Haunting Desire (24 page)

Even as he cursed himself for not being there to keep Liam from venturing out on his own, Tiarnan felt a flash of pride at his little brother’s determination. No, Shealy would not have been able to stop him if he’d made up his mind to go. But why would he leave? He had to know that Tiarnan wouldn’t have wanted that.

Shealy reached out and placed a soft hand against the wall of his chest, silencing his thoughts. It seemed his heart jumped at that touch and then beat madly against it. “Tiarnan, what happened to you? You told Eamonn that you killed all those men. You looked . . . different. Bigger, fiercer. Did you? Kill them?”

Yes.
He saw it all now, images jerking, falling, sliding through his mind. Horrifying, satisfying, condemning pictures that painted a scene of bloody vengeance like nothing he’d ever imagined.

“I cleaned you up,” she said, and he felt the heat of her blush even if he couldn’t see it. “I thought you must be wounded, there was so much blood. But after I washed it all away . . . there was nothing. A few scratches, that’s it.”

She was still touching him, her palm hot against his chest, her words featherlight in the dark. Their whispers created a cocoon that surrounded them as completely as the tent, sealed by the soft patter of rain against the hide. It was warm and dry where they lay, as secluded as a curtained bed.

“When I saw those men,” he said, and his voice still held a deep, raspy tone, as if he’d screamed himself hoarse. “When I saw
him
with his filthy hands on y’ . . .”

He stared into her eyes, unable to put words around what he’d felt. But it seemed she didn’t need him to explain. The hand on his chest moved up until it rested at the base of his throat, her touch light and tentative over the pulse that surged there. It was as if she held in her palm everything that made him alive, every reason, every sadness, every hope.

With a soft groan, he circled her with his arms, pulling her yielding body tight against his, finding that nothing felt close enough. She was soft and pliant beneath the heavy tunic she wore, but it was a barrier he couldn’t tolerate. The first time they’d come together it had tasted of desperation and desire born of denial. Before that, it had been years since Tiarnan had last known a woman’s touch. A lifetime since he’d wanted to lose himself in the intoxicating flavor and scent of a female. But he wanted Shealy now.

He gripped the hem of the too large tunic and pulled it up and over her head in one movement, leaving her as nude as him beneath the furs. His muscles still ached, his joints still burned, but none of it compared to the throb of need that swelled and consumed him. He’d fought to protect this woman and now here she was in his arms, making every misery worth enduring. He might not have conquered the foe, but he hadn’t failed her either, and for that he was grateful in ways that couldn’t be explained with mere words.

The soft rub of fur against his back contrasted with the hot burn of Shealy’s flesh against his chest, and the dissimilar sensations merged into one overwhelming pleasure that whipped his arousal until it became all he was. All he’d ever be again.

Was it only last night that they’d come together in a frenzy of heat and passion? It felt like a lifetime ago. Then he hadn’t been able to slow himself enough to simply
feel
, to experience the lush softness of her skin, the sweet spice of her scent, the seductive brush of her fingers against his body. He’d been too consumed with the
needing
to indulge in the wants of his senses, but now he wanted to stroke every inch of her. Her hands had slipped into his hair and he let his do the same to hers, reveling in the silken feel of each strand against his hard and callused fingers. Cupping her scalp, he looked into her eyes as his pain merged with his pleasure, making his blood run faster, hotter, wilder.

He still couldn’t say just who this strange and powerful woman really was, but he knew one thing. He wanted her to belong to him and he would do whatever it took to have her. He would protect her with his life, open his own veins if it meant saving her pain.

These thoughts took hold and grew, rampant as Fennore’s dark forests, single-minded as its violent predators.

He wanted her to be his. His to hold. His to love. His to protect.

She murmured his name, arching beneath him with a slight shift that wrenched a moan from somewhere deep in his throat. Her skin glowed in the darkness like a luminescent pool spilling with moonlight. Against his burnished tone, she seemed ethereal and too fragile to touch and yet so much a temptation that he knew he’d never pull away. Carefully he eased his weight and freed one hand so he could trail his fingers down the damaged shell of her ear, finding beauty even in her flaws, stirred by the shivers that traveled through her at his gentle touch.

