“I’m sure the opportunity to die will arise again if you do not follow their commands. As long as your ring glows with their light, though, you can be assured they have not forgotten you.”
Unwillingly, he glanced at his ring. The blue light was barely visible. Lis had said earlier that meant he’d accepted the gods instead of fighting them. Right this minute, he could almost agree. If the gods meant for him to have Lis, he was in complete accord with their wisdom. But if they meant for him to be Oracle, the gods were crazed. His ring flared hotter.
“We should bathe,” Lis demurred as he laid her on the clean sheets of his bed. “I am covered head to toe in sand.”
“Do you think I have waited for you all these years to let you out of my bed so easily? What if you changed your mind while bathing?” He preferred to deal with the here and now and not the might-be’s and could-be’s over which he had no control.
He climbed on top of her, straddling her legs. Her eyes widened as she noted the extent of his arousal. He needed to be inside her again. He waited for her to feel and accept the desire that was coursing between them.
“I need to consult my spirit guide,” she whispered, half in protest. “We must See what the gods intend.”
“You consult. I’ll proceed.” When it came to Lis, he was incredibly focused. He leaned over and caught her nipple between his teeth. She writhed beneath him, whether to fight him off or part her legs wasn’t easily ascertained.
Just to prove he was in charge, Murdoch flipped her over on her stomach and pressed his arousal against her buttocks. She instantly quit squirming.
He raised her up enough to stroke between her legs until she buried her moans in the pillow. He teased her breasts until they were swollen in his hands, pressed his kisses down her spine, then pushed her to her knees in a position of supplication. He heard her strangled cry as he kissed and licked along the line separating her rounded buttocks. Then the bond between them became too strong to deny.
He was no more in charge than she was—just more experienced, for now.
He sent Healing energy to the soft tissues he’d bruised earlier in the evening, then inserted the tip of his erection into her welcoming moisture.
Gently, he pushed deeper, stroking back and forth until she surrendered. With a moan of pure lust, she thrust backward, plunging him deep inside her, where he needed to be to make her fully, irrevocably his.
He held her as she climaxed, keeping his rod straight and strong until he’d wrung the last tremor from her, and then he pushed deeper still. The rush of power to his loins emptied him of all except the exploding joy and acceptance of finding his mate. Together, they collapsed in a tangle of limbs, sweaty and satiated.
He felt the heat and bruising of her newly ravished body as if they were his own. As before, her mind was fully open to him, and he was too exhausted to take advantage by tiptoeing through her thoughts or feelings. Maybe someday, in the future, they would grow accustomed to this joining and learn to explore each other in new ways. Not now. The physical exploration was too demanding.
Falling to one side, Murdoch tugged her with him, cradling his Lis in his arms as they both drifted into a satisfied sleep.
Gleaming silver, glittering with precious gems, the Chalice of Plenty illumined the shadowed chamber with the holy light of the gods. On an altar consecrated in the dark ages of forgotten time, the sacred object beckoned, promising answers, promising ease and plenty.
A fair hand reached. . . . The incandescent light flared brighter, hotter, preventing touch.
Another hand stretched through the darkness, a bronzed male hand with a black pearl and onyx ring rimmed in blue light.
Fireworks exploded across the night sky. Red, yellow, blue stars illuminated the rocky cavern.
And when the stars blinked out, the chamber fell dark. The sacred chalice was gone.
With the first light of dawn, Lissandra discarded the uncomfortable remnants of the dream in her head and woke to a heated male body warming her backside.
She and Murdoch had tested the strength of their wills on each other since childhood. She knew his mind as well as her own, and she felt his equal in most things, but she’d never fully appreciated how much larger he was than she. She fit into the shelter of his long, broad body with room to spare. Everywhere he touched her, he was hard. Everywhere.
She smiled like a cat with cream, rolled to her back, and let her fingers glide through the soft hair of his broad chest, down to his taut abdomen. He was awake. He could never fool her about that.
