by Harper, Dani
Morgan tried to suppress her smile. “Omigosh, are you actually using Jaws as some kind of relationship analogy?”
He simply shrugged. “It wasn’t until Brody followed his instincts instead of his orders that he was able to save the town from the monster. It’s the same with many things in life, including the bond between men and women: instinct often reveals the greater truth.”
Rhys had succeeded in surprising her again. “That’s very wise,” she said. “So I’ll admit that my instincts know what I want. But my head hasn’t decided if it’s good for me yet.”
“You mean if I’m good for you.” He leaned over and kissed her, long and deep until she thought she’d drown in the pure bliss of it. Then he rose. “Perhaps you need to try me in order to know,” he grinned. “My thanks for the pizza and the movie.”
Morgan watched him leave the room, then sighed as she heard the back door close. Why had she let him leave? Sometimes being sensible felt an awful lot like being stupid.
“Lucy looks really good. Far better than I expected.”
Rhys looked up to see Morgan in the doorway of the stable. The rising moon highlighted her hair with silver and sharpened her fine features. She almost looked like one of the Fair Ones, except there was genuine warmth in her expression, true feeling in her eyes. But exactly what that feeling was had him puzzled. Something was different, changed. “You did fine work on her,” he said as she approached.
“That was just the beginning. It’s your constant care that’s brought her around. I saw you walking her after supper tonight. She doesn’t seem quite as stiff.”
“The heat is gone from the wounds. She still has pain, but she knows she must move. It’s a very fine balance between moving too much and not enough.” He sensed that Morgan was the one walking a fine balance. She hadn’t come to talk about the horse, that was certain. At her house, she’d admitted she wanted him—but had she made a decision?
She nodded. “I guess we make a pretty good veterinary team then, you and I.”
“I think we would be very good together in all ways,” he countered boldly, daring her to reveal herself.
“I think you’re right.” Without any warning, she stepped into him, but she’d barely begun to slide her arms around his neck before he seized her. Cupping her lush bottom in one hand, he tangled his other hand in her hair and brought her lips to his. Torn between the need to feast and the desire to savor, he explored her mouth thoroughly and was delighted when she held him to her as fiercely as he was holding her.
He nuzzled her ear, alternately kissed and nuzzled his way to her throat, as his hands pushed under her blouse to cup her full breasts and thumb their peaked nipples. His cock had reared up hard to the point of pain, and his control trembled. By all the gods, he was hungry, nay starving, to press her skin against his, to touch and grasp, taste and nip. Ravenous to bury himself deep and hard in all that softness until he was insensible. The urge to take was overwhelming, and he fought to bridle it back as if it were a half-mad warhorse.
Morgan welcomed Rhys’s rough palms on her skin, his textured caresses providing a rich sensory overload. She shrugged off her blouse and fought to unbutton his shirt, planting desperate rapid kisses on his chest as she exposed it. Her breasts were tight with arousal and she pressed them against the hard planes of male muscle. Something new was building in her, something primal. She gloried when his strong hands shoved her jeans down her thighs and gripped her bare ass, lifting her until her toes no longer touched the ground. Instinctively she rocked her bottom in the cup of his palms and rubbed her nipples over his chest, wanton and triumphant at the same time. The scents that surrounded her took her back to her dreams, ramped up her arousal until all her senses were electrified and begging for more.
Instantly Rhys responded to her unspoken need, tossing her lightly onto the quilt-covered straw that was his bed. He stripped away her jeans, then stood back as if to admire his handiwork. She should have felt self-conscious, normally would have half-covered herself with her arms and hands. Instead, she welcomed his gaze, reveled in it. She wanted his eyes on her. Suddenly she was inspired to open her legs and circle her fingers in the wetness there. He reeled slightly as if physically punched and quickly skimmed off his own clothes. Omigod. Morgan inhaled sharply as he revealed his rampant cock, ran his hand along its length as if brandishing it. “Yes,” she breathed. “Mmm, yes.”
