Forged in Dreams and Magick (Highland Legends, Book 1) (28 page)

Talk afterward came in awkward statements until we gave into the heavy issues on our minds. Nothing I said would make it any easier, but I had to try. Velloc had to have some hope to get him through the days ahead.

“When will you return?” he asked.

“A week’s time. After one week here and one there, Iain thought we could decide if the duration should be altered.”

“It should be altered.” He gave me a grave look.

I sighed. “I agree. This last week was filled with days on horseback, half of which we didn’t share together. Maybe two weeks would be better.”

“Forever .
 . . would be best.” He grinned, his face lighting up.

I kissed his grin. “We’ll have to string together weeks at a time to make our forever.”

“Don’t go. Choose to stay. Be with me.”

I shook my head. “I can’t, Velloc. If I do, I’m betraying every other part of me that makes up the vibrant woman you love. To stay with you, gives you only part of the woman all of the time. Instead, you will have all of the woman part of the time.”

My argument fell on the deaf ears of a man who wanted more. He wanted the entire woman all of the time. Unfortunately, we hadn’t been granted the luxury to have everything. I couldn’t have both Velloc and Iain simultaneously, nor would I want to cause us such madness. My heart could only handle loving one man at a time.

* * *

Dawn’s sun warmed my face. The hot spring beside us babbled a soothing chorus. With care, I pulled the fur over Velloc’s face to shield his eyes and let him sleep longer as I slipped out of his arms.

We’d dipped into the amazing, mineral-rich waters of their ancient hot tub and used one of the soaps that Scota had spirited to me before telling us of their treasured place the night before. Instead of making primal love again, Velloc simply held me tenderly as we drifted to sleep.

I dressed in the damp skins I’d roughly cleaned the night before. We had agreed it would be best for me to go alone. Velloc didn’t need to have the last image of me to be of my vanishing into thin air.

A short walk back from the copse of trees led me to the structure that housed the box. No guards barred my way. No security seemed necessary when a god served as an interdimensional alarm system, returning the stolen artifact to its rightful owner.

Had it been returned to the rightful owner?
Possession had dictated my involvement on every end of each jump. Where the box went, I followed. The nuances of the realization made me remember Iain’s statement back in the professor’s office:
I think it found you.
Even the apparition had beckoned me to journey to Drust’s village. My calendar had rapidly filled with days where my path followed a custom-made, freshly paved, yellow brick road.

The box hummed with energy more than ever before. I wondered if it had grown in power due to its own travel between dimensions .
 . . or wherever it had been. A charge filled my body, matching the intensity of the artifact that sparked into the surrounding air.

I took a deep breath and placed my hands on its cool, metallic surface. A warmth spread beneath my hands, but nothing happened. I stood there for several minutes, waiting.

How anticlimactic.

The electricity flowing through everything, including the atmosphere in the room, felt greater than on any other attempt, yet nothing completed the circuit. I drummed my fingers on the lid wondering what I could do to mimic what Iain had done.

In frustration, I circled the pedestal, then went back around again, pacing. Minutes ticked by. Sunlight streamed further into the doorway, sending a shaft of light directly onto the box’s front surface. The sun’s radiant heat warmed my hands, and the box surged. We needed more power. Whatever blocked my easy transfer would only be overcome by a greater force on my end.

I focused. Deep breaths inflated my lungs as I opened myself up to everything around me. Vibrating particles flowed into me from the air, the box, and the sun’s radiation. On an exhale, I forced every ounce of energy I’d collected down onto the box as I touched the surface again.

The familiar orgasmic jolt shot through my body, and the box disappeared.

I blacked out.

CHAPTER
Twenty-seven

Brodie
Castle—Thirteenth Century

Loud groaning interrupted a deep sleep. Pain behind my temples finished the job, extricating me from the sticky hold of a vivid dream forgotten the moment my dry eyes pried open. A scratchy growl rumbled from my throat as my hand flew up to a throbbing head that acted more like the victim of a hangover than a neutral body part topping my shoulders.

I blinked slow and heavy, willing moisture beneath my lids to focus on the blur above me. Something very wrong had happened. My prone body felt like lead, fused entirely to the floor. A soundless vibration pulsed into the air, quivering every cell in my body.

I shot upright, and my lungs seized.

