by Carolan Ivey
Beith swiveled her head around, Kel’s breath hot on her neck, and found a dark shape lurking deep in the back of the dolmen. Burning yellow eyes peered out at her from the dark shape. No, not at her.
The eyes were on Kel.
Thank you for bringing him to me, daughter. He should fill my needs nicely. For a little while.
Something inside Beith shifted from apprehension to fury. “No. No, you can’t have him.” Kel didn’t seem to hear the snarl that emerged from her throat.
A low grunt was her answer. Now that’s what I wanted to see. A moment ago you would have pushed him away if I hadn’t held your hands and forced you to use your own power. Take him and enjoy him—for now. Whatever’s left of him after tonight belongs to me.
The black shape and burning eyes faded away, leaving only the little rippling pool of water on the floor. She felt Kel’s hands on her shoulders.
She turned toward him. Her vision blurred and her knees buckled as she caught her left foot in a crack and her leg gave way. She found herself scooped up and on her way back toward the Harley.
“Did you see that?”
“I saw something,” he said tightly. He lifted her over the fence and stood her on her feet. “We’re getting out of here.”
She leaned against the stones and surprised herself by laughing drunkenly as adrenaline left her limbs. “It was the Hag. The old woman of the land. The Cailleach.”
He climbed over the wall and stood before her for a long moment, saying nothing, his face unreadable. Then he set his shoulder in her belly and hoisted her up like a sack of potatoes, which only set her off laughing again. The logical part of her brain observed from a distance and tsked.
“Can you ride, woman?”
She snorted, then clapped her hand over her mouth.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said dryly.
“She wanted you. I told her—” she paused to gasp and she kicked her feet as she laughed harder, “—told her she couldn’t have you.”
“Did you, now?” He sounded amused, but he didn’t slow his pace. In one strong motion, he swung her off his shoulder and onto the back of the bike.
She looked back at the dolmen, and her laughter died. Suddenly, all she wanted was to get herself—and Kel—away from here.
“I need a drink.”
“We need that bed.” He brought the Harley to life, put it in gear and accelerated down the track without even pausing to put their helmets on. He said something else, but the wind sucked his words away.
Beith slid her arms around his shoulders, tilted her head back, and let the cool wind tangle her hair. For the first time since her accident, she felt fearless.
Take him and enjoy him, the Hag had said.
Oh, yes, she thought. The old Beith is back and there’ll be nothing left of him for you, old woman, when I’m done.
The Hag let her fingers trail through Beith’s streaming hair as the midnight-blue-and-silver wheeled beast streaked past in a pitiful effort to get away.
This land was her body, and anywhere they touched land, they touched her. She knew exactly where they were at every moment. She felt the pulse of their pounding hearts in her own breast. The throb of their excited bodies in her own center.
Yes. These two were exactly what she had been waiting for.
She lay back and reveled in the delicious tension between her mountainous thighs, an itch she would not scratch. Not yet. She would let it build until the ripest moment. When the time came, their cries and hers would echo in tandem.
Their release would merely shake their hearts.
Hers would take the tide that crashed against the Cliffs of Mòr and turn it back upon itself.
The Hag shifted so that a shimmering stream flowed over her aching breasts and throbbing center, letting the wetness stimulate her dreams and cool her ardor just enough to allow her to wait.
Coiled. Impatient.
And ready.
Chapter Five
The poorly maintained cattle tracks and fire roads leading to Inisnagowan Castle were not for the faint of heart nor weak of vehicle suspension, but Kel barely slowed the bike.
His heart pounded in a way that he’d never felt, not in any of his extreme sport activities. Not even when he’d launched his chute off the Cliffs of Mòr—illegally, which was the most fun—or hung upside down in a tangled rappelling harness in New Zealand with only Fionna’s quick hands to keep him from falling to his death.
