Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (27 page)

In the sky above, a sudden explosion of light burst around the black disk of the moon. Sunshine flooded down through a break in the canopy of leaves
. Birds chattered in sudden unison and the buzz of insects rose from the earth, as if for the dawning of a new day.

She knew she should be frightened
. She should be racing to the churches whose bells pealed in panic, but the thought was distant and wavering. She’d existed too long in darkness insensate. Now passion slipped around the gloom, like the blazing flood of new light pouring upon the Earth.

Her scarlet surcoat slipped easi
ly off her shoulders and pooled over her leather girdle. She shrugged her arms out of it without a thought, as his kisses burned a path over her collarbone and into the hollow of her shoulder. His fingers tugged the cloth between her breasts, loosening the laces of her tunic until the neckline sagged and slipped to her elbow, and one bare shoulder lay exposed to the air.

His cheek rasped against hers as he breathed ragged words into her ear. “Is that enough of a kiss for you, woman?”

He loomed over her. His tunic gaped, and she caught a glimpse of flat, rippling belly. Golden sparks lit his gray eyes, eyes of smoke—hot and dangerous.

His fingers traced a path from her cheek to her throat, and th
en lower. “If you had any sense you’d be putting up a fight.”

“Och,
Conor,” she stuttered as his fingers hesitated at the curve of her breast, “is it true that an Irishman isn’t at peace unless he’s fighting?”

“Did they not warn you of
temptation in that convent?”

“T
hey spoke of it.”  And here lies the character of the man, she thought, checking his lusts for the sake of her. “But if I were to fight temptation the way you fight me, I’d be a saint.”

With a soft shrug of her shoulder, she let the tunic shimmy to her waist
. She kissed him, swiftly, out of boldness and also to hide her flushed face. Never in her life had she bared so much skin to the gaze of a man. Her breasts felt heavy, engorged, aching, and so sensitive that she detected the spotted warmth of dappled sunshine and the lick of a warm breath of wind.

He growled something under his breath, then bent his arms and lowered his weight onto her body, imperceptibly, so first all she felt with a shivering gasp was the rasp of damp linen against the tips of her breasts
. He shifted side to side, teasing her with the grate of fine, cloth against her nipples until they puckered into tight little knots of exquisite sensation.

The
warm languor which had invaded her limbs began to simmer. She wanted, though she knew not for what. She arched her back, but he pulled away and denied her the contact she craved. Her fingers dug into the balls of his arms and she tried in vain to pull him closer, to stop the maddening gentle rasp, but her nails did nothing but grate his sleeves. He stood so tense and immobile, a hair’s breadth away from her flesh, until, with a strangled sound, he pinned her against the incline of the tree.

The bark bit
against her back. She didn’t care. This is what she craved—the heat of his body flush against hers, the ragged sawing of his breath against her ear, an urgency in his kiss—a crack in his control. The rough palm of his hand closed over her breast.

She broke away from his lips, for the air between them grew thin and rare, and she heaved to take more in, only finding the motion thrust her breast deeper into his hand. He splayed his fingers, filled his
grasp.

Sensation blended into sensation
. He curled his fingers into her skin. His palm pinched her nipple. He lifted her breast into his grip, then rolled his fingers over the peak. The possession sent her senses reeling into a bright oblivion. She didn’t know herself, or the throes which possessed her body, but this was not the innocent girl straight from the convent, swathed in her wimples and veils, lowering her gaze from all who glanced. She barely knew this creature arching and moaning. She sensed in some deep, instinctive place that this would be called lust, this would be called sin, but it wasn’t—not between her and Conor.

It felt like her
wedding day, because he would cleave to her. Only now, as he thrust his thigh between her legs and she felt the hard length of him pressed against her, did she vaguely grasp the meaning of the words. He tugged upon the buckle of her girdle, lost under the drape of her tunic and surcoat. Today, Lughnasa, on this open hilltop under the wonders of the sky, he would take what a wife gives her husband, and all they lacked were a few words spoken over them. Hadn’t she foreseen this? Had her gift, as Conor once called it, finally given her wisdom? This lovemaking under an open sky seemed to be a ritual as ageless as time, as simple as the rain falling, as necessary as air and water.

