the dirt and sucked on her skin. I could have tasted her come. I could have felt that writhing, feisty body clench my dick.
“Which way?” she asked in a sigh. I shook my head and drew my attention to the fork in the road. I really should be in front. Not just because staring at her ass all day was giving me a boner from hell, but also because I didn’t trust these woods not to betray us. Bhaltair had loyal people hidden in every crevice of this kingdom. The sooner we were at the castle, the better.
“Right,” I grunted while adjusting my bow on my shoulder and walking off the road and toward the forest to find a place to stay for the night. “We will need to camp for the night, though.”
I popped my neck. “I thought you said no stopping until we were at the castle,” she said while crossing her arms at her chest. I purposefully kept my eyes up, forcing myself not to look at how the thin material stretched across her defined breasts.
“I’m tired. We won’t be able to see the road soon, and I’m running low on spells. Not all of us can conjure magic by our erratic emotions, you know.”
At my words, lightning flashed across the sky. For fuck’s sake. She was getting more and more powerful. The longer she was out of her cell, the less control Bhaltair had over her. This was both good and bad. Good, because it made him weaker. Bad, because it made the beautiful, pissed off girl angrier at me.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I’m a truth puller. I can get people to spill their guts whenever I please. It comes in handy in my line of work, but at the end of the day, I need hellfire and spelled objects to get the work done that my bow and fists can’t do. At the guild, we’re trained how to use it all.”
I wasn’t usually so forthcoming about my abilities, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
“At Nightmare. You coaxed the truth out of me,” Layne said while looking off in the distance.
“Yep.”
But the less said about that, the better. I shouldn’t have done that. I needed her father to pay me, and I didn’t want to piss him off by delivering his long-lost daughter damaged by a truth spell gone awry.
We walked further into the woods until I found a good place to hunker down for the night. Things might be easier if she whined. If she complained that she was cold, which she had to be, or she was tired—I was, so she must be as well—or that her feet hurt, then it would be so much simpler to dismiss her as nothing. But she was so fucking brave.
“What can I do to help?” she asked. I locked onto her tired, pissed-off gaze.
How was I to deal with this? I’d kissed her, not because she’d ordered it—that was laughable—but because I’d wanted to. Losing her had scared the shit out of me. Sure, at first it had been annoying, but when I’d realized they had her, irritation quickly turned to terror, the likes of which I hadn’t known since I was a boy.
When I’d seen that now-dead asshole, Drogal, using that spell on her, I’d lost my mind. Turned her into a tree. Who turned a Druid Princess into a tree?
This idiot.
That was a hard spell to live with for most non-nature oriented practitioners. It must have been really hard on her.
Did I… Should I ask her if she was okay?
She glared at me. “Going to answer?”
“Are you doing okay? Since the tree spell?” Not only did she endure one of the hardest spells, we’d spent hours walking, too. How was she still upright after that?
Some of her anger cooled in her gaze. It was like the moon bathed her features in its embrace, making her the most visible thing in the night, ever. It might as well have been noon for as well as I could see her. Beautiful, brave princess who made me hard just by being in my presence right then.
“I liked it.” She sat down in the clearing where we would stop, tucking her legs under her, as though she meant to stay like that for some time. That didn’t look comfortable, and certainly she couldn’t sleep like that.
I sat down next to her. We should make a fire, but it would draw attention to us. “You what?” I couldn’t have