Prince of Passion Read Online Free

meant?”
    For an incredulous moment, she stared at him. Then she couldn’t help herself; she laughed. “Yes, actually. At least so it would’ve been under my great-grandfather’s rule. He strung up more than his fair share of outworlders, the distrustful old monster.”
    Icere drained his cup and set it beside hers without even a clink. “From what I’ve read of your history, he had cause.”
    Rynn grimaced. “Only because he stole the kingship and wondered who would take it from him next.”
    He blinked, as if surprised she had admitted the theft. “I was thinking of those who would abscond with your planetary resources.”
    “Would they steal our sheerways-renowned recipe for the Purple Passion Pacifier that our visitors drink by the bucketful? It wouldn’t be the same drunk on a beach that didn’t have our violet waves.” She stared out at the ocean beyond the window. The lights from the barge had been lowered to show off the silvery bioluminescent foam that danced in mesmerizing patterns on the storm wrack. “What is from here can never really leave.” She brought herself up short when she heard the mournful note in her own voice.
    “What about the malac?”
    Surprise knocked her gaze from the hypnotic ocean view back to Icere. “The malac? A delightful creature to fabricate a festival around. Vicious as my great-grandfather, unproductive, slow to mature, sensitive to environmental disturbance. Who would want them?”
    “For the liqueur.”
    She waved one hand. “Mostly a tourist trick.”
    He frowned. “Not from what I’ve read.”
    “The Malac Festival leaflets from our tourism bureau? Yes, we’re quite proud of those.” She smiled. “Got you here, and your credits too.”
    He clamped his masculine lips together with the irascibility of a malac slamming its shell closed. “So the liqueur isn’t a dopamine agonist with a direct impact on orgastic potency?”
    She mirrored his scowl. “I certainly didn’t approve such language in our brochures.”
    “It’s not an aphrodisiac?” He bit out each word.
    She shrugged one shoulder, ruffling her braids so that the tiny shells tinkled like laughter. “We might have said that. But what substance isn’t an aphrodisiac when consumed in paradise by the light of triple moons?”
    “Chemically—”
    “My sweet child, an aphrodisiac is not a chemical. It is a state of mind and body and spirit.”
    He took a short step toward her, and his glower raised her pulse a notch. “Is that also in the brochure?”
    Her breath hitched in a strange excitement. She marveled at the sensation. A reigning monarch shouldn’t be this giddy, shouldn’t be giddy at all. And she most certainly shouldn’t feel it. But she matched his heated glare. “Maybe you should read it again more closely.”
    Just as she needed to study him more closely. There was something about him… She eliminated the remaining gap between them, her gaze fastened on his face.
    Like the wyverns, he really was too beautiful to be real. The sculpting of his face hovered on a knife’s edge between a remote loveliness and an almost brutal masculinity, like a wistful girl’s dream of a slumbering prince, not yet awakened to the riotous passions of the flesh.
    Despite herself, her lips softly parted.
    He made a low noise, not quite a groan, and lifted his hand toward her cheek.
    The warmth of his skin, hovering, not quite touching, went through her like the scent of those Purple Passion Pacifiers, heady and dangerous to the inhibitions. She leaned infinitesimally toward him, drawn just as the sailors of old had pursued the wyverns. The creatures were dangerous, but their rubidium treasure was used in the high-precision timing devices of sheerships to navigate the tangle of timespace passages that created the sheerways.
    She was feeling every bit as lost as one of the very first wandering ships that discovered here be dragons . Which reminded her, there were other legends in the universe.
    She