“I only did as my heart bade.” I gave her my sweetest smile, and watched even her exasperation melt away.
“I cannot love you and I will not bed you,” she sighed. “If you can accept that, then I will stay.”
My heart rejoiced. She had not said did not love me but can not. I clung to hope and eagerly agreed.
That evening I brought her a rabbit and roasted it through the night. We walked along the cliffs at noon that next day and she retreated to the cave after to find her peace.
I brought her a grouse that evening.
“I heard the hound,” she told me when I returned. I nodded. “You heard it too, then?” I nodded again. “Surely it can’t be the same one?”
“How could it be?” I asked.
“Right. How could it be?”
When she woke on the third morning, she set her overgowns aside, and when we walked again at noon, the breeze flutter her shift in tantalizing waves across her most delicious curves. I took her hand as we walked, and she didn’t protest.
That night I brought back a brace of quail and we sat together, side-by-side, by the low fire, turning them on their spits till they were done. I offered her mine and, laughing, she gave me hers.
Noon on the fourth day I found her at prayer in the cave. She rose eagerly. “Already time for our walk?” she asked.
“My dearest Lady”—my eyes wandered in adoration across the perfection of her face to where her blue shift hung on the prominences of her shapely form—“I hoped today we might… forego… our walk.”
She sucked air between her teeth under the scrutiny of my adoration. Already I could see the slight shake of her head in protest while her body began to tremble with anticipation. “I can’t love you!” she cried, and it could as easily have been a reminder to herself as to me.
“Then you betray no one should you accept the simple comfort offered.”
“Damn you!” Once again I couldn’t be sure which of us she cursed, though it struck my heart like a physical blow.
“Damn your beauty,” she sobbed. “And your kindness. And your terrible patience. Damn you for bringing me here and for making it so perfect. Damn you for your own perfection. And damn me for what I’m about to do.”
I tensed, half in hope, half in fear.
She flowed into my arms, pulling my head down and covering my face with kisses. Then her lips found mine and she suckled at them with bruising force.
Shifting my weight, I settled her into me as I nudged apart her lips. With my tongue’s tip I teased and tickled before plunging deep. With a moan she tried to swallow me. Then I felt her hips insistent against mine.
A memory flashed of her pinned against a garden wall while Tris swived against her.
My staff, already hard, grew painful. I groaned into her mouth. She squeezed the linened globes of my hips with urgent hands and pressed me close.
No matter how slow and seductive I’d planned for this, it was clear neither of us had such patience.
Grabbing handfuls of her shift at the small of her back, I tugged up. We parted long enough for me to raise the shift over her head and for her to—
Ah, her hands at my lacings were maddening. Then she spread them apart and I sprung free. Bootless in the gentle grotto, I kicked away the cloth at my ankles and dropped Yseult’s shift after it.
In the light at the mouth of the cave we stood for a moment, arrested by the sight of the other. Fair and unflawed, Yseult’s every curve was beauty and grace itself, a masterwork of nature. A bounty so great it hardly mattered Tristan had been there first.
“Exquisite,” I breathed.
“And you”—she took a half-step forward and traced my jaw with a fingertip—“with the face of an angel. I only dared hope the rest would match.” She ran a finger from her other hand along the underside of my risen staff and it danced for her pleasure.
“Do I disappoint?”
“Only those who are denied the sight of you.”
I pulled her back to me as I sank to the cave floor. Hands on her breasts, I laid back, flicking the pink buds to attention as I offered her complete control.
With a sly smile she caught me firmly and straddled me. I nearly fountained at her touch.
“Hurry,” I begged.
She slid around me, engulfing my length with tantalizing slowness.
“Now.” It was her turn to beg, though I needed no encouragement and could have delayed no longer anyway.
Leaning over me, panting, she held my gaze with the intensity of a stalking cat as we moved together to the rhythm of the waves.
When she went still above me but tightened about me, her lips in a silent O of ultimate focus, her hands pressing my chest in plea, I wished nothing so much as to keep us both on that precipice of agonizing anticipation forever.
It was my own body that betrayed me. Of their own my hips moved, thrusting once, twice, three more times, hard and long into her sweet depths. Then every muscle clenched. Four quicker, faster stabs pushed me over the brink.
“Yseult!” I howled her name in purest delight even as she rocked above me, unbreathing, eyes tight shut. Then a sharp cry and she tensed, pulsing around me as wave after wave of joy poured through her.
Laughing, I licked the tip of her nose and she collapsed atop me.
“This changes nothing,” she said later as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms. “I still can’t love you.”
I nipped her ear. “Then I guess we can’t love each other again?”
Over the next two days I lost count of how often we couldn’t love one another.
Late afternoon on the day before we would have to return to Tintagel, we lay in our sea cave, I stroking Yseult’s fair body with undiminished delight.
“I have given you my everything. And yet,” I confessed, “I have given you nothing of who I am.”
