When he looked again, the shadow had vanished behind a teasing smile. Perhaps he’d imagined it. Perhaps seeing things was the first stage in going blind drunk.

“The first time we kissed, you jumped a mile and tried to clobber me,” he said. “How far we’ve come in a few short weeks.”

She linked arms with him, nudging him toward the wagon. “We have, haven’t we?” she said, casting him a sideways glance that seemed to drag his heart right out of his chest.

Dark turned darker as they entered the wagon. He tripped over a trunk, a stool, and a bag before she wrestled him down onto the bunk, pulled off his boots, and upended him onto the mattress.

“You’ve done this before. I can tell,” David said.

“Branston enjoys his grain-based pleasures too.”

“Brilliant. You’re comparing me to your horrid brother.”

“If it’s any consolation, you’re heavier, but at least you don’t sing.”

“Thank you . . . I think.”

She grabbed a blanket and a pillow.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’ll sleep by the fire tonight.”

He shoved himself up against the head of the bed. “You can’t do that. I can’t take your bed and leave you to sleep on the cold, hard ground. What kind of gentleman do you take me for?”

“I hadn’t taken you for a gentleman at all.”

“Fair shot.”

“I’ll be all right, David. You forget, I lived this life before. It won’t be the first time I’ve slept outdoors. I enjoy it actually. I’ll watch the stars and listen to the breeze.”

“And freeze your ass off. Sleeping outdoors is terribly romantic in theory, damned uncomfortable in practice.”

“And how does one of London’s most eligible know that?”

“Creature comforts were in short supply between Portugal and Paris. And humble army scouts rarely rated them.”

“You’ve never been humble in your life.”

“Sleep in here. I don’t bite. I don’t snore. And I’m housebroken.” She continued to hesitate as he held an arm open for her to curl against. “This is only because you’ll fall on the floor otherwise,” he said. “This bed was built for pygmies. Trust me.”

“You had me up until the last,” she replied, but she joined him, curling into the crook of his shoulder, though other than that slight submission, she remained uncomfortably wooden.

David lay still, breathing through his nose in an effort to ease his discomfort and keep his hands from traveling. His cut hurt, but it was a dull pain, easily managed. The greater pain was the one burning along his nerve endings.

This was madness. Callista was no different from countless others—faceless, nameless strangers he’d pleasured and left behind. Why did he restrain himself? Why did he not use every persuasive weapon in his arsenal to peel away her proper exterior? Why did he lie here like a lad with his first hard-on and no idea what to do about it? Did it come back to that damn friend thing again? She was not a friend. Never would be.

He had never wanted to peel his friends’ clothes off one delicious inch at a time. Nor had he had the insane urge to kiss his friends senseless. Friendship was definitely not making every drop of blood in his body flee southward, leaving him woozy and reckless . . . or rather, more reckless than usual.

Damn it, he was just about at the point of hating his new so-called friend when . . .

“It’s funny, but the closer I get to Scotland and my aunt, the more I question if that’s what I really want.” Callista rolled over so that she faced him, her breasts pressed against his bare chest, her legs sliding long and lean against his own. So much for wooden and awkward. She must have taken him at his word and decided he was harmless.

He didn’t feel harmless.

“A little late to be second-guessing your future, isn’t it?” he said, though his voice sounded rough as if he’d been running hard.

“You once accused me of exchanging one prison for another, of hiding from life. But maybe that’s only because I didn’t see any other choice. I couldn’t imagine any other future.”

“What’s happened to make you change your mind?” He felt himself holding his breath, terrified of her answer and yet willing her to say it just the same.

She motioned around her. “All this.” Her expression softened while hesitation flickered in her eyes. “I’ve never known anyone like you, David.”

“You mean a shapechanger?”

“I mean a brilliant, amazing man who makes me feel like anything is possible,” she whispered, caressing his cheek, the taut line of his clamped jaw, “that I have choices and that my future is up to me.”

So maybe she didn’t like this friend designation any more than he did. Still, he found himself clasping her wrist before she could rouse him more fully. If that were possible. “I don’t sport with maidens, Callista. Only women who understand the game.”

But, oh, how he wanted to make an exception to that rule. He wanted to taste her on his tongue. Make her scream. Feel something besides tired and sore and frustrated and guilt-ridden and lonely and bitter. Wanted to fill his heart with an emotion other than rage.

“So it’s just a game to you?” she asked.

“Up to now, yes. With you, I fear it would not be.” And wasn’t that the whole damn problem? The blasted dream that haunted him, offering the glimpse of a happiness that could be before a brutal end. Horrible and yet heartbreakingly tempting.

“I’m willing to risk it,” she murmured, her words hardly more than a soft breath against his cheek.

But you’re risking me as well, he wanted to say. Instead, he cocked her a practiced grin, turning his back on the last tattered vestiges of his principles. Friend? He’d show her his definition of friend. Hadn’t he told Oakham that Callista was a grown woman who could make her own choices? A small, tired voice at the back of his head told him this was wrong, he was wrong. The louder, more demanding bits of him drowned it out.

David murmured in her ear as he drew her against him. “Who am I to refuse a lady?”

* * *

Laughter bubbled up inside her. Only a few short days ago, she had worried about the repercussions of visiting David’s bedchamber. Now here she was poised to hand him her maidenhead without hesitation. And yet, rather than running, she pressed closer, her stomach tangled in a million knots and her skin prickling with lightning.

