Oh, Lachlan.
What a bittersweet declaration of love.
And what a fool she had been, imagining that she’d become so good at reading Lachlan’s expressions. The way the little scar by his eye whitened when he was angry. The way his cheek flexed when he wanted something he didn’t dare take. But for all that, she’d failed at understanding his most important message of all.
He can offer me nothing.
She pushed away from the bedpost and wandered to a fire that couldn’t warm her. She didn’t have her mother’s gift, but right now she could see her own future as clear as day. If she chose to stay with Lachlan, she’d be living in a hut on the outskirts of some Loch Fyfe village. A place where Lachlan would visit her now and again, when his wife and other duties allowed him. Cairenn would live in that hut and hear news about the chieftain’s wife bearing him heirs, one after another. Perhaps she’d bear him a child or two of her own, bastards without names. She would tend to them as she waited by the door in the hopes of hearing the hoof beats of his horse coming through the woods. Days upon days passing, months upon months, years upon years, while she lived far away from him, as well as the only family she knew.
Forever an outcast among outsiders.
“I’ll take that berth on Angus’s ship.” The words passed through her throat like sandpaper. “My parents must be missing me.”
She heard his weary exhale. This was the kind of trouble that happened when a woman wrapped herself up in dreams and ignored that which is not spoken aloud. This was what happened to a woman when she couldn’t see into a man’s deepest thoughts.
He said, “I can’t let you go, Cairenn.”
“Don’t say such things.”
“Everything has changed.”
“Yes. I’m finally the wiser.” No more would she stride to the lonely heights and watch the ships sail out of Galway Bay, for Lachlan was the dream she had chased and now that dream was lost. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll be on Angus’s ship before the people of Derry can even think to build the witch’s pyre.”
“You’ll be on a ship tomorrow, lass, but you won’t be apart from me.”
She wondered why he persisted when every word was a plunging knife.
“I’m bound to seize back Loch Fyfe,” he said. “Your gift will help me do that. Willing or not, you’re coming with me.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Cairenn sat in the back of the galley, swathed in a woolen cloak borrowed from the wedding-chest of Angus’s late wife. She gripped the gunwales of the boat against the surge and lap of the sea. There was little wind, so the sailors had furled the sail. Fourteen men worked the oars in a sea dense with fog. None seemed concerned by the fact that they couldn’t see more than a stone’s throw beyond the ship’s curved prow, and the low silhouette of Derry had long been swallowed by the fog behind them. They just kept working the oars, steady and hard, doing their best to avoid looking at the witch within their midst.
And here she was, with the sea wind in her hair, and a ship rolling under her feet, and an adventure waiting ahead, just as she’d once dreamed. Yet all excitement or joy or even fear was subsumed by the numbness of her heart. Lachlan had left her alone in that bedroom last night, thwarted, aching, and flummoxed by a new, disturbing truth. His sense of duty was a far stronger force than the love he’d confessed.
If he truly loved her, he would have sent her home.
Now she couldn’t help but gaze at the man who had broken her heart, for Lachlan stood at the prow of this ship, looking more chieftain-like than ever. As the man most familiar with the crags, islands, and promontories that would make the best approach to the lands around Loch Fyfe, he would search for an anchorage where they could hide the ship in case they had to retreat from enemies. She knew this through the thoughts of the sailors around her, because Lachlan’s mind was battened tight.
“Lugh’s Seat is coming up fast port-side,” Lachlan said, throwing his voice over his shoulder. “Cut to stern, half-speed, drag the blades.”
The man behind her worked the rudder as the galley slowed. Energy surged in the oarsmen, who’d been rowing tirelessly in shifts for hours. Their minds swam with a mixture of tingling anticipation and heart-pounding wariness that she suspected all soldiers felt when faced with looming danger.
A craggy rock appeared from out of the fog, the base foamed with the crash of the sea. Seals swarmed over the stone, barking and ducking their sleek black heads as they dove headlong into the surf. Lachlan shouted orders as the galley slipped by only to weave through a series of smaller rocky outcroppings, just as infested. But for the random arrangement of stony islets, she was reminded of Inishmaan and the other Aran Islands and how they appeared to sailors as their ships tacked their way into Galway Bay.
The fog thinned to wisps as they entered the mouth of a river. Now she could see the sun, a bright white spot in the sky.
“Head to that anchorage,” Lachlan said, pointing to a scalloped landing just ahead, a sliver of mud at the base of a wooded slope. “We’re in MacDonald lands, but they rarely patrol these wild places.”
With a foot on the gunwale and a hand on the curved prow, he twisted to meet her gaze. His face was stone, but his eyes posed a silent question. She cast her mind toward the shore, spreading her consciousness as far as she could. She did the same for the opposite shore, sensing only the seals swimming around the galley, poking their heads above the water in curiosity, as well as the tickling consciousness on land of red squirrels, tiny voles, and a flock of flighty birds.
Her heart lurched when she turned to find Lachlan waiting, but she met those midnight-sky eyes and nodded.
“We’ll camp here,” he announced. “Tomorrow we’ll march out by land.”
