The Falcon's Bride (13 page)

He struggled upright, bracing himself upon his elbows, blinking the sleep from his eyes. It was a moment before they focused. The bird was still flapping about, and he stripped off its hood and glanced around the room in search of Thea.

Free of the hood’s encumbrance, the bird took flight and soared about the exposed beams above. Screeching, it dipped and soared and flapped about in a genuine rage,
Drumcondra thought. It wasn’t long before he realized why.
Thea was gone!

“Bloody hell!” he cried, swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, an action he instantly regretted. For a moment, he’d forgotten the injury. Cursing the air blue, his head thrust back in pain that manifested itself in spurts of red glare behind his screwed shut eyes, he pounded the furs beneath him with white-knuckled fists and tried again to rise more gingerly.

Snatching up his leggings from the floor, he tugged them on—no mean task with the injured thigh. The blood had ceased to flow, and his brow was running with sweat. Both were good signs. Mossie’s mysterious Gypsy unction had worked some magic.

By the time he’d tugged his boots on, the bird had ceased its circling. Not a minute too soon. He was still half castaway from the whiskey, and the creature’s irate revolutions were making him dizzy.

“
Stay
, damn you!” he commanded. “How did she get that key, eh?”

The bird’s eyes flashed. If ever a falcon wore a look of indignation, this one did now.

Drumcondra strode to the door and seized the handle. When it didn’t release, he rattled it relentlessly. Loosing a bestial howl that sent the screeching falcon, wings flapping, straight into the chimney corner, he raised the heavy Glastonbury chair and slammed it into the door, rendering the chair to splinters. The door sustained no damage. Neither dent nor scratch marred the thick old wood. Drumcondra raved again, his thunder ringing from the rafters, both clenched fists raised to the heavens.

“Bloody hell, she’s locked me in!” he seethed, bearing down upon the bird hiding in the shadows beside the hearth. All that showed its presence there were two beady
eyes blinking at him from the dusky recess behind the bellows.

“Oh, aye—hide, you bloody coward!” he thundered. Stalking stiff-legged toward the hearth, he seized the iron candle stand, stalked back, and hefted that against the door. It groaned, but showed no sign of giving way. He lunged at it again and again to no avail until—blind with battle madness, impervious to the throbbing pain in his thigh—he shattered the glass in the window overlooking the courtyard and heaved the candle stand through like a javelin. Before he could blink, his bird took flight and soared after it, screeching its complaints as it grazed him with its flapping wings sailing past.

The narrow window was barely wide enough to accommodate either of them, since the glass was a later addition to what amounted to no more than glorified arrow slits in the upper chambers. Below, three nonplussed lackeys patrolling the grounds stared up at the missile speeding toward them, their jaws sagging, and Drumcondra roared like a lion.

“What are you gaping at, you lazy gudgeons?” he bellowed. “Haul your worthless arses up here and turn me loose!”

Thea had escaped the chamber, but escaping the castle would not be accomplished as easily. If it had been summer, it mightn’t have been impossible, but how was she to manage with no shoes and snow?

Keeping to the shadows, she crept along the cold dank passageways looking for a staircase that would take her below. What to do there she had no inkling, unless it be attempting to hide in one of the carts she’d seen from the windows coming and going. Then, if she could only find her way back to Newgrange, she might be able to access
the portal she had stumbled upon that had brought her here, and find her way back to her own time. If such a thing were even possible was a mystery. Her entrance to Drumcondra’s world through the passage tomb had occurred at the solstice, and that was long past by now.

Presently, she found herself in what appeared to be a gallery above the lower floor. There had to be a staircase leading below, and she hugged the musty walls bleeding with dampness and slimed with green mold in search of it. She had scarcely begun when a racket below echoed along the corridors as three lackeys came running. Flattening herself behind a column marking a recessed alcove, she held her breath until they passed, traveling toward the wing she’d just fled. From their mutterings, it was clear that they had been summoned. Could Drumcondra have wakened? The possibility of that gave her feet wings, and she raced along the hallway until she found the staircase the lackeys had mounted to reach the gallery and made her way below.

