A Kiss of Fire (A Kiss of Magic #2)(42)

She withdrew. Pulled away from him an inch and he caught her gaze with his.

“Please. Don’t leave me,” he said softly. Imploringly.

It made her long to come back to him. Made her crave his mouth and the heat of his dominant, passionate nature.

But she couldn’t.

“Please let me up,” she begged him. She wished she could say she was growing cold on the ice, but with the incredible heat he was generating, there was no hope of that being the truth.

To her surprise, however, he obeyed her. He let her up, standing up and holding a hand out to her to help her. As she stood up she realized her cloak was wet. She had generated so much heat during the kiss that she had melted the ice a little.

“Come on…let’s slide a little more,” he invited her.

She hesitated, part of her thinking she should put an end to this now. That it had already gone too far. That her defenses were already too far gone. But given a choice between ice sliding with him and returning to her imprisoning little room, she decided she would remain with him a little while longer.

So they spent the afternoon on the ice. She found herself laughing as if she hadn’t a care in the world. As if she weren’t a prisoner in a strange land. By the time they headed back to the temple she was rosy with laughter and the cold.

They entered the hallway leading to her room, and a sudden pall fell over her.





Chapter Twelve


“Please,” she heard herself saying. “I don’t want to go back in there.”

He stopped and looked at her. He seemed to think on it a moment. “Would you like to go over some of the accounts with me? I was going to—“

“Yes!” she said brightly.

Sin had never seen anyone so eager for the dry task of tabulating numbers. He supposed he should have exercised more caution. He was trusting her now with the intimate financial details of his government. Should she ever make it back to Saren, she could use it against him.

She was never going to make it back to Saren, he thought fiercely. She was going to stay with him. He would never let her go.

He showed her into his study and her eyes widened at the sheer volume of ledgers on the desk and tucked into the bookshelves behind him.

“You do all of this yourself? You don’t have accountants?”

“I do not trust anyone to do it right. And besides, it helps me to keep my finger on the economic pulse of my people.”

She couldn’t help but be impressed. Still…

“Wouldn’t your time be better spent elsewhere?”

“Perhaps, in the future, once my economy is stable and my people are being housed and fed properly, then I will trust the coffers and accounts to others. But right now I can’t afford mistakes and I can’t afford thievery. Every coin counts.”

“Are you that poor then?”

“No. Not poor. But balancing precariously between mine production and trade agreements. There is some little to save, but it will take many autumns to amass the wealth we had before the land sale once more.”

He sat her down in the chair behind the desk once he had taken her cloak from her. She could feel the warmth of the room after being out in the cold for so long. It was cozy and contenting. He put the cloak aside on a chair and pulled one of the ledgers in front of her. He leaned over her shoulder and opened the book.

“This is the imports accounting. Each businessman deals with his own accounts, but the crown has separate needs. For instance, the seed and supplies I was telling you about. The crown absorbed the cost of all of the startup equipment for the farmers. They will be responsible from here on out, but to get them started each farmer was allocated a portion of seed and there was a thresher bought for each ten parcels of land. They will share in the labor and the equipment. Each farmer will work at threshing the other farmers' fields when the grain is ripe and take turns in their time. They decide amongst themselves who will go first and who will go last. If there are any disputes, the marshals mediate. Each farmer then pays the crown a small portion of the proceeds or product of the crop. They can choose to sell the crop and give those proceeds in cash or they can pay with the crop itself and the crown will sell it or use it as necessary.”

“It is such a sound system,” she marveled. “We implement taxation. It’s the same idea, only it affects all citizens equally. Businessmen as well.”

“Well, importers pay a tariff. Miners pay a tithe to work the mines. Most of the mines are owned by the crown though.”

“That should make you very wealthy.

“Normally it would, but we just—“

“Bought the land. Yes, I see. And we have demanded a annual tithe on top of it.”

“I made the agreement. I wouldn’t have made the agreement if it weren’t possible.”

“I know you wouldn’t have.” She bit her bottom lip a moment. “So what are we doing here?”

“We are tallying the import tariffs. That’s this book. This one is for the mine production and this one is tracking the feed and grain supplies.” He pointed to each book as he spoke of them.

“So we are tallying the tariffs for…the month? The week?”

“I do it biweekly.”

“All right. Give me a quill and an abacus.”

“I do the figures in my head,” he said with a smile.