She stood, jostling her table and sending beer slopping over the rim of her glass. The bartender darted a quick, worried glance her way. Of course he did. She was behaving like a drunk. But the couple at the next table was also staring at her as was the quarryman at the bar. Was her blouse unbuttoned? She looked down to check, felt even more foolish. Her nipples were pebbled, visible through the soft cotton of her blouse.
She looked back up. Now the quarryman and his buddies were smirking, but the bartender and the old-timers near the fire were studiously looking the other way. Was she imagining all this? She felt flushed, awkward, self-conscious. She couldn’t remember a moment like this since middle school—everyone aware of her and ignoring her at the same time. Except Frank and his floozy in the corner, too absorbed in themselves to notice.
She edged out of the window seat and ran smack into the quarryman. And his friends. Five of them. “Don’t leave yet. Stay and have a drink with us,” he drawled, backing her into the alcove. She could smell whiskey on his breath. She darted a quick look at Frank, still absorbed in Christie Kelley. No help there.
“No thanks. I was just leaving.” His friends were sliding onto the bench behind her, cutting off her retreat.
And the thing outside the window, the danger her body could feel like an icy wind, was growing closer. She had to get out of there.
There was no room to maneuver, but she knew from her earlier clumsiness that the table wasn’t screwed to the floor. She grabbed the apron of the heavy wooden top and shoved. The bastard menacing her swore and jumped back, and she scrambled past him.
She fled from the room, into the front hall, and straight into the neat, silver-haired landlady. “I’m so sorry,” Beth murmured, trying to steady the tottering innkeeper. Mrs. McClaren was one of her best sources of local folklore, had talked for hours about the fairy mound when Beth had first visited last spring. The woman was tiny and frail, eighty years old if she was a day, but her grip on Beth’s wrist now was like a vise.
“I’ve got to change your room, dear,” she said. It was an ordinary enough statement, but Mrs. McClaren sounded as spooked as Beth felt.
“Now isn’t a good time, Mrs. McClaren,” Beth said, trying to loosen the woman’s hold.
“I’ve got a nice room right across the hall with an iron latch on the door,” she persisted.
“An iron latch won’t keep him out.” Beth recognized the speaker. The old man sitting behind the desk was Mr. O’Donovan. The locals accounted him a great authority on the sídhe, the mythical, semidivine inhabitants of the fairy mounds, but when Beth had approached him on her first visit to Clonmel, the man had refused to speak to her. When she’d returned with Frank, the old man had marched up to them and told them to leave the mound alone. Then he’d marched off and never said another word. Until now.
“Who are you talking about, Mr. O’Donovan?” Beth asked.
His eyes were wild and his smile was gleeful. Beth didn’t like that at all. “You know who. You came here looking for them. You woke the worst of a bad lot. I warned you not to dig in the mound, but you wouldn’t listen, and now he’s come for you.”
“Bite your tongue, old man,” Mrs. McClaren said, and turned to Beth. “Pay no mind to him. Sit here for a minute and I’ll have your things moved across the hall into the nice room with the batten door. An iron latch and iron bands. Old as the inn. Strong in the earth,” she said, as though she was recommending chocolate biscuits or vanilla cake, something ordinary and pleasant.
“Won’t keep him out,” the old man cackled. “It would take iron windows and iron walls and an iron floor and a roof of iron to keep him out. And even then, he’d get to you. And it’s no more than you deserve. No decent woman goes searching for the likes of them.”
It was too much. Beth bolted. Up the stairs, into her room with the brass doorknob, and the brass bolt, and the brass window latch. She locked all three, then took a deep breath and rested her forehead against the cool glass of the window.
“Don’t let them frighten you.” The voice was musical. Wind in the forest. Deep and primal. Musky sweet like honey. It compelled her to turn and behold the speaker, who leaned casually against the door she had just locked.