He knew now just how vulnerable those tiny blemishes made her feel. That she bared herself for him was a gift like none he’d ever been given.

He felt the muscles in her neck flex when she swallowed, and then he followed the silky pucker of that slashing scar that might have ended her life. Thanking the fates that had spared her, he pressed his mouth to the old wound, to the hollow at the base of her throat, the fine bones of her collar, the delicately rounded shoulders. Each dip and curve of her body became a fascination he couldn’t pull himself away from.

And then he was moving down, letting his hand cup the satin weight of her breast. Her nipple pebbled as he thumbed it, and he couldn’t have kept his lips away from that seductive invitation if he’d been risking death in kissing it.

She made a small, sharp sound in her throat, so alluring and feminine that it hardened every muscle in his body until it felt like his skin could no longer contain him. The friction of that flesh beneath his tongue, the song of her ragged breathing expanding her lungs, the scent of her filling him up . . . it all conspired to turn him into a flame teased across a dry meadow until every parched blade and stalk went up in a blaze. Never had he felt so much the master and so desperately enslaved at the same time, and he gave himself over to it, at once challenging and obeying each warring instinct.

She pulled him away from his sweet torture and captured his mouth with her own, tasting his lips with the stroke of her tongue before urging him into a silken dance that consumed him. The kiss was more than passion, more than sensation and gratification. It demanded something very personal from him, and even as a deep-seated sense of preservation tried to shy away, he surrendered and allowed the stroke and slide to center his world.

She stole his breath, returned it with the murmur of his name. Filled him with a sense of power that had been missing for so long that he barely remembered what it had felt like. In her arms, he was strong and
capable
and though it shouldn’t have been such a monumental thing, it was. It was.

He’d thought that piece of himself dead. For so long he’d blundered through fault, chasing error, always taking the wrong turn, forever making the wrong decision. But with this woman in his arms, he could do no wrong. Each silent caress of her hands, every wordless brush of her tongue against his told him this.

His reactions and responses made him dizzy and for a moment he stilled, half afraid she would vanish like a dream in the morning light. But Shealy seemed to read his mind and she took over without taking control, leaving him his strength and purging his weakness. A silken thigh slid between his as she arched against him, centering the hard length of him against the soft dip of her belly, using her whole body to caress and fondle him. He could smell the soft fragrance of her arousal, knew that he wasn’t alone in any part of this dance.

He slid his fingers down the valley between her breasts to the hollow beneath her ribs, to the cradle of her hips, and then deep into the folds between her legs. She bucked against him and sank her teeth gently into his shoulder, muffling her cry of passion, imbuing him with that heady feeling of power.

The need to be quiet and not alert anyone who might be outside spiced their passion with an erotic flavor that turned his brain to putty and the hard weight of him trapped between their bodies became a painful rapture. He sank his fingers into the slick wet of her and used his thumb to tease her, feeling her body tense and tighten around him, the grip of her fingers against his back, hearing her breath in his ear. In that moment, he felt invincible, and when she sucked in a soft cry and clenched around his fingers, he wanted to shout with triumph at her release, wanted to savor the contractions that rode her. But he needed more and she gave it, pulling him down, wrapping her legs around him as he slipped between her thighs.

The moment he entered her felt like it stretched an eternity. She was so hot she burned him to the core, but like everything else, the pain was a joy that he’d thought never to experience. He buried himself deep inside her, losing his identity, freely surrendering his sense of reason and control, his awareness of anything but the slick, tight hold she had on him. If Cathán stormed the tent at that very moment, Tiarnan would die, but die a happy man.

But no, that wasn’t true, because now that he’d felt this unbelievable oneness, he never wanted to be without it. He would die to protect Shealy O’Leary, but he didn’t think he’d ever be able to let her go.

“Tiarnan,” she breathed in his ear. “Get out of your head. Feel me.”

