by Dawn Madigan
Determinedly, Dara jerked her hand out of Rowan’s.
“So, what’s the big melodrama for?” she demanded, her tone defiant. The blunt words had been enough to crack the silence. It made her feel oddly better.
“Dara,” Rowan whispered, cautioning.
“No, Guardian, let her talk,” a raspy voice spoke, sounding amused. It had drifted from the dark figure standing at the farthest edge of the circle’s unsure glow. Dara hadn’t noticed him until he had spoken.
There are seven of them, then, she silently concluded.
“’Tis a bit of a mix of reasons, see?” the Speaker volunteered, a smile threaded in his rough voice. His brogue was a solid, vibrant one. “The first being, as usual, timing. Beltaine night is only two sundowns from now, and the Veil between the worlds grows thin again. ‘Tis a time of great magic and nasty surprises. And, same as your American boy scouts, Dara, we like being well-prepared for the nasty bit.”
Raspy didn’t sound like he was about to introduce himself.
Dara frowned.
“What are the other reasons for summoning us up here?”
“You, of course,” said a melodious contralto from the opposite rim. “And, naturally, him.”
Dara swiveled sharply to face the feminine voice, blinking against the dark.
“Not to mention the prophecy,” caressed a new, luxuriant male voice, only slightly tinged with an accent. He sounded like a famous radio DJ.
Dara swung wildly from Contralto to Radio DJ, feeling Rowan’s hand clamping on her arm with a steadying, gentle grasp.
“Easy, sweetheart,” he hummed in her ear.
The warmth of his palm against her skin managed to soothe her a bit. Dara drew a quick, nervous breath. She hadn’t been able to discern any facial features, but the Speakers’ voices sounded vibrant and young. She felt her cheeks grow hot with embarrassment, recalling the conversation she’d had with Rowan back in Oregon. What had she told him then? Something about a “circle of demented elders”?
“What is it that you want so damn bad?” she finally said, her voice edgy with anger and apprehension. “Why did you send Rowan Mackey to track me down in Portland, six months ago?”
“Dara, daughter of Cuinn O’Shea, a scion to the bard Amergin.”
Dara gasped aloud, recognizing Niamh’s voice.
Rowan struggled to suppress a smile. Though a leader of the Speakers circle, Niamh had been standing as an equal among the rest of them. And, he noted, she hadn’t lost her flair for a bit of melodrama.
“Rowan Mackey is your Chosen mate, child,” Niamh spoke softly. “All I want is for you to look into your soul, and tell this Gathering if we have chosen incorrectly.”
“No. You can’t play me like that.” Dara shook her head, eyes ablaze.
“You’re right, Dara, what I’m asking of you now is uncalled for,” Niamh replied, venturing further into the light. “Unfortunately, we can’t afford the luxury of subtlety, nor that of time. There are forces wishing the both of you dead, and ‘tis only thanks to the Goddess that you two are yet alive.”
“No!” Dara gave her head a more violent jerk.
“Why are your parents dead, Dara?” Niamh strode closer, merciless. “Was it truly an unfortunate road accident that claimed their lives? And why isn’t Aidan Neilan sharing your bed anymore? Was the Hound arrow that took him truly meant for him?”
Dara made a strangled sound, her hands instinctively climbing to her throat. She hadn’t withdrawn, though, studying Niamh’s smooth face with wide, wounded eyes.
“And why was Aislinn’s family slaughtered, Dara? You should know, perhaps, that Aislinn’s family moved to your parents’ farm shortly after they left Ireland with you. I think we can safely chalk those murders up to a case of mistaken identity.” Niamh’s tone softened, but her eyes stayed cold and uncompromising. “Were Rowan’s parents truly killed by bandits? I think not. In each of these cases, Dara, the killers have never been found. But most important of all, how is it possible that the three of you have all lived? Who has been guarding your lives—Aislinn’s, Rowan’s and yours, Dara?”
“Bantiarna, enough of this,” Rowan intervened, his voice strained. Speaking to Niamh so was against any Law he’d known, but he couldn’t bear Dara’s trembling by his side.