Rhys knelt at once but didn’t give her what she asked for. Instead, Morgan was certain she might die of anticipation as his hot, open-mouthed kisses roamed slowly up the insides of her legs. He nuzzled her inner thighs and pushed her legs wide, breathed on her inner folds. Then ran his tongue along them, in them, up and down, flicking his tongue lightly over her pearl before settling in to feast.
Morgan was wild beneath the onslaught of sensation, knotting her hands in Rhys’s hair as he devoured her relentlessly. And when the orgasms burst through her, her screams were both helpless and jubilant, snapping the ropes of his control like weak threads.
He was inside her at once. She was hot and slick and pulsed around his cock like a tightening fist. He pounded into her, faster and faster as she urged him on, higher and higher until the sweet annihilation of release overtook them both.
Exultant, he sank to the quilt-covered straw and gathered Morgan to his heart.
Morgan awakened to the sound of geese overhead. The morning air was cool, and she snuggled deeper under the quilts, nestling back against Rhys, who tightened his arm around her. She breathed in the sweet scent of straw, the warm tang of horse, and sighed contentedly, her entire body still in a kind of languor. Their lovemaking had been like nothing she’d ever experienced. Earthy and raw, tender and fierce, it had unlocked a depth of passion in her that she hadn’t known was there.
It had unlocked her heart as well. Nothing had ever felt more right than being skin to skin with Rhys. Nothing had felt so much like home as being in his arms. She’d never felt such an intense connection in her life. Never imagined it was even possible.
That connection was even more apparent as they reached for each other twice more in the night. It sang in her very veins as he whispered to her in a language she didn’t know, yet understood just the same. He was a strong man, but his touch was tempered with a tenderness that utterly disarmed her. And through it all, in his arms she felt the sense of belonging that she’d been missing for a very long time.
She snuggled closer, breathing in his scent, and slid back into sleep for a time until she startled awake and found herself alone. “Rhys?”
“Morning to you, anwylyd.” His voice came from Lucy’s stall, and Morgan sat up to look. There he was on his knees, gloriously naked, as he changed the dressings on the mare’s wounded legs.
“Morning—what did you call me?” Morgan ran her fingers through her hair to remove some wisps of straw from it.
“Anwylyd. It means beloved or darling one.”
A few days ago she might have protested, but today it sounded good. There was something solid and right about it. There was something solid and right about the defined muscle that covered Rhys’s broad frame too, and she admired it openly. He moved slightly, and the early sun through the stall window illuminated an odd pattern of silvery lines crisscrossing his back. Clutching a blanket around her against the cool air, Morgan struggled out of the makeshift bed and stood by Lucy’s stall.
The first time she’d seen Rhys naked—when she’d threatened him with a garden hoe—she’d noticed a number of wide white scars on his arms, legs, even chest, and thought them profuse. She hadn’t seen his back at that time, hadn’t seen his back in last night’s darkness either. But her fingertips had felt dozens upon dozens of long raised ridges. In daylight, the damage was even more appalling than she’d suspected. Unlike the scars on his arms and legs, these stripes were narrow. They crossed Rhys’s spine from neck to tailbone, wrapping tapered edges around his ribs and shoulders and hips. There was barely an inch of skin that wasn’t bru
tally marked. Morgan felt shaky, almost ill, at the ghastly evidence of long-ago abuse before her and sat on the grain bin for support. “What the hell happened to your back? Who did this to you?”
Rhys didn’t answer at once. Instead, he finished wrapping the mare’s leg, before wiping the salve from his hands on a cloth and putting the supplies away. Finally, he came to stand in front of Morgan. His eyes still reminded her of ale and old gold, and his gaze was steady on hers. “To the Roman way of thinking, a man with the sign of a dog should be treated as a dog. They whipped me for sport as much as for punishment.” He shrugged. “It was a long time ago, and their bones are naught but dust now. Truly, the Fair Ones were just as cruel, though they didn’t lay a hand on me.”