“I dreamed of the chalice last night.” He cupped her breast as casually as if he spoke of their next meal.
Startled, Lissandra tore her gaze from the fascinating prize below his waist and met the concern in his eyes. “So did I.”
Taking advantage of her momentary distraction, Murdoch straddled her hips and began planting swift, tickling kisses to sensitive zones he’d discovered the prior night. “What did you see in your dream?”
As if she could think while the musky scent of him made her head spin. She wrapped her fingers in his sat iny hair, but forgot to halt him when his mouth found her breast. “You have the unfair advantage of experience,” she complained. “Either talk or do this. I cannot do both.”
“Good. I want you thinking only of me when we’re together.”
And he made certain to give her something worth thinking about as he taught her how to use the passion of which she was capable. Lissandra surrendered to his lessons with the eagerness of a dedicated student. When they reached the pinnacle of bliss, she deliberately held her eyes open and enjoyed the grimace of ecstasy that softened Murdoch’s sharp features as she used the final throes of her orgasm to push him to the brink and over.
Opening her mind as well as her eyes, she allowed him to see the vision of her dream.
Startled by her mental intrusion, he collapsed on top of her. With his maleness still firmly embedded in her, he braced his weight on his forearms and touched his forehead to hers. “How do you do that?”
“Make you come?” she asked demurely, wriggling until he shifted his heavy weight to a more comfortable position.
“I wager with enough experience you can accomplish that with just a look,” he said drily, rolling off her and back to the bed. “It’s your ability to play around inside my head that frightens me. You just showed me your dream.”
“That will teach you to think you are more powerful than everyone. I cannot plant images unless your shields are down, but there are several of us with the ability to insert impressions into open minds. You would be more careful in your lovemaking if you’d spent more time on Aelynn and less with untalented Other World women.”
“I didn’t dare test your green-eyed monster by lying with Aelynn women. I feared you would turn me into a toad.” He caught her hand and squeezed it. “I can’t decide if your ability to play with my mind is good or bad. For now, it’s convenient. My dream was the same.”
“The gods are telling us to seek the holy chalice in a cave?” Lissandra tried not to sound too excited. She hadn’t expected to accomplish what others had failed to do, but if in some extraordinary manner she and Murdoch together could retrieve the Chalice of Plenty . . . it could save Aelynn. Hope and joy swelled within her.
“I recognized the surroundings in our dream—a tunnel, not a cave, and a sacred tunnel at that.” He lay still, studying the vision they both held in their heads. “If that’s where it is, there’s no wonder that we could not sense its hiding place.”
She felt him abruptly shut down his thoughts. She refused to release his hand when he tried to sit up. “What?” she demanded. “What are you thinking?”
“That it’s too convenient. Someone planned this.”
“Planned what?” She sat up, dragging the sheet across her breasts, not out of modesty, but because she wanted Murdoch to focus on this crucial discussion.
“If the dream is true, the chalice is still in England, near where Ian
lives,” he said curtly, pulling loose from her grasp and locating his still-damp and salt-encrusted trousers on the floor. He threw them aside in disgust.
“And?” she encouraged.
“Ian knew the Chalice of Plenty had gone to England. I tried to Find it for him, but it vanished from all our senses. It appears to be sentient, or at least guided by the gods. At the time, I believed the gods had deemed me unfit to touch a sacred chalice.”
“Ian was furious when you abandoned the search.”
Comfortable in his nudity, Murdoch sat on the bed’s edge and gazed down at her. She was all too aware of how wanton she must appear with her hair spilling across the linen and her face still flushed from their lovemaking. When he looked at her like that, she forgot all argument.
“We have time to idle before the fishing boats return this evening,” he said without expression, dismissing their talk of dreams.
She couldn’t tell whether mischief or seduction was behind the blue intensity of his dark gaze. “Time for what? We cannot spend it in bed,” she reminded him. She had to make him talk, but when he looked at her like that . . . talk was far from her mind.
