Tempted by a Rogue Prince Read Free Page A

warning without a shred of compassion, and the swirls, dashes and spikes of his fae markings shimmered in hues of dark blue and burnished gold. Not anger. She knew that an incubus’s markings flared crimson and obsidian when they were angry. Judging by the look in his green eyes, this was something more like apprehension.
    Why?
    Rosalind glared at him and flicked her knotted blonde hair over her shoulder in defiance. “It isn’t in my nature to ignore the needs of another, especially if I feel I can help them, and I do feel I can help this man.”
    He was gaunt though, sick and not from his injuries. His skin was sallow and grey, and he was too thin, the bones visible in the backs of his dirty hands. Many of his nails were cracked, caked with grime and dried blood.
    “Let him die,” the incubus whispered. “This one isn’t worth saving, Little Girl.”
    Rosalind turned her glare on him again. “Why do you say such nasty things? Do you know him?”
    The incubus dropped his green gaze to the man, narrowed it, and then shifted it back to her. “Only by reputation, and if I were in your place, I would kill him and not save him. By killing him, you could be saving many lives, one this man may take if you allow him to live.”
    Rosalind looked at the man in question, a cold heavy feeling pulling her insides down. She knew he was dangerous, but she knew nothing else about him. She didn’t know the incubus from Adam either, and for all she did know, he could be a compulsive liar or a sadistic bastard itching to get a hit of pleasure from watching her kill an innocent man.
    She lifted her hand with the intent of touching her patient’s arm and funnelling a spell into him to sense whether the incubus was telling the truth about him, and remembered that such spells were beyond her right now. Locked away. She had never been without her magic. It was unsettling, strange, and left her feeling vulnerable.
    The man on the cold stone slab before her twitched and moaned, the sound strained and filled with agony that tore at her and compelled her to help him.
    “I don’t have power over this man’s life,” she whispered to him in reply to the incubus, her eyes fixed on his face, taking in the dark circles beneath his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks. “I don’t have the right to choose whether he lives or dies.”
    “Because the demons told you to heal him?” the incubus said.
    “No.” Rosalind shook her head and looked across at him. “Because it isn’t in my nature to do such a thing. I will heal him.”
    The man scoffed. “And you will live to regret it, Little Girl.”
    “I’m not a girl. I’m over one hundred years old… and do I look like a girl to you?” Rosalind stood and ran her hands down her tattered black dress, the traditional garb of a witch on duty.
    The incubus’s eyes followed them, the blue and gold in his irises increasing, and he muttered, “No.”
    He turned away, pressing his bare back against the bars of his cell and revealing the twin lines of markings where they joined between his shoulders and formed a line down his back that ended in a diamond above the waist of his low-slung black jeans.
    At least he would be quiet now. She hoped. Healing always required focus, and something told her that this time it would need the highest level of concentration she could manage.
    Something else told her that the incubus might be right. She might regret healing this man. If he was as dangerous as he felt, he might well kill her upon waking.
    But maybe that would be what she deserved after the things she had done.
    She had vowed to protect lives, to do all in her power to tend to people’s needs, and she had been protecting lives in the war between the Third and Fifth Realms, but she had also been taking them.
    If this man was a killer and deserved death because of it, then surely she deserved the same fate in order to maintain the balance and order of the world?
    She closed her eyes against the