Sing Me Home (13 page)

So when Colin tugged her hand, she followed him without resistance out of the circle of revelers. They closed ranks behind them without a break in the rhythm. With her tunic gripped in her free hand, she followed him down to the river’s edge where the only music was the wash of the tide rising.

He tugged her toward a cluster of overturned boats. Then he cradled her head. There was his face, that handsome bristled face hovering above hers. There was that laughing mouth, descending upon hers.

She welcomed his kiss without hesitation.

His mouth was firm, expert, urging her to part her lips. She felt the brush of his tongue against her own. The shock took her by surprise and she pulled back so she could catch her breath. But he kissed her again, tilting her head with gentle hands, teaching her how to strengthen that frisson of pleasure skittering up her spine as his kisses deepened.

She was vaguely aware that they were still moving against each other, as if they still danced around the fire, and suddenly she felt the lip of a cart behind her, digging into her backside. He pressed her onto the bed of the cart and she gave in to his will. Through half-closed eyes, beyond the sweep of his dark hair, she saw the streak of the stars across the sky as the world tilted and she lay flat. He climbed in beside her, shuffling her farther in until she felt the full length of his body pressing, ever more urgently, against her.

She kissed him as the moonlight bathed their shoulders. The night wind brushed her face. She played with his tongue as Padraig’s pipe wailed in the alehouse beyond, as Matilda’s voice rose in song. They kissed as the buckle of his belt snagged on her leather girdle, tangling them close.

Short, eager kisses. He pulled away from her and she couldn’t help herself. She pressed her forehead against his as something changed inside her—like the sudden rising of dough slapped into the grease, burning and expanding at the same time. Her heart raced, but no longer from the breathless whirl of the dance.

She thought,
don’t speak. Don’t speak.

His hand slipped under the hollow of her back. His lips captured the lobe of her ear, his tongue traced a trail down her jaw, and the wind cooled the place where his lips had been. He splayed his fingers against her rump as he urged her up higher, so her breasts flattened against his chest. Liquid sensation flowed through her body and seemed to pool between her legs.

He slipped his hand over her buttock and she jerked in surprise as his fingers trailed in the cleft between. He kept going until he gripped her thigh and nudged it to spread her legs apart. Only when she felt the rasp of his woolen hose against the tender inside of her thighs did she realize that he’d pulled up her kirtle. The shock didn’t deter her, she’d tumbled too far along this road for that. She spread her knees wider for him. She didn’t like the hollow feeling growing inside her and she sensed he could do something about it.

She was not ignorant of what lay between a man’s legs. Watching the day-laborers wander to a tree to pass water, she knew a man had a part different from a woman, a long part like a thick rope, so Sabine had once told her, whispering answers to her curious questions. She knew from the talk of the kitchen girls that the man’s part grew long and hard, and men liked to press that part inside a woman.

Now Colin yanked and tugged and she moved her bottom until her skirts were wadded somewhere around her hips. She felt the breath of the night air on her bare thighs and even higher, where the wind had never touched. He rolled atop her and she felt
him,
the man part of him, hard and hot and long just like the girls had confessed. She pressed against it, a reflex she hadn’t expected.

It felt good to feel him there.

It felt
right.

She blinked open her eyes to meet his gaze and saw a man she didn’t recognize. This was not the laughing Colin she knew, not this stone-faced man with the flicker of a muscle in his cheek—surely, this was not the same man who had laughed and danced with her only moments before. This wide-shouldered creature whose muscles flexed beneath her hands, had taut, whitened lips, suppressing some emotion as he stared down at her with a look in his eyes she could not fathom.

Maybe she didn’t look like the woman he knew, either. She felt like a stranger in her own tingling skin. Her cheeks felt red-hot, her lips swollen from kisses, her breasts tightening almost to the point of pain, made tighter as he suddenly rolled his fingers across them, then focused on one nub, rubbing it through the wool.

“Maura,” he said, his voice a rasp in his throat. “You could kill a man with wanting.”

She grasped his head. “Don’t fill the night with words.”

She curled her fingers into that hair soft enough to strike envy in any girl’s heart. She moved her own hips against his body in a way she thought would put the twin’s acrobatics to shame. With a low groan, he tugged her skirts until they slipped out from under her. The wooden slats of the cart felt rough upon her backside—at least until he slipped his fingers into the cleft between her legs.

She made a noise in her throat she didn’t recognize. Her own body bore down upon that invading hand. She threw her head back at the sensation of his touch. One of his fingers burrowed inside her and she started to shake like a woman with the ague. He probed again and she felt a stretch, a pressure.

He went still.

She blinked out of her blindness and whispered, “Colin.”

His face was unreadable in the shadows, the stars bright beyond the silhouette of his body. He moved his fingers again, probing in that magic way, and he muttered something, words she could not hear, because suddenly she couldn’t think anymore.

She
wanted.

She slipped her hands beneath his tunic, searching for the ties that held up his hose. Her fingers quivered against his flat abdomen, but she couldn’t seem to find those ties. She felt his finger slip out of her and she whispered, “no no no,” until he started stroking her, short little strokes at the top of her cleft. Something inside her tightened to unbearable tautness with each stroke of his wet fingers—
where are those ties—
and then she gave up with the ties and grasped his waist because with his stroking she felt as if she were about to fall somehow, coming closer with each slick stroke, and then she sank her fingernails into his back as a sensation swelled, rising, rising, rising—

Oh.