Others were milling about now—houseboys and lackeys and scullions running every which way through what she assumed to be the great hall. If her shift weren’t covered in blood, she might have mingled among them undetected, but as she was, barefoot in the sumptuous chinchilla fur pelerine, there was no hope of that. The servants being preoccupied with some urgency was to her advantage, however. No one had taken notice of her yet in the confusion. If she could only reach the servants’ quarters undetected, she might just be able to find a cart leaving the compound and affect her escape. It was a pleasant fantasy to be sure, but all she had to cling to as she followed the servants hoping to implement her hastily formed plan.

She had nearly reached a narrow hallway that emptied into what her nose told her must be the kitchens, when a
rumpus behind turned her to face two of Drumcondra’s band who had laid hands upon an intruder. The captive was holding his own in a bold attempt to break free, and two other men came running. Thea’s heart fairly leapt from her breast. Stifling a scream, she gave up her shadowy anonymity along the periphery and ran back the way she’d come. Bursting into the great hall, the scream long building in her throat would no longer be contained, and she ran straight into the melee screaming:

“
James!
”

She had not taken two steps when Drumcondra’s strong hands lifted her off the floor and slung her over his shoulder. Where had he come from? Her eyes having seen naught but James, she had not even seen him approach.

“So here you are, fair lady,” he said. “You needn’t have invaded the kitchens. I would have been happy to satisfy your appetite.”

Ignoring the obvious innuendo, Thea beat upon his broad back with both her hands balled into fists. “Put me down!” she shrilled as he hitched her higher. “Ow! Put me down, I say! And turn my brother loose! If you harm one hair upon his head, I—”

“Your brother found at last, eh?” he interrupted, wheeling to face the two men struggling to restrain James. “I thought that bit a work of fiction. I couldn’t imagine there to be two lackwits fool enough to be wandering the battle-fields of County Meath unprotected. I stand corrected. What manner of clothes is the man wearing?”

“The l-latest London fashions, my lord,” said Thea, thinking on her feet though they were off the floor. “If you were not barbarians here, you would know that, you clod! Now put me down!”

“You heard my sister, let her go!” James demanded, earning himself a blow to the mouth from one of his captors.

Thea screamed. “James, do be still!” she warned. “I think I can explain all this . . . if Lord Drumcondra will only let me.”

“Lord Drumcondra?” James breathed, aghast.

“She will have to explain it to
me
first,” said Drumcondra, stalking off with her. As he strode off, over his shoulder to the others he said, “Take him below and clap him in irons while I get to the bottom of this. I shall deal with him later.”

Chapter Ten

Drumcondra literally dumped Thea on the bed. The bloodied bedclothes had been stripped away and replaced with fresh linens and feather beds beneath the furs. Across the way, while the floor was still littered with broken glass, a plank had been fitted in the gaping window. While it preserved some of the warmth, it diminished what little light the chamber boasted to begin with, since it was the only window.

“What have you done with the key?” he asked, looming over her.

No blood seemed to be seeping from his wounded thigh through his leggings, though he favored it, moving stiff-legged. His tight-lipped stare through eyes glazed with pain, however, told too well that carrying her back to that room had aggrieved it.

“I threw it away,” she snapped, tossing her dark curls.

His eyebrow inched up. “I do not believe you,” he said flatly.

“I do not care what you believe, my lord. Let me go to my brother!”

“Not . . . just . . . yet,” he pronounced, studying her. After a moment, he strode to the chest in the corner and fished out a shift of cream-colored silk, richly embroidered with threads of gold in a pattern of the same concentric circular motifs she’d seen at the entrance of Newgrange. He tossed it to her. “Put it on,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are covered in blood. Put it on.”

“I will not disrobe in front of you, Lord Drumcondra!” she said unequivocally.

“Tell me, what have you got that I have not already seen, eh?”

“That is neither here nor there, sir. What you have already seen,
I
did not show you.”

“A minor point.” He jerked her to her feet and stripped off the pelerine. “Now the shift,” he said. “Or would you rather I do it for you?”

Thea backed away. “At least turn your back, my lord,” she said.

“I think not,” he responded, folding his sinewy arms across his chest. “How can I see where you’ve hidden the key if I do that, fair lady?”