This was holy ground now
.

Wi
th a wrench he tossed her girdle to the earth. Her tunic slipped down to drape around her loins, held there only by the press of her hips against the tree. He loomed over her. A shock of hair shaded his brow, but could not dim the sparks in his silver eyes. Impatience thrummed from his body. He had intense eyes, like a lion she’d once seen on fair day, pacing in its cage at the end of its tether.

S
he wanted to snap that leash. Words trembled on her lips—
love me, Conor
—but before they were spoken, he pressed his face against her throat and then he slid down her body, rubbing his stubbled chin through the valley between her breasts, and still lower, his lips tracing across the indentation of her belly. His hands gripping her sides, then her hips, then yanked her tunic lower. At his gentle insistence, she parted her thighs and felt the warmth of his breath, and then—

Oh.

His mouth was
there.
Sparks exploded through her. Her heart tumbled, started, raced. She felt her sudden moist warmth, the relentless craving for more. The world tilted. Strong ridges of bark pressed against her cheek as her palms dug deep into his shoulders. Gasping, she opened wider as his hot tongue probed and stroked, a deep, hot, intimate kiss. Though her eyes were closed, she winced at the blinding lights racing toward her—flooding over her with sharp heat and brilliance. She squeezed her eyes shut tight as those lights hit her and exploded her senses.

A
long time she leaned blind, her breath rasping through her throat. Conor rose and wrapped himself around her, keeping her still so she wouldn’t tumble to the grass. He pressed his cheek against her hair. She burrowed in the hollow of his throat, clinging to him, while her heart trilled a hymn of thanks to the bright, blinding blue sky.

Only when
he lifted himself from her did she realize that the loving was not yet finished.

***

He was drunk—drunker than he’d ever been in the early days, with Aidan in the mead halls after a day of hard fighting, when they’d toasted their survival with honey-mead, and in delirium drowned out the memory of their brothers-in-arms dying on the battlefield.

H
e was drunk, and it wasn’t upon the wine sloshing in the skin he pushed away as he laid her on her back upon the bolt of yellow cloak. He was drunk on the nectar he’d sucked from her, where she now lay open and hot and gleaming for him. He thought he was long done with mindless passion—that urgency that gripped a man’s vitals and propelled him beyond all reason. He was a man of nearly eight centuries of age, he knew every nuance of mating that there was to know. But for a man who’d long ago learned to control hunger, thirst, pain, all feeling, all the agonies and the pleasures of humanity, the scent of this one woman sent him reeling. One urgent moan from the base of her throat, one eager arch of her back, and the old urgency dragged him into her.

He let it seize him. Life pumped
through his body with a force he hadn’t felt for seven centuries. He stripped the last of the clothes from her limbs and followed them with his own. They lay under the arch of the sky naked to the world while his cock stood at attention, throbbing for her.

He brus
hed her hair off her forehead. She lay heavy-lidded, soft and yielding, her cheeks flushed and her lips still engorged from their kissing. Now was the time, while her body lay tingling and pliant from the pleasures of moments ago. At his first probing touch, her eyes fluttered open. They were clouded but still swirling with deep knowledge, still fluxing and flowing. She shifted beneath him in welcome, opening her legs wider to accommodate his size, resting her hands upon his shoulders, a smile lurking about her lips—a smile of knowledge, a smile of wonder, a smile of pleasure.

He pressed deeper, finding the hot, welcoming fold, demanding entrance and fe
eling with a groan the slight resistance—a tightness which clamped around the tip of him—a tightness he eased through with a slow, gentle thrust. Her smile faded and her lips parted and her brow crumpled up into that grimace of pleasure he knew so well. He told himself he must be patient. Her body was new at this again, but there was no tethering a passion unleashed—so he drove deeper, waited, then moved a bit deeper, letting her body accommodate while her tightness sheathed him a little more.

“Och,
Conor—” her voice, broken, hoarse, anguished, “— Conor,
mo rún
—”

In the end, it was those words of Irish
that shattered the last of his control. He buried himself to the hilt. But her cry was not of pain, no, he’d heard this loving cry a hundred thousand times. Even as he thrust again he felt her throb around him, seized in the flux of another climax before he’d barely begun the stroking.

Then he
knew nothing but the smell of her hair, her soft sounds of surprise. On the mindless roar of his body’s release he dared to let a seed of hope find a resting place in his heart. He dared, for the brief moment of madness, to dream.

The hope lingered on long after, as they lay entwined in the shade, dozing in the half-sleep of lovers
in the protection of woods.

He should be used to waiting.

The wall sweated against
Conor’s back as he sprawled on his damp pallet. He listened to the servants on the floor below bickering with one another over who deserved the driest place by the hearth. In the midst of their squawking, his gaze strayed to the second of two doors down the hall. That door stood slightly ajar, beckoning to him.

He shifted his weight
, impatient. Rainwater from the afternoon’s storm oozed through the roof and dripped into fissures in the rotting floorboards. Conor found himself thinking of the Inquisitors of Toulouse, who used several forms of water torture to extract confessions from accused heretics. He wondered if they’d taken the idea from the ways of his own gods.

But there was nothing he could do, not
while the Clunel servants quarreled among themselves at the bottom of the stairs. If they saw him sneaking into Deirdre’s room in the middle of the night, there’d be no stopping the rumor. It’d find its way swallow-swift to Toulouse, to Deirdre’s father, to the end of their idyll. He hadn’t felt this kind of urgency since he was a young man, thinking death lurked at the end of every battle, and ignorant of the glut of time he had on his hands. He mentally willed the servants to settle to their pallets. Time was dripping away.

The quarrels settled into grumbling resolution. The voices gave way to the rustle of cloth, the scrape of a buckle across the hearthstones, an occasional murmur. A door opened and closed, followed by the footsteps of someone who’d lingered too long in the
outside privy. The nub of Conor’s candle sputtered with a faint draft of wind. A moth descended from the darkness and flirted with the flame.

Finally, s
ilence. Conor waited a few minutes more, his gaze drawn to the crack of that far door. His damp cloak slipped to the pallet as he eased up and made his way down the hall, along a quagmire of creaks and squeals that he’d well-mapped in the night and day since Lughnasa. One part of him rebelled against sneaking around like a man seeking his bondswoman’s bed, when it was his own wife’s bed he sought. But this is what he’d come to. If this secrecy could win him one day more, an afternoon—an hour—before this flickering exquisite moment was extinguished—then he’d suffer the grating indignity.

Her
door swung open beneath his hand. She stood in the middle of the room like a chatelaine awaiting an expected guest, draped in a shift of something sheer and white which frothed around her feet. Clear blue starlight poured through the open window behind her and cast her face in shadow.

She whispered,
“So here you are, Conor, finally blessing me with your company.”

He eased the door closed. “Do you want
to wake the Lady of Clunel and every servant in the house?”

“It might be
for my own good,” she argued, “to protect me from a rogue.”

She was in a state, he could tell by the tilt of her chin
. His gaze fell upon the swift rise and fall of her breasts beneath the shift. Yesterday, upon the hilltop, she’d been eager for more loving than he was willing to give, knowing as he did more about the state of her own body than she did herself. Now, it was clear that the night and the day he’d left her alone had sharpened the lass’s impatience—and her pique.

A heaviness
filled his loins. She’d be an eager thing this night, and he no longer had to hold back for delicacy’s sake. A smile stretched his lips. The motion ached a little, as if the muscles of his face had atrophied all these centuries. He crossed the room in two steps and reached out for her.