His mother had told him he had the sight, but he had never felt it nor believed it. Until he’d seen the primordial black creature with the runny yellow eyes crouching at the back of the dolmen, and Beith talking to it in gut-deep syllables that bore no resemblance to English.
The energy that emanated from it was female, but felt like no female he had ever known. Its power would have sent him backward several steps—he who never retreated from any challenge—if it hadn’t been for Beith standing her ground between it and him. When Beith had turned and tripped into his arms, that same fiery light had burned in the back of her pupils. Then she’d blinked and it had disappeared.
In that split second, he had been afraid.
He remembered the old tales from childhood, and from Fionna’s late-night bardic ramblings. Of how the Cailleach would walk among the people every so often in the guise of a ravishingly beautiful woman, luring young men into a forest. There, she would rut with them all in a vain attempt to slake her lust. Taking each one over and over again, tossing aside one lifeless body and leaping upon the next. Until they were all dead.
He shook it off. Those were just tales. Myth.
Beith said nothing during the ride, her breath warm and coming fast on the back of his neck as the Harley bounced over the rough roads. Her hands scrambled for purchase on the shirt covering his chest, looking for something to hang on to. He risked a few seconds with one hand off the handlebar to move her hands down to the waistband of his Levis. But instead of gripping the waistband, she slipped her small hands under it to press hard against his lower belly, nails digging in. A groan vibrated his throat. Her cold flesh and the sting of her nails only made the pressure in his groin increase. He set his jaw and tried to concentrate on the road while his imagination conjured up erotic images of her naked skin in his fire-lit bedchamber.
As the tern flew, it wasn’t many miles to the castle, but there was no direct way to get there. The shadows of the late midsummer day grew long as the castle’s single stone tower loomed into view. Evening mists already gathered around its base. Urgency gnawed at his gut, to get her far away from the Hag—and in his bed—as quickly as possible. Fionna would have laughed at this. Even now, they rode on the Hag’s back and no doubt the Old One knew exactly where they were. Nevertheless, the quicker they got behind the walls of Inisnagowan, the quicker he would draw an easy breath.
From the outside, Inisnagowan looked like any one of hundreds of abandoned stone castles and abbeys that dotted the Ireland landscape. That was just how he liked it.
Inside…he smiled to himself. Well, Beith would soon see.
He leaned the bike into a blind curve that disappeared over the crest of a rise. He’d traveled this road enough to know exactly how it dropped off on the other side. Too fast, he realized, and throttled down as he crested the rise. To come face to face with a knot of about a half-dozen sheep loitering in the middle of the track.
Beith made a sound as he reflexively hit the brakes. The rear wheel skidded sideways precisely at the same moment the front wheel hit a fresh pothole. Beith screamed as she came off the bike and sailed into the steep embankment beside the road. Kel managed to jerk his right leg out from under the bike as it went down in the mud. “Bugger!” he yelled, frightening the sheep back through the break in the fence.
He killed the engine and left the bike on its side, jumping over it to get to Beith. The bank was soft, thanks to thick layers of turf, moss and grass, but he’d heard her hit it with a solid thump. She lay flat on her back, eyes huge
, mouth wide on a gasp she could not take.
She reached for him, grabbing two handfuls of his shirt as her lips moved in a silent litany of oh shit oh shit oh shit…
He pressed her back against the slope. “Try not to move your head, darlin’. Hold on a few more seconds. Your wind’ll come back. You’re all right. Easy now.” He knew well how agonizing those ten to twenty seconds were before the diaphragm re-engaged. He passed the time cursing himself, brushing her hair away from her face and probing the back of her head for bumps.
Finally she got one word out. “Leg.” Followed by several long, relieved breaths as air flooded back into her lungs. But none of the anxiety left her eyes as her hand went to her left thigh.
“Hurt?”
A quick, jerky nod. Fear in her eyes. Her throat working convulsively as she fought some strong emotion. Kel cursed himself again, looked at the leg and gently ran his hands over it, but everything seemed to be in proper alignment. Nothing moved or crunched. He grasped her ankle and carefully bent her knee. “How’s this?”
