WindBeliever (19 page)

Sajin folded his arms over a chest so wide, so muscular, so heavily furred with crisp black curls beneath his robe, the servant girl itched with anticipation as she met his bold look. Her lips were touched with a secret smile.

“How long must you be gone, Sajin?” Jasmine demanded. She turned so that her body WINDBELIEVER

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blocked Sajin’s view of the buxom tart across the way.

One corner of Sajin’s expressive mouth lifted as he understood his guest’s intent. “Long enough, Jasmine.”

He cocked his head and observed his cousin with detached interest. The young woman was breathtakingly beautiful, so beautiful she made him giddy just looking at her, but despite her obvious charms, and the offer of her virginal flesh, he knew he’d never be the one to initiate Jasmine into the realm of sexual bliss.

Her long legs—she was a tall woman—were elegantly shaped, tapered and as smooth as polished ivory. Hanging freely about her waist was a thick mane of raven-black hair, shiny and soft, like silk to the touch. Almond-shaped eyes of the deepest emerald color he had ever seen brought a man’s instant notice to the tilt of her nose, the slight cleft in her rounded chin, the sensual height of her cheekbones. Her voice was low, throaty, filled with an allure that brought a man’s fleshy sword to immediate attention. Her lips were a deep coral, and he knew without ever having seen them, that the tips of her lush breasts would be the shade intriguing shade. Jasmine had everything a man could wish for in a mate, in a mistress, in a lover, or a wife, but along with her came that vile half-brother of hers and that was enough to cool even the horniest man’s ardor.

“Are you listening to me, Sajin?” Jasmine hissed in an unladylike burst of breath.

“To every word, my little dove,” he answered her. He took her hand and brought it to his lips, turned it over and planted a soft, lingering kiss on her wrist. He gazed up at her through the fringe of his lashes and he saw the hunger growing in her face. It was time he sent her on her way.

He let go of her hand.

“Your brother will be looking for you by now, mistress,” the servant girl said in her soft, sultry voice.

“My brother can ....” Jasmine began in anger only to have Sajin shush her with his fingertips against the thrust of her pouting lips.

“Cause me trouble, Jasmine.” He put on his sternest face and lowered his voice to the carefully developed tone that would give nothing away, not even his contempt for the girl’s bastard kin. “I have no strong desire to duel with him over some imagined slight.”

“I am a woman, Sajin,” Jasmine protested.

“True. But an innocent woman who has no business being in this man’s tent!”

Sajin glanced up at his sister, Sybelle, and grinned his thanks. He watched her pull Jasmine to her feet, swat the young woman on her backside, and send her, and the servant girl who would later help keep him warm during the cold of the desert night, out of his tent. He lay down on his side, propped his head with the palm of his hand and waited for Sybelle to come back. When she did, his grin deepened.

“You play with fire, little brother,” Sybelle warned. “I have heard tales of Guil Gehdrin gelding men who looked askance at his sister.”

Sajin shrugged. “That’s because he wants her for himself.”

Sybelle looked away. “I do not doubt that for a moment.”

“Have you decided whether or not you are going to accompany me to the Outer Kingdom?”

Sajin asked. Whenever the subject of Guil Gehdrin came up, his older sister was always acutely uncomfortable. He suspected she loved the reprobate but he hoped that wasn’t the case.

Sybelle picked up a pomegranate and sliced it, began to pick out the bitter seeds and place them in her mouth.

“If you are seriously considering a marriage proposal for the Tzar’s daughter, I suppose I WINDBELIEVER

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must go along to chaperone you.” She shuddered delicately as one particularly bitter seed burst on her taste buds. “I would not wish you to be detained in one of their gulags because you deflowered the little chit before the wedding night.”

Sajin threw back his head and laughed. Sybelle was the light of his life, the pleasure of his existence. His sister, having been married at the ripe old age of fourteen to a Kensetti sheik and widowed at seventeen, came and went as she pleased, was free to take lovers as she felt the need, and was in no hurry to re-align herself with masculine company. As long as she was discreet with her sexual appetites, not flaunting her liaisons, Sajin allowed her her entertainments. As her guardian, despite the fact that she was five years his senior, he rarely pulled the reins guiding her behavior any tighter than an occasional tug to keep the woman out of harm’s way and the eye of their local holy man.