Iain’s wall hovered so close to me, if I moved my right arm a fraction of an inch, I’d brush against the rippling surface. Fear gripped me as I scrambled away from the
so-not-innocent
architectural element while staring up at it openmouthed. I thought the enigma had seemed sentient before, but the slab that spanned the entire side of the room had come fully to life.

The sparkling gray stone had transformed into what looked like molten platinum. Slight air-current disturbances made tiny waves undulate like invisible dragonflies had dipped onto a mirrored pond. Points of light that had once pulsed in response to my touch now streamed bright beams across the room, animating dust particles in luminescence.

Unable to overrule my curiosity, I poked a finger at the liquid façade. A membrane resisted my touch, bowing fractionally before giving way. My hand disappeared, and incredible energy flowed into my arm from the connection. Startled, I pulled back.

I jumped to my feet, hyperventilating, disoriented by the shock of electric energy and my unexpected locale. Whoever punched the time-machine coordinates had miscalculated the landing pad, sending me into the thirteenth-century plane nowhere near the box that had always been my portal. The unstable game kept throwing me curve balls.

I felt nauseous. Someone needed to arm travelers with a cure for time-jump sickness or, at the very least, a bag.

For breathing.

Or . . . puking.

With my arms spread wide for balance, I spun in a slow circle, scanning the room for the box, confirming that it hadn’t been moved there. Laser beams from the wall hit every part of my body, across my skin and the deerskin clothing I wore. I felt some residual heat, but only a fraction of the voltage charging through the actual wall itself.

“What
are
you?” I addressed the light-show maker as if expecting a response. None came.

The wall had clearly been the travel gateway in my recent go-round. Iain held the only knowledge to help me decipher the change in protocol.

I darted through the doorway in search of him. As I moved through the castle toward the front door, queasiness unsettled my stomach. Like a dry-lander on the deck of a ship for the very first time, I shuffled sideways as the floor seemingly swayed beneath my feet.

Everyone seemed unconcerned about, or totally unaware, of my arrival. People in the kitchen carried on with their duties as usual; I passed soldiers finishing a meal in the great hall; the wolfhounds sat at the end of a table, brows raised in anticipation, eyes fixed on their treats for the day.

I burst out the front door into a day so bright, my hand instantly shot over my eyes to shield them. Squinting alleviated only some of the blindness. After several hard blinks in an attempt to adjust to the vision-shocking sun, I lowered my arm. And my jaw dropped with it.

No sun caused the sensitivity, because it had gone missing from the sky. In fact, the blue sky had gone MIA too. No ice-capped mountain panorama framed the landscape. All that appeared above the horizon line beyond the curtain wall was a misty iridescence, ebbing and flowing with atmospheric currents. It looked like a white aura borealis had swallowed the castle whole.

Soldiers trained on the fields, women tended the garden, and a dark-gray plume of smoke still rose from the smithy’s smokestack. The entire clan acted as if the day held no properties different than any other day.

Iain. Brigid.
Someone needed to explain what the hell had happened to the world in the week I’d been gone, before I slipped into complete and irrevocable insanity. I glanced skyward, toward a Heaven I hoped still existed somewhere up there.

“Really? Still with the tolerance lesson?”

Determined to get answers to every question I’d restrained for far too long, I charged into the courtyard. Iain stood alone to the far side, overseeing about a dozen of his youngest soldiers training with claymores. He lifted his face and our gazes locked. I closed the distance between us as the anger of a thousand volcanoes threatened to blow.

In a fluid movement, Iain twisted, tossed his sword point down into the soft earth, and strode toward me. Had I not stopped a few feet from him, we would’ve collided.

“How dare you—” I yelled.

“What the hell—” he shouted.

“—keep valuable information from me—” I clipped out.

“—do you think—” he growled.

“—when I have every right to know?” I finished.

“—you’re wearin’ in front of my men?” He glared down, moving in front of me to shield me from the view of others.

I seethed, struggling to process what he’d said over my tirade. Comprehension seeped its way past my attitudinal huff. I looked down at my body. Lots of exposed skin shimmered in the brilliant light. The parts that were scantily covered boasted suede-hugged curves.