The storm gray of her eyes deepened. “If you tell me you’ve slain an uncle of mine…” she began, only half in jest.
“Not to my knowledge.” It had been many years since The Wild Hunt had roamed Ireland.
“Then what secret can you have still that I have not already guessed?”
I met her teasing smile with grim resolve. “One you must never give up to anyone. Not to Tris or Mark, Anguish or Isolde. It is all I have left of me to give you, and I give it to you alone.”
“Then you should keep it to share with another. Not me. Not me who can never love you.”
The litany had become a whip to my back, striping me with its every utterance. Yet every utterance also gave me hope. I didn’t believe it was just me she was trying to convince.
“It matters not,” I said. “You deserve to know the truth of who—what—you’ve lain with.”
I expected a measure of fear. There was none. “Go on,” was all she said.
I faced her, my emotions as naked to her as my body. We had only one more day together. One day for me to win her heart to have her soul. The risk I took now loomed greater than any that had gone before. A complete baring of self to one who wasn’t fae.
I inhaled deeply, letting the scent of her bolster me. “The hound you’ve heard running the cliffs of Cornwall—it is no coincidence but indeed the same one that delighted you in Whitehaven.”
“But how did it cross the sea?”
“By boat. The same that brought you here.”
Suspicion dawned in her eyes. “A stowaway, you mean. It crept into the hold and hid.” She already knew that wasn’t true and expressed no surprise when I told her, “No.”
She pushed away from me. Not in fear or doubt. Simply of the unknown. Not yet knowing whether to fear or doubt or loathe. Putting distance between her and it. Giving herself space to react.
Only then did I consider my need to confess might not align with her need to know. My chest constricted in a panic I’d rarely known before.
What if I’d made a mistake? What if truth was about to destroy the fragile trust we’d built between us?
And
if it did, how would I survive?
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
YSEULT
I’d hurt him. His stricken look told me that. But I couldn’t return to his arms. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
I was suddenly aware of my nakedness as I’d not been for the past three days. Not since we’d first bared ourselves one to the other. I thought then we’d been at our most vulnerable.
I was wrong.
My hands fluttered, desperate to cover breasts and loins. With effort I stilled them because, not able to cover enough, they would only emphasize my nakedness.
How was it people closest to me—Tris, Des, Brangien—could keep soul-deep secrets from me? Was no one who they seemed? Or was I just gullible enough to believe?
And what now was Des asking me to believe?
“Tell me then,” I said at last, “where did the hound hide?”
“Here.” Des placed a hand across his chest. “The hound is here, within me.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. But already I knew otherwise.
“I am fae. A cursed fae, made to wear mortality for… a time. When I’m not playing at being a man, I run with The Wild Hunt. Herne is my father.”
There was deeper meaning here I wasn’t catching with talk of a curse and playing at being a man. But Herne and The Wild Hunt—I knew those cradle tales well. Or thought I did. “Are you fae, then, or hound?” And was I truly asking that of the man I’d taken pleasure with these past three days? The man I’d intimately explored and kissed, held and tasted? The man I knew for a man, exquisite in face and form.
“My fae are shifters. The hound is my other self, a part of me. A second aspect as inseparable as skin or bone or sight.”
“When the hound—you—came to me in the glen, you knew what you did?”
A shadow hooded his eyes. “Fae and hound are one—a single mind, a single soul shared between forms. And fae flow freely from one to the next. As a man, it’s… more complicated. I am hound, not of my own choosing, from twilight to the fall of night. When a man, the hound’s memories are… scattered, as the man’s memories are to the hound. It takes energy and forethought to guide the hound. Generally more than I have to give.”
“But you did, that night.”
“For you, yes. Mostly, though, the hound runs as it will, neither a mad thing nor wild.” He grinned. “At least it remembers where I’ve stashed my clothes.”
I grinned, too, at that. Such an ordinary—and human—detail.
“Does it happen every night?” I thought back over the time I’d known Des, only now recognizing the pattern. Even this past week he’d disappear at the same time to hunt. I didn’t wait for his nod before asking, ‘The rabbits and birds you’ve brought—?”
“Gifts from the hound. Much easier than setting snares.”
“So it knows… about us?”
“As I said, it’s complicated. Does it know you? Yes. Does it care for you? Yes, because I do. Would it protect you with its life? Most certainly. In its essence, it is still me.”
“And if it were to come to harm?”
“Its hurt is mine. Its pain is mine. As my joy is his. As my love is his.”
I nodded. Understanding nothing, yet comprehending all. “What is it to be fae?”
“It is long life and Old Magics, birth and death and an eternal search for happiness, fulfillment and love.”
“You make it sound so… human.”
His mouth quirked at that and his expression dissolved into a tender look of wonderment. “Perhaps there isn’t so much difference between us as fae and men believe.”