“You might find one of their warriors to your liking,” Sajin teased her. “They tend to be hulking brutes with strong arms and weak minds.”

Sybelle smiled sweetly. “The perfect male.”

“Some would think so.” Sajin laughed. He reached out and gently touched her cheek. “Please go with me, Sybelle. I will surely get myself into mischief if you don’t.”

Her black eyes, far too old for her forty-seven years, regarded her beloved brother with amusement. “You want me to go along to keep the Tzar’s daughter in line, not you!”

“True,” he confessed, “but I would miss you.”

She leaned down toward him. “You knew all along I would go, you conniving little bastard.”

She tweaked his nose. “How much leeway am I allowed there?”

A slight frown marred the handsomeness of Sajin Ben-Alkazar’s smooth face. “Don’t embarrass the family, that’s all I ask.”

“Don’t bring home an Outer Kingdom brat baking in my oven, is what you mean.”

“That, too,” Sajin agreed.

“Do you want my sisterly advice, Sajin?” she asked, all seriousness now that the rules had been laid down for their visit.

“Have I ever not listened to your advice, my sister?” He batted his long lashes at her.

Sybelle ignored his playfulness. “It would be better, little brother,” she warned him, “that no Kensett brats be left in ovens in the Outer Kingdom, either.”

Sajin gripped his sister’s hand. “I promise you I have no intention of leaving anything of mine behind when I leave the Palace of the Tzars, Sybelle.”

Unfortunately, that proved to be a promise the young Kensetti Prince would be forced to break.

As evening drew down and the sharp desert night brought with it a drop in the temperature, a silent, lithe figure slipped into Sajin Ben-Alkazar’s tent and folded itself beneath the welcoming covers held up for it.

“Good eve, my Prince,” a sultry whisper fanned over Sajin’s cheek.

“It will be.”

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If no one understood you, Conar thought, no one could manipulate you.

If no one could manipulate you, no one could weaken you. Only weak men allowed themselves to be manipulated. Only weak men let others take control of their destinies. Weak men stood by passively and allowed those around them to plan their lives for them.

He was not a weak man, he reminded himself with a grimace. He had to make sure these people knew that.

Adversity and defeat had shown him a strength he never knew he had. That strength had brought along with it a determination to never, ever let anyone run his life for him ever again.

He’d overcome obstacles most men who had faced them would have knuckled under to, but not him. He’d risen above those obstacles, had made them just one more reason to be in control of his own life.

He just damned sure wasn’t use to have to ask anyone’s permission to do anything, either, he told himself. Not even in the Labyrinth when his every waking moment had been planned for him.

Not even in the Wind Temple as a child had he ever needed to seek permission from another.

He just did as he saw fit, suffered the consequences, and did as he wanted the next time, damn the punishment.

But when he asked the Tzar in a somewhat formal request to provide him with a ship with which to return home, he had been refused.

Refused, damn it! He’d been refused!

And he knew why!

The reason was at that moment making itself known.

As he stood, looking down from the battlements at the procession of horses, wagons, and strange, hump-backed animals so ugly he wondered from what nightmare they had been bred, he was in an absolute blind fury, mindless to the strange looks he was getting from the soldiers roaming the walls about him. His snarls of rage drew many an alarmed look from these men, but it was his alien eyes, hot with pure fury, that caused them to keep well out of his way.

“I will not be manipulated!” he told Yuri Andreanova who stood a few feet away. He swung that hot gaze to the Outer Kingdom warrior. “All my damned life I have been manipulated by people who didn’t think I had sense enough to make my own decisions!” He jerked his head back to the procession winding its way to the palace gates. “I don’t like it.” He spun around and fixed a steely glare at Yuri. “I don’t like it! Do you hear me, Andreanova?”

“Yes,” Yuri said quietly. “Most of this province heard you.”

