Read Beneath the Thirteen Moons for Free Online Page B

it.”
    Prince Korl stood, the thin material of his spider-silk sleeping clothes still wetly clinging to every part of his body. “If I remember rightly, that’s precisely what you did.”
    Mahri tried not to smile at his words or pant at the ridges of his body. “I… I couldn’t think of anything else.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”
    He steadily advanced toward her and she tried not to admire how quickly he’d gained his sea legs.
    “Why exactly,” he asked, “did you need to kidnap a Healer? Couldn’t you have knocked on the door and asked for one or is that too easy for you?”
    You patronizing, thought Mahri, arrogant, ignorant… Prince! How her lust for him turned to anger. “Tell me, Healer. Had I come to your door and asked you to travel in a rootrunner’s boat to a village in the swamps, to cure a virulent fever, what would’ve been your response?”
    His mouth dropped open. He had even white teeth, she noted. Of course.
    “You’re a smuggler?” he asked, with a hint of wicked admiration. He stepped back and eyed her up and down, as if seeing her for the first time.
    Mahri fisted hands on hips. Why did people who lived in luxury think that those who didn’t made them somehow exciting? She had no false illusions about what he looked at. Her vest of snar-scales with its matching calf-high leggings exposed most of her dark, freckled skin. Although impervious to water and of rugged endurance, she couldn’t imagine that snar-scales would be the fabric of choice for most of the women at Court that he’d be used to seeing. He slept in spider-silk himself!
    Mahri knew she had a nice face, heart-shaped, with slightly slanted olive-green eyes and freckles across the bridge of a narrow nose. She stood tall, lean, and too muscular; her biceps bulged from constant poling. Her dark golden-red hair refused to be tamed by the long braid down her back, constantly escaping its fetters and flying around her face. Her feet had never known shoes.
    And although her lifemate, and recently that rascal Vissa, marveled at the expanse of her chest, she knew it would be too… much for a cultured Royal.
    Yet when she stared defiantly at him the look on his face told her he liked what he saw.
    Oh sure, thought Mahri, something different. A peasant water-rat that had dock-side language and fish clothes. If he’d passed her in the street, he’d sweep his robes aside to keep them from getting sullied. Well, she was just as good as any silk-attired, powdered-faced court lady, whether he knew it or not.
    He stepped closer and she could smell him again. That indefinable scent that made her want to crawl into his skin.
    With a gasp of surprise she sagged to the deck. The root in her veins had spent itself and the pain from her injuries, and the overdose, made her whimper. Jaja had hopped down when she collapsed and chattered up at Korl in accusation.
    “I’ll take care of her,” he assured her pet.
    Mahri gritted her teeth. “I don’t need taking care of,” she ground out.
    Korl ignored her and picked her up, which set the boat to rocking and almost capsized them into the channel. Mahri would’ve vented her disgust at him but her traitorous body had already responded to his arms around her. She instinctively snuggled her face into his neck, remembering the sight of him shaking his hair. The muscles in his arms tightened shellhard but his skin felt soft and warm, radiating a spicy scent.
    She melted into him and would have been horrified if he’d recoiled from her reaction. But he didn’t. Korl just froze with her in his arms, the boat gliding down the narrow channel, the soft swish of the current and their harsh breathing the only sound in the sudden stillness of the morning.
    “I believe that you don’t know S’raya,” he whispered in her ear. “But I definitely don’t trust you.”
    Mahri groaned inwardly at the sound of his voice when it gentled. The hair rose on the back of her neck at the feel of his breath