Read My Beautiful Enemy for Free Online

metallic hiss, she pulled a sword out of the bedroll to her side. “And you would risk your gold to satisfy such a silly curiosity?”
    The sword was not a curved scimitar, but straight and slender. Flames danced upon the steel, beautiful and deadly at once.
    Another warning. But he only smiled. “With a friend like you by my side, who would dare touch my gold?”
    “Exactly. Leaving me to rob you blind.”
    “For a master thief, you don’t seem to have prospered.” He lifted his waterskin and took a long swig.
    “If thieves knew how to handle money, they wouldn’t be thieves,” she said quite reasonably. “I, for one, am much too fond of the brothels of Kashgar.”
    He nearly choked on the water he was drinking. Spitting it out, he looked her up and down, this time openly. No, he was not mistaken. If she were a man, then he was a chimpanzee in London’s zoological garden.
    “Aren’t you too young for such places?” She was what? Eighteen? Nineteen?
    She smiled toothily, all knowing, predatory gorgeousness. “No one ever asks for your age. Only your money. The girls there would fuck my horse if he trotted in with enough gold.”
    He gaped at her, speechless.
    “Perhaps you can treat me, friend.” She leaned back slightly and arched her eyebrow. “I’d like to take two girls to bed at once.”
    He recovered his voice. “Would you now?”
    “Every night, it’s all I can think about before going to sleep,” she answered smoothly. “So what say you? I escortyou and your gold safely to Kashgar and you buy me the night of my dreams.”
    His life hadn’t been so interesting in long, long years. “I will,” he said, “as long as I get to watch.”
    She didn’t bat an eyelash as she sheathed her sword. “Agreed. I’ll bet you can learn a thing or two. The girls, they go wild for me.”
    When the hares were done, they ate with knives and fingers. And throughout their meal, he was conscious of her gaze. She looked at him often, and did not bother to look away when he caught her at it, as if their positions were reversed and
he
was the most unlikely person
she
had ever encountered in her life.
    He could not recall the last time he’d felt so completely alive.
    Y ing-ying could not recall the last time she was so unsettled, she who led a hunted life, no less.
    Sometimes it surprised her to remember that she had not spent most of her days riding from one end of Chinese Turkestan to the other. That until a few years ago, she had not only never stepped out of the great imperial city of Peking, but almost never stepped out of her own front door.
    Behind that front door, however, life had been anything but ordinary: years of grueling, secret training under the tutelage of her amah, undertaken not because Ying-ying had burned with a particular desire to master the martial arts, but because she would otherwise always be at the mercy of others, a girl with no say in the direction of her existence.
    Being deadly, however, was no assurance that one would be free from misfortune. Amah’s death at the hands of an enemy had come as a devastating blow to Ying-ying—that night she had truly become an orphan, bereft of everyone who had ever cared for her.
    By strange coincidence, the next day, a decree had comedown from the Forbidden Palace, appointing Da-ren, Ying-ying’s stepfather—her late mother had been his concubine—to the governorship of Ili.
    It was a punishment, an exile to the farthest corner of the empire, where Da-ren would no longer be able to agitate for reform and modernization at the imperial court. His family was granted leave to remain behind in Peking, but he chose to bring Ying-ying.
    Trouble in the form of Lin, disciple of Amah’s enemy whom Ying-ying had killed in self-defense, found her within weeks of their arrival in Kulja, the capital of the territory. She’d managed to escape Lin’s wrath, but it became clear that she could not remain in one place.
    So she roamed. The hardship of the