A growl of spitting-mad bitterness erupted from Conar’s clenched teeth and he tore his gaze away from the calm, placid face of a man who had come, if not to be a close friend, at least a boon companion, and glared down at the pair of high-stepping white horses which were almost now to the gate.

“I don’t like my life fucked with!”

“So you’ve said,” Yuri agreed. “We only want what will make you happy.”

Conar gripped the battlement half-wall, threw back his head and snarled to the heavens above him.

“All my life I’ve been paying for the happiness people have wanted to give me!” he seethed.

“You people want to force me into something I don’t want!”

“No one is trying to force you into anything,” Yuri reminded him. “His Highness just thought WINDBELIEVER

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you would like a little entertainment.

“Damn it!” His bellow of frustration echoed off the battlements, startled the men doing guard duty on the towers and brought in the instant reining of the two purebred Kensetti mounts below.

“What was that?” Sybelle gasped as she struggled to bring her horse under control.

Sajin Ben-Alkazar, struggling, as well, with his stallion as the beast sidestepped and nickered in protest, looked up at the battlements, twisting his head to do so as the horse continued to turn in circles, and saw a man glaring down at him from the wall. He stared back, his masculine instinct sensing trouble. Even from where he sat, he could see the irrational fury pressing the man’s face in a mask of deadly promise. A slow grin began to fashion itself on Sajin’s mobile mouth.

“I think that was a warning,” Sajin chuckled.

“A warning of what?” Sybelle needed to know. If her brother was in danger here, she would be aware of it and from whence it might come.

Sajin’s gaze had found the man’s on the battlement. Deep brown clashed with deep blue and a challenge passed between the two men, a challenge both recognized, and intended to act upon.

“A warning from the lion to the panther,” Sajin answered, “that the panther has strayed into the lion’s den.” He nodded his head at the man above him. “A warning this panther intends to ignore.”

Sybelle looked up at the tawny-haired warrior atop the battlements. She saw a glimpse of bright golden hair before the angry face, attached to it, jerked backward and away from sight. A nameless fear entered her chest and she reached out to put her hand on her brother’s arm.

“Be careful, Sajin,” she begged. “I sense true danger here.”

Sajin sighed. “Don’t start with that shit, Sybelle,” he warned. He looked at her. “I mean it.”

“Scoff at my gift if you will,” she answered him. “Just be careful of that man. He means you harm.”

Sajin drew on his mount’s reins and kicked his heels into the glossy white coat. “Keep your witch’s prophesies to yourself, Sybelle,” he ordered. “I don’t want to hear it!” The stallion leapt forward through the opened gates, taking its rider into the darkened archway above the wide portals.

“He’s trouble,” Sybelle said beneath her breath, glancing up once more to the battlements.

“Very bad trouble.”

Stomping heavily down the stone steps to the guard rooms at the front of the palace, Conar was in such a rage, he did not see Catherine coming out of the duty officer’s quarters until he plowed into her. Reaching out with an instinctive grab to keep the woman from being bowled over, he pulled her up too quickly, too roughly, too hard into the solid wall of his chest. A small

‘oomph’ of air shot out of her surprised mouth before she brought her slippered foot down on his instep with all the force she could bring to bear.

“Unhand me, you brute!” she snarled.

“Goddamn it, you bitch!” Conar yelped, letting go of her and hopping away from her. He crashed into the damp stone wall behind him and cursed in such a vulgar, mean-spirited way, it made the woman before him take a step back.

“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” she snapped at him.

“Why don’t you stop following me around?” he shot back, rubbing his instep as he tried to maintain a dignified stance on one leg.

“Following you a ....” A furious burst of contempt spat from Catherine’s mouth. “Why, you grotesque, motherless ....”

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“You’d better watch what you call me, woman,” he warned in a voice Catherine dared not heed. “I’m in no mood for you damned ....”

“If you don’t like my opinion of you ...,” she began, but found herself plastered tightly against the wall behind her, his hand at her throat, his body pressed so closely and intimately to her own that she could neither breathe nor move even if she had been so inclined.

“If I want you to have an opinion, woman, I’ll give you one!” he growled at her a second before his mouth swooped down over hers to cut off her response.