The low fire in the cave held back the dark but the shadow at its mouth spoke of a setting sun. Des glanced nervously from the grotto to me.
“There will be no more secrets, Yseult. My oath to that. I bow to your command.”
“You are still Des,” I said. “I see no difference.” Searching heart and soul, I realized I meant it. At least, “For now.”
“Ask me anything, my Lady. Only,” he nodded toward the deepening shadows, “later.” He stood, an Adonis in the fireflame. My Adonis.
“Wait. I will watch your hound tonight.”
I don’t know what I expected. Some violent transformation full of pain and agony, perhaps. Instead, Des surrendered himself completely to me, lying in my lap in the circle of my arms while we waited. One moment I was holding the most beautiful fair-skinned man in the world. The next a large, white-coated hound more handsome than any dog had a right to be. The shift from one to the other was hardly noticeable, no fanfare, no flourish. It simply was.
Des’ uncanny emerald eyes stared up at me, wise and intelligent. Its soft fur hid tight muscles beneath. I hugged the hound close, and for a time it allowed me to explore, from its flame-tipped ears to its long, thin tail, plumed with silky strands of fur that waved in delight at my touch.
Then, with the swipe of a warm tongue against my cheek, it pulled from my arms and was gone, baying as it went.
What more miracles did my world hold? I wondered.
I dug deeper at that idle thought as I waited for the hound to return. After all, I had come here to meditate and pray, and while I’d been most pleasantly distracted from that purpose, I had managed two full days and the odd bits of quiet time to think.
The greatest miracles in my life were the men who loved me. And, despite their secrets and their dark pasts, I could not turn away their love, reciprocating it even, though to different degrees. I had come here to find shame in my feelings for them. Because shame and remorse were expected. Because civilized people should feel no other way.
But shame would not come.
The profound lesson I had learned here instead was that natures could not be changed.
Just because he was my uncle didn’t make Sir Marhaus a nice man. He had set himself as a target, taunting all to challenge him. Whitehaven’s champion had grown ever more conceited in his quest to subjugate all who came his way. None in Whitehaven gainsaid him. My father even encouraged him, using him as a tool to exploit the tribes around. With no benefit to change, why would he, even had he grown old in Whitehaven’s halls?
Nor could Tris have disobeyed Mark who saw him as his surrogate son. Where Mark bid, Tris fought. His duel with The Morholt could have gone either way, but it was Tris who won and The Morholt who had used a coward’s poison against him.
Both had been commanded by their kings to fight. They acted out of duty—no less than I would be doing in just a few days. Tris had fought honorably, The Morholt had not.
My heart knew Tris’ nature as well as it knew my dead uncle’s. It took no need of prayer to understand how, spelled or not, I could still love Tris.
And not only love him, but forgive him.
Forgiveness for myself, too, I’d found rather than the shame I’d come seeking.
In like wise, the man I knew as Des was in nature most honorable. How could he as fae be otherwise? His otherness should have repulsed me. I should have been shamed even now for laying with him. Perhaps most women taught that different is evil would have been. Instead, these last few days were folly only in how much more deeply I now held Des in my heart. More than ever the fact remained I could not love him. More than ever I did.
My time here had given me clarity but no comfort. Everything had changed—and yet nothing really had.
Tomorrow I would return to Tintagel—and Mark. In four days, I would be his wife. I had come to find my way to shame for loving those who would not be my husband, and had instead found myself absolved for loving them.
How is it I could be so miserable when my heart sang so free?
It was the hound that returned to me, a partridge in its jaws, which it laid aside on seeing me. I opened my arms and the magnificent beast walked willing into them. When I closed them, it was Des the man I held, his body hard yet supple and pliant in my hands.
I let him take me one last time on the floor of the sea cave in the midst of our secret grotto. And when h
is impossibly beautiful face flared in ecstasy with the brilliance of the noonday sun, I impressed the image upon mind, desperate that I should never forget it.
And when we stood by our horses in the early morning ready to ride, I told him in all gentleness, “No matter what comes, remember that I don’t love you less, it’s only that I love Tristan more.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
YSEULT
That night I supped again with King Mark and the knights of his House. Tris sat again at the high table, only this time pulling his chair next to mine. Mark found no reason to gainsay the arrangement so long as I let his hands roam where they may.
Des sat at the first table before us, looking lost and alone. I frowned my way through the meal to Tris’ consternation, affected by Des’ gloom and Mark’s unwelcome hands. Tris and I had only one moment of privacy when Mark turned his attention to Dinas, his seneschal, to address a piece of business that likely had to with the wedding or the wedding guests.
“Will you meet me?” Tris’ whisper was urgent with the hope of forgiveness.
“The king’s courtyard. At ten,” I agreed, confident this king would not be retired by then.
Relief flooded Tris’ face, the expression so raw I feared Mark would see.
Only then did it occur to me to wonder if Des’ hearing was as keen as his hