she once would have yanked him over the counter and squeezed his throat tight, just to prove a point, the relatively newfound peace in her life helped to calm her instant rage.
    It was now enough just to know that she could.
    So she reached into her cloak, intending to pull out the bottle that she had found only minutes before. Gale wouldn’t know that it was worthless, and was dumb enough, even, to think that he’d be getting the better end of the deal. But for reasons that she couldn’t explain, she found herself hesitating as her fingers brushed over the smooth metal, the surprisingly cool bump of the sapphire. If she’d believed in such things, she’d have sworn that she felt an odd surge of energy tingle through her fingers as they rubbed over the stone.
    That was nonsense, of course, and so she dismissed the notion. But still, against her better judgment, she reached for her coin sack and withdrew the money.
    She could always trade the sapphire-studded bottle later, someplace else.
    “So long, Gale.” Moira hoisted the sack onto her back. She thought if she went slowly, she could make it back home without causing any further damage to her ankle.
    “That’s it? You ain’t gonna stick around and give me some company?” The leer returned on Gale’s overemphasis of the word
company
, and Moira gagged inwardly. It seemed that her gut feeling toward the slimy little lizard man had been dead-on, for now it seemed that he intended to drop all pretense and become completely creepy.
    “Give company to a man who charged me five coppers for a two-copper bag of rice? And a tin for a damned drink of dirty, warm water? Forgive me for not jumping at the offer, sexy though that tail of yours is.” Fixing a ferocious sneer onto her face, she swept out of the ramshackle hut with as much dignity as her wounded ankle would allow her.
    And, for the second time that day, fell down onto the sand.
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed, shoving at the hard body of the man she’d run straight into, the man whose body had become tangled with hers during the short tumble to the ground. “Get off of me!”
    Instead the stranger raised himself up onto his elbows and looked down at her, even as he disentangled his fingers from her long locks. Her first thought was to search frantically for the bright red pentacle under his ear that would have marked him as a witch. Her second—as she squirmed beneath the surprisingly unyielding male flesh—was that here was man she wouldn’t mind keeping company with. His hair was bright as the sun, and his eyes were as blue as the sapphire on the bottle in her cloak.
    The eyes. The color made her uneasy. She’d given up ever again laying eyes on the man who deserved the blade of her knife, but still she found herself searching for him in the face of every blue-eyed man she knew.
    This stranger was no different. And yet instead of the usual disappointment, or the mild repulsion that that color blue brought, Moira felt…
    Stirred.
    The body. The
body
. The lean angles that pressed along the entire length of her softer curves had heat humming through her veins. It wasn’t often that she was physically helpless with a man, any man, and the fact that she was now excited her a bit, even as it roused her anger.
    “Who are you?” she demanded, for the attractive face wasn’t one that she recognized.
    “I am Boone,” she was told, and the husky velvet of the deep voice sent a delicious shiver skating down her spine. “You called me.” And before she could argue, she was pressed flat into the ground again while her lips were attacked with a skill she’d never before experienced.
    It was a full minute before she could think. Her body responded instantly to the taste of wine and of man on the stranger’s tongue, and the burning heat of the sand at her back and of the aroused male body