“No, I think that’s fine. It’s…oh shit I cannot go through this again…” She passed a shaky hand through her hair.
“Through what again? What’s wrong?”
Angrily she dashed tears from her eyes. “I was in an accident not too long ago. My left thigh bone is pretty much nothing but plates and screws.”
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Shite, woman, why didn’t you tell me?” He put up his hands. “Never mind that now. I’m going to press on your belly. Tell me if anything hurts.”
She parted her jacket and lifted her shirt, but he put her hands aside. “Don’t move anything if you can help it, especially your head.”
“My neck’s okay. It doesn’t hurt.”
“Humor me,” he said more curtly than he meant to. He closed his eyes and pressed the flats of his fingers around the four quadrants of her belly, feeling for anything that wasn’t supposed to be there.
She laughed shakily. “You’ve done this before.”
He nodded and kept probing her soft flesh. “In my line of work, a certain level of medical training is required.”
“Is it, now?” She raised one eyebrow as her wobbly voice mimicked his Irish lilt.
“’Tis.” He offered nothing else. “All right. Let’s stand you up and see what we’ve got.”
She swallowed audibly, rubbing her leg.
“Better to find out now, darlin’.” He gentled his voice as best he could, what with the adrenaline surging in his veins. “Then I’ll know whether to take you on to the castle, or to Galway to hospital.” At which point Declan will find us and I’ll be a dead man, brother or no.
She was just scared, he told himself. If the bone were truly broken, she’d know it.
“Castle, huh?” she said, as if glad to have a different idea distract her from her leg.
“Castle. That’s where we’re staying the night.”
She nodded and pressed her hands against the embankment to lever herself up.
“Let me do the work,” he said gruffly, sliding his arms under hers and lifting her to her feet. For a long moment she clutched his shoulders, then let her weight come down on both legs.
She shifted, testing. Then wiped her nose on her sleeve and lifted her chin.
“I think I’m okay.”
Just like that, the wildish Beith who’d offered herself up to him with abandon on the Burren, who practically had him coming in his jeans on the bike with a simple touch, reverted to the Beith he’d met at the airport. Stiff and distant. The one who didn’t want help, didn’t want to be touched.
His heart did something else it had never done before. It ached.
The sun slipped behind the hill and she shivered in the gathering evening fog. Shock would be setting in right about now. “Don’t move,” he commanded. “Just stand there and I’ll bring the bike to you.”
“It’s three steps. I can do it.”
“T’ree steps you don’t need to take, girl. Stand there.”
I’m going to feel this in the morning. Every bone and muscle in her body began to ache as Kel pulled up in front of the imposing square tower, which was perched in a glen between two long slopes that led down to the sea. She craned her neck to peer up at its four stories of sheer stone walls, punctuated here and there with arrow-slit windows.
He reached back and laid a firm hand on her knee. “I’ll be right back.”
She was getting a little tired of being ordered around. She scooted back a few inches to give him room to get off the bike, and just that small effort set off a Greek chorus of twinges and pains. Kel opened a concealed panel in the stone wall and set about punching a series of buttons. Other than that, there was nothing on the outside of the stark edifice to indicate anything other than bats lived here.
A movement at the corner of the building caught her eye, and she leaned slightly to look beyond where Kel was standing.
She was back. The shadowy, yellow-eyed figure that had spoken to her in the dolmen. Somehow she had followed them here. The Hag said nothing, just squatted in the lengthening twilight and gathering fog, fondling one of her own pendulous breasts as she stared at Kel and licked her full, shiny lips.
Breath coming fast, Beith tried to get off the bike, her only thought to get to Kel. But her leg shook as it met the ground and she was afraid to move any farther for fear of tumbling to the fog-wet turf. “Get away from us, old woman,” she gritted under her breath. “I told you, you can’t have him.”
