The Falcon's Bride (16 page)

“There’s more,” said Thea, “but no time to tell it. That is Drumcondra’s voice I hear. He will be upon us any second! Say no more, and do not divulge what I have just told you. He has no idea that I am from another time. If it must be told, I must be the one to tell it. Do not fear, James, I will get you out of here. It matters not whether you believe me or you don’t, so long as you keep my confidence. My life—both our lives—may well depend upon it.”

“Thea—”

“No! There isn’t time. One last thing. The ruined wing you say you entered through . . . how was it ruined?”

“It’s hard to say. I have studied such sites in my travels, as you know, with much interest. It is my passion, and it appears to me that at some point what bits would burn were destroyed by fire. The rest has deteriorated over time. But that is only my opinion. Why?”

Thea swallowed the lump that had constricted her throat, and blinked back tears. “He’s here!” she said in a low whisper. Drumcondra’s return had saved her from answering that question. “Remember what I’ve said,” she murmured. “Say nothing.”

Chapter Twelve

Drumcondra wore a face as long as the day returning her to his chamber. Jeta was nowhere in sight. Thea wasn’t certain if that was a good sign or bad. She wasn’t certain of Drumcondra’s mood, either, only that it wouldn’t bear testing. He had a face like a thunderhead. His eyes were cold and shuttered, his sensuous mouth drawn in a tight lipless line, his jaw muscles ticking and his nostrils flared so wide that he resembled a fire-breathing dragon. Making matters worse, his leg was paining him. She could see it in his ragged gait, though he careened through the halls with all the finesse of a juggernaut.

When he threw open his chamber door, he pulled her up short of the threshold. The Gypsy girl, who had stolen Thea’s chinchilla fur pelerine when she first came among them, had donned it again, with nothing underneath, and now lay writhing in Drumcondra’s bed, flaunting her voluptuous nakedness beneath the fur.

Drumcondra reeled Thea into the room, slammed the
door, and reached the girl in three staggering strides. “So, this is where you’ve got to. I should have known, and searched here first,” he seethed. “Get up out of there, Drina!” Without ceremony, he hauled her to her feet, delivering a string of reproofs in either Gaelic or Romany—Thea couldn’t be sure which, since she spoke neither dialect.

He stripped the pelerine from the girl in one motion, just as he had the first time, and tossed it on the bed. Then, snatching her clothing from the floor where she’d discarded it, he steered her to the door. As she passed, the girl spit full in Thea’s face, wrenching a shocked outcry from her. She wiped the spittle away. Drumcondra thundered something unequivocal in that same foreign tongue, crimped the girl’s hands around her clothing, and shoved her through the door naked, locking it after her.

Spinning back toward Thea, Drumcondra glowered. “What?” he said.

“That is exactly what I was about to ask you, my lord,” she returned loftily.

“Oh, I see,” he said, standing with his hands on his hips. “Well, I am neither priest, nor monk, nor eunuch, fair lady—a thing I mean to prove to you before this night is done.”

“I think you ought take yourself off and prove it to the creature you have just evicted. With such as that to warm your bed, you can have no need of me.”

He reached her in one stride and seized her in strong arms, pulling her against his hard muscled chest. “I have a need that only you can quench,” he said, bearing down upon her with his powerful gaze. “You have bewitched me, I think, with those eyes the color of Londonderry bluebells, and hair like raven’s feathers. There’s Gypsy somewhere in your blood; I’ll not be persuaded otherwise.” He
inhaled deeply, and let his breath out on a soft moan. “You smell of gillyflower and of rose. You have not gotten such a perfume here. Can it be your very essence, I wonder? Neither flower blooms in the snow. . . .”

“P-please, my lord, I beg you, let me go,” Thea pleaded. His closeness was like a drug to which she had become addicted, his hands like firebrands searing her through the flimsy ecru silk. Across the way his bird was perched, sleeping, though its beady eye was open, watching them. Did it always sleep thus, with one eye open? She wondered.

Food brought up in her absence stood undisturbed on the linens chest. Food always seemed to be in good supply. She couldn’t help but wonder if the same was so in the lower regions, where poor dear James was chained, shivering with cold and confusion.

Drumcondra tilted her chin up to meet his gaze and lowered his lips, but she turned her head aside. “Please, my lord,” she said.

He took hold of her chin again. “You say no, but I feel yes in that perfect body. It betrays you,” he murmured. His deep baritone thrummed through her—through the veins that carried hot blood to her cheeks and temples. Her heart was beating against his—shuddering, thumping. Could he feel it? How could he not? Anger at her weakness flared.

“I find it quite impossible—nay, repulsive—suffering the advances of a man who intends to use me as a means to slake his lust for vengeance, sir,” she snapped.

He stiffened as if she had struck him, but did not let her go. Scooping her up in his arms, he laid her on the bed and climbed in gingerly beside her.

Thea twisted away. “Neither do I favor bed sport where another has been cavorting. So this is why you left me alone with James, then—so you could have your little
assignation with that Gypsy roundheels. You are caught out, my Lord Drumcondra. Now, let me go!”

He seized her arm and turned her back. “You heard me say otherwise.”

“I heard a foreign tongue. Did no one ever tell you speaking so when others are unfamiliar with your speech is ignorant and impolite, sir?”

Though there was a hint of jealousy, too, Thea was stalling for time. There was only one way to prevent the horror she had seen in Jeta’s bucket, but she did not know how to accomplish it. As long as Drumcondra remained in his time, his fate was sealed and imminent. And being there with him, she was not exempt from the devastation. Neither was James. Not one, but three lives now hung in the balance.

The only way to prevent it was to lure him into her time. Jeta had said it was already written. Thea did not understand the augur then, but she did now. Hadn’t Nigel himself told her that Drumcondra’s bones were not found in the passage tomb with the others? Had he not said that all trace of him had vanished from the pages of local history and lore nearly a hundred and thirty years ago—that he had simply disappeared? But how could she accomplish that? Jeta obviously trusted that she could, but Thea couldn’t see how. If she told him the truth, he would never believe her, just as James hadn’t believed her. She would have to trick him into following her back somehow. But if she knew how to get back, she would have done so on her own long since. And then there was James. It all seemed so hopeless and, though she knew the answer, there seemed no solution else she use her womanly wiles to have it done.

Out of that facetious thought, inspiration struck. Since time out of mind, women had used their sexuality to
charm the unsuspecting male. She was a woman after all, despite her sheltered life and inexperience that left her so vulnerable to his prowess. If he were to break down her defenses here in his time, comfortable and complacent, he would never leave it; but if she could somehow lure him into her time . . .

Drumcondra’s hands were roaming over her body through the silk shift, his skilled fingers doing scandalous things to her breasts. He bared them to his lips, and she moaned in spite of herself. She fought desperately to keep control, but her pulse was pounding in her ears and her heart was fairly leaping against her ribs. While innocence by no means meant ignorance of such matters, she was unprepared for feelings so intense they took her breath away, for the firestorms at her very core that riddled her belly and thighs mercilessly. It was a volatile awakening, made more so by the dire circumstances facing her and so little time to do what seemed impossible. It would be so easy to let him have his way with her, to welcome inside her the turgid member leaning heavily against her thigh, as he’d promised she would. The shocking thing was, this was so totally against her nature. She could only surmise that it was because of the unreal, dreamlike quality of her situation, and her girlish air dreams—but that did not make it any easier to bear. Existing in another time, it was as if these things were happening to someone else, which was making it harder and harder to resist him. That she wanted him was without question. He had seduced her to the brink of yielding to a single kiss, something she never would have credited as being possible in her own time.

Her aching nipples, at the mercy of his lips, hardened under demands of his silken tongue, betrayed her. Her moist sex swollen—aching for release—would not be ignored where the heel of his open palm massaged it through
the gauzy silk. As if possessed of a will of its own, her body arched against the pressure of that hand as lightning strikes of liquid fire coursed through her, catching her breath, dulling her senses, lifting her out of herself into the swirling white pinpoints of blinding light that starred her vision.

