Mystic Warrior (25 page)

And then he caressed between her legs with his thumb, and the pressure exploded. She bucked and cried and came apart in his hands, and spasmed again when he shouted his joy and plunged so deep she could see the moon and stars with her eyes closed. Saw them through
his
eyes.

His shields were down.

The shock and wonder of their mental joining was lost in the sensation of their physical completion.

The hot fluid of his seed spilled deep inside her, lubricating his thrusts, encouraging her muscles to clench and relax until he'd wrung every ounce of pleasure from her and drained her to limpness.

“I was your first,” he murmured in wonder, holding himself up to prevent crushing her into the sand where she lay languid beneath him.

“Did you think I would take another and allow you to destroy the island with your jealousy?” she murmured in return.

He chuckled, and finally, after all the years of denial, they relaxed together, as one.

Feeling strangely at peace with himself despite fearing he'd committed an irrevocable sin, Murdoch wrapped Lis in his shirt and carried her back to the house.

The brief glimpse of the glory of Lis with her shields down was as close to heaven as he'd ever hoped to experience. It was probably best that they both retreat behind their emotional barriers before he started believing in her amazing confidence in him.

Lis laid her head on his shoulder as if she were a docile, newly ravished maiden, but Murdoch knew now that she possessed a hard core of strength and volatile passion—and he stood in awe of what she concealed behind her starchy demeanor.

She'd raised the tide with her mind, and slapped
him
down—the strongest man on Aelynn—thereby preventing him from destroying himself or possibly others.

She might not wish to wield her warrior strength as he did, but she was his equal, his match, his mate.

He still had difficulty grasping the concept of his sometimes gentle, often imperturbable Lissy summoning the rage to knock him over. Even her powerful brother had done no more than bring him to his knees, and that had been with sword and staff.

Murdoch supposed he'd always known her strength, but she'd never used it in anger or with reckless zeal—as he had.

She'd knocked him flat in more ways than one.

“What am I going to do with you?” he murmured against her hair as they ascended the stairs to the room he'd claimed for the night.

“Listen to me?” she asked drily.

He snorted. “And hear you tell me again that I should be Oracle? Have you no more rational reason why the gods did not let me die?”

“I'm sure the opportunity to die will arise again if you do not follow their commands. As long as your ring glows with their light, though, you can be assured they have not forgotten you.”

Unwillingly, he glanced at his ring. The blue light was barely visible. Lis had said earlier that meant he'd accepted the gods instead of fighting them. Right this minute, he could almost agree. If the gods meant for him to have Lis, he was in complete accord with their wisdom. But if they meant for him to be Oracle, the gods were crazed. His ring flared hotter.

“We should bathe,” Lis demurred as he laid her on the clean sheets of his bed. “I am covered head to toe in sand.”

“Do you think I have waited for you all these years to let you out of my bed so easily? What if you changed your mind while bathing?” He preferred to deal with the here and now and not the might-be's and could-be's over which he had no control.

He climbed on top of her, straddling her legs. Her eyes widened as she noted the extent of his arousal. He needed to be inside her again. He waited for her to feel and accept the desire that was coursing between them.

“I need to consult my spirit guide,” she whispered, half in protest. “We must See what the gods intend.”

“You consult. I'll proceed.” When it came to Lis, he was incredibly focused. He leaned over and caught her nipple between his teeth. She writhed beneath him, whether to fight him off or part her legs wasn't easily ascertained.

Just to prove he was in charge, Murdoch flipped her over on her stomach and pressed his arousal against her buttocks. She instantly quit squirming.

He raised her up enough to stroke between her legs until she buried her moans in the pillow. He teased her breasts until they were swollen in his hands, pressed his kisses down her spine, then pushed her to her knees in a position of supplication. He heard her strangled cry as he kissed and licked along the line separating her rounded buttocks. Then the bond between them became too strong to deny.

He was no more in charge than she was—just more experienced, for now.

He sent Healing energy to the soft tissues he'd bruised earlier in the evening, then inserted the tip of his erection into her welcoming moisture.

Gently, he pushed deeper, stroking back and forth until she surrendered. With a moan of pure lust, she thrust backward, plunging him deep inside her, where he needed to be to make her fully, irrevocably his.

He held her as she climaxed, keeping his rod straight and strong until he'd wrung the last tremor from her, and then he pushed deeper still. The rush of power to his loins emptied him of all except the exploding joy and acceptance of finding his mate. Together, they collapsed in a tangle of limbs, sweaty and satiated.

He felt the heat and bruising of her newly ravished body as if they were his own. As before, her mind was fully open to him, and he was too exhausted to take advantage by tiptoeing through her thoughts or feelings. Maybe someday, in the future, they would grow accustomed to this joining and learn to explore each other in new ways. Not now. The physical exploration was too demanding.

Falling to one side, Murdoch tugged her with him, cradling his Lis in his arms as they both drifted into a satisfied sleep.

 

 

With the first light of dawn, Lissandra discarded the uncomfortable remnants of the dream in her head and woke to a heated male body warming her backside.

She and Murdoch had tested the strength of their wills on each other since childhood. She knew his mind as well as her own, and she felt his equal in most things, but she'd never fully appreciated how much larger he was than she. She fit into the shelter of his long, broad body with room to spare. Everywhere he touched her, he was hard.
Everywhere.