“The girl is stronger than you might think, Guardian,” Niamh retorted coolly. “Now hear me out, the both of you. Only the Goddess Danu’s hand has guarded your lives to this day. Her sacred will is the only reason you are still standing here, breathing. But there is Dark working against Her, and there are still many desiring your death.”
“Even if half of what you’re saying is true, I can’t possibly change any of it,” Dara said bitterly. “I still can’t figure out what the hell it is that you want of me.”
“Aye, you can.” Raspy cracked a laugh. “You’re bright enough to figure it out by yourself, lass.”
“Do you love your Chosen mate?” Contralto sang from the dark.
“If you do love him, then prove it,” whispered Radio DJ.
“By joining with him against Lia Fáil on the night of Beltaine,” concluded a new voice dryly, flat and devoid of emotion.
“Joining?” Dara repeated. “What do you mean, ‘joining’?” She turned to look at Rowan suspiciously.
He evaded her gaze, pretending to clear his throat.
Dara’s brows drew together in suspicion, her voice dropping. “Rowan, you’d better tell me I’m not expected to have sex with you against that dick-shaped stone, with everybody cheering in the background! You’d better tell me that now, Rowan Mackey!”
“Uh, didn’t Aidan talk to you about the Stone, sweetheart?” he managed hoarsely.
“No,” she replied using the chilliest of tones. “He meant to take me there, but obviously, we didn’t make it. And I’m not your sweetheart, Mackey.” She spun around furiously. “I won’t do it,” she screamed. “Do you hear me? I won’t!”
Only silence echoed her. Dara held her breath. Her own blood was hammering in her ears, driven by her madly beating heart. The dying fire shivered and hissed against the hummock’s gaping black mouth, casting a shriveled ring of light. The Speakers weren’t surrounding the circle anymore.
“I think this meeting is over,” Rowan remarked softly behind Dara’s back.
“Not fair,” she muttered. “Where have they all gone to?”
“They have their own ways,” he said. “Some say there’s a network of passages worming through these grounds, unknown to anyone else but them.”
“I’ll ask Niamh directly, then, when we meet face to face.”
“She won’t be at the house for the next couple of days.”
“Goddess, but what am I supposed to do?” Dara’s limbs felt as if they were loaded with lead again. Her knees gave out, and she sank to the dark earth. “What am I supposed to do,” she repeated miserably.
She felt Rowan’s hand over her bare arm like a patch of heat, and shut her eyes against the darkness. Slowly, he rubbed his lips against the side of her face, like a wolf rubbing his scent against the trees, marking his territory. His body pressed against her back and he tightened his hold on her left arm, steadying her.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, finding herself leaning back into him. Her body, quicker than her mind, was already seeking to mold against his.
“What does it feel like I’m doing?” Rowan dug his head deeper into the hollow between Dara’s neck and shoulder, moving his mouth over her skin, tracing the quick beat of her blood. A hint of teeth grazed her flesh. He sucked the delicate skin into his mouth, his tongue tasting and laving over the frenzied pulse.
“Rowan, don’t—” She made a faint protest, sounding unconvincing even to her own ears.
“Rowan don’t, what?” he teased, and his mouth took her again.
Dara groaned and twisted against him, her breathing growing erratic. She tilted her head to the side, allowing his mouth full access, and his sharpening teeth
sank deeper. The small pain stirred a hot jolt right through her core, and she drew in a shaky, hissing breath.
He fondled her right breast with a sure hand, kneading her flesh through the supple leather, and she moaned aloud and squeezed her hand over his. The surrounding shallow mounds of Tara shrank into nothingness. The only thing remaining was Rowan’s body against hers.
Rowan laughed against Dara’s neck, the sound low and dangerous. Gently wrestling his hand free from her grasp, he slid beneath her fingers and captured the laces tightening her corset. Dara recalled his fingers fastening those same laces back in Medb’s bedchambers. She gasped as Rowan manipulated the silken threads in the valley between her breasts, and exerted a slow, gentle pull. The corset gave and hung loosely against her back, its front half-open. Her breasts heaved with her breath, finally freed from their tight confinement. Rowan cradled the curved underside of one naked orb. Slowly he shifted his hand, pressing a rough fingertip around a hardening nipple.
“Rowan…” Dara moaned, rubbing her back against his chest.
“Get on your knees,” he coaxed, urging her with a thrust of his thighs, imploring her with his hands.
“’Kay,” she breathed, bending forward to lean on all fours. A sluggish fog had settled upon her mind, blurring the remaining shreds of any rational thoughts.
His hands were already cajoling the tight leather skirt up her ass. She felt him shifting behind her, peeling down the buckskin breeches he still wore, muttering an impatient curse. His erection sprang free against the crevice splitting the twin globes of her buttocks. He pulled the cheeks of her ass apart, driving his hard shaft in between until his cock head was nestled against her vaginal opening. Dara whimpered, trying to push her hips back, to get him inside her, but he’d moved his hands to her hips and held her in place with a firm grasp.
“Please,” she pleaded.
“As you wish,” he said. He laughed then, with the same edgy note she’d heard earlier that night. Seizing her hips with a steely grip, he eased his cock inside her with wicked slowness, enjoying it every inch of the way.
Dara whimpered with frustration, lowering her damp brow to rest against her tightening fists.
“Easy,” he whispered from behind, now fully lodged within her. “Does it truly matter now…sweetheart…what is happening around us?”
“No.” She gave a muffled groan, feeling him flexing inside her.
“Does it matter…if anyone else is watching us?”
“No,” she whimpered again. “No, there’s only this… Only you.”
Rowan grimaced as he struggled for control.
Eyes aglow and jaw set, he forced himself to follow a leisurely rhythm, driving into her with slow, easy thrusts. It took every ounce of restraint he had left. What he was doing to her was sweet torture, but Great Goddess, he wanted to hear her plead for more, to drive her mad enough to dare him with threats and screams. But the way her pussy was squeezing him, he’d been doing a bleedin’ good job at driving himself out of his own mind. His eyes responded to the scant moonlight, pupils dilating, and he struggled to keep his fingers from growing claws. Thank Danu this wasn’t a full moon night, otherwise he doubted that even his unique talent would have kept him from fully changing. A low growl formed deep in Rowan’s throat. He dug his fingers into Dara’s hips and pulled her against him with force, burying himself deep inside her.
“Yes…Rowan!” she screamed, her palms pushing against the ground, muddied with a paste of sweat and soil.
He started pounding into her with an almost-violent force, his mind blurred by a heady mix of fury and lust. A roar undulated inside him… Mine. Mine. Mine.
Her back arched. She met him with equal fervor, matching his thrusts with short, broken screams. As his balls slapped her ass and his sweat-soaked skin pressed against hers, she wasn’t pleading, but challenging him for more, urging him to take her harder. Deeper. Rowan granted her what she demanded. He plowed inside her with rough shoves, control slipping away. Dull pressure built in his head, muscles tightening in his lower abdomen.
She cried out and squeezed down on him, her pussy tensing on his cock with a shocking, brusque force.
Harsh pleasure surged up Rowan’s body, fire rushing down his loins. With a howl he forced Dara’s ass tight against his body and exploded inside her, shuddering with the force of it. He came so hard that nothing else existed besides her… So tight around him. Hot. Wet.
Dara moaned as he jerked inside her, her pussy still quivering around his shaft.
He collapsed against her, his semen oozing down her inner thighs. Trembling roughly, Dara sagged to the ground with him. For long minutes they lay on their sides with their chests heaving, their sweat-drenched bodies crushing the already-trampled grass. Neither could utter a single word.
“You two are at it again! Will you give it over!”
Dara yelled with shock and sprang to a sitting position, struggling to pull up the corset that had been tangled about her waist.
Rowan didn’t bother to do more than grunt irritably, “Go away, Brighid!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I hate to sound like a cliché, but we really should stop meeting like this!” Dara suppressed a fleeting shiver, partly provoked by the sweat cooling on her skin. She searched blindly for Brighid, the pool of meager firelight having dissolved into darkness long minutes past.
“You didn’t sound like a cliché a couple of minutes ago,” Brighid’s voice jeered in the dark. “In fact, Dara, you sounded much more like a screeching, rutting, cat in—”
“Brighid!” Rowan roared a warning.