“You have an Other Worlder as patient,” he agreed, grimacing. “Still, if you wish to discover where my mind differs from others . . .”
She widened her eyes at his easy acceptance. “You will let me compare your brains?”
“If it will help you understand how our minds function.” He stood and padded across the room to search the wardrobe.
“You said that to distract me.” She flung a pillow after him. “If you want knowledge of why your gifts go astray, then I will give you what I can, but that doesn’t deny the fact that without the chalice, Aelynn is at grave risk. And without an Oracle, all is lost. We need you.”
“Aelynn is one very tiny part of a much larger world. The chalice didn’t mean for me to find it, so I returned to France to a more useful occupation of aiding those who’d been unjustly imprisoned. Why would the chalice be any more inclined to fall in my hands now than it was before?”
Their impending disagreement was interrupted by the sound of a child’s bare feet running down the hall and cries of, “Papa, Papa, where are you?”
The day was upon them.
“Pierre is well enough to travel,” Murdoch warned, trying on a pair of Trystan’s trousers.
Lissandra opened her senses to their patient downstairs. “He seems to be, although it would be better if he rested for a while longer. He needs to recover his strength.”
“You can work on him once we’re safely gone from here.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” she reminded him, wrapping herself in a sheet to go in search of clothing.
“That could be a problem if I’m the Oracle as you claim,” he called after her.
Twenty
Murdoch watched as Lissandra happily arranged a lounge chair in the summer sun, then settled Pierre into it, and tucked a blanket around him. She’d found Amelie a pretty gown and a doll to play with and set her to making a daisy chain. Leaning against an apple tree, Murdoch waited with interest to see if Lis would make a doll of him and arrange him in her playhouse, too. He’d once considered her as domineering as her mother for this habit of pushing people into the place she assigned them, but back then, she’d been wearing her illusion of authority. Now he could see that she was just Lis, a woman who enjoyed Healing and wanted to study people in order to become better at it.
With this new perspective, he recognized that the Oracle’s daughter needed people to care for as much as he needed air to breathe.
“Have a seat. I can’t reach you when you loom over me like that.” She shooed him from the shade into the sun where she’d set a kitchen chair next to Pierre.
“What type of experiment is this, Madame LeDroit?” Pierre asked, stretching his thin frame on the cushions and turning his face gratefully to the sun.
Murdoch jerked uneasily at the sound of his plebeian surname being attached to his noble Lis, but she seemed blithely unaware of the disparity. He leaned against the chairback and sprawled his—Trystan’s—boots in front of him. Trystan had clodhoppers for feet, but with the padding he’d added, the boots worked well enough.
“There is a Dr. Gall in Germany who believes the shape of our skulls reflects the areas of interest in our brain.” Lissandra measured her fingers across Pierre’s hair.
Murdoch knew she was giving the shoemaker an explanation that would make sense to his Other World mind, but he didn’t know if she was making up the doctor and his beliefs. He examined a scuff on the toe of his boot and tried to school his impatience. When was the last time he’d simply sat in the sun and enjoyed the laugh of a child and a pretty woman’s touch?
His soul ached for the peace this moment offered.
Satisfied with her measurements of Pierre, Lis turned to him. Her hand grazed his hair gently, and he could feel her soothing energy. She had Healing in her touch, a heat that drew off his ill humors and bathed him in relaxation. He could almost imagine falling asleep under her ministrations. He leaned his head back to smile up at her, and she smiled back, wickedly pulling both the strings of his heart and the thread of amacara that bound them. His reproductive organ jerked to attention.
“You’re playing with fire,” he reminded her.
She laughed. “And so I am, Lord Volcano. Close your eyes and think pleasant thoughts.”
He thought of her pearly pink nipples jutting from the frost-colored cascade of hair tumbling over her golden breasts.