When the shallow-draft galley pulled close to the shore, Lachlan leapt out and dragged the tow-line to a sturdy tree trunk. The men settled their oars, paddle-up, and then by turns leapt over the gunwale, hauling their packs above their heads. She stood up and headed toward the bow to find Lachlan waiting, his hand held out toward her.
The word betrothed was like a wall between them, one that had nothing to do with the black curtain of his mind.
Slipping a strong arm around her back, he swept her up as if she weighed no more than a bag of flour. She may as well have been a sack of supplies for all the attention he paid to her as he carried her to the shore. Absorbed in the pattern of beard now thick upon his jaw, she didn’t realize how far he’d carried her beyond the anchorage until he deposited her out of earshot of the men.
He said, “Still no one patrolling?”
She started at his rough voice, so curt. Like he hadn’t stretched his naked body over hers last night.
“There’s no one nearby.” She mentally probed the woods all the way up the slope. “Not as far as I can tell.”
“And how far is that?”
Each clipped question was a pinprick that drew another drop of her heart’s blood. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“On the height of Inishmaan, I could hear sailors on the ships that passed to and from Galway.” She wished he wouldn’t loom so, she could hardly breathe. “But I could see those ships with my own eyes, and I was far away from people like your sailors, filling up my mind with noise.”
It was a half-answer, but it was the only one she had. It had never even occurred to her to measure the range of her gift, it was always too broad as it was. Yet he stood before her as if waiting for a better explanation.
She said, “If I were to move farther from those sailors and foray into the forest a little deeper—”
“No.”
“Why? Do you think I’ll run away?”
“If you’re seen, we’ll be forced into a skirmish.”
“I won’t be seen because I will sense them before they see me. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”
He twisted to glance toward the sailors, setting up camp some ways away.
“They can’t hear us,
” she said. “Though they are wondering if I summoned up the fog that shielded our journey, or conjured the seals, and what other witchery I might now be brewing for you.”
“In Derry, you told me that those men were loyal.”
“They are loyal. To Angus, and thus, by his command, to you. That doesn’t mean their minds aren’t wild with superstition. Now are you to let me use my gift for our safety, or was your reason for dragging me here just a mockery?”
She imagined she saw a glint of guilt on his face before he turned away, waving to the deeper woods.
“Be off,” he said. “But don’t wander far.”
She turned on one heel and headed away from him. Slivers of pale sunlight cut through the trees to streak the forest floor. She pulled her senses away from Lachlan’s shuttered thoughts and cast her mind wildly into the world. She sensed no other life but that of an owl stirring in a hole in a tree and a fox going still as she passed by its den under the wood of a fallen pine.
She continued to walk long after she stopped bothering to listen. These quiet, thick woods bore no resemblance to the windswept heights of Inishmaan, but her soul sensed that it was a lonely place nonetheless. She let her feet lead her. A pang of longing pierced her to the quick, for the warmth of her family’s hearth, for the sight of her mother’s gentle eyes, for the familiarity of her own people.
She should have realized that the high-born were not like the laboring folk of Inishmaan, who chose as lovers whoever took their fancy. The people of Inishmaan married young, threw up a house, and happily kept a patch of land in order to feed the single cow given in dowry. But the high-born were like the wounded warriors who found their way to Da’s sickroom. Coughing blood, they’d brag of their exploits and boast of their ambitions, risking their lives and the lives of their kin for the stupid, blind determination simply to be called “My lord.”
What a fool she had been to give her heart over to Lachlan of Loch Fyfe.
She shuffled to a stop in a pool of hazy light. Out of breath, out of reason, she fell to her knees amid a circle of trees. She raised her gaze past the treetops to the endless northern twilight and wondered how she found herself in this strange place, in such a sorry state. Did she ever really have a choice in the matter? Or had her fate been sealed the moment she’d looked upon Lachlan, stretched naked on the sands of the strand?
She remembered the lines of poetry that had come to her when she’d first laid eyes upon him, lines from the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows.
I would have a man like that
Hair like the raven
Cheek like blood
His body like snow
What irony that she was destined for the same fate as the mythical Deirdre, forever in love with a man to whom she could never be betrothed.
A familiar voice rose from behind her.
“I ordered you to stay close, Cairenn.”
Lachlan stepped into the circle of oak trees just as she remembered another thing about the doomed Deirdre of the Sorrows.
Deirdre had defied a king for a chance to be with the man she loved.
***
In the gloaming, she raised her head from her knees and looked at Lachlan with bright, unworldly eyes.
His heart shifted when he saw the determination on that face.
She surged to her feet and headed for him. Orders shouted in his head—stay safe where you are, little Cairenn—but they didn’t make it out of his mouth. He’d promised himself that he would protect her—from hope, from harm, and mostly from himself. But the sight of her striding toward him with her face alight broke whatever brittle will he’d constructed. Ever since he’d left her bedroom last night, his heart had been full of wanting.
His arms opened for her as she approached, but he seized her shoulders instead.
“Cairenn—”
“You don’t love her,” she said, leaning against his grip. “This woman you’re betrothed to.”
He should lie but her eyes wouldn’t let him. “I’ve known her since I was a child. I don’t love her in that way.”