Dust. Romans. The Fair Ones. Morgan didn’t know what to say. Her expression must have showed her bewilderment, because Rhys tried to brush her face with his fingertips, and heaven help her, she shied from his touch. She didn’t mean to, but her mind was racing like a rabbit from a lynx, panicked and desperate. She cared for this man—crap, she loved this man—and he had abruptly morphed into a deluded stranger again.
Suddenly furious, she was upset with him for changing, yet most of her anger was directed at herself. Wasn’t this her very own fault? Why hadn’t she asked more questions? Why had she rationalized away the strange things he’d said when she first found him naked? Had she thought that if she just ignored them, Rhys’s mental problems would simply disappear?
“Look,” she said, fighting to steady her voice and losing the battle. “I don’t know what you’re dealing with, but you don’t have to do it alone. We can work on it together, find you some help—”
“Help?” He looked both puzzled and annoyed. “There is no help for the truth.”
“The truth? All I’m hearing is fantasy here. You’re still trying to tell me that you’re over two thousand years old, for God’s sake!”
“I told you about the Tylwyth Teg—”
“Those are goddamn faery tales! Stories for kids! They’re not real!”
“They were real enough when they changed me into a grim.”
Morgan stared at him for a long, long moment. His expression didn’t change, his golden eyes remained steady. “Please tell me you don’t believe what you’re saying. You can’t. It’s not rational. Something’s wrong, something’s giving you these delusions, these hallucinations, and we need to find you some help, some treatment, medication, something.”
“It’s you who are needing a bit of help,” he said gently. “You’ll not allow yourself to believe; perhaps you’re afraid to believe that there is more to the world than what you see. There are many things all around us that are old and powerful, and they’re to be respected not feared.”
Morgan forgot to breathe for several seconds. Those were Nainie’s words—exactly what Nainie had once said to her. How could he know, what did it mean? She sucked in a lungful of air just in time to realize Rhys had ahold of her hand. Before she could pull it back, he had placed her fingertips on a scar just under his rib cage.
“You’re a healer, and a fine one. Do you not recognize your own handiwork?”
What? Morgan saw at once that this wound was different. It was pinkish and raised slightly, fresh knit. She could discern that it had once been sutured with tiny, even stitches. But it was the shape of it that electrified her—a long straight slash with a hook at the end, like the letter J. She’d had to make an incision to enlarge the stab wound on the black dog, so she could repair the damage to his heart and lungs. Her finger traced along the scar almost of its own volition. The scar was located in the same place, oriented the same way…
She yanked her hand away as if from a hot stove. “It’s just coincidence. It has to be!” Desperation edged her voice. “Just a crazy and bizarre coincidence, that’s all!” Sliding from the grain bin, she edged around Rhys and backed toward the stable door.
He didn’t move. “I don’t like that you fear me.”
That halted her in her tracks. She marched up to him until they were only inches apart and planted her index finger in the center of his chest. “I. Am not. Afraid. Of you,” she said, emphasizing every word. “But I’ll tell you what I am afraid of. I’m afraid that your fantasies are contagious. I’m afraid of buying into your make-believe world. I’m afraid of loving you so much that I tell myself it’s perfectly okay to know absolutely nothing about you. And it’s not okay, not at all.”
“You already know everything that’s important about me. I’ve worked every day to prove myself to you, but you refuse to give me your trust.”
“My trust? You’re living on my property. That’s a helluva lot of trust, mister. And so was last night, goddamn it. Now you’re messing with my mind again, and I don’t like it. I want the lies and the games to stop. I want them to stop right now.”
He reached for her as if to hold her, but she knocked his hand away and headed for the door once more. She could feel his eyes on her and paused at the threshold to face him. “I want you to leave. Take your fantasies and go play with somebody else’s life.” With somebody else’s heart…“Go back to Leo’s or go to hell, but don’t come back, do you hear me?”