Maybe she was hysterical.

Or shamelessly wicked.

She wouldn’t admit that it might be a result of her journey into death and the vision revealed there. That meant she had to face the truth, and she wasn’t quite ready to do that yet. Facing it—rolling the possibilities around in her head—cemented it in reality, and she couldn’t acknowledge that she might be running straight to her own death.

If only she’d seen the figure behind her, some hint of form or glimpse of a face. But the shadows had obscured him and she’d not learned to wield her powers well enough to illuminate the hazy half-seen images the spirits offered.

Corey? Branston? Eudo Beskin? Or some as-yet-unmet adversary?

Would it be tomorrow? Next week? Ten years from now? No way to know.

Questions that would keep. After all, death held no terrors for her. It was a landscape she knew too well. Tonight, it would be enough to feel the bone-melting heat of David’s kisses and the strength in his arms as he held her close.

His heart beat steady beneath her palm, so different from her own wild fluttering. And why not? She knew his reputation. She’d seen Lady Fowler’s greedy stare and Sally Sweet’s bold advances. No doubt there were half a hundred women who could say they’d been pleasured by David St. Leger.

“I don’t sport with maidens,” he’d claimed.

But he would have her here in this cluttered, smelly wagon surrounded by Big Knox’s spinning plates and juggling sticks. She felt as jumbled and topsy-turvy as any of them. Tossed upside-down until she was dizzy with stomach-plunging excitement.

His face was lost in the wagon’s impenetrable gloom, but she could see the clean line of his jaw, and his eyes glowed like ice in the dim light. David was beautiful. The hard planes of his body, the muscled perfection of his chest, the strength in his arms and the sharply chiseled angel face. And for tonight, he belonged to her.

For an instant, he froze, his eyes cloudy with some indefinable emotion. “You play with fire, Fey-blood,” he said, his voice shaky, almost angry.

“I thought you’d say I baited a wild animal,” she answered, trying to sound worldly despite her dry mouth and clammy palms.

He gave a sharp snort that could almost have been laughter. “That too.”

“No one need ever know.” He was so warm. The cool air raised gooseflesh on her arms, while he wore naught but a pair of breeches and still sweat damped his skin. “It will be our secret.”

“You’ve traveled alone with me over hill and dale unaccompanied but for a rabble of traveling carnival players, that’s all the knowing anyone will need.”

He was right, but by now she didn’t care. Aunt Deirdre herself could have stood over them with an accusatory glare and Callista wouldn’t have been able to stop herself. An ungovernable desire sizzled through her like wildfire, casting aside rational thought. She had known as soon as she’d awakened with him sliding in beside her that this was what she wanted. If this were her one and only chance, she would not let it pass her by.

“If I’m to be found guilty of a crime, I may as well commit it.” Her hand moved across his muscular shoulder and down over the puckered, burn-scarred skin of his broad back. Feminine instinct took over, making up for her lack of experience.

His teeth flashed in a grim smile. “I think my wicked ways have rubbed off on you,” he murmured just before he lowered his mouth to hers for another of those mouthwatering kisses that left her head spinning. His lips moved over hers, his tongue darting out to tease until she opened for him.

Her body went lax, her arms tightening around him as if she could draw him ever closer. Still he kissed her, long and deep and thoroughly, until a whimper rose soft from her throat and she arched into him, her body knowing what it wanted, her brain along for the ride.

He pulled her gown from her shoulders, taking a breast in his mouth, tonguing her flesh until her nipples puckered, and she moaned, wet and aching; any lingering reservations swept under by the torrent of her racing desires.

“I could get used to being wicked,” she whispered, fumbling with his breeches, impatient for sinful and sweet and scorching hot. For David in all his ruthless, heartbreaking splendor. “If you’d let me.”

“My pleasure, sweet Callista.”

His hand stole beneath her shift to caress a thigh, raising shivers as it passed. A brush of his fingers at the junction of her legs quickened her blood to boiling, and she gasped, eyes locked on his face. His expression bore a dangerous intensity as his hand teased and caressed. Tears pricked her eyes.

She needed him. Needed skin and sweat and fiery kisses and bone-melting caresses. She needed to feel him inside her, moving slow and steady. This was what the songs and stories spoke of; this wild forbidden exhilaration as her heart pounded in her chest, and complete bliss was a kiss, a stroke, a thrust away.

“Callista . . . are you . . .”

“Yes, gods yes,” she gasped, guiding him within her.

He filled her as muscles yielded, nerves jumped, and her pulse roared in her ears. A stinging pain shot from her womb to her brain, and she caught back a quick breath, but then it was gone and there was only sweet coiling heat and a fierce, unrelenting urgency. He withdrew only to plunge deep once more, but this time she met his assault with her own, lifting her hips, the raw friction of their joining sending stars flashing across her vision and scorching every vessel in her body.

David gasped, his muscles hardening to granite, sweat sheening his face. She felt the moment he surrendered, as he drove into her in a final rush of release. She tightened around him, his explosion dragging her into the same spiraling ecstasy. She cried out, and felt herself falling, the steel in his eyes rushing to meet her.

* * *

The sky brightened from slate to pearl as dawn approached. Already, David smelled the smoke from Lettice’s cookfire and heard the first stirrings of early risers. Soon the sun would rise, Oakham and the others would wake, life would resume as if nothing had changed.