He yanked me by the arm, dragging me back up the hill. I trotted to keep pace with his swift strides. Red faced and shaking, his level of anger trumped mine. He shouldered the oak door open, crashing it into the stone wall inside with such force, splinters flew and pieces of stone crumbled. I scrambled up the stairs for fear my arm would be torn from its socket if I didn’t keep up.

We arrived at the threshold of our bedroom. Iain kicked the door open and threw me forward as he stood in the doorway, staring at me, his nostrils flaring. He stalked inside and closed the door behind him without ever breaking eye contact.

I’d never been afraid of anyone before—let alone Iain—but he looked as if he’d gone mad, and I trembled in uncontrollable fear. He took measured steps over to me. I retreated until the backs of my knees hit the bed, and I sat down. I swallowed hard and remained silent. My eyes had gone dry from my wide-eyed shock. I took several hard blinks, looking up at him, my pulse racing.

“You will not wear such lack of clothin’ outside ever again.”

His words came out ominously calm.

“No one yells at me in front of my men,
including
you.”

I trusted his deadly composure far less than the shouting.

“I will not tolerate your demandin’
anything
from me when
everything
I do is for your safety and that of my people.”

He leaned down, dropping his face to within an inch of mine, his tone just above a whisper. “I
hated
you being gone, knowin’ you were in another man’s arms, knowin’ he
fucked
you while I missed you so bad, my chest ached.”

I exhaled. Iain was hurting. The animal he barely contained threatened to break free because he loved me.

“Iain, I—”

“No.” His fists clenched and unclenched by his sides, his nostrils flaring again as he snorted. “Clothes off.
Now
,” he growled.

Iain stood nearly on top of me, ripping the material off with his eyes. His body shook with barely restrained power.

Like a giant, fifty-ton pillar at Stonehenge, Iain towered over me, immovable. He forced me to rise while pressing against his body to comply with his command. I undressed as quickly as my shaking hands allowed.

At some point escaping my notice, he’d dropped his clothes. The instant my last clothing item fell to the floor, he bore down on me hard, herding me to the center of the bed. He pushed against me, skin to skin, owning the space between my legs. In a powerful stroke, he filled my wet, ready body.

His penetrating eyes stared into the depths of my soul. Love, lust, and possession sparked his olive irises, dissolving my misguided fear. I arched up, pressing my breasts up against him, tasting his lips with slow, soft nips.

Iain growled, pressing me down into the bed. No tenderness would soothe his raging beast breaking free. He devoured my mouth in a bruising kiss and slammed into my depths with such force, I grew certain his marks would be everywhere on my body from the inside out.

An indefinable need tore loose in me too. My carnal met his primal. We consumed each other, desperate to release the tension under which we’d been suffering. With every hard drive into me, my hips met his, deepening the impact.

The slaps of hot, slickened bodies mixed with labored grunts as sounds rebounded into the chamber. My climax built on a steady ache, simmering below a boiling point, driving me toward frenzied insanity.

Pleasurable pain thrummed endlessly on a charged tightwire. Iain drove in hard then paused. The break in rhythm cascaded me over the edge, and my muscles clenched around him. A tremendous orgasm thundered through me, and I screamed.

Iain went wild. He plunged into me as I buried my face into his shoulder. His unrelenting thrusts escalated my ecstasy, sending another set of punishing waves crashing through me. I gasped for air, gripping him so tightly, we became one. He roared and stiffened, his release overtaking him.

Heart racing.

Head spinning.

Lungs tried to supply oxygen to my brain, and the rush of fresh air set off a chain-reaction epiphany.

All had been set right in the world. My priorities had been reestablished.

Iain
was
my world in his realm. Nothing mattered but Iain—not some historical imperative, not a sense of purpose, and certainly not a man who existed twelve hundred years in the past.

Iain needed me .
 . .
all
of me . . . for every moment I could grant of myself. Hundreds in his clan depended on him for his selfless love and protection. He gave of himself completely to their needs every single day of his life. When
Iain
needed to be replenished—so that he had something of value to give to his people—
I
would be there to provide.

I clung tightly to him as his protective body settled around mine. Iain’s massive arms and legs imprisoned me, allowing just enough room for my easy breath. I nestled closer, enjoying the security of his captivity.

A hazy bliss descended, calming my mind and body. I sank into a peaceful state far beneath the surface, where thoughts were too buoyant to hold within my grasp.