Oh he was, he did. He felt nothing
but
Shealy. He moved, finding a rhythm that had her sucking in air, gripping his back, and lifting her hips to meet him. He heard the sawing rasp of his breath, felt his muscles bunch and quiver as she drove him to the edge where he balanced for just a moment before she caught his lips with hers, cried his name into his mouth, and then came with a great wash of wet heat that undulated around him until he plummeted into pleasure so intense that all else ceased to exist. He was blind and deaf, a creature of sensation and nothing more. His heart pounded in his chest, his blood burned beneath his skin, and his muscles went hard, then lax as slowly, like a rising sun, awareness came back.

He realized he must be crushing her and tried to pull away, but she wrapped her legs tighter and kept him where he was, where he always wanted to be, mated to her heat. At last he lifted his head from where he’d buried it in the crook of her shoulder and looked into Shealy’s eyes. They were wide and silvery, shining with satisfaction that made him hard all over again.

“Wow,” she whispered. “We’re definitely going to have to do more of that.”

He found he was smiling.
Smiling.
He’d never thought he’d feel again the bliss that settled through him as he looked into her face. Here he was—in the camp of his traitorous brother, disconnected from Liam and his responsibility, separated from his men, holding a woman who might be his enemy’s greatest weapon.

And he was smiling.

B
RANDUBH the Druid stood behind bars, his memory clouded. Uncertain how he’d come to be there . . . only minutes had passed since he’d opened his eyes and found himself stripped and shivering in the dark, dank dungeon. But it was long enough to grow cold. Long enough to feel something he hadn’t felt in thousands of years.

He paced the cell, eyeing the dead man in the corner distastefully. The rot of decay had not yet descended, perhaps because of the chill penetrating the stone walls and pouring through the barred window, thick with damp and winter. But it disturbed him, this corpse in his space, an unpleasant reminder of the mortality he’d not thought of for millennia. He shivered, naked and exposed to every gust that found its way in.

He was a man of flesh and blood—something else he hadn’t been for centuries unending. Rubbing his arms, he moved to the corpse, scowling his revulsion. The man wore a faded blue garment that covered his legs and circled his pelvis. It fastened in front of his groin with hard silver discs. Brandubh had never seen the likes of such clothing. On the man’s feet were bright white shoes with strange, colorful symbols on the sides and laces on the top. Brandubh removed them and the short white stockings beneath. He fumbled with the fasteners at the dead man’s hips and finally managed to strip him of the queer leggings. Beneath he wore a tight white loincloth, but he left that alone.

The soft and flexible leggings fit him snugly. The stockings were warm but the shoes too tight. He couldn’t get the stretchy tunic over his shoulders. Still cold, but feeling less vulnerable now with at least some covering for his nudity, he pulled the lacings from one of the shoes and tied his hair back with it. Then he paced again, trying to fit the pieces together of how he’d come to be there.

Voices carried from the dark passage leading up to the uneven steps and the dungeon door. A moment later the heavy door swung open and a woman’s voice carried down.

“Get your fecking hands off me, you fecking moron.”

There was a clatter and thump and the sound of a man groaning followed an instant later by the crack of a hand striking against flesh and a woman’s sharp cry of pain.

“Cathán said not to kill you, didn’t he?” a man shouted. “But he didn’t say nothing about hurting you. Didn’t say nothing about shutting that mouth of yours, did he?”

“No, he didn’t say nothing about that,” another male voice agreed.

Cathán.
Brandubh felt his anger rise. Of course it would be Cathán.

The footsteps descended and Brandubh could see feet, then legs. Two men dressed in deerskin clothing carried a woman wearing leggings almost identical to the ones Brandubh had stripped from the corpse. The small, short tunic she wore looked as soft and stretchy as the one he’d taken from the dead man, but again, the picture on the front was different and hers molded to womanly curves. The two men hauled her up to the cell where Brandubh stood and unlocked the door.

As soon as it swung open, he charged, throwing his weight against the bars, intent on pinning one man in the opening while reaching through to impale the other with his own sword. The cell door jerked out of the smaller man’s hands, but not with the force Brandubh had intended. Instead he merely jarred it, and he couldn’t reach the second man to disarm him.