Beguiled (17 page)

He cupped them both, sliding his hands between their bodies and even through the fabric of her T-shirt and the pink lace bra she’d donned that morning (thank God she’d worn pretty underwear). She felt the power in his touch, the dazzling sensations that spread from his skin to hers. The heat welling between them until it was nearly an inferno.

Then he shifted his grip on her again, sliding his hands up, along her throat to cup her face, thread his fingers through her hair and hold her head steady for his tender assault. His kiss deepened further, his hunger grew and fed her own. Maggie felt the desperation in his touch and shared it.

This is what she’d needed for so long. From the moment she’d met him. Maybe even since before that. She felt as though she’d been waiting for this night for an eternity. Through countless lives. Through endless days and innumerable nights. All of her dreams, her desires, had led her here. To him.

“Culhane,” she said brokenly as he tore his mouth from hers to slide his tongue along the curve of her throat. She tipped her head to one side, allowing him access, allowing him anything he wanted so long as he never stopped touching her. “I need you. I need you to touch me.”

“I will and I am,” he promised, his hot breath dusting her skin.

He held her firmly and she felt her molecules dissolve, dissipate, blend with his, become part of him, indistinct from the basic atoms that made up the mighty Culhane. And then in an instant, they were separate beings again and lying on the wide bed he’d created just for her. Just for this night.

The soft mattresses beneath them enfolded their bodies in a warm embrace. The silk of the coverlets was a cool kiss on her heated skin and all Maggie could think was that she wished she were naked.

Her clothes were gone an instant later. “Whoa!”

Culhane grinned at her, snapped his fingers and his clothing, too, was nothing more than a memory. His broad, tanned, muscular chest was sculpted and beautiful. His abdomen was flat and ridged with muscle and his . . .

“Wow.” Maggie’s eyes widened. She wasn’t an inexperienced virgin or anything, but she’d never seen a man built like Culhane.

The hard, solid length of his erection was enormous and just a little worrisome.

“Culhane . . . you know I want you, but . . .”

“We are matched, Maggie,” he assured her, taking her hand and guiding it down so that her fingers could encircle him. He pulled in a sharp, short breath and hissed it out at the glory of having her hand on him; then he stared into her eyes and said, “We are meant to be together. Our bodies are interlocking pieces destined to fit tightly and bind us together.”

She ran her fingers over the silken steel of him and knew that she believed him. At that moment, she knew that she’d been born just for this. To be the one woman in the world who was the perfect fit for Culhane.

“Show me,” she whispered, and slid her hands up his abdomen and across that beautiful chest of his. She loved the way he jolted at her touch and how his silvery green eyes darkened with hunger. His heartbeat pounded frantically beneath her hands and she knew he felt everything she was. Knew this moment was as monumental for him as it was for her.

He dipped his head and took first one of her nipples and then the other into his mouth. His silky hair spilling across her skin felt like the softest caress. She arched off the bed, moving into him, offering herself up to his ministrations. His tongue and teeth toyed with her sensitive skin and she groaned out his name as she held him to her.

Maggie lifted her head from the bed and watched as he suckled her. Culhane, the fierce and proud warrior, took her as tenderly as any woman could wish, yet at the same time, he caused a burning deep inside her.

He’d told her once that Fae sex for a human was so overwhelming, women had been known to faint from the experience. But Maggie wouldn’t faint. She didn’t want to miss a minute of it.

“You are everything I’d hoped,” he said softly, his mouth still adoring her, tasting her. “And so much more . . .”

He swept one hand down the length of her body and cupped her heat in his palm. Maggie jolted in his grasp, lifting her hips, trying to move into his touch, to fill the aching emptiness inside her.

Culhane smiled and lifted his head to watch her eyes as he pushed first one finger, then two into her depths. She hissed in a breath and tipped her head back into the blankets beneath her.

A warm breeze sighed through the room, carrying the scents of the garden below and the distant sea. Maggie moaned as he rubbed his thumb across the most sensitive part of her and he smiled as he watched her rush toward the peak of pleasure.

She trembled, she shook, she moaned and then cried out when he took his hand from her before she could find release.

“Bastard,” she whispered, tossing her head from side to side even as she grabbed at his shoulders, his hair. Her hips lifted and rocked, her legs opened wider as she silently demanded that which he had promised her. “Culhane, be inside me. Don’t wait. I need you. Now.”

“As I need you, Maggie. As I have needed you through millennia.”

She opened her eyes and stared up at him as he moved to position himself between her thighs. Her dark blue gaze shone with the same need that held him in its tight grasp. He felt the heat building between them and knew that once he was within her, the fire would consume them both. And he hungered for it. A true mating. A merging of souls and bodies and minds and hearts.

“Once joined with you, we will never be truly separate again,” he told her, lifting her legs, spreading them, looking his fill of her most honeyed flesh. He trailed the tip of one finger across her swollen folds and she jerked at his touch, her body so ready for release, the slightest touch would push her over the edge into oblivion. But for that, he wanted to be within her. To stroke her from the inside, to feel the tremors and quakes as her body splintered. To know that it was he and only he who would be joined with her in such a way.

“I understand.” She shivered and lifted her hips in welcome.

“With this mating, I claim you.” He said the words, even knowing she wouldn’t understand their depth. He’d said the words only once before but had never meant them so deeply. Never needed to say them so much.

“Culhane . . .” She reached for him, but he caught her hands in one of his and held her wrists together.

“You are mine, Maggie Donovan,” he told her as he slid his cock into her heat. Inch by glorious inch, he claimed her as he had known all along he would. “As I am yours. This is destiny, Maggie.
Our
destiny.”

