Dillon vanished the book and closed his eyes.
Was that all it had been? A bit of Craft that had made Blyte’s suggestions sound reasonable? A spell that had him believing that he loved her? Was that all?
If you loved me.
A spell like that would be expensive—maybe not for the spell itself, but sometimes discretion was the most expensive part of a transaction. It would probably take most of the payoff he’d received from Carron’s father. And he couldn’t go back to the same witch who had taught the spell to Blyte, even if he found out who she was. The Lady was probably a favored customer who paid very well for deceitful spells and unsavory brews. However, if one witch knew how to make that kind of spell, it stood to reason that there were others who were as well trained in the Craft and would know that spell or something similar—and would be willing to teach the spell to a young Warlord for the right price.
If you loved me . . .
He could play that game as well as Blyte. If the aristo girls were going to plague him because of things she had said, he should get some compensation for the association—without having to get into a bed.
SIX
Standing behind a table in her sitting room, Surreal sorted her notes and reports for the SaDiablo estates and slipped the pages into heavy paper folders, along with the correspondence she carried from District and Province Queens who wanted to convey information to the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan but didn’t want him to think his personal attention—and presence—was required. She didn’t have a study like Sadi or an office like his secretary, Lord Holt. She didn’t want one. She wrote reports whenever she deemed it necessary and handed them to one man or the other, letting them figure out what to do with the requests, the complaints, and the paperwork.
The arrangement suited her, and the men, wisely, had never asked her to make any adjustments that might have accommodated them better and certainly would have annoyed her.
She’d spent a couple of days at each estate and a couple more talking to residents of the neighboring villages, the District Queens who ruled those villages, and even a Province Queen who must have heard she was in the area and made an “informal” visit to that village. That had left the District Queen’s court in a state of controlled panic as her First Circle organized a formal dinner for the Queen who ruled over theirs as well as for the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan’s second-in-command.
After spending days doing the work she’d been doing for decades—and still enjoyed—she admitted to herself that she had missed Sadi’s company, had missed sleeping with him. Missed having sex with him.
Admitting that much allowed her to consider what had happened with Daemon that last night before she’d fled from the family seat.
Truth wasn’t always a comfortable beast to ride.
A Warlord Prince’s bedroom is his private place, and he tends to be more possessive when he’s there.
She should have heeded Jaenelle Angelline’s warning and instruction.
Truth, then, before Sadi and Jaenelle Saetien returned from visiting Manny and Tersa in the village.
She had loved Daemon Sadi for a long time. She still loved him. Had chosen to marry him because he needed to stay connected to the living, and he’d trusted her enough to make the commitment to be her husband. All right, if she hadn’t become pregnant, he wouldn’t have married again after losing Jaenelle Angelline, but once they’d made a child, she became his wife.
Except she hadn’t become his wife. Not the same way Marian was Lucivar’s wife. She and Sadi had a partnership—a mutual commitment to raise their daughter, to take care of the family estates and the vast SaDiablo wealth, and to rule Dhemlan. There had been a comfortable distance between them. A safe distance between them. Even when they had sex, she had been separate, independent—and always in control of how much she surrendered.
That night in his bedroom, he’d erased that distance, that safety, had drowned her sense of independence and her ability to choose what she surrendered. He’d made her need with a desperation that was almost a sickness.
But that had been in his room, in his bed. That seemed to be the key that turned that particular lock, so she would take care to stay out of his personal territory from now on.
Surreal knew the moment that the Black returned to the Hall. Minutes later, she felt Sadi approach her sitting room. Moving the folders to the sides of the table, she called in her crossbow, already primed to fire, and set it in the center of the table.
Daemon rapped on the door and took one step into her personal domain before he stopped. He looked at the crossbow, then at her, his lips twitching in what might have been amusement. Or relief?
“Is that on the table because you found out something at one of the estates that you think I won’t like?” he asked.
He just stood there. Beautiful. Tempting. His sexual heat flowed into the room, a stealthy coiling around her skin, between her legs. She’d shaken off this damn need while she’d been away, and here it was again, just as fierce, within a minute of her being in the same room with him.
“The estates are fine.” Her voice held an edge that should have warned him to back off.
“Surreal . . .” Daemon took another step into the room.
Surreal placed a hand on the crossbow. He stopped. But the heat . . . In another minute, she’d be on him, tearing at his clothes and trying to arouse him in order to get some relief.
No. She was not going to surrender to the point of being helpless. Not again. “I accept some of the blame for what happened that night—”
“Blame? Surreal . . .”
“—but I am telling you, here and now, that what happened that night will not happen again. You will not do that to me again. Are we clear on that, Sadi?”
A flash of something in his eyes—pain? regret?—before that beautiful face became a mask that revealed nothing.
“You have made your wishes very clear, Lady. I will, of course, respect them.” His voice, like his face, told her nothing. “Now that you’re home, I need to be away for a day or two. If Jaenelle Saetien pesters you about having a special cake made, the answer is no. I’ve already had this discussion with her.”
She’d been gone for days, and now he was leaving without . . . Well, Hell’s fire, she couldn’t exactly say that she needed sex, could she? Wanted, not needed.
“When are you leaving?” she asked.
“In the morning. I have some things to finish up here before I go.”
His psychic scent had an unfamiliar edge, and his physical scent . . .
As he turned away, she snapped, “Leash the damn heat!”
Daemon turned his head but not enough to look at her. “The sexual heat is leashed.” He walked out of the room.
Surreal vanished the crossbow before she did something that couldn’t be undone. She knew what Sadi felt like when the heat was leashed, and he didn’t feel like this. This was more—with something jagged and dangerous mixed in with the heat.
The man who had walked out of the room wasn’t quite Daemon Sadi and wasn’t quite the Sadist. She wasn’t sure what was happening between them, or why, and she didn’t know who would come to her bed tonight. But she was sure that if she wasn’t careful, the man who came to her bed would be something a woman might not survive.