OH.

Chapter Ten

C
olin held Maura until she stopped trembling, until he felt her breathing ease and slow. He distracted himself from the softness of her body by noting the summer constellations spread like milky drawings in the sky above—the bull, the twins, the crab—listing them by rote until his head ached, a dull throb to match his still-aching cock. He breathed in the scent that clung to her hair and tried not to imagine what it would be like to sleep next to this woman every night, to live a normal man’s life.

He slipped his arm from under her and slid away. She didn’t move as he laid his mantle over her. He shuffled down to the edge of the cart and hopped off. Mud sank under his feet as he followed the gleam of moonlight to the edge of the shore and let the water lap over his boots. The black expanse of the river shone with strange light, winking here and there on the ripples of current.

Maybe it had something to do with the scent of the sea, the softness of the air, or the blue-white quality of the starlight, but standing on this familiar shore all the old poems rushed to his mind in full clarity as surely as if he were a young man reciting them for his father’s approval:
To Fergus, nephew of Tadhg, son of Uilliam, nephew of Fionna …
He could recite his genealogy back to the King of Ulster, still farther to the nephew of the King of Connacht, every name shrouded in the martyrdom of death on the battlefield. It was a story of jealous Irish tribes competing for a slippery high kingship, defeating themselves with their own divisiveness, fighting for pride rather than uniting to fight against a powerful mutual enemy.

He glared over his shoulder at the town of Kilcolgan. The stone donjon loomed, a black shadow against the stars. The English knew how to conquer and subdue. They came as one army and seized land and built a castle to guard every port, to take tolls upon every road, to watch the land from on high. In the years since he’d been gone, Ireland lay like a pincushion under their dominion, making the Irish kingship nothing but legend. The poems he had spent his youth memorizing no longer mattered, yet here he was, drawn back to this bloody ground like a vengeful ghost, no wiser than his own ancestors.

He wandered back to the cart and the voluptuous woman sprawled upon it. He hung his hands over the creaking side and pressed his chin against the salt-stained wood. He had nothing to give this innocent but an evening’s fleeting pleasure. Even masked, he’d taken a reckless chance at Tuam by satirizing O’Kelly. He wondered how long it would take before someone figured out his identity and came looking for the price upon his head.

His father would have taken the initiative himself, and at least preserved the element of surprise.

But he was not his father.

Then he reached out to bury his fingers in Maura’s hair, wondering how much longer he could live a normal life.

***

Maura emerged from the shadow of the church into the bustle and whirl of the fair of Kilcolgan. An onion-seller hawked her wares nearby. A stray dog yipped, then darted out of the path of a broomstick. People milled about the stalls in the square. Coins clinked, trades were bartered, bickered and shouted, English farthings changed hands for pasties and pies. She leaned against a carved stone column, staring at Colin.

He stood as still as a roof-tree. A devil’s mask hung from the ties at his neck, upside-down and askew on his back. He sported a tunic of horsehair on his lanky frame. Apparently he’d taken Maguire’s place this morning, playing the wild man among the crowd, to draw the fairgoers into the alehouse this day. But he played no wild man now, standing as still as stone, staring at the looming donjon that lorded over the town.

She approached, her heart in her throat, staring up at the castle. “It’s a fine day to be sightseeing.”

He flinched. She took some satisfaction in that. For he’d left her to wake up alone to the cool light of morning, dazed, her whole body aching and strangely tender-sore.

“So it’s you, lass.”

So it’s you, lass,
as if they hadn’t spent the night entwined on a fisherman’s cart doing things she’d spent the morning confessing to the local priest, sinning twice over because she still wasn’t sure she was repentant.

“In my grandfather’s father’s time,” he said, “that castle wasn’t there. It was a hunting lodge, winter lodgings for the O’Maddens, so they would have fresh fish for the forty days of Lent.”

She mumbled, “Fish for forty days of Lent.”

“The MacEgans stayed there often, as well. The clans were close, cousins.”

“Is this the way you usually put off your women,” she stuttered, “chattering nonsense the morning after you've had your way with them?”

Heat rose to her face. As she squinted up at the castle she thought that starlight was far kinder than the bright light of day. A woman could hide in the night what secret parts of her the glare of morning exposed.

Colin’s gaze flickered to the church behind her. “You’re straight from the confession box. Newly anointed and ruing last night’s passion?”

“You’ll tease me now?”

He had the grace to look chastised.

“I told the priest,” she continued, “that I wouldn’t put off my pilgrimage any longer, that I’d be setting off in a day or two, for penance,” she said. “And truly, I’m
trying
to go to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, but it seems that you keep making us change directions. Are you such a vagabond that you can’t even stay in a woman’s bed through the morning?”

“If I’d stayed any longer,” he said, “you’d have lost that lovely innocence, and likely would have ended up like Matilda.”

Flushing anew, she cast her gaze away from the glamour of him. She’d suspected that he hadn’t finished the act, but she didn’t have the courage to ask. If what Colin said was true, then last night she had skirted along the edge of sin—tasted the icing upon the honey cake—but did not actually take a bite. She hadn’t known that a woman could feel pleasure and not pay the price.