The man was well over six foot, and his skin was the ivory of Viking raiders and Celtic heroes. His hair was pale gold and arrow straight, woven in slender braids. She recognized the silver dagger at his hip, twin to the blade in the tomb, tucked into a wide leather belt that cinched soft fawn trousers. His linen tunic was embroidered by the same hand as the tapestries in the burial chamber, and around his neck was a torc finer than the one Frank had palmed that afternoon.
Strong limbs and broad shoulders in soft pelts. It flashed through her mind, and though the rational academic in her said no, the woman in her said yes, this is him. The Celt from the tomb. Rational Beth said, It’s some local joker playing with you, but irrational Beth, the Beth who could feel the old places through maps and pictures, heard a voice whisper, The Good Neighbors. The Fair Folk. The Lords and Ladies who dwell in the earth. The Sídhe.
You’ve always known they would come for you.
Conn had chased the deer for miles, not because he had to, but because he enjoyed feeling the grass beneath his feet and the wind in his hair, and because prey deserved the dignity of the hunt. He roasted and ate his fill, washed in the stream that ran down toward the mill, and left the carcass hanging outside the mill door so that word might spread. “Bring your tithe to the mound,” they would say. “Keep your daughters inside. One of the Old Lords walks abroad, and requires meat for his table.”
The inn he remembered. He could feel the age of it in the timbers, could read its history through the wood. A stand of living trees four hundred years ago, hewn and new, rooted to this place. He had liked it then, with its thatched roof and shuttered windows, better than the stone buildings the invaders brought. He liked it less now. The building was the same, but it stank, inside and out, of black iron and burning smoke. The filthy tar of the long dead beasts under the earth was poisoning the living wood and clay, driving the clamorous engines that rumbled past at unnatural speed, drowning out the sounds of the birds in the trees and the wind in the meadow. The girl was here. And her weak man. And another foreigner, a different woman. Younger. Callow. She smelled of base metals and dead beasts, too, bright and clattering like the smoke engines.
He entered the low door of the inn, and the old man sitting by the fire nodded. “I warned her,” he said. “She wouldn’t listen to an old man. But here you are, come to claim her. And it’s no more than she deserves.”
“Quiet!” The old woman curtsied, the creak in her arthritic knees audible as the snap of the fire. She tried to keep her eyes downcast, but her gaze was drawn to him. He knew the glamour he cast, irresistible even to a woman long past youth, wondered what it would be like to be obliged to woo a woman, to win trust and affection, rather than receive them as his due.
He followed the trail of the woman, his woman, her scent now spiked with fear, into the common room. The crowd fell silent as he entered. all save the granite-dusted men clustered in the window seat, where she had been. He could feel her lingering warmth there, see the print of her lips on her unfinished glass of ale.
He strode to the table, lifted the beaker, and licked the taste of her mouth from the rim. Summer fruit and honey wine.
He addressed the biggest of the quarrymen. “Where is the woman who was sitting here?”
The big man stood. Almost as tall as a Fae. Conn caught another tendril of the woman’s scent, all panic and indignation, clinging to the man’s clothes.
“What’s it worth to you, pretty boy?” the man asked. His friends laughed. Memory, it seemed, was growing short in Clonmel. The quarryman reached for a lock of Conn’s hair, and faster than the human eye could see, Conn seized the man’s wrist and broke it. Beneath the skin, the two long bones jostled and
splintered like dry kindling.
The man screamed. His nearest friend swung a fist at Conn. Foolish. But this one hadn’t touched the woman, so Conn decided not to maim him, and merely picked him up bodily and dropped him onto the table, shattering it.
The rest thought better of challenging him.
“Where is the woman?” This time he addressed the room at large.
“Upstairs,” said the bartender.
The callow girl who smelled of metal, and was, he noticed with amusement, wearing one of his lesser ornaments filched from the mound, tugged at the sleeve of the foreigner. “Frank,” she said. “What’s going on? Why doesn’t someone call the police?”
“She’s right,” Frank hedged, nodding at the bartender. “You should call the police.”
“For the love of God, shut up,” said the bartender.
But the woman persisted. “Aren’t you going to do something? He’s threatening your ex!”
