The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (14 page)

What happened?

Her palms ached. She scraped them against the stone behind her and scrambled to make sense of it all. It had been the healing she’d felt in the midst of his sexual embrace. The healing, after all the nights she’d set herself to it, had finally came to her when she least expected it.

“That’ll teach you to guard yourself well, Irish.” Rhys turned away and swung himself upon his horse. “Be wary of strange men, lest you find yourself rutting in the dark with a demon.”

His horse’s hooves pounded as he raced away. The hoofbeats faded as he cleared the ridge and entered the homestead just beyond.

Her knees failed her. Her bottom bounced against the path. Realization came to her as the stars multiplied in the sky.

In the midst of their passion, her hands had strayed to the part of Rhys from which came the most pain.

His heart.

Chapter Eight

R
hys galloped into the bailey with a stag flung over the back of his horse. The rest of the hunting party and the hounds followed him in, the dogs yelping as they spread about. The yard rang with voices as the men regaled each other with tales of the morning’s hunting foray.

But all Rhys saw was Aileen standing in the yard, arms akimbo. She was glaring not at him, but at Dafydd, who sheepishly dismounted from his horse and approached. As she started to talk, Rhys watched her face flush angry. Rhys abruptly dismounted and strode toward them as Aileen jabbed a finger in the air.

“. . . as full of excuses as a drunkard, you are, but you promised today, you
promised
—”

“I promised,” Dafydd argued, “before I knew we’d be hunting.”

“Well, you’re back from hunting now. Marged told me there’s time enough to get there and back before nightfall.”

“A fair lass you are, Aileen, but my time is not set aside for you—”

“Shall we give her a sword,” Rhys interrupted, “and let you two fight it out?”

“And give her the advantage?” Dafydd tugged his gloves off his hands. “She already has a mace in that tongue and a lance in her words.”

Rhys laid his eyes upon her, bracing for the blow to the chest it gave him to see her with her blood running high.

“Your brother,” she said, dropping her gaze, “promised to take me to the chaplain today. To Father Adda.”

“And I will,” Dafydd insisted, “once the cattle are herded in and the tenants’ tribute counted.”

Rhys raised a brow at Aileen. “You can’t wait until Sunday to confess?”

“It’s herbs I’m seeking.” The lass had eyes as cold as winter. “Your larder would put the meanest midwife in Ireland to shame.”

“You, boy.” Rhys gestured to a stable boy who froze like a deer sensing danger. “Saddle my palfrey.”

“You? Taking me to the church?” Aileen brushed her cloak out of the way of the milling hounds. “Aren’t you afraid the holy ground will open up and swallow you?”

“Are you?”

“I’ve no sins on my conscience.”

“And I have no conscience to be burdened.”

When color flooded her cheeks like this even the spray of freckles across her nose blended so they couldn’t be seen at all. He liked to see her uncertain, unhinged. It meant that the memory of Samhain night still throbbed between them. It was always there, a living thing, rising whenever their gazes met.

She was a witch, indeed. She’d stuffed that wild mane of hair into a net of some sort, a silvery thing, but it couldn’t contain it all. The chill wind riding down from the crag buffeted the loose hair across the paleness of her neck. That peasant’s mantle she insisted on wearing swathed her figure, but he knew that body better than he should—lean, strong, full of heat where her pulse throbbed close to the skin.

He could have had her that night. She’d been ready for a man and nothing had separated them but a few layers of linen and wool—even that had seemed to burn away with the heat between them. Even now he didn’t understand what sent him reeling away from her. He’d been gripped by a lust so intense that he’d spent the last few days in bone–jarring activity—dragging his men half dead with lack of sleep over the hills, driving the hounds beyond endurance, and felling two stags—all in an attempt to shake the dreams from his head.

Dreams about a broomstick of an Irish woman throwing her head back as he sank himself into her tightness.

“You told me,” Dafydd said, dragging his attention away from Aileen, “that you planned to ride to the castle this afternoon.”

Rhys slapped the knee of his tunic with his glove and billowed up a cloud of dust. This morning, one of his men had ridden in bug–eyed and babbling of strange lights dancing on the scaffolding of the construction site. Faeries, he’d claimed, elves dancing to the twanging of a stringed
crwth.
“It makes no difference which fool’s errand I make. Cledwyn drinks too much of his wife’s bad ale. And whoever camped on the site is long gone by now.”

Aileen turned toward the stables. “One lord or another, it makes no difference to me. I’ll see to the donkey.”

Rhys said, “Forget the donkey.”

“If you want to play the penitent and walk your way to the church in this cold, then you won’t find me stopping you.” A three–legged mutt nuzzled her skirts and she absently swept down to pet its head. “But I’ll ride a mount—”

“You will ride with me.”

Her chin puckered into stubbornness. “I won’t climb on that huffing beast of yours.”

“I won’t have you trailing after me like Mother Mary.”

Ride with me, woman, ride with your back against me and your hair in my face. Ride with me. Even if it’s only a mockery of the rutting, it’s better than waking with sweaty linens in the night.

This is what he had come to then. Luring a woman onto his horse just to feel soft buttocks pressing against his cock. Demanding a “healing” every night just to feel a woman’s hands stroking his face in the darkness of his bedroom. He was no better than an old man agreeing to launder the linens just to sniff the perfume of a woman’s undertunic.

Rhys tugged his leather glove back on his hand. “You ride with me. Or we don’t go at all.”