Lis tugged his hair, jarring him from the pleasant image. “Your shield is too easy to breach like this. You’ll embarrass me.”
Murdoch grinned wickedly, not in the least displeased. “Get used to it.”
With a sigh of exasperation, she returned to Pierre and asked him to think of something pleasant. Then she asked him to think of something that made him angry. Murdoch raised his eyebrows when she jerked her hands away from Pierre’s head as if she’d been burned.
He noticed she was reluctant to ask him to think of something unpleasant when she returned her hands to his skull. “Can you feel what he’s thinking?” he asked in an undertone.
“I don’t have as strong an ability to read a jumble of thoughts as Ian does,” she acknowledged, “but I can feel the pain of his ordeal.”
“Then it may be best if you do not touch me again.” He started to stand up, but she shoved him back into the chair.
“I am only beginning to sense the differences,” she scolded.“This isn’t an easy task.Try thinking of something not too bad. Imagine you’re hammering your thumb.”
He nodded in appreciation of her wisdom. “Pain isn’t as apt to make me angry.” He summoned the image of smashing his thumb and winced.
“I think I see it,” she said with excitement, keeping her voice to a whisper. “It’s a very different sensation from Monsieur Durand’s. How extraordinary! You have an intensity here”—she touched her finger to the front of his skull—“that connects with your motor skills here.” She touched another part of his head. “You do not simply feel pain. You react to it.”
“Like a skunk throws scent when frightened,” he said in scorn.
She thumped his head with her knuckles. “Do not underestimate the power of self-preservation.”
He glanced over at their guest, who had fallen asleep. “But now you would have to compare me with others of our kind before you can see if my brain is different from theirs.”
“Oh, certainly. And it would take many tests to develop a theory. But it’s a very good start, don’t you think?”
Only if they had a hundred years or so. Murdoch wished he believed they had even a year together ahead of them, but though he was a dreamer, he wasn’t a fool.
“The stranger is here,” Lis murmured that evening as Murdoch helped Pierre down the long flight of stone stairs to the harbor dock. There was no hope of disguising their activity in the red glow of the summer sun setting over th
e Channel.
Murdoch didn’t have to ask whom she was talking about. While waiting for the tide to turn, they’d both kept their senses open for the silent Aelynner who was lurking about Pouchay. They could linger no longer. The ship they’d hired awaited them.
An Aelynner who did not greet them directly was not a friend. Out of caution, Murdoch had to assume they’d been followed from the village. Lis wouldn’t care. She’d insist all Aelynners should be rescued, regardless of who they were. He’d feel safer if he knew with whom he was dealing.
“Get the child aboard,” he ordered, scanning the nearly empty dock below.
He was aware of the limits of his energy. Even if he thought he could successfully raise a fog on a dry summer evening without causing a hurricane in doing so, he would expend more vital forces than he could afford. He didn’t want to be crippled and nauseous if they had to run a Channel blockade later.
Lis shot Murdoch a look that said she obeyed only because she agreed, then took Amelie’s hand and ran lightly down the stairs to the dock.
Her quiet determination concealed as much willful bullheadedness as he could claim. If she really thought they had a chance of finding the holy chalice, they needed to agree on who was leading this expedition. First, they had to make it out of France alive.
“If you can go faster without me, then go,” Pierre urged. He attempted to pick up speed, but his weak legs barely held him up.
Murdoch ignored the admonition and helped him down the last steps.
The burly captain of the hired ship hurried to the rail to help load their last passenger. “We should have waited for a dark tide,” the sailor muttered as he grasped Pierre’s arm. “I don’t like that we can be seen.”
“I don’t like that the committee is allowed to watch,” Murdoch retorted. “When you return with your hold full of cheap grain and English cotton, you’ll be a hero.”
The captain ceased grumbling. He’d known the risk before he’d accepted the task. And Murdoch had paid him well for concealing the refugees. Wealth couldn’t be had without risk.
Mystic Warrior Page 19