This was entertaining. Conn watched as the foreigner—Frank—deliberated. The man wished to keep both women, not because he valued either one, but for status. The arrangement was an old one, a woman to make his home, and another to warm his bed. But this Frank was a fool. He had made a queen out of his concubine, and a drudge out of an empress. No good could come of it, and he deserved to lose both.
“I’ll go check on her,” Frank said to the woman. But Conn held up a hand, and two strong villagers—memories apparently in good working order—grasped the outlander’s shoulders and held him there.
Conn smiled. He enjoyed seeing the man humbled. It was one of the delights of waking. Food and drink and sex and the taste of mortal emotion. Salt and sweet. Anguish and joy.
He took the stairs two at time. The hall was long and dark, the only light coming from beneath the door at the end. Her room. He crossed the hall and passed through the door.
She stood at the window, her temple resting against the smooth pane, her fingers wrapped around the brass latch. She thought it would keep him out. He would show her otherwise.
“How did you get in here?” she asked, wondering at what point it would be appropriate to scream. If this was a prank, some tasteless joke cooked up by Frank, she would look like a fool.
Her question seemed to amuse him. “I passed through the door.”
“Get out,” she said. She ran through all the possible explanations for this man in her head. A crazed reenactor. One with an improbably thorough knowledge of the grave goods she’d excavated only hours ago, and a lot of free time to spend at the gym. A thief who had plundered her discovery, and then come straight to visit her, decked in the loot. None of it made any sense.
Unless she was delirious. She’d contracted malaria in the Yucatán last year, but an attack in this climate seemed unlikely. Perhaps she was really out of her mind with fever and this was all a bizarre dream, her mind conjuring a hero to fit the discoveries she’d made in the tomb, a body to fill that empty bier.
And what a body. Biceps she wouldn’t be able to circle with both hands, whorled with sinuously inked tattoos. Thighs like tree trunks, sturdy, muscled, virile. The drumbeat between her legs sped faster.
She realized she was staring, openmouthed, at his body. Just short of panting.
Over a complete stranger who was probably some local lunatic with a fetish for Celtic jewelry and—dear God, were his nipples pierced beneath that shirt? And why did the thought make hers contract to hard points? What was happening to her?
“Speak your name.” That voice again.
She obeyed before she realized what she was doing. “Beth.”
“Beth,” he repeated. “It tastes like a meadow after rain. Beth. It pleases me. Show me your breasts.”
She reached for the shoulder of her blouse, started to push it down, then stopped. What was she doing?
“Go ahead,” he instructed. His voice was music that reached deep into her soul, made her want to join the dance.
She shook it off, said, “No,” but it was like the tide, lapping at her, and the urge came back even stronger. She wanted to expose her breasts. Because she wanted him to touch them. She fought it.
He knew. “Why resist,” he asked, “when surrender will bring so much pleasure? When you want to be on your back, beneath me, filled.”
She almost came from the thought alone and remembered with frightening clarity that she had never experienced a climax with another person in the room. She’d never come with a man. Or, at least, she had never come with Frank, the only man she had ever been with. And this one was a total stranger, and probably deranged. The thought was a tiny spark of sanity, and she clung to it. “Who are you?”
“I’m Conn.” As though that explained everything.
“Conn who?”
That seemed to amuse him. “Of the Aes.”
“Aes,” she repeated the syllables. “That just means ‘people’ in Gaelic.”
“You are pedantic as a Druid,” he said drily, but he also sounded amused. He crossed the room and touched her hair, stroked it. And she let him. She enjoyed it, was lulled by it. And by his voice, which went on, “You came to the mound looking for me. Surely you knew what you would find there. Only the Aes Sídhe, the people of the mounds, the Tuatha Dé Danann dwell in the hills.”