So tight, he thought, loving the slide of her heat against him. No more than halfway inside her, he paused and called on all of his strength of will to hold perfectly still and allow her body to become used to his presence. He was beyond need. Beyond desire. Maggie was his air. His life. She was all.

“Culhane!” She arched and moved into him. “Don’t stop.”

“We must go slowly,” he told her, unwilling to hurt her now, when they were just beginning.

“No,” she told him, looking into his eyes. “I need you now, Culhane. Fast and hard. I need to feel you need me. Next time, we can go slow.”

Next time. She had already accepted there would be a next time. And a next. And one after that. The ragged edges of his self-control, his legendary patience snapped completely. He released her wrists, lifted her legs higher and drove himself into her, over and over again. Hard, demanding, and as he had wanted to from the beginning, with
possession.
She was his. And only his.

He would never let her go.

The inferno engulfed them as he’d known it would. Her eyes sparkled with the shine of a thousand suns and when she cried out his name and her body shuddered and shook around his, Culhane gave himself up to the inevitable and emptied himself inside her.

“I’m not going to Otherworld,” Nora said for the twentieth time in the last fifteen minutes.

“You have no choice now,” Quinn told her. “You heard Eileen and Finn. Mab has escaped.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Eileen put in.

“We know that, baby,” Nora said softly. She knew her daughter was suffering pangs of guilt and worry and no doubt, a heavy dose of fear. Nora was right there with her. But it
had
been an accident and at least now, they could all stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mab had escaped as they’d all feared she would one day and now they would just have to find a way to deal with it. But she wasn’t about to go along with Quinn’s idea to run to the Warriors’ Conclave.

Quinn kept talking. “Mab is in Otherworld now, no doubt plotting Maggie’s destruction. Think you she wouldn’t use you or Eileen to make that happen?”

Nora quailed a little at the thought, but a moment later, she stiffened her spine, swallowed her fear and looked her Fae lover directly in the eye. “If Mab’s in Otherworld, doesn’t it make more sense for us to stay here?”

Quinn Terhune was a warrior. For centuries he’d fought the battles of the Fae. He was stalwart, proud and fearless. Yet, when faced with this one, stubborn, part-Fae woman, he was helpless. Irritation spiked through him. He knew very well that the safest place for his woman was at his home in the Warriors’ Conclave.

No one, not even Mab herself, could breach those walls. His mate, his coming child and the child of his heart, Eileen, would be safe there.

He didn’t want to force his will on a woman, but by the gods, he would if given no other choice. Even if that meant facing Nora’s fury. Better she be alive to rage than dead and gone from him forever.

“If it starts looking bad,” Nora said in an effort to placate him, “we’ll talk about it again. But for now, we’re not going anywhere.”

“You are the most confounding female I have ever known,” Quinn told her.

She grinned at him. “What a sweet thing to say.”

Bezel made kissing noises from his perch at the kitchen table.

“Be silent, pixie,” Quinn warned.

“Don’t pick on Bezel,” Nora said, measuring out a cup of white sugar. “And now that we’re finished talking about Mab, I want to talk about our son again.”

“For the love of Fae children, Nora,” he whispered, “I beg you no.”

She ignored that plea. “I still say you should have told me what you were doing when you were doing it,” Nora said, and cracked two eggs into a bowl.

Afternoon sunlight slid through the kitchen windows and lay across the pedestal table where Eileen sat doing her homework. Bezel was nearby, talking to the dog; Quinn was stalking around the perimeter of Maggie’s kitchen like an ancient Viking looking for someone to behead.

“It’s not something males talk about,” he argued.

Nora huffed out a breath and looked across the room at her lover. He’d come into her life in a rush, swept her off her feet and had made her love him more than she would have thought possible. But that didn’t give him the right to plot out her child’s life before that child had even drawn his first breath!

Before she could say any of that, though, Eileen spoke up. “Did you know that thirty-three percent of domestic violence begins with a simple argument?”

“There is no violence here, child,” Quinn reassured her.

“Not yet,” Bezel tossed in, “but it looks promising.”

“Quiet, pixie! No one asked your counsel.”

“I am,” Nora said, waving a wooden spoon at Quinn as if it were a broadsword. “What do you think, Bezel? Do you think it’s right for
him
to decide
my
little boy is going to become a warrior?”

“I think you should keep making those cookies,” Bezel said, then hopped onto a chair beside Eileen. “My wife, Fontana, makes cookies with Terezia berries.” He sighed. “Fontana’s quite the cook. I miss those cookies.”

“Terezia berries?” Eileen asked.

“Think raspberries but better,” Bezel said, then stabbed a finger at her math homework. “That one’s wrong.”

“No, it’s not,” Eileen argued. “The answer’s in the back of the book and I checked.”

“The book’s wrong,” Bezel told her with a shrug. “Pixies know math.”

“Pixies are a plague on the Fae,” Quinn muttered.

“Don’t you pick on Bezel because you’re mad at me,” Nora told him.

Quinn took a deep breath and Nora watched his chest swell to enormous proportions. And though she was still furious with him, she couldn’t help the instinctive sigh of appreciation that slid from her lips. The man was really completely gorgeous. And normally very supportive.

“Woman, you must see that our child is already destined for great things,” Quinn said, trying to be placating, which only irritated Nora further.

Grumbling under her breath, she went back to stirring the cookie dough. She’d had a craving for chocolate chip cookies and her oven was broken, so she’d come to the main house, since Maggie was off in Otherworld. This kitchen, the one she and her sister had grown up in, was comforting in a way the guesthouse just wasn’t. This kitchen held memories, echoes of her family, her grandparents and the kids she and Maggie used to be. Watching Eileen doing homework at that table was comforting, too, and right about now, she could use a little comfort.