Sing Me Home (17 page)

For modesty’s sake, she bowed her head and ducked behind the same tree where Colin was hiding.

“But the songstress,” Arnaud was saying, shrugging his massive shoulders, “she’s not feeling so well, an affliction of the throat I think.”

“An affliction of the throat, is it?” the man said.

“Yes, yes.”

“Maybe,” the man said, “she shouldn’t be bathing in the cold river in the middle of the day then.”

Behind the tree, Maura felt her cheeks heat. She glanced at Colin but Colin’s expression was stony.

“Come, come,” the man continued, “I’ve never heard traveling players to strike such a hard bargain. Let this be the balm for your songstress’s throat.”

Maura heard the clink of coins as if tossed from on high.

“Tomorrow,” the man said, “is the St. Vitus’s Day feast. You’ll be expected at the castle.”

“But—”

“Don’t disappoint me, minstrel.” The horse’s hooves scraped on the road. “More importantly, don’t disappoint my master, Lord William Caddell.”

Chapter Thirteen

M
aura drummed her fingers against her crossed arms. She paced in front of a wattle screen, kicking up bits of chaff and old hay. Here, in this musty upper room of the castle of William Caddell, she’d spent the last hours suffering Matilda’s poking and painting and Arnaud’s bellowed warnings, while all of the minstrels acted as if this was just another evening performance. Now the furious jig of Padraig’s pipe siphoned up from the stairwell, punctuated by shouts and laughter and the shuffle of dancing feet. Just another St. Vitus’s Day feast. As if they all weren’t deep in the heart of the home of a man Colin intended to kill.

Soon Arnaud would be coming for her to drag her down to sing before Lord William. She closed her eyes and pressed her fists against them. She would sing, aye, she would sing. If she had her way, she would sing Colin—wherever he was—right out of a hangman’s noose.

“Hello, Maura.”

She dropped her hands and there he was, outlined in the glow of the open stairway. She flushed with fresh anger that this afternoon, without a word of good-bye, he’d disappeared into the woods less than a mile from the gates of Shrule.

“Where have you
been?”
Her bells jangled as she trembled with agitation. “The twins and Matilda were chewing their fingers off with worry—”

“That worry will be done, soon enough.”

He sounded deadly calm. He stood straight and wide-legged in the portal. Though his gaze was fixed upon her, she sensed one part of him was already looking through her.

“Colin,” she said, swallowing what tasted suspiciously like a sob, “just lay a curse upon the man, as you did O’Kelly back in Tuam.”

“A hundred thousand curses have already been rained upon him and they slide off his back as if the devil forged his armor.”

“Can’t you just—”

“No.”

He crossed the room in two long strides and dragged her up into his arms. He seized her hair, arched her head back, and muffled her cry with his mouth. She wanted to curl his tunic in her fists and shake him, shake him, shake him. She wanted to scream until her voice went raw. She wanted all these things, even as she pounded on his chest only to fling her arms around his neck.

He wore a leather strap across his chest fitted with a buckle that bit into her breast. He pushed her behind the shadow of the screen until they slammed against the castle wall. He dragged his hands down her body. She gasped, broke the kiss, and arched against him.

He yanked the borrowed silks above her knees. She dug furrows into his shoulders as his tongue slipped around the lobe of her ear and then probed the hollow behind. She should be pleading with him now—while he wanted her, while he was vulnerable—but she couldn’t speak in this rush of feelings.

This was no soft roadside loving. Her blood coursed through her, wanting him all the more now that she knew what it felt like. He yanked down the neckline and palmed out her breast. Lowering his head, he sucked her nipple between his lips. She squeezed his hair as he suckled her puckered nipple, over and over and over, over and over, over and over, and she knew that if he asked her to be his traveling whore for days uncounted, she would beg him to take her with no second thoughts.

Then he lifted his head, leaving her breast wet and cooling. His eyes were in shadow, but his breathing rasped. Holding her gaze, he thrust his hand between her legs. She peeled open her thighs to give him leave, and he seized one of her knees to open her legs more. As he braced that knee high upon his hip, she lurched to one side, unbalanced, but he pressed his body against hers—pinning her to the wall.

She made a noise she didn’t know she could make as she felt his cock press against her cleft. He shifted his weight until the hot throbbing tip of him nudged through to the eager heart of her body. She stretched her hiked leg to the limits of the sinew, wanting him to fill her up. Once positioned, he grasped her buttocks and lifted her whole body against the wall. With his cock he stroked her from front to back, rubbing, rubbing, only to pull himself back and stroke between the folds again. Her throat filled with a moan, for she was sore and tender but she felt everything, the pounding of the veins in his shaft and the shared dampness he spread over her inner thighs.

Take me, Colin. Take me. Take me.
She didn’t realize she was speaking aloud until he tightened and braced himself, squeezing her hips in his hands as he thrust through the clench of her muscles. She heard the echo of her own cry. He stood there for a moment, his face in her throat, his breath hot against her collarbone. Then he jerked back, leaving her gasping, clasping for handfuls of his tunic until he thrust again, a short thrust. Then again. Another. Then another. Quick shallow thrusts. She stretched for him, arching her back to increase the contact, trying to hike her leg higher to make room for him. At each stroke she thought she would burst from the sensation, but he jerked back again, leaving her aching. She sensed by the tightness of his shoulder muscles and the cramp of his abdomen that he was controlling this, that he was winding her to the very razor’s edge of pleasure.

