The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (17 page)

“The women of Graig tended well enough to their men before you came.” He wrestled his way out of his padded gambeson. “They don’t need you to see to every scratch, bump, and bruise inflicted by a bush of gorse.”

“Aren’t you the prickly one this night.”

He tossed the padded garment onto his bed and ignored her words. He swept up the candles, blew them out and set them upon the table near the portal, then slammed the door.

“Let’s see your new trick.”

It was blacker in the room than the caves of Moel Cefn he and his brothers used to explore in their happier youth. He knew every move she made nonetheless. There was vibrancy to her presence, as if she gave off a dark light of her own. He heard the rustle of her skirts. He felt the warmth of her as he settled on the bench.

He untied the laces above his ear, on his neck, and then reached into his shirt to undo those beneath his arm. He yanked the leather out of his sagging collar and tossed it to the ground, then spread his knees wide, to welcome her to stand between them.

Come, Irish. Come close this night.

His cock hardened long before she stood in front of him. He closed his eyes as he scented the cloud of her perfume, an aroma of spruce and cold winter air that brought memories of nights in abandoned huts with milkmaids and servant–girls back when any woman would have had him gladly. Wool brushed his thighs, razing the thin veneer of his control.

She whispered, “You’ll have to take your shirt off.”

All his blood headed south as he tugged his shirt out of his belt. “I might like this healing.”

“Stop your talking,” she said, her voice trembling.

He complied and then she laid her hands upon his shoulders. She stroked with a long, languorous touch. Tonight she used the open palm of her hand and not the swift efficient pads of her fingertips. She leaned her body into each stroke. She tilted her head so a tress of her hair slipped out of whatever kept it up. It brushed his cheek as she swayed.

His palms itched to be filled with more than the roundness of his own knees. All he had to do was shift forward, seize this woman by the hips, and pull her down against the ache between his legs. He burned to feel her pressed against him. The temptation tormented him. All he had to do was open his mouth, lean forward, press his face against her tunic and take that nipple between his lips. All he had to do was seize what stood before him.

He closed his eyes. How long could a man take this, night after night? He knew the answer to that, fool that he was. If he showed her the beast raging beneath the man, she’d startle like a sparrow and flap her wings in a desperate attempt at freedom.

He flexed his palms over his knees, remembering a story his Latin tutor had told him once. Something about an ancient Greek forced to stand neck–deep in cool spring water, but never be able to take a drink. A man forced to gaze upon a cluster of gleaming grapes always just out of reach.

His eyes flew open as she trailed a hand far below the last ridge of the affliction, as she trailed it over his own flat nipple. She rested that hand against the hollow in the center of his chest. Oddly, he felt his own heart move beneath her hand. It was a strange sensation, a loosening, an unfurling, a step off a precipice into thin air.

His will snapped. He closed his thighs and trapped her legs between his. He seized her before she could struggle away. Off–balance, she gasped and canted forward, bracing her hands on his shoulders. He buried his head between her breasts.

I was once a man who dreamt of being a beast, Aileen. . . . Now I am a beast who dreams of being a man.

The sparrow was captured. Her chest heaved against his face. Her nipple beaded against his cheek. Blood rushed in his ears. With one turn of his head he could have that nipple in his mouth.

Hard. Taut and as small as a raspberry. He sucked on it, and the wool over it, wetting the fibers hot. He held her tight while he feasted, sucking and licking and all but nibbling a hole in the wool.

Aileen.

His cock throbbed. He pressed her thighs against him but the pressure only thickened. Her hair tumbled down from whatever held it up. Soft, soft, all that curling mass she could never control, swirling fragrant around them. He yanked her neckline down to taste her skin, to finally find that bud of a nipple so he could suck it deep into his mouth.

She shuddered and gasped. He held her tighter.

No, woman, you’ll not get away, not yet. You think I don’t know the fear roiling within you now? I’ve seen it in a hundred thousand faces since that Christmastide when I recognized it for what it was. You should have known better than to enter the sanctuary of a beast, should have known better than to tease him, to touch a man starved for the feel of another’s flesh. Now you shall pay the consequences.

He scraped his hands across her buttocks to crush her closer. She was all give and suppleness, her spine bending beneath his grip. He struggled out of the fog of sensation to realize that she made no resistance to his embrace. She didn’t struggle—no, more than that, she pressed against him. Her fingers raked over his head, through his hair from forehead to nape, then trailed down flat against the center of his back.

What was this?

For one brief, shining moment he stilled in the awareness of her desire. He drank in the shimmering moment, sucked it down to a place parched and cracked from lack of it, and felt the sustenance through his body like a white light pushing back the darkness. He knew this was more than the carnal need for a woman, knew that she was feeding a different hunger, a more basic one, a more necessary one—knew, too, that she knew how much
he
needed this.

That, in the end, was what gave him the strength to drag his hands back to her hips and thrust her body away from his. That, in the end, was what doused the heat in his blood as effectively as if someone had changed it for icy mountain water. Yes, he could have her. He was lord of this place, she was his captive, and she stood bared to the waist before him. He’d taken women for lesser reasons.

But he hadn’t fallen so low that he would take a woman who felt no more for him than
pity
.