He was smug, like Frank, because he was handsome and women threw themselves at his feet. She hated that. And herself, a little, because she’d fallen for it, once. She latched on to her irritation, tried to use it to keep her head clear. “I am not some gullible tourist. I have a PhD in archaeology,” she snapped. Or tried to snap. It came out more of a moan. She leaned into his touch, so sure, so deft. “The Tuatha Dé Danann are not real. They’re a myth. The old Celtic gods recast by Christian monks as early Irish kings and heroes. The Fair Folk. The Good Neighbors. The Lords and Ladies . . .” she trailed off, blinked, looked down to find his hands at her collarbone. “The Fae.”
“Who worship beauty. Their own,” he said, sliding the soft cotton off her shoulders, letting it rasp her nipples, exposing her to his hungry eyes, “and that of others.” His skin brushed hers, an electric jolt, accompanied by a whisper in her mind.
Never let them touch you.
She ignored it. Nothing had ever felt so sweet as his hands on her breasts. Lifting them, testing their weight, rubbing the sensitive curve beneath the areolas, thumbing the tight nipples. Murmuring approval and admiration. Frank had always called her breasts teats and jugs, said they were too large to be tasteful. Had handled them roughly, as though annoyed with himself for being drawn to them despite their gaucheness.
This was different. This was . . . worship. This man—no, that joy-killing voice whispered, this is not a man—compared them to summer fruit, then bent his head and tasted them, his tongue latching on to her swollen buds and suckling, first gently, then with greater force. A hint of teeth, sharp, smooth, scraping over her sensitized flesh.
She was losing herself to his touch and his voice. “Your man leaves you wanting,” he murmured. “Let me ease you.” He pressed her down to the bed and she went willingly. Or part of her did. Another part of her was screaming inside, telling her this was all wrong, that she had to stop him, that something irrevocable would happen if she didn’t.
But the mischievous voice, the voice that wanted to know what it was like to enjoy a man, said, he’s a handsome stranger. You are having a casual hookup. Women do it all the time. Frank cheated you of this in college, stole your youth. Take it back.
“Frank isn’t my man,” she said, wondering why it was so important she tell him that.
“Lie down,” he coaxed. God, he was gorgeous. He was kneeling on the bed, his golden braids falling like silken ropes over her breasts. His eyes had appeared amber when she first saw him, now they were golden, catlike, feral. Wrong. But she no longer cared if this was wrong, so she didn’t look in his eyes. She looked at his c
hest—strong, muscular, only the finest scattering of golden hair over his pecs, leading down, down, where her hand wanted to go.
She pushed at his shirt. He obliged her and pulled it off, smiling down at her. His regard warmed her, made her feel alive and free and comfortable in her body. Beautiful, even. Though nothing could be as beautiful as his body. She ran her hands over his torso. Yes, those were tiny golden rings in his nipples. And a swirling pattern of scars, whorls, and dots that stirred some memory she could not quite grasp, over his rib cage. She ran her fingers over the rings and he hissed, a sharp intake of breath that told her he was pleased, and that made her feel powerful.
She couldn’t stop herself. She spread her legs, felt him push her skirt up and cup her sex. His touch felt like fire through her wet curls. She writhed, and her hand brushed the iron bedstead.
Cool and rough. Cold iron. Cleansing. She opened her eyes to see the creature poised over her with crystal clarity. Still blond. Still beautiful. With his hand between her legs. But fox faced. Cruel. It hurt to look at him. His eyes were cold, the planes of his face sharp and merciless. A perfection so alien it stopped her breath.
His fingers stroked. So good. She wanted this. Her grip loosened on the iron. His image blurred, became seduction itself, and she teetered on the edge for a heartbeat. Then she gripped the bedstead hard and screamed.
The words that came out were not English, and the sound was not her voice. But the meaning was clear: GET OFF ME!
Her cry threw him across the room. He hit the wall like an earthquake.
And the bastard laughed.
She’d tossed him across the room with the force of a geological event and all he did was throw his shoulders back and laugh. Never mind that she had no idea how she had done that.
He wiped a trickle of blood away from the corner of his mouth, then licked it off his hand, seeming to savor the taste and the violence at the same time.
She shivered, frustrated desire and revulsion making her sick. “What are you?” she asked.
Cold Iron Page 2