Please …

His face was tight, his eyes intense, and a muscle moved in his jaw. His hands dug into her hips almost to the point of pain. Just as he pulled out from the clench of her muscles again, she bucked against him. He made a throaty sound and shoved his cock so hard into her that she threw her head back. He started to grunt and she saw a sheen of sweat on his forehead. She sensed a desperation behind this loving, the same knuckle-gripping, bloody-toothed desperation he’d shown in the fights he’d had in so many village squares.

Again and again, he stroked deeper than before, filling her, filling her, filling her, her buttocks slamming against the wall with each thrust. He’d thrown his own head back, gritting his teeth, and she saw veins bulging in his throat. Then sensation swamped her—a rush of blood to her head, a snapping of bonds, as if something set loose within her, something wild, raging. She groaned as she felt him swell inside her. She closed her eyes as her senses lifted, and she felt hurled off to a bright place, knowing nothing but the hurried stroke of Colin’s hardness inside her, the vibration of his groan, the hot sensation of being washed with his seed.

She floated and floated and floated and floated, reveling in the feeling of being buffeted about with no direction and no decisions and no cares, her heart pounding, her body held up by his clenched hands. Slowly, she drifted back into the musty room with its drafts. Slowly, she became conscious of the bulk of Colin’s shoulders holding her still against the wall, his face buried against her cheek, her fingernails snagged in the wool of his tunic, his cock still throbbing deep inside her.

Then the sound of someone clearing his throat filtered through the fog.

Damn it.
The words screamed in her mind. She blinked her eyes open to see Arnaud’s ponderous shadow cast upon the screen.

“I waited as long as I could.” Arnaud’s voice was pitched low. “Lord William is calling to hear the songstress.”

No.
Panic drove away the last of the languor.
No.

Colin pulled away. Her hair tangled in the buckle of a leather strap—he stopped to set it free. She slid down the wall. Her feet jarred against the floor and her silken tunic tumbled free of its folds. He gripped her by the shoulders until her knees found the strength to hold her.

She searched his face, but there was no mistaking the tightness of his jaw.

“Colin—”

He placed a finger upon her lips. Then he trailed his hand over her cheek, down her jaw, her throat, then up again, into the tangled sweep of her hair. Maura stared at the familiar fall of that lock of his black hair, the crook of his nose, the mouth that now lacked a smile, and she thought,
I can’t save him.

She unlocked her fingers from his neck. Something soft brushed her knuckles. That’s when she realized he wore a quiver of feather-tipped arrows across his back.

“Have done with it, will you?” Arnaud muttered, pacing in a small circle beyond the screen. “The whole hall awaits.”

Colin backed away and fumbled with something in the bag slung around his waist. Seizing her hand, he pressed into it a circular brooch, winking with bits of colored gems. Across the diameter of the metal curled a visage of a long-necked swan.

“The MacEgan brooch,” he said.

She shook her head, not understanding.

“If a child is born from this night, I would see that he has a name.”

Then he was gone, his cloak snapping as he whirled around the screen—moving so fast that he had already disappeared from sight by the time she ran around the screen to follow.

Arnaud seized her before she reached the door. “Colin will do what he must. And now, you must do what you must.”

No.

She shook her head even as she knew she had no choice. Her body still throbbed from their lovemaking, but her mind had gone numb, and Arnaud didn’t release her until she stopped shaking her head. She stumbled down the stairs, squeezing the brooch in her hand, hoping to glimpse Colin. Instead she found herself in the main hall.

She swept the room with her gaze. On one side stood a single trestle table, covered in white damask. A half dozen well-dressed nobles sat behind it, sharing a chalice of gold set with jewels. Retainers milled around, red-cheeked from dancing to Padraig’s pipe. A grand tapestry swayed behind the trestle table, moved by the drafts that sang through the castle—a depiction of the slaying of a stag, the arrows jutting bloody out of the beast’s hide.

Colin was nowhere in sight.

A piercing sensation brought her attention to the brooch. She’d held it so tight the pin had burrowed into her skin. She swiftly covered it up with her fingers and slipped it into one of the many secret pockets in her tunic. Then she walked into the hall.

Men paused with cups to lips, eyeing her from the tip of her head to the toes of her boots as conversation fell to a murmur and then a hush. Arnaud had made his way around her and now he gestured as he told a romanticized tale about her being found on the convent steps—an abandoned babe with the voice of an angel. Fingar, planted on a stool by one of the roof-trees, strummed his harp.

She must sing now. Colin was somewhere in the shadows, and she must sing like an angel, to stop a good man from becoming a murderer.

Arnaud fell silent. All eyes were upon her. She waited for the blind harpist to begin the plucking. Then she closed her eyes and let the song shimmer through her.

“The Minstrel to the war is gone…”

Colin, she thought, listen to me.

“His father’s sword he has girded on, and his wild harp slung behind him …”

It was an old song, a minstrel song that Padraig had taught her, though she’d changed the words. As she sang it she became aware of a rustling in the room, a shuffling of feet. Though her heart trembled in fear, she opened her eyes. She startled, because a nobleman stumbled to a stop before her.

She knew, by the richness of his clothes, that he could be none other than Lord William Caddell.