The taste of her turned bitter in his mouth. With a grunt he thrust her away. The bench rocked as he stood up. She knew of Elyned. She must have heard the story. For what other reason would this woman come to him after all this time? A woman who’d snarled and snapped at him at every turn?

“Are you the kind,” he said, his voice as hard as gravel, “who likes rutting in the dark with satyrs?”

“R–Rhys?”

“I don’t want your pity–kisses, woman.”

She rustled frantically, arranging her clothing, knocking a stick of tinder across the paving stones.

“Tomorrow, when your senses are restored, you’ll thank me for not planting a demon seed in your belly.”

Light poured into the room as she swung open the door and stumbled out. He dug the butts of his palms into his eyes, squeezing them shut against the illusion he’d held, for one fleeting moment, of something he would never have: A woman in his arms wanting him for him alone.

Chapter Ten

“A
wise woman,” Dafydd said, “would have stayed in the kitchens today.”

Aileen trailed a scowling Dafydd across the yard. A herd of cattle poured through the narrow gateway of the palisade, lowing and bumping. Dafydd barked orders to a young man herding the cattle toward a pen, then stopped to turn upon her. With a scowl marring his features, he had the look of Rhys upon him.

Color flooded Aileen’s cheeks, a common enough occurrence this past night. “In the kitchens I have nothing to do but suffer Marged’s silence,” she insisted. “Is there to be no forgiveness for me from either of you? All I did was try to make the hall festive—I was ignorant of all the rest.”

She would not soon forget the look in Rhys’s eyes when he’d first seen it, or the tale Marged had told her afterward. But at least now, finally, she knew the real wound she should have been trying to heal all along.

She would set things to right. “Dafydd, I need your help.”

Dafydd sank to his haunches as he probed the cow’s underbelly. “Not today, Aileen.”

“I need but a moment with him.”

“A man doesn’t want company,” he said, as he thrust his head beneath the beast’s belly for a better look, “when he rides off alone.”

“I’m not after keeping him company. There are things I have to tell him—”

“Say it when he returns.”

“When he returns, you’ll be bending his ear about these cows,” she argued, waving to the milling chaos in the yard, “and the slaughter to come and the salting of the meat, or whatever you two chatter about in the evenings.”

“You had plenty of time to say your piece last night when you were alone with him in his room.” Dafydd glanced up from his crouch and elbowed his mantle over his shoulder. “What in God’s name did you do to him in there?”

This time the warmth seeped clear to her scalp. She knew that the walls between Rhys’s room and the rest of the hall were thin, nothing but wattle and daub. But no one could really know what mischief went on behind that closed door. Surely they speculated about coming upon the cold wicks of the tallow candles, the dry tinder of the fire, and the closing of the door during each of their healing sessions, going back to the kitchens to weave wild stories from the thinnest thread of truth. But no one—
no one
—could have witnessed the blinding lightning that had crackled through that room last night. No one else could have heard the roar of her blood.

That had all been in her head.

But Dafydd was staring, waiting for an answer. She shrugged and hoped it looked careless. “Rhys was of no mind to listen to me last night.” And she was barely capable of speech after the way he’d touched her. “But what I have to say can’t wait any longer.”

Nay, not a moment more. She couldn’t live in this place with the shame creeping up on her. She wanted to be done with him. She wanted to run home to Inishmaan where the men didn’t thrash and fight and growl when they set to kissing—and where there were no men at all willing to be kissed by her.

Dafydd slapped the rump of the cow and sent the creature bolting toward the pens. “The Irish never know when to keep quiet, do they? Or is it just the women?” Dafydd shook his head. “Leave the man in peace, Aileen.”

“Is this your mouth I hear these words coming from?” She trailed after him as he waded deeper into the herd. “You yourself once asked me to set things to right.”

“And there was a time, Aileen, when I believed you could do just that.”

She met those hazel eyes, bright with frustration and angry thwarted hope. She wondered if Rhys knew the depth of this man’s loyalty, or if he waited for Dafydd to show the same blackness of heart as his other brothers.

What did it matter? She could not open a mind so twisted with bitterness. She could not ease a heart encased in stone, no matter how rightly so. Her hands did not work on his face. And when she dared to touch his heart, the healing muddled with something else, something fierce and reckless that rebounded upon her and turned her into a creature she did not recognize, aching for things she had no right to feel, yearning for something she’d never expected to have.

Dafydd brushed by her and skirted a cow patty steaming in the frosty air. “I won’t be doing the man any more wrong today.”

“You won’t take me to him?”

He gave her no answer, and she knew the set of those shoulders well.

She swiveled a heel into the mud. “Very well. I’ll go myself, then.”

She told herself that the walk through the frosted valley would do her good. She needed the slap of cold air on her face. She needed the weave of the icy wind through her hair. Maybe the journey would help her forget what she’d nearly done last night. Maybe she could figure out what it was in the darkness that urged her to throw herself upon a wealthy Welsh lord—a thief, a killer, an unbeliever—when in the brightness of day she could not even find a civil word for the man.

“There’s no end to a woman’s wiles, is there?” Dafydd’s voice rose above the lowing of the cattle. She didn’t have to glance over her shoulder to know he was striding after her. He snapped an order to a boy who raced off to the stables. “Do you think I’m going to let you wander these hills like a stray calf, while Rhys’s enemies roam the woods?”