by Carolan Ivey
Taking a silent breath, she looked up and found the sparkle in his eye, the half-smile and the accompanying dimple firmly in place. Her heart thumped.
“You must be hungry.”
Her foot slipped off the peg and an involuntary squeak escaped her throat as she lurched sideways. Cobblestone rushed toward her face. This is gonna hurt, she thought, a split second before she landed on rock-solid arms. She found herself clutched close to Kel’s chest, looking up into green eyes.
“Thanks,” she murmured. “Klutz. I mean me. Klutz.”
“Low blood sugar,” he replied, the dimple on one side of his mouth reappearing, like a north star. “When’s the last time you ate?”
Someone brushed past them on the sidewalk, a blurry figure in grey, indistinct out of the corner of her eye. The figure chuckled, low, husky, like rocks scraping together. The sound rolled lazily around her head and settled at the base of her skull, tickling an ancient part of her brain that was nothing but pure impulse.
Kiss him, daughter. Mark him as yours with your own mouth.
As if in a dream, she lifted her chin toward him.
Her stomach growled.
She shook herself and flicked her gaze to the left, but the figure had vanished. Shifting subtly, she made to ease out of his arms, and he set her on her feet without resistance. But with that half-smile firmly in place.
“Nothing solid since I left Cleveland,” she replied, straightening her jacket. “Was that the Burren we passed through?”
He took her change of subject in stride. “So you recognized it.”
“How could I not? Kemberlee described it as a place with ‘not a tree to hang a man, not enough water to drown him, and not enough earth to bury him in’.”
He laughed, scanning the street again. “That would be it. After I feed you, I’ll take you to the heart while the light is still good.”
“Then let’s get lunch to go and get out there,” she suggested, eager to begin photographing—and stop imagining what Kel’s body looked like naked.
He cocked his head. “We could. I would. But I have the feeling that if I let go of you right now, you’d fall down.”
Realizing she was still standing in his arms, she pulled free of his grasp and stepped back. Praying that her left leg would hold up. It did, without a wobble. By sheer force of her will.
Walking, she could do. Sitting for hours astraddle a motorcycle was something she hadn’t planned for.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said without a trace of rancor. Which somehow irritated her. “But I’ve friends in here and I’ll be stoppin’ in to say hello, at least.”
“Oh.”
“Take a breath.”
“What?”
He leaned forward and tapped her nose. “Close your mouth and inhale t’rough your nose.”
What is with this guy? Mentally rolling her eyes, she obeyed. Ahhh…
“Smell that, do you? That, my darlin’, is the best Irish breakfast in the west of Ireland.”
Mouth watering, Beith allowed herself to be led toward a red-painted door. “Will there be blood pudding?”
He raised an eyebrow in obvious surprise.
“My grandmother came from County Cork,” she said, feeling her scarred mouth stretch as she aimed her first genuine smile in his direction.
Kel’s foot missed the step up and he fell head-first through the pub’s half-open door.
Beith followed the sound of hearty guffaws and colorful insults toward her long-overdue breakfast.
The next time Kel stopped the bike, Beith slithered off the right side on her own. She had her helmet off, pannier open, camera out and a lens attached before he could even shut the engine off. He took his time securing the bike, enjoying the view of her bum as she leaned over the drystone fence by the side of the road, snapping pictures of a large dolmen about a hundred yards distant.
The mobile in his back pocket vibrated. He pulled it out and checked the number before he answered
“Fionna.”
“You feckin’ owe me for this one.”
“Where are you?”
“Right now? I myself am at Hook Head, enjoying the first real sunny day of the summer. Everyone else is spread out over County Wicklow.”
Kel grinned. “I do owe you.”
“Why am I doing this for you again?”
“Because once, a long time ago, I made you scream like a bean sidhe.”
“Because you stepped on my foot and broke it, you oaf.”
Kel grinned and snapped the mobile shut.
Walking up behind Beith, he slipped one arm around her waist, another under her legs, and unceremoniously lifted her over the low stone fence, setting her feet on the solid granite face of the Burren.
“What are you doing? Isn’t this someone’s private property?”
“As long as we don’t disturb the sheep, no one will mind.”
“What sheep?” she said, looking over the empty, desolate landscape.
“Exactly.” He climbed over the fence and joined her.
She smiled in delight and set off, picking her way uncertainly along the rocky ground.
“Funny. The ground sounds hollow,” she called over her shoulder.
In a few strides he caught up with her, his own boots ringing bluntly on the rock.
“This whole region is basically a giant granite shield, cut by millions of fissures, thanks to the wind and water. If you look at it from the air, the earth looks like the wrinkled face of the Hag.”
“You’ve seen it from the air?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said offhandedly. “I’ve flown my chute over it hundreds of times.”
“You mean like a parasail?”
“Something like that. Like an ultralight, only with a chute instead of a wing.”
She stopped in her tracks and stared at him. “What is it that you do when you’re not taking defenseless artists on joy rides across the country?”
“I work for my brother. In security.”
“Security. That’s rich, the way you drive that bike.”