“Do you think this is how it’s going to be
, then?” She skittered back, leaving him with nothing but a handful of air. “You wandering to my bed whenever the mood’s upon you?”

“Have faith, the mood will be upon me often.”

“A night and a day I’ve waite
d, and not a wink from you, not a thing.”

“W
ould you have me groping at you with the servants about?”

“You can whisper, can’t
you? I think your fingers can write.”

“
Best not to risk it. And I thought you’d want none of me after yesterday.”

“
I have thought of nothing else.”

She swirled
away. She paced to the window, then toward the bed, her gown floating behind her. He watched her as one would watch water simmering into a boil, waiting for the bubbles to burst.

“Tell me the truth,” she said, still pacing. “
Was yesterday nothing more for you but an idyll on a summer’s afternoon?”

“You know that’s nonsense.” 

“Nonsense, is it? You don’t dare to meet my eye in the day while in the night you sneak around like a thief—”

“
For your protection. You’re building yourself up into a fit over nothing but your own imaginings.”

She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “
It isn’t my imaginings that mark your behavior like that of a rogue.” 

He
repressed a frustrated sigh. She wanted words, as all young women want words of tenderness and love, words that never came easily to his lips. “If I’m a rogue, I’ll tell you what you want to hear. If I’m not, then you’ll hear truth. But since you haven’t decided which I am, my words will mean nothing.”

“It’s
action that makes the man.”

“Is this enough proof for you?”  He stepped close,
seized her hand, and fit it over his swelling.

She yanked her hand back. “It’s no more than any stallion would do around a mare in heat.”

“Tell me what pretty words to say, what sweet things to do, and it’ll be done, lass, but don’t expect me to read your mind.”

“Very well.”  She grasped frothy handfuls of her own undertunic. “This belonged to my mother. It was part of her trousseau when she married Da.”

“
It’d look better tossed across the floor.”

“My mother,” she continued,
her voice deepening, “was no more innocent than me by the time she wore this. She’d given birth to me and Jean-Jacques long before she could marry our father. I thought it was fitting that I wear it now, since the same might happen to me, if you don’t go about making an honest woman out of me soon.”

Ah, so that
’s what was putting her in a fit. He should have known that in the cold sober morning, her convent-training would emerge again, and she’d be wondering about the sin of it all. He brushed past her to lean upon the windowsill, to make her turn toward him so that the moonlight would fall upon her face. That’s when he saw the hope that lurked in those innocent eyes. At the sight of it something in his chest slid away. The lass had lived in cages since she was barely a woman—first in a convent, and now trapped by her own gift in a world that dubbed it evil. She had hung upon him all her hopes for freedom and happiness.

Just like before.

He held out his open palm. “I’ll marry you, lass.”

“Och, we
ll.” She swallowed down a cry. “I’m glad the words didn’t break you.”

“Married or not,” he
said, “I will love you just the same.”

She stopped
before words rose to her tongue. Her chin lost its stubborn set under the rush of her smile.

Conor
thrust out his hand anew. “Are we going to waste away the night?”

“Nay,
no more, Conor,
mo rún
.”

She launched herself
into his arms. She covered his face in kisses. It was the embrace of the eager, the untutored, full of passion but vague in direction. He grasped her waist, searched for her lips, but she would not stay still. She swayed and slipped and wriggled against him like a Saracen dancer, hardening his already hard cock. His frustration mounted as the smooth, translucent stuff of her gown slipped like water through his fingers, yet clung stubbornly to her frame.

Finally, he seized her head and kissed her—hard. He’d forgotten
how eager a young, passionate woman could be. He’d forgotten how consuming the relentless drive to consummation. Yesterday he had savored the feast. Today he would treat it like a final meal before battle. By the purring sound of her surrender as he tossed her down upon the bed, he knew she did not mind that he tore her shift, or that he did not linger over the curves and hollows of her body. She spread her legs and he thrust himself into her the moment he’d disentangled the wretched gossamer webbings.