“Like a sister, then?”
“A bratty, temperamental one. Our betrothal is just a union to solidify the septs of the clan, nothing more.”
She tilted her head. “Swear to me it’s true.”
“To that I’ll swear.”
“Then I’ll be your leman.”
Those words shot to his head faster than a dozen quaffs of ale. His thoughts scattered in a thousand directions, muffled under the riotous pounding of his blood. To be a leman, she would entrust her life, her future, and her body to him with no expectation other than what he offered through kindness. His cock tightened, making it all the more difficult to summon his wits and what was left of his tattered honor.
She shifted in his grip and he realized he was squeezing her shoulders too tight. He eased his grip but fixed his will. “You deserve a better fate.”
“Yes, I do.” Her voice cut like a blade. “I deserve a hard-working husband of my own kind. I deserve a man who will speak vows in public and grant my children his name. But tell me, what chance did I ever have for that, with who I am, and all that I know?”
He had no answer for her. She claimed she could not read his thoughts except in a shared bed, but he remained uneasy with her powers nonetheless. How much harder it would be for a man she could read all the time.
“I’ll take what the world allows, Lachlan of Loch Fyfe,” she said, “if you’re still willing to offer me your heart.”
In the end, it wasn’t just her words that made him surrender what was left of his tattered promise to her father. It wasn’t just the sight of her pale, lovely face, or the beauty that lay beneath her clothing. It was the scent that rose from her pale hair, the salt-sweet scent of the open sea that gave way to a fragrance of sun-warmed rocks and crushed grass that gave away to something muskier. Her fragrance birthed fantasies of the life they could have lived on Inishmaan, if he’d had the liberty to choose.
She made a small, gasping sound just before he captured her lips. He pressed his mouth against hers and felt for a moment like they stood upon the height of her island. Nothing existed in the world but the ground beneath their feet and the trees standing like sentinels around them and their bodies so close he could feel the pillow of her breasts against his chest.
She made another sound, a whoosh of breath. Coming up from their kiss he saw the splay of her hair across the grass and realized that he’d swept her off her feet and laid her down beneath him. He looked at her in the hazy light of the lingering northern twilight. He ran his palm across her breast and her body arched, pliant to his touch.
A groan vibrated in her throat, he felt it against his mouth as he kissed the hollow. He loosened the tangle of her laces as he ran his teeth across the wool that covered the nub of her breast. The arch of her back formed a pocket for his hand. Her fingernails scratched his shoulders in the fury to pull away his tunic.
He loosened her tunic enough to yank it down until one sweet nipple strained away from the restricting neckline. He took it between his lips and rolled it around as she gripped his head and shuddered with her pleasure.
“Lachlan.”
His balls clenched, for in the speaking of his name he heard how much she ached for him. He gave up trying to pull down her tunic and instead gathered the hem of her skirts until he found the flesh of her thigh beneath. He ran his fingers up until one firm buttock filled his hand. She moaned and her head fell back onto the grass.
Rising up on his knees, he shoved her skirts up. He made short work with his belt and tugged his surcoat and tunic over his head as one. Her hollow belly rose and fell as he eased her knees wider. His cock throbbed when the shadow of her cleft came into view. He seized her by the hips and dragged her body closer to the swell of his shaft.
Then he paused, though the air was cool and her cleft gleamed and his cock pulsed for release. He wanted nothing more than to plunge into her and feel her hot body throbbing a
round him. He could give her nothing but his heart and the fleshy pleasures of their bodies, so he would make her come—hard, fierce, and often. He hesitated because she was a virgin and deserved a sweeter, kinder loving, but that was in part a lie. There was another reason that held him back from doing what nature demanded.
Once he slipped inside her body, she would slip inside his mind.
What would the woman he loved think when she pierced the shell of his long-blooded name and his Roman education to see within him the dull, ordinary, unlikely warrior?
He had no time to ponder, for her thighs quivered in his grip. He released them and ran his fingers toward her cleft to grant her the release she needed, but she gripped his hand still before he could touch her.
Her eyes were in shadow but her face filled with longing.
“Please,” she said, moving his hand away from her sex. “Come inside me, Lachlan.”
Her words scattered the last of his reason. He stretched forward, planting his hands on either side of her. He would accept the consequences. Perhaps if she knew the worst, she would revoke her offer to become his leman and leave him for safety as soon as his duty to Loch Fyfe and his clan was done.
So he surged forward until his cock kissed the warmth of her cleft.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cairenn dug her fingers into his arms as he pressed deeper between her legs. She craved his fullness, even as the pressure became painful. She flinched at a sudden, sharp twinge. He paused, the muscles in his forearms flexing.
In that moment of stillness, their breath rasping, she forced her heavy eyelids open to the sight of his midnight-blue eyes. He watched her as if he were trying to reach into her mind with his own. In the flex of his cheek, and the tiny movement of the muscles around his eyes, she sensed how he struggled to remain suspended when he wanted to sink fully into her. His restraint was a sweet kindness that rippled through her, causing the tingling pain to ebb and her body to soften around him.
Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3) Page 13