“Lud!” Thea exclaimed. Jamming her hand into the pocket of the shift, she tugged out the key and threw it at him. “There!” she cried, as he snatched it up from the floor where it landed with a clang after bouncing off his chest. “Are you satisfied? Now will you avert your eyes, sir?”

“I would have done,” he said, his droll words riding a theatrical sigh, “had you been honest with me. Since you have not, I think I shall just give you a taste of what you may expect should you ever oppose me again.”

His eyes, half-closed with desire, smoldered toward her
as he closed the gap between them in one ragged stride. Thea’s breath caught in her throat as he took her in his arms. She thought he was going to strip her of her shift, as he had the pelerine, but to her surprise, he did just the opposite, moving ever so slowly, savoring every facet of the chore before him.

How tall he was, bending over her; the look in his eyes devouring her at close range was more than she was ready to bear. She could no longer deny her attraction to the man. But nothing could exist between them. They were from two different worlds—literally. It was inevitable that time would part them. There would be nothing but heartbreak. Besides, he only wanted her for one thing: to use her as a means of retribution against Cian Cosgrove; to take her virtue, and give her back tarnished and deflowered. That was not what those shuttered eyes were saying now, however. Should she listen to her head . . . or her heart? All at once, the old Gypsy woman’s words came again without bidding:
Ye do not belong with this lot. Ye have come here for another. Two days until the solstice and ye see Ros Drumcondra, the Black Falcon, in the flesh. Beware the Cosgrove clan. Ye are the Falcon’s bride
. . . What did it all mean?

There was no time to ponder. His lips were warm when they took hers, his tongue like silk. The gentleness of that first long, lingering kiss was so totally contradictory to every other encounter she’d had with the man, it stalled her brain. It was her secret fantasy, come to life in such a volatile way there was no mistaking it; only now it was no air dream,
it was real
. Stark terror and raw passion vied for supremacy. Passion won.

Before she realized what was happening, her arms were around him. As foxed by his closeness as a drunkard in his cups, she breathed in his scent. It was darkly mysterious, just as she remembered it, heavy with musk, with the
heady, earthy scents of the forest laced with a hint of tanned leather and whiskey residue.

His moan aroused her. His hands, exploring her body through her linen shift, set her blood racing. Shocking waves of liquid fire pumped through her belly and thighs as the flat of his open palm splayed out on her chest, inching lower, dangerously close to the soft swell of her breasts and her nipples that had grown hard and tall beneath the fabric in anticipation of his skilled fingers. Ever so slowly, that hand came close; but they did not touch those aching buds or the puckered flesh around them. Excruciating ecstasy, so deliciously acute it took her breath away.

The arm around her waist crushed her closer to his swollen hardness, its bruising pressure throbbing against her. Again, her breath caught. What sort of man was this to be aroused, come so soon from such a serious surgery? He was in pain, and yet . . . ! And how could he be gentle and explosive at the same time? The stars only knew, but he was. A sleeping tiger lay just beneath the surface of his ardor, ready to pounce. She could almost feel its claws, its fangs—the primeval pull of its passion drawing her like a magnet. It was palpable, living in its own space—a space he had invaded, claimed,
possessed
. That space was her flesh, her sex, her very soul.

What was she doing? What was she thinking? This man was a fierce fire-breathing warrior—the Black Falcon. He had her in his talons now, and though she should resist, she was powerless against his prowess, powerless against the smoldering fire beneath the surface of this man that threatened to consume her whole. In that one wonderful, terrible instant, she would have let it. She had never dreamed this. How could she have, when she had no idea such ecstasy existed?

Her scandalous penny novels had not prepared her for
anything remotely like what was happening to her now in Ros Drumcondra’s arms—what was evidently happening to him as well—those secretly read tomes, taken as gospel in her ignorance, paled miserably in comparison.

Just when she thought she could bear no more, his hand left her chest and began inching up the skirt of her shift. The fabric was wrinkled and stiff, crimson with his dried blood. He drew it away as gently as if he were peeling a delicate, succulent grape, which is just how she felt then, vulnerable—raw and moist, and his for the taking. But he did not take her. Casting the shift aside, he took the fresh one from her hand—she hadn’t even been aware that she still clung to it—and slid it over her trembling nakedness.