Backing into deeper waters, he watched her eyes measure the hot steel length of his erection, saw the hungry pinch of her teeth into her plump bottom lip, and thought that he might lure her, after all.
After he tended to her wounds.
Though the pool was warm as a bath, Maddek didn’t linger. Instead he turned and swam to the deepest point, where he submerged himself, scrubbing at his hair and skin.
Yvenne’s gaze was alight with wonder when he broke the surface again. “I have never seen swimming before. It was as if you were a bird, but underwater. How did you not sink?”
He grinned, swiping the water from his dripping face. “It is also the same as a bird, but I flap arms and legs instead of wings.”
“Is that how a fish swims, too?”
“They have no arms and legs. More akin to . . . a snake.” For he knew she’d watched a constrictor undulating through the grass, as fascinated then as she was now. “Have you never seen a fish?”
She shook her head. “Though I’ve heard they are tasty.”
A laugh rumbled through him. Almost every animal she encountered, her foremost interest was whether they were good eating. “I think not as tasty as roasted dally bird or millipede jelly, but you will soon judge for yourself. We’ll likely eat fish for every meal when we sail the Boiling Sea.”
“Did you often eat it while upon the river Lave?”
“More often than I liked,” he admitted. But upon the Boiling Sea, Maddek thought he would take his pleasure not in the food itself, but in watching Yvenne enjoy hers. It would not be such a torment when she groaned and closed her eyes in bliss, because her moon night would be past and he could ease his hunger when hers was sated.
As he would this night. His erection had subsided while he bathed, but his shaft was still a heavy, hot weight as he walked back to the shallows. Standing ankle-deep at the edge of the pool, Yvenne watched him come, her gaze slipping downward as he rose out of the water and more of his body was revealed. When the waterline dropped below his loins, there her focus remained until he was almost upon her.
Rarely did she hide from Maddek’s eyes, and this time was no different. She tilted her head back. Though he could not read her expression, this near to her Maddek saw more evidence of their journey in the shadows below her eyes. The two braids that ran back from her temples had begun to unravel and fray. Her skin had darkened in these past days, but he was not certain how much of it was dust and how much from the sun.
“Let me tend to your right arm,” he said quietly.
Her tongue moistened her bottom lip in a hesitant gesture before she lifted her hand between them. She had tied her loose sleeves back behind her elbow, yet her forearm was still wrapped in her bloodstained linens.
Maddek gently took her wrist and untied the ribbon that secured the wrappings. A quiver moved through her still form. He glanced at her face but her eyes were on his fingers slowly unwinding the linen, revealing soft skin yet untouched by the sun. Her breath moved quick and shallow through her parted lips.
He had become more acquainted with her breaths and their meanings. These were not of pain. Yet they were not of arousal, either. Instead they seemed nervous and uncertain.
“If the blood has dried to the linen, the wound might open again when I remove it,” he said to her softly. “But I will be slow and gentle.”
A shrug lifted her shoulders. “Better to be quick and over with.”
That response suggested that any coming pain concerned her not at all. Yet her tension seemed greater with every unwinding, and another reason for her nervousness occurred to him. Maddek had known she preferred to cover her skin as many southerners did. In the bed at the inn, she’d kept her front concealed with her cloak even as he’d rutted on her from behind. In all this time, he’d seen her feet and her face and her hands . . . and nothing else.
Yet he could hardly think her modest or shy. Her mind was not. Her words were not. Her gaze was not.
But perhaps in this one aspect, she was. “Have you ever bared your arm to anyone before?”
She trembled and this time did not meet his eyes. A blush darkened her cheeks. “My mother has seen me,” was her reply before she added under a breath, “when I was a babe.”
And since then only Maddek had laid eyes upon her skin. Only he had seen the delicate tracery of veins at her inner wrist, the faint blue streaming up the length of her forearm to feed her wounds. The bloodied fabric stuck to the first slash, and as he peeled it away from the scab her breath changed, sucked in more deeply through flared nostrils and hissing out through her teeth. Despite her suggestion, Maddek did not go quickly, because that would tear open the wound more. Silent he remained until each of the slashes had been uncovered and her breathing lost its pained hiss.
The wounds bled only a little, small drops welling where the scabs had torn, but no redness or swelling surrounded them.
Satisfied that they would heal again quickly, Maddek blotted the drops with her linens. “Leave these uncovered so they will dry. In the morning, before you wrap your arm, use the salve beneath the linens so the weave will not stick to the wound.”
She nodded, and then her blush deepened as he reached beneath her silk sleeve, where another tie secured the linens at her shoulder. Yet she didn’t protest as he stripped the wrappings from her arm and dropped them into the water.
He looked down at her, but this time she did not tilt her chin up to meet his eyes. Her cheeks blazed as she stood before him with her head bowed, naked from wrist to elbow.
Yet he was naked from head to foot. Never had she averted her eyes from him or any of the other Parsatheans, and his warriors shared not a modest bone among them.
He could make no sense of it, but he trusted that Yvenne could make sense of anything. Untying the ribbon at her left wrist, he asked, “Why do southerners wrap themselves up even during the summer?”
Her gaze darted up to his face, her brow furrowed. “I have not—I . . .” Abruptly she blinked and her eyes unfocused as if she searched her memory for an answer. Slowly her full lips curved and she met his gaze boldly again. “It is so Parsathean raiders will not be tempted by our beauty and steal us away.”
Maddek grunted. She teased him, yet he also thought many southerners likely believed it. “That is what you’ve heard?”
“Only through my mother.” Her attention dropped to her arm. Not avoiding his gaze now, but because he had reached the wound. Her breathing tightened again as he began to peel the linen away from the scab. “And it was not what my mother said to me, but what she saw a weaver say to her son.”
As they lived lives outside their tower. “Warning children to cover themselves or they would be stolen away to the Burning Plains?”
A faint hiss and nod was her reply.