The Sword Dancer. Jeannie Lin

still and she realised she’d spoken aloud. He laid his forehead against her breast and gradually lowered his hands from her wrists. It was a silent and momentary truce and she wasn’t quite certain what to do with it.

      After many heartbeats, Han spoke. ‘We must have known each other in a former life. Fate keeps on bringing us together.’

      ‘We keep on meeting because you keep hunting me down,’ she said with a scowl.

      He lifted his head and gave her a look that bordered on fondness. The grin transformed his rough features into something delightfully compelling, almost wicked. Her skin flushed and heat pooled in her belly. His smile did more to disarm her than the kiss.

      ‘What are you looking for, Wen Li Feng?’ he asked, completely serious.

      For just a moment between them, all pretence was gone. ‘There is something I need to find out. Something that happened a long time ago.’

      She was no longer trying to torment or seduce him, though his weight did feel unforgivably wonderful over her. She hated being trapped or confined, but she felt none of that fear as he held her now. There was almost a familiarity to it. A strange comfort in Han’s strength and his control over it.

      ‘I went to Taining,’ he said. ‘What you said about Wang Shizhen being a tyrant might be true, but that doesn’t absolve you of guilt.’

      A thief-catcher to the bone. She wriggled out of his grasp and Han let her go without a struggle. Once again, she had been fooled by the natural pull of yin and yang. They weren’t friends. They weren’t anything, though she was disturbed to find she missed the feel of his arms around her. Just a little.

      ‘What do you want, Hao Han? No thief-catcher works this hard to chase a warrant.’

      ‘To know the truth. I know your pendant wasn’t part of the heist.’

      ‘It was given to me.’

      ‘By whom?’

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she insisted.

      But it did. Don’t cry, her mother had pleaded. Li Feng wouldn’t surrender the memory of their last moments together over to him. He was nothing but a man whom she had found intriguing two seconds ago.

      Her irrational attraction to danger had got the best of her again. No matter how much she liked the look of him, she had to remember that Han was still a bastard thief-catcher and she couldn’t trust him. The momentary feeling of being close to someone, of feeling secure, was an illusion. She should know that after her disastrous affair with Bao Yang.

      She straightened. Her sword was in quick reach if he made any movement towards her. ‘It seems our truce is over.’

      ‘One of the jade thieves was caught last week,’ he told her. ‘He was beheaded.’

      She stopped cold. ‘Beheaded?’

      Li Feng started away from him, but was only able to move as far as the other side of the bed. She wanted to believe that she was afraid of nothing, but it was far from true. Her pulse pounded and the urge to run took hold of her.

      ‘It was General Wang,’ he said.

      She hadn’t stolen the jade out of greed or even out of necessity. None of them had. The theft was one act in a string of minor attacks against the warlord. The main goal was to disrupt Wang Shizhen’s activities to keep him from seizing more power within the province.

      The danger hadn’t seemed real until that moment. At the time, the heist had seemed a grand challenge and that angry part inside of her had wanted to strike out at something to make up for all that had been taken from her.

      At one time, she had believed deeply in the cause, but it was no longer her battle. Bao Yang, the leader of the rebels, had drawn her into his cause with his lethal charm. She regretted becoming so involved now.

      Han watched her reaction. ‘There was someone else at the head of it, wasn’t there? If you were misguided or coerced—’

      With every word and every action, he was testing her. She needed to understand where exactly they stood with one another.

      ‘Are you still pursuing me over the jade?’ she demanded.

      ‘I’m interested in much more than that, Miss Wen,’ he replied, keeping his eyes locked on hers.

      She gave him an evil-eye at the double meaning. ‘Scoundrel.’

      The corner of his mouth twitched.

      They were interrupted by a booming voice in the front hall. Footsteps marched downstairs. Han moved to the door and opened it just a crack before returning to her.