“Some very important personages stake their lives on my driving ability. Trust me, darlin’, you’re safer with me than driving yourself.”
She tilted her head. “What kind of security?”
“Let’s just say it’s the kind that keeps heads of state from coming to harm when visiting less than friendly ground.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
He grinned, amused at the lines that formed between her eyebrows. “Worried about me, are you?”
She snapped her mouth shut and moved on, cheeks flushed in a way that told him she was, at the very least, intrigued. This woman was different. Most women he met, when they learned what he did for a living, well, suffice to say he had no trouble finding company when he wanted it.
This one, she was timid. It would take time, but she’d come around. They all did. Even before they learned about his second love, extreme wilderness racing.
They reached the dolmen, a three-sided structure made up of solid stone slabs. Another slab perched precariously on top, held in place by nothing but gravity. To the uneducated eye, it looked like something out of the Flintstones.
She walked around it, touching the walls with tentative fingers, as if afraid she’d accidentally knock it down. “What is this?”
“It’s said to be a tomb of kings. At some point, it was covered with a mound of rocks—a burial cairn. There are some tombs not far from here, still buried. I can take you there if you like. They say this one could be older than Stonehenge.”
“How does it stay standing up? I don’t see any mortar.”
Kel couldn’t resist. “Hag spit. Stronger than any mortar.”
Beith’s mouth quirked. She swung her lens toward him and quickly snapped his picture.
“The Hag,” she prodded, continuing to circle the dolmen, taking pictures from every angle.
“She’s also called the Cailleac
h.” Fionna’s Guinness-fueled lectures came back to him as if she were speaking in his ear. “She’s said to inhabit the very bones of this land.”
“Who is she? This Cailleach?”
“The mother of all other gods and goddesses. The most ancient of all. The most primal. The most…” He gestured, looking for a word, taking a second to study a car passing by on the road.
“Feared.” Beith ducked inside the dolmen. “I wonder if this place is a shrine to her.” Her voice echoed from inside the chamber.
The car rolled on by without slowing down, and Kel relaxed.
“Hard to say.” He followed her inside, finding it was tall enough for him to stand almost upright. “She’s older than this place. So old, no one knows her true name. She’s at least as old as the world itself. We don’t even know how she was worshiped, what rituals they used.”
“So she’s been forgotten.” Beith angled her knees wide and did a strangely balletic move to the floor to dip her fingers in a small pool of collected rainwater in the dim back of the structure.
“And that makes her a little wild. Unpredictable, because no one knows what will displease her. They say she’s a lustful goddess and no man was safe walking the roads alone at night. About a hundred years ago, near this very spot, they found a man. Or what was left of him. Just a bag of bones—but by all reports he died with a smile on his face.”
Beith shot him a look, and he almost snorted out loud at his own words. He was starting to think like Fionna, believing in these antiquated tales. Yet, in this vast, empty space, he felt smaller than he’d ever felt in his life. Odd. He’d been coming here since he was a child and knew it like the back of his hand. Every dolmen. Every tomb. Every contour of the land.
Somehow, he felt like the land was watching him. Watching what he would do next. Judging if he was worthy. Of what?
He shrugged it off.
“This is amazing.” Beith wiped her wet fingers on her jeans, then rose and exited the dolmen. She walked in ever-widening circles around it, stopping every few feet to snap a picture. Of a tiny flower. Of rocks. Of the landscape. Of the miniature dolmens that tourists had built with splintered-off chips of rock.
“There are tern nesting sites here?”
“No, closer to the coast, where we’ll be staying. Tomorrow’s soon enough to start scouting them out.”
She nodded and switched lenses to begin shooting the stony horizon.
She’s hiding behind that camera.
He watched for a few more minutes, irritation growing as she continued to look at the Burren only through her lens. Finally he could take no more.
In a few strides he caught up with her. Coming up behind, he reached around and caught hold of her hands.
“Stop. Look with your eyes, not your lens.”
Her body stiffened in his arms. “I work from high res photographs. The more I take, the better my final product.”
“Give me the camera.” He didn’t know where his words were coming from, but he suddenly didn’t know what he would do if she didn’t obey.
She shifted, releasing the camera, and he slung it over his shoulder. She made no move to step out of his arms. Did he detect her trembling?
“Okay, now what?”
What indeed? He wasn’t sure, himself. All he knew was, he’d spent the last several hours with her warm body up against his back, trying to concentrate on the road and making sure they weren’t being followed, all while battling a raging hard-on. He’d never felt this with any woman, ever—never this close to losing control.
And now she was in his arms, her soft body pressed against him. Her sweet scent filled his nose. The sounds around him went silent—no wind, no birds, no passing cars. Nothing but a faint noise in his ears, like someone taking a deep breath and holding, holding it. A tension that needed release. His body took up a slow throb, a drumbeat he felt from his feet to the crown of his head.
Keeping hold of her, he walked her back inside the dolmen, took her hands and placed them on the stone wall.
His better sense warned him she was going to think him completely insane.