Her footsteps scuffed in the dirt as she made a beeline to his side. “For days on end I’ve brewed you salves and mixed you unguents from what meager stores you have in your kitchen. It’s for your own good I’m going to this priest to ask for herbs.”

“That’s conjurer’s smoke, Irish, and you know it.” He lowered his voice though they spoke in Irish. “You can’t mask what you are from me.”

“I won’t mock your mask, if you won’t mock mine.”

“I’ll agree when you start taking off your mask in the dark.”

Stormy gray eyes sharpened to silver.
Yes, woman, it’s not so easy, is it, to drop the mask.
She lowered her eyelids, the fairness of her lashes stark against her freckled cheeks. He scoured her features still, and the questions which had tormented him all these nights rose with sudden fierceness.
Who are you, Aileen? What are you?
It had been more than lust he’d felt that night—else he wouldn’t have reeled away and let her go.

Like to be a saint.

She was no saint. She banked too much passion in that skinny body. But she was some sort of enchantress for him to be staring at her in the middle of the bailey whilst his own brother stood still nearby, listening—every soul watching him arguing with this Irish witch who was all angles and bright red hair, all prickles and defiance.

The stable boy tugged a fresh horse into the yard. He seized the reins as the horse tossed its head. She eyed the great beast as if it was some mythical creature, and he remembered she was peasant–born. She’d probably sat on nothing bigger than a plow horse.

She was more afraid of the horse than of him.

She had that all wrong.

He said, “A pity this palfrey is so fierce.” The horse snorted, bared his yellowed teeth, and thrust his muzzle into Rhys’s side with bone–jarring force. “We have no choice but to mount him. All the others are too exhausted from the hunt.” The horse nuzzled an apple out of a pocket inside his cloak, tossed his head, and then neighed in soft thanks as it chewed the apple’s flesh. “I warn you, watch for his hooves,” Rhys continued, as the horse rubbed its snout lovingly against his cloak. “He’s been known to give swift, clean kicks. And to bite, too, if you don’t please him.”

She frowned as the horse made soft noises and bowed its head to be scratched. “For all your mockery, the horse seems tame enough.”

“I’ve got a strong hand upon him.” He drew the reins taut. “But a single sudden move from you will send him bucking.”

“Are all horses so skittish? Or is this one more prickly than the others?”

“The finest breeds are the highest strung.”

She drew herself up and then strode around Rhys to where the lackey kneeled. Clutching the saddle, she cried out as the lackey all but launched her into it. Her seat met the leather with a jar, and then she grasped the saddle as the beast skittered.

Her knuckles whitened.

“He has to get used to the feel of you,” Rhys said, lowering his voice. “To the smell of you.”

He pried her fingers off the edge of the saddle and planted her hand on the pommel. “Foolish, stupid beasts they are, then.”

“A spiritless horse is worth nothing.”

“If I were to have a horse,” she said, keeping an eye on the beast below her, “it would be a Connemara pony, strong–backed and docile.”

“You want a common workhorse.”

“Better than one who bucks out of a simple fear of the unfamiliar.”

“A rare horse that would be.” Rhys swung up behind her as the beast settled. “There’s no greater fear than that of the unknown.”

He thrust his hand under her arm and flared his fingers across her flat belly. Her buttocks slid against his loins.

“Easy.” He spoke into her hair as the horse sidestepped beneath them. “The ride will be easier if you relax.”

Easier for her, yes, but not for him, no, not for him. He kicked his mount and turned it toward the open gate. By God, the woman
did
have an ounce of flesh upon her, and now it pillowed against him as they rocked in rhythm with his horse. That hair . . . it smelled like warm heather.

He nudged the horse across the short yard and down the path toward the base of the hill, but the pace gave him no ease. It increased the sway of her stiff back against his chest, the feel of her, bird–boned, ramrod–straight, trying desperately not to press against him. The wind eased in the valley and he brushed his face free of the clinging tendrils of her hair. He caught a strand through his fingers. As bright as new brass and radiating an inner heat.

He flicked it from his hand. Foolish fancy. It was just hair, just a woman’s hair, of a color and texture he’d never seen before Aileen the Red.

The valley opened up to winter grazing grounds flecked with cattle and sheep. Rhys veered his horse west, toward a pass that wound its way around a ridge of slate gray mountains. The birds had long abandoned these slopes, and the boughs of the dense oaks and birch rang with silence. Beneath a sky striped with reedy gray clouds, the land lay brown and black with winter heather, gray with exposed stone.

They rounded a cut in the hill and cantered out into a patch of woodland surrounding a near–perfect circular lake. A peasant woman, kneeling by its edge, upended a basket full of hazelnuts as she stumbled to her feet. At the sight of them the woman’s ruddy face paled to the hue of porridge. With a hiss of a command, she thrust her arms out to a small boy playing with sticks in the mud. The boy glanced up under a flop of bangs, and then darted like a squirrel behind his mother’s skirts. The two stood, frozen like sentinels, as Rhys kicked the horse into a gallop and swept by.

“Aren’t you a haughty lord,” Aileen muttered, as they continued on through the thin forest. “Not even stopping to greet your own people, leaving them standing there as frightened as if they’d seen a ghost.”

“No, not a ghost.
Y Tylwyth Teg.
The faery folk.” He barked a wry laugh. “I wager the story will reach the homestead before we even return.”

“What story?”

“The story of the black–faced beast.” With a shrug of his shoulder he sent his cloak snapping behind him. “The beast and the flame–haired faery he carried off upon his winged mount near Llyn Dyffryn.”