The Maiden Seer by Tracy Ann Miller - Amber Sees Just How Dangerous Konnar Can Be

       A vein bulged on Konnar’s neck, a tear moistened the corner of his eye. “I swear, mouse, that my hand will no longer be stayed if you are not silent.”

She had always found success in wielding words as weapons, and even now, scores of explanations scuttled through her brain, a hundred excuses, and a thousand denials. But in the face of Konnar’s unyielding stance and the fact that he had not slashed her throat, she opted to heed his warning. So she remained shivering on the ground as the skies turned from gray white to dusky gray, watching Konnar standing as if turned to stone, and she would wait, neither moving nor speaking. 

With distant eyes, hiding the working of his mind, he appeared prepared to tower over her indefinitely. Amber could not guess his thoughts. He was, after all, a stranger, though an intimate one ... yea ... tall and broad and handsome. She had spied in him a measure of promise for tenderness, and a willingness to find redemption from his violent past. He possessed the potential to protect and to love, which was evident in his pain over the women who had left his life. But what else did she know of him? That he was too dangerous, too volatile and that he had seemed tempted to kill her? That in spite of the gray-green bliss she found in his eyes, or the wonders he wrought upon her flesh with his hands and mouth, he was still a Viking, her enemy?

It defied logic, common sense, and even her history of listening to troubles of others. It defied even lucid thinking. And yet ...

I was so near to loving him. I would have loved him.  And dearly so, for sure. There had not come a worse time to discover it, nor a more disastrous time or more heartbreaking, for there was nothing to be done about it ... now, nor later, nor ever.  It was not to be. He had killed it.