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of
us, but it was his,” Piers looked the lad up and down. “I’ve half a
mind to give him his trophy. He looks like he hasn’t eaten in days.
Put him down, Bruce.” Something in the way he landed on his feet
reminded him of someone, and Piers took another, closer look. The
boy’s head turned away from him to stare at his feet. “I grow tired
of the hunt. Let’s take the kill and go home.” He shoved the boy in
front of them and marched him home, right into the castle and up to
his room, where he knew everyone was going to assume he was going
to be interrogated and probably killed, or at least imprisoned in
the oubliette until he died.
    That was what he might have done, if
he thought the poacher was a man.
    What he did instead was put him in the
middle of his bedroom and strip every stitch of clothing off him,
until he could see Amber’s beautiful hair and the curve of that
luscious backside, and the remnants of the punishment he’d given
her not very long ago.
    Her hair fell long down her back,
almost but not quite enough to afford her bottom and the backs of
her legs shelter from his prying eyes. What would she think of
next? Dressing up as a man—or more closely a boy—and hunting with
the men? She could have been killed.
    “ Do you want to tell me
why you did what you did, or should I just begin beating you now?”
Piers had to admit, he was curious about most everything she did.
She was such a different woman from any he’d met. And she’d bested
all of them at the hunt—even himself. And he liked to think of
himself as a reasonably good huntsman, yet this little slip of a
girl had it over all of them.
    “ You were all talking and
taking too long. He was going to leave, so I took the
shot.”
    Piers took a firm grip on his anger.
“Not why did you best us in the hunt, Amber. Why did you go on the
hunt dressed as a man, no less, in the first place?”
    “ I like to hunt, and I do
it well. I haven’t been able to since–” she looked down, then
brought her head right back up, “–since we lost the war. I wanted
to go, so I went.”
    Piers could see that she was
shivering, and stoked the fire. “You know that I could have you
killed for this, don’t you?”
    He watched her swallow hard, but she
shed no tears, and he knew that she neither expected nor would she
ask for any quarter to be given, which was braver than a lot of the
men he’d known, professional soldiers, who had been faced with the
same realization. “I know, although it was never my intent to keep
the meat. I’m more than well fed here.”
    “ Do you like it here,
Amber?” he asked, circling her and trailing his fingertips at will
over her, while she did her best to try not to dance away from
them, knowing he wouldn’t like that.
    “ Yes, Sir,” she
whispered.
    “ Why the whisper?” Piers
tucked her hair behind her ear and spoke into it.
    She hung her head, and he knew it had
to be something important to her. Her voice was even softer this
time, if that was possible. “Because I miss my Da and my sisters,
even Faine the Pain.”
    Still, no tears, not even for her
family. But she’d practically wailed like a baby while he was
disciplining her. It was one of the things that had been most stark
about it, how different she was, how uninhibited, how uncontrolled.
He’d thought about it long after she’d left, in the middle of the
night when he’d profaned himself multiple times, like he hadn’t
been able to since he was a lad.
    He wanted her. He wanted to spread her
open and take her hard. He wanted to bend her over every possible
available surface, and some that weren’t possible or available. He
would press her against walls, front to back and back to front,
beds, tress, grass, moss, take her in lakes, sea, baths, on horses,
nothing and nowhere would be safe from his lust for her.
    He would gladly lose himself in her,
but that was exactly what he didn’t want. She was dangerous, this
one. She needed to be controlled, so