After almost a full minute, she spread her fingers out on the stone slab.
“Do you feel that?” she whispered. “What is that?”
He felt it. The low, insistent vibration, the pulsing, like the flow of electricity along a wire.
He felt her breath quicken and realized he had a hard-on pressed against the small of her back. He cursed silently, but nothing on this green earth was going to make him move away from her. She turned suddenly in his arms, backing up against the stone. Her eyes were huge, her pupils dilated, her breathing fast. His gaze fell to her mouth, and he wanted to cover it with his, scar be damned.
For a weird second a strange weakness swamped him. He wanted to lie on the ground and beg the Hag—something. What? Release him. To let him leave this place with all his parts intact. Especially his heart, which thumped like it wanted to leap out of his chest.
Beith’s hair came loose and blew about her face. Her expression was one of a woman who wanted him. All of him.
She blinked once and licked her lips. Her brown eyes turned deep gold.
Somewhere in the distance, he thought he heard an old woman laugh.
As if an unseen hand shoved him from behind, he leaned forward and took her mouth.
Her first thought was that Patrick had chosen her tour guide well.
Her second was that she was standing in broad daylight, pressed against a millennia-old stone dolmen that might at any moment tumble to the ground, trying to put her tongue down a near-perfect stranger’s throat.
She felt cold stone under her hands where they were pressed flat at her sides. She commanded them to move so she could push Kel away, delicious as he tasted in her mouth. She didn’t know what had driven her to allow herself to stand in his arms like this. She’d heard Ireland was full of magic, but she’d attributed it to the fanciful tourist brochures. In any case, this had to stop.
Her hands didn’t move.
She whimpered into his mouth and struggled to raise her hands, but they stayed stuck fast to the stone as if glued.
Her heart began to pound, but strangely, not in panic. She tore her mouth away from his and turned her head to one side, gasping for air.
“Kel.”
His mouth roamed down the side of her neck. His labored breathing filled her ears.
Even as she arched her neck to give him better access, she yanked and tugged at her hands, but they refused to move. He misread the writhing of her body and unzipped her jacket.
Before she could gasp her next breath, his hands dove under the two thin layers of shirts she wore and sought her breasts.
Oh God.
“Kel!”
Cool air beaded her nipples, and she found herself arching her back into his touch. His fingers tugged at the hard peaks, and he swallowed her raw cry as he took her mouth again.
It had been so long. But this was different. Although she couldn’t move, it was she who controlled the ravenous power spiraling up from her feet through her spine, to explode with sensation along every nerve ending. She found that wherever she centered her spinning thoughts, the energy followed and created pools of almost unbearable pleasure.
Push him away? Hell no.
Why couldn’t she move her hands? She wanted those hands on Kel, in his hair, to pull his mouth down to her aching breasts. Why were her feet planted just as solidly on the rocky ground below? She wanted to wrap her legs around him and pull him inside. Yet she could do nothing but stand there, compelled by some unseen force to do nothing but feel.
Something wild pounded in her head, exultation razor-edged with sheer panic. The same kind of panic she’d felt when she’d woken up in the hospital, weighed down by casts, IVs and miles of wire, a tube down her throat. Only this time she had no desire to break free.
His hands left her breasts to slide down her torso, and just the knowledge of where his hands were head
ing was enough. The energy that surged up from the ground, centered in her groin.
She tipped her head back and screamed as she came, but his mouth followed hers and swallowed the sound.
Suddenly, her hands were free.
She wasted no time in grabbing two handfuls of his glorious hair and plundering his mouth as she rode out the waves of pleasure on his marauding hand. Finally she pulled his face away from hers. His hair had come loose from its ponytail, and the wind whipped it around his face.
“What is this place?” she gasped, the last echoes of her orgasm still shuddering her body.
Kel blinked and yanked his hands away, his face pale, but his eyes still burning with desire. His lips moved. He was saying something, but no sound reached her ears. No sound but the laughing woman. Nearer. Louder.
She wanted him right now, down on this hard stone earth, any way she could get him. The mental image of the two of them naked on the land shortened her breath.
Curving her fingers under his jaw, she pulled his face to hers and sucked his lower lip between hers, watching his eyes. His low growl vibrated against her lips, but instead of reaching for her again, he planted his hands on the stone on either side of her head and let her have her way with his mouth. His breath came faster, his erection pressing against her belly.
She let her hands slide down his chest, down his belly, which contracted at her touch, to stroke him through his jeans.
This Beith was like no Beith she had ever known. Old or new. But she could learn to like this one, the one who held this man captive with only the power of her touch.
The land changed and shifted around her. Grass growing in the rock fissures at her feet became millions of strands of mossy hair. Long, rounded slopes became thighs; the cairn-topped hills, breasts that swayed in the sharpening wind. Stony ridges, arms that hemmed them in. Rainwater pools became eyes that shimmered with lightning-hot life force.
Ah, rasped a voice, unseen, coming from somewhere below her feet, winding up her spine like a serpent to vibrate in her ears. Long have I waited for such a man to lie on my belly.