There is no running from me, daughter. I will have what I desire. This one may live long enough to satisfy me. But alas, none of them ever does. The yellow eyes looked her up and down. And you are not woman enough to keep me from what I want.
“Watch me, Old One.”
Oh, indeed, I shall.
Kel’s broad chest loomed in her line of vision. Two strong arms wrapped around her as her left leg seized up in another spasm. “Dammit,” she hissed through her teeth as he picked her up yet again to cradle her like a child. “Stop carrying me everywhere. It’s getting annoying.”
“It’s quicker than standing around arguing with you,” he shot back, shifting her so that her arms fell naturally around his shoulders. “Besides, you’re so…”
“Easy?”
“I was going to say portable.”
Even as he spoke, she looked over his shoulder at the Old One grinning with green, algae-covered teeth. Rubbing herself as her yellow gaze roamed Kel’s broad back.
Beith narrowed her eyes at the Hag and tightened her arms around Kel’s neck. To the core of her being, she sensed his life was in danger. To save him, she would have to overcome every demon clinging to her soul
She had no time to admire the interior of the castle as Kel carried her through an anteroom with stone walls adorned only with iron hooks, on which hung heavy yellow rain slickers. Several pairs of wellies were marshaled neatly along the wall.
Through one arched doorway she caught sight of a dimly lit great room and a fireplace big enough for her to stand up in, before he whisked her on by and up a narrow spiral staircase. He paused only to hit a light switch with his elbow. Two landings swept by her vision, each with doorways leading to cozy bedrooms and sitting areas, all simply furnished.
“All right, I take back my statement about you being ‘portable’,” he puffed as he stepped sideways through a door at the top of the stairs. He elbowed on the light, and she gasped in wonder.
The large bedchamber was a study in medieval splendor, all stone walls and shadowed alcoves, rough-hewn wooden tables and sturdy caned chairs. The soft light of midsummer evening filtered through what had to be modern windows installed in an alcove, falling on an unadorned canopy bed loaded with pillows and tartan blankets. The bed was arranged next to an enormous carved-granite fireplace, with an iron stove set inside it and a basket of peat ready to burn.
She looked down at the floor as he set her on her feet, and laughed.
“Sheepskin rugs. You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Nearly a dozen of them, pools of wooly cream against the coffee-colored wood-plank floor.
“You’ll come to love them in the morning when you get out of bed and your feet hit this floor,” he said, sliding her jacket down her arms and depositing it in a muddy pile in a corner.
She looked down at her feet. “Kel, I’m covered in mud.” She made to step off the rug he’d set her on, but a fresh ache in her back stopped her cold.
“Even with your muddy shoes, I daresay it’s cleaner than when the sheep was wearin’ it.”
She laughed and looked up into his face, and the laugh died in her throat. The Kellan O’Neill before her bore little resemblance to the care-free, ready-for-anything man who had raced off with her on his motorcycle that morning. This Kellan’s face was tight with an emotion he was clearly uncomfortable showing.
Tenderness bloomed in her chest, and she reached up to stroke his lower lip with her thumbs, seeking to ease the tension there. After a moment, he released a breath, took her hands and kissed each of her palms. Then he drew them up and around his neck, slid his palms down her sides and pulled her close. She went without resistance, the trace of surprise in the back of her mind melting away with a rapidity that left her wondering at how quickly and easily this land had changed her back to something resembling her old self.
“I have to know something,” he rasped.
“Anything,” she agreed, ignoring the soreness in her shoulders as she sifted through his thick, glossy hair with her fingers.
“If what happened on the Burren was real.”
He lowered his head, and she met his parted lips with her own.
This kiss was gentler than the first, but no less charged. His taste filled her mouth, entered her bloodstream and spread fire clear out to her fingertips and toes. He hands roamed her back, gently, finding the bruised places and soothing the hurt away with his heat.
He pulled her hips in to his, pressing her throbbing belly against his erection. Mmmmmmm.