She smiled like a cat with cream, rolled to her back, and let her fingers glide through the soft hair of his broad chest, down to his taut abdomen. He was awake. He could never fool her about that.

“I dreamed of the chalice last night.” He cupped her breast as casually as if he spoke of their next meal.

Startled, Lissandra tore her gaze from the fascinating prize below his waist and met the concern in his eyes. “So did I.”

Taking advantage of her momentary distraction, Murdoch straddled her hips and began planting swift, tickling kisses to sensitive zones he'd discovered the prior night. “What did you see in your dream?”

As if she could think while the musky scent of him made her head spin. She wrapped her fingers in his sat iny hair, but forgot to halt him when his mouth found her breast. “You have the unfair advantage of experience,” she complained. “Either talk or do this. I cannot do both.”

“Good. I want you thinking only of me when we're together.”

And he made certain to give her something worth thinking about as he taught her how to use the passion of which she was capable. Lissandra surrendered to his lessons with the eagerness of a dedicated student. When they reached the pinnacle of bliss, she deliberately held her eyes open and enjoyed the grimace of ecstasy that softened Murdoch's sharp features as she used the final throes of her orgasm to push him to the brink and over.

Opening her mind as well as her eyes, she allowed him to see the vision of her dream.

Startled by her mental intrusion, he collapsed on top of her. With his maleness still firmly embedded in her, he braced his weight on his forearms and touched his forehead to hers. “How do you do that?”

“Make you come?” she asked demurely, wriggling until he shifted his heavy weight to a more comfortable position.

“I wager with enough experience you can accomplish that with just a look,” he said drily, rolling off her and back to the bed. “It's your ability to play around inside my head that frightens me. You just
showed
me your dream.”

“That will teach you to think you are more powerful than everyone. I cannot plant images unless your shields are down, but there are several of us with the ability to insert impressions into open minds. You would be more careful in your lovemaking if you'd spent more time on Aelynn and less with untalented Other World women.”

“I didn't dare test your green-eyed monster by lying with Aelynn women. I feared you would turn me into a toad.” He caught her hand and squeezed it. “I can't decide if your ability to play with my mind is good or bad. For now, it's convenient. My dream was the same.”

“The gods are telling us to seek the holy chalice in a cave?” Lissandra tried not to sound too excited. She hadn't expected to accomplish what others had failed to do, but if in some extraordinary manner she and Murdoch
together
could retrieve the Chalice of Plenty . . .
it could save Aelynn
. Hope and joy swelled within her.

“I recognized the surroundings in our dream—a tunnel, not a cave, and a sacred tunnel at that.” He lay still, studying the vision they both held in their heads. “If that's where it is, there's no wonder that we could not sense its hiding place.”

She felt him abruptly shut down his thoughts. She refused to release his hand when he tried to sit up. “What?” she demanded. “What are you thinking?”

“That it's too convenient. Someone planned this.”

“Planned what?” She sat up, dragging the sheet across her breasts, not out of modesty, but because she wanted Murdoch to focus on this crucial discussion.

“If the dream is true, the chalice is still in England, near where Ian lives,” he said curtly, pulling loose from her grasp and locating his still-damp and salt-encrusted trousers on the floor. He threw them aside in disgust.

“And?” she encouraged.

“Ian knew the Chalice of Plenty had gone to England. I tried to Find it for him, but it vanished from all our senses. It appears to be sentient, or at least guided by the gods. At the time, I believed the gods had deemed me unfit to touch a sacred chalice.”

“Ian was furious when you abandoned the search.”

Comfortable in his nudity, Murdoch sat on the bed's edge and gazed down at her. She was all too aware of how wanton she must appear with her hair spilling across the linen and her face still flushed from their lovemaking. When he looked at her like that, she forgot all argument.

“We have time to idle before the fishing boats return this evening,” he said without expression, dismissing their talk of dreams.

She couldn't tell whether mischief or seduction was behind the blue intensity of his dark gaze. “Time for what? We cannot spend it in bed,” she reminded him. She had to make him talk, but when he looked at her like that . . . talk was far from her mind.

“You have an Other Worlder as patient,” he agreed, grimacing. “Still, if you wish to discover where my mind differs from others . . .”

She widened her eyes at his easy acceptance. “You will let me compare your brains?”

“If it will help you understand how our minds function.” He stood and padded across the room to search the wardrobe.

“You said that to distract me.” She flung a pillow after him. “If you want knowledge of why your gifts go astray, then I will give you what I can, but that doesn't deny the fact that without the chalice, Aelynn is at grave risk. And without an Oracle, all is lost. We
need
you.”

“Aelynn is one very tiny part of a much larger world. The chalice didn't mean for me to find it, so I returned to France to a more useful occupation of aiding those who'd been unjustly imprisoned. Why would the chalice be any more inclined to fall in my hands now than it was before?”

Their impending disagreement was interrupted by the sound of a child's bare feet running down the hall and cries of, “Papa, Papa, where are you?”

The day was upon them.

“Pierre is well enough to travel,” Murdoch warned, trying on a pair of Trystan's trousers.

Lissandra opened her senses to their patient downstairs. “He seems to be, although it would be better if he rested for a while longer. He needs to recover his strength.”

“You can work on him once we're safely gone from here.”

“I don't take orders from you,” she reminded him, wrapping herself in a sheet to go in search of clothing.

“That could be a problem if I'm the Oracle as you claim,” he called after her.