Rhys’s face darkened, but he didn’t move from the spot, only folded his heavily muscled arms across his broad chest. “I hear you fine. And now you hear me, Morgan Edwards. I’m not daft or touched in the head. I’m not a liar. And I’m not playing any foolish games. Do you think what we shared here was just a lark to me? You have my heart, and if I’m not very mistaken, I have yours as well. I want to make a life with you, but there’ll be nothing between us without trust and truth. I’ve given you both. Where are yours?”
She opened her mouth and closed it again, unable to form a coherent response to such an outrageous question. Truth indeed. Romans and fairies and death dogs, oh my. Morgan turned on her heel and marched to the house with the blanket flapping around her, angrier than she’d ever been in her life and glad for it, because it kept the pain in her heart at bay.
SIXTEEN
After slamming the door and locking the dead bolt, Morgan peeked out the window and saw nothing. Rhys hadn’t followed her, and for some reason, that made her even madder. Good. Fine. Dandy. She stalked to her room, muttering and fuming. Balled up the blanket and threw it into a corner.
She showered in the hottest water she could stand, scrubbing herself furiously as if she could erase the memory of Rhys’s touch. Remained under the water until it was too cold to bear, but it failed to cool her anger. Morgan toweled off and pulled on clothes in a fury. What the hell had she been thinking? It had been foolish, absolutely stupid of her to let this man, this stranger, stay on her property in the first place. And downright crazy to have sex with him.
Sex. Her fury suddenly popped like an overfilled balloon, and Morgan sank to the edge of her bed with her head in her hands. It hadn’t been just sex, not by a long shot. Not for either of them. Whether she liked it or not, the connection was real and powerful. She felt as if she had known Rhys all her life, in spite of the fact that she’d only just met him. And she loved him—that was certain. She’d always been on the cerebral side, cautious and careful, inclined to consider all the pros and cons and analyze everything to the nth degree…
This one time—just one damn time—she’d followed her heart, her instincts, and now look at what had happened.
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She was good at analyzing, and if ever a situation called for it, this one did. Okay, step one: lay out the facts. That turned out to be harder than she thought, because the fact was that Rhys hadn’t exactly committed a crime. He hadn’t beaten her, stolen from her, cheated on her, or done anything other than work around her neglected farm and care for a wounded horse. In fact, the entire dilemma lay in his outrageous ancient-warrior-becomes-death-dog story.
Well, so what? That made him a goddamn liar, didn’t it?
But was it still a lie if he believed it? Everything in his face, his eyes,
his body language, said that he was telling the absolute truth. Morgan had never heard of anything like this, had certainly never seen the situation mentioned in the advice column of the newspaper. And as problems went, it seemed insurmountable. She couldn’t just ignore it—it would always be the elephant in the room. And who knew what other strange things Rhys believed or what odd behaviors could develop because of it?
It didn’t help a bit that her partner, Jay, believed that the intricate silver dog collar proved that Rhys’s strange tale was true. Surely Jay was letting his own wishful thinking cloud his judgment—yet his judgment had always proved sound before. She relied on him at the clinic without hesitation. Why should this case be any different?
Was there any chance, any totally wild, billion-to-one chance that Rhys’s story could be true?
Oh, for pity’s sake, now I’m buying into the fantasy. She snorted, but the derisive sound turned into a sniffle and her eyes filled with unwelcome tears. She sniffed again, loudly, and a mounting headache had her heading to the kitchen for the bottle of ibuprofen she knew was on the counter. Afterward, she wandered aimlessly to the living room with a box of Kleenex under one arm and stood staring at her many bookshelves. Sunlight penetrated the venetian blinds on the windows, and bright rays fingered the numberless issues of veterinary journals, enormous resource books on every species of animal, and texts on chemistry, pharmacology, and anatomy.
Nainie had laughingly called her a bookish child, and the evidence plainly showed she still was one. But the titles on the spines had been very different when she was younger. Faery tales, folklore, myths, and legends. Elves, witches, ogres, and dragons. Spells and curses. Good and evil. All just silly fantasy of course, but Morgan still felt a pang of nostalgia. She had loved every single one of them. How many nights had she pleaded with Nainie to keep the light on just a little longer so she could read more of the wonderful stories?