Technically, he had already taken her virtue. All that remained was for her to give it to him in the physical sense. She was his captive. He could take her anytime he pleased. That he had not, spoke to the success of her desperate prayers that he would not unless she gave him leave. That was part of the seduction: The conquest must be total. She had to open herself to him of her own free will . . . to beg him to fill her with his life, to possess the sweet flesh of her innocence in total abandon. She was on the brink of that under his artful enchantment, despite the fact that she knew all too well she must not give in to the demands of his sex or of her innermost desires. To surrender now would break the spell that daren’t be broken until they, all three—he and she and James—had passed through the corridor together.

When he reached beneath her shift and his hot, rough-textured hand began to palpate her naked sex, she pulled back, resisting. “I beg you,
don’t
,” she murmured, shoving the hand away.

He loosed a guttural chuckle, rubbing his fingers together. “I do not see the difficulty,” he said. “By the look of this, you are deflowered already. All that remains is that you let me know you in the Biblical sense.” He whispered the last directly in her ear, which he nipped in the process, beginning the damming sensations again. It would not do, and she vaulted upright in the bed and covered her breasts.

“You would like that, I am sure,” she said, “but it shan’t
happen here in this bed after what just got out of it. You’ve turned your bedchamber into a brothel, and I am no whore. If you are hell-bent upon seducing me, you shall have to find a more romantic setting in which to do it. As it is here now, I would rather take my chances with the rats.”

It sounded credible enough, though she dared not offer a sideways glance in the direction of those eyes to be sure; she was that unsure of her footing and her resolve. Throwing her feet over the edge of the bed, she went on quickly, while she still possessed the courage. “Besides, you shan’t claim my favors while my brother lies chained and hungry in your dungeon. That would be foolish of me, don’t you think? I am no birdwit, sir.”

He seized her arm. “It is inevitable, you know.”

“That may well be,” she returned, prying his fingers from her arm, examining the white fingerprints his grip had left behind, “but if it is, it will be in
my
time—not yours, my Lord Drumcondra,” she said. Gooseflesh washed her from head to toe at the prophetic nature of her words. They all but stopped her heart. It hadn’t been deliberate, but couldn’t have been more aptly put. What was that look in his eyes? Did he see the hidden meaning in those words as well, or was it her stricken expression at giving the bizarre situation substance with words that seemed to have stricken him also? “Besides,” she said, on her feet now, “that leg is paining you. Any fool could see it. You are in no fit condition to seduce anyone.”

Drumcondra vaulted out of the bed in a vain attempt to hide the truth of her accusation. His unsteady exit brought the ghost of a smile to her lips.

“You think so, do you?” he seethed. “How wrong you are, little hypocrite. It would have been wiser of you to give way to your desires. But no matter, you need not have
rats for bedfellows. I shall spend the night in more . . . welcoming apartments. Sleep well, fair lady.”

Drumcondra lumbered down the hall in such a fit of foul temper he nearly ran headlong into Jeta ascending the stairs from the level below.

“Clumsy lout! What ails ye now?” she said, steadying herself against the wall.

“Where is Drina staying?” he asked, ignoring the question.

Jeta shrugged, and crooked her thumb toward the opposite wing. “Where she always stays when you two have been at it,” she said. “What do ye want her for? She says ye put her out.”

“I have an itch that needs scratching,” Ros growled, turning down the corridor, dosing his mother with an ireful glance. Though he loved Jeta dearly, he made no display of it either in company or when they were alone. It wasn’t the Gypsy way, such weakness. What existed between him and his mother was an understanding in the heart that need not be spoken with the lips.

Jeta presented him with a toothless smile in return. “Ye might just have to scratch it yourself, after what I heard comin’ out of her mouth just now.”

Drumcondra paid her no mind. Limping along the hall, he cursed Thea for being right about his leg. He had stressed it, and the bandage needed changing. Mossie would do it, but that would have to wait. Right now, there was a more urgent press, and smoothing ruffled feathers was not his strong suit.

He burst into Drina’s chamber only to duck low as a crockery jar whizzed past his head, missing it by inches. It smashed against the wall, splattering his jerkin with some anonymous women’s unction that reeked of strong perfume.
Another followed that he wasn’t quick enough to avoid. It hit him squarely in the chest and turned him white with talc.