Page 90 of Forbidden

Am I married? Is that what the cursed silence is trying to tell me?

No memory came, yet Duncan felt certain he was not married. He couldn’t say why, but the feeling remained unshakable.

“Duncan?”

He turned toward the girl whose eyes were even more beautiful than the amber gems she wore.

“We are nearing the Stone Ring,” Amber said. “Does the countryside look familiar to you?”

Amber reined in her horse at the top of a low rise. Duncan urged his horse alongside before he stopped and stood in the stirrups to get a better look at the land.

It was a glorious, hushed country of mist-wreathed trees, random outcroppings of stone, and steep-sided hills whose tops were lost in silvery cloud. A brook gleamed darkly among mossy rocks and fallen leaves, its voice hardly greater than that of the water drops slowly sliding from naked oak branches to the ground.

Anxiously, Amber waited, watching Duncan’s face for the recognition she both feared and prayed would come.

The fear was for her own happiness.

The prayer was for Duncan’s.

“It looks much like the trail to Ghost Glen,” Duncan said finally. “Would that Whispering Fen lay beyond.”

A small smile played beneath his dark mustache as he spoke. Color that had nothing to do with the cool day rose in Amber’s cheeks. When Duncan saw her blush, his smile widened into a frankly sensual grin.

“Are you remembering what it was like to feel my mouth upon your breasts?” he asked.

The color in Amber’s cheeks deepened.

“Or are you remembering the lush blooming of the flower?” Duncan asked.

Her breath hesitated.

Watching Amber, Duncan added softly, “I dream of the flower’s sleek, hot petals and wake up in a fever.”

Amber could no more conceal the sensual shiver that went through her body at Duncan’s words than she could take the high color from her cheeks.

“Tell me you remember,” Duncan coaxed in a low voice. “Tell me that I’m not alone in my fever.”

“I’ll die remembering,” Amber said, her eyes half closed. “You gave me…Paradise.”

The sensual catch in her voice sent a stroke of heat through Duncan’s body.

“You delight and tempt me beyond endurance,” he said huskily.

A sad smile curved Amber’s lips.

“I don’t mean to,” she said. “I’ve tried not to, now that I know.”

“Know what?”

“The power of what draws us together.”

“Is that why you’ve avoided touching me as though I were somehow unclean?”

Amber gave Duncan a quick, sideways look. “I thought it would be easier for you that way.”

“Is it easier for the falcon to have broken wings?”

“Duncan,” she said, stricken. “I never meant to hurt you. I thought—I thought if I weren’t always in your sight or within your reach, you would want me less.”