“What?!” the Sidhe demanded. Her fingers made a dry snapping sound as she produced a small flame between her forefinger and thumb. She tilted her hand a little, dancing the flame to the center of her palm, and brought it up against her face.
“Neat trick,” Dara commented, “if you’re a smoker.” She stood up, tugging everything back into place the best she could. Drying streaks of moisture still clung to her inner thighs.
“You’re just jealous.” Brighid grinned at her behind the quivering flame. “Now get some clothes on, both of you—unless you call this dressed?” She peered at them with disapproval. “And find me a place where I can get a decent meal. Then we’ll talk.”
Rowan uncoiled from the grass and joined Dara, towering above the wee banshee. “Where were you, Brid?” he softly inquired. “We thought you’d finally ended up with your arse seriously bitten.”
“Oh, you were worried about me! I’m touched,” she chirped.
“What happened back there, by that river?” Dara asked, squinting her eyes against the enchanted flame dancing on Brighid’s palm.
“The Hound shapechanged, and I crashed into him from above in my raven outfit,” she answered, somewhat deflated. “I hope I poked one of its eyes, at least. The bastard cost me a couple of feathers.” She gave a heavy sigh. “You two had already jumped into the river, and then I lost you. It’s almost impossible for me to read anything going on beneath the water, in Mananann’s realm. But now that you’re standing on Tara’s soil, your Power is like a beacon, easy to—”
“A beacon?” Rowan interjected, shaking his head. “In that case, we’d better bleedin’ move out of here right now.”
“I wasn’t the one giving the audiovisual show here a few minutes ago,” Brighid shrugged, flashing Rowan an impish grin. The play of fire and shadows over her mischievous features made her face seem even more elfin.
“Fine,” Dara said, “let’s head back, then.” She turned to Rowan. “How do we get back, Mackey?”
“We got ourselves a ride, remember?”
“You don’t mean Teague is still down there, wai—?”
“He is.”
Dara’s cheeks heated, imagining Teague’s thoughts regarding the exact reasons keeping them from getting back to the car. He’d see their clothes… Forget the clothes, with his keen shifter senses he’d easily sniff out that they’d just had sleaz
y, sizzling, downright mindblowing se—
“Easy, Dara, he’ll say nothing.” Rowan broke through her train of thoughts. She could hear his grin in the dark.
The three of them turned and marched down the tortuous path they’d climbed earlier. They made a small line, with Rowan in the lead looking like an odd version of the Pied Piper, and Brighid in the back, still cradling her small tongue of fire. Dara sulked in between, trying to guess Teague’s first words upon seeing them.
Teague simply started his Bronco as he saw them approach, not saying a single word. Maybe it was because he was staring at Brighid so hard, he’d forgotten the art of speech. His object of fascination didn’t seem to mind—Brighid had been far too fascinated with the car to pay attention to anything else, and naturally demanded to take the front seat.
Rowan swept Dara up into the Bronco’s back again, grinning at the show.
“Don’t worry about Teague’s driving, sweetheart,” he promised. “I think he really likes Brighid. He’s got other kinds of tricks on his mind right now.”
* * * * *
“I desperately need a shower before I can eat any kind of a dinner,” Dara said adamantly.
Rowan nodded, his fingertips skimming over her nape, then gliding lower between her shoulder blades.
A pleasant shiver raced down Dara’s spine.
They’d been lingering on the front porch for no other reason but exhaustion, solid darkness pressing against their backs like a phantom weight. The voices of Brighid and Teague drifted from the rose garden at their rear, carried over a light breeze.
“Let me show you to your room then, Dara. I think you’ll find everything in there that you need.” Rowan raised his unoccupied hand to haul up the door’s brass knocker.
“My room?”
“Aye, the Summer Room,” he answered with a soft grin. “You might remember the Bantiarna asking me earlier to take you there?”
She shook her head in response, too exhausted to recall a room’s name popping up in some earlier conversation.
Fiona had answered the front door this time, her astounded eyes immediately rounding upon seeing them, but Rowan quickly seized Dara’s hand in his, drawing her with skill past Fiona’s as-yet-unspoken questions. Together they mounted the left staircase curving from the foyer. The broad stairs opened to a mostly vacant wing of the household, mainly reserved for the rare houseguests.