H
e watched her face as he thrust in her, again and again, thinking,
be the rogue, be the deceiver, destroy any lingering hopes that this will last
. The thought fueled his rough lovemaking. For their fates were set on a course to agony, he knew that. They would love now, while they could, they’d marry now, if the Christian ceremony would give her some peace in the years to come, but he would not—
would not—
repeat that part of history that stole from both of them the poor unborn child who may now be growing in her womb.

When the loving was spent, he lay heavily upon her, a breeze chilling
them both. Her arms curled around his neck as she pressed her lips against his shoulder. He squeezed his eyes shut against the splay of her hair. There is still some time left, aye, a few more stolen moments, he thought, as he pressed his face into her throat.

A few moments later, s
he shifted beneath him. “It will be a fine thing to have such a big body as yours by my side in the winter, Conor, but right now you’re cooking me.”

He slipped off her. The bluish starlight did not quite reach the bed, so all he saw of her face was a gleam of a smile and a twinkle of eye
. He felt the languid urge to sleep come over him, but he resisted. There would be time to sleep, later.

He spoke into the
darkness as her silence stretched. “What are you thinking of, lass?”

“Trifles.”
  Sleepily, she shifted her shoulders against his side. “A young woman’s foolishness.”

“Trifles are what I want to hear.”

Talk to me of spindles and wool, of
the toughness of the meat at dinner, of the grayness of the open sky as you peered between the parchment of the window, talk to me of the little things that make up the roll of a life
.

“
My head is full of nothing but fancies, but you . . .” She rose up, folded her arms on his chest, and planted her chin on her hands. “You’ve a head full of mysteries.”

“I am what you see.”

“I don’t even know of your family.”

“I’ve none.”

“You must have somebody back in Ireland—”

“They’re all long
dead.” There was too much he still hid from her, too much she had no need to know. How much time could he steal? A few more weeks? A month? “Does it bother you, lass, to be marrying a man of no name?”

“I know a drunken sot with a name and what good is he?
”

“
Well, then, we both have heads full of foolishness. I’d rather be listening to yours.”

“I suppose the best way t
o get an Irishman to refuse to do something is by ordering him to do it. For now I’ll let you thrash away like a fish set loose, Conor, but only for now.”  She slipped down upon his shoulder again. “If you want to know the truth, I was dreaming of the lovely swath of blue silk put aside for my wedding dress, and I was thinking of the surcoat I’ll make of it . . .”

Her voice lilted in the darkness. He let it lull him into half-slumber
. As she spoke, he imagined he smelled the smoke of peat fires. He heard the distant roar of the sea breaking upon the cliffs, and from afar the faintest tinkling of fairy bells. He opened his eyes only to see the gleam of the sweating roof above them. The sound of the sea was no more than moisture pattering through the thatch, the smell of peat fires, nothing but his imagination and the mischief of the Sídh.

She fell silent
. He glanced down to find her gaze intent upon him.

“What were you thinking,
Conor? Just now? You’d such a look upon your face.”

He
surprised himself with the truth. “I was thinking of Inishmaan.”

Sh
e rolled the name on her tongue.

“That was
my home in Ireland.”

U
nder the cover of darkness he spoke of the rocky spine of cliffs braced against the Atlantic Ocean. He described the silver-white light which suffused the place like a great veil. He told her about the fish so plentiful one could grasp an armful just by reaching into the sea. He spoke of the clear blue bay and of the sunshine glittering gold on the water. All the while, the taste of salt filled his mouth, the scent of seaweed left drying upon the sand filled his nostrils, and his skin flushed as if the chill wind braced his figure.

“We must go there,” she whispered, as his words lapsed into silence, “after we are married.”

“Aye,” he said, gripped by the urge to stand upon that barren rock again with this same woman at his side. “Aye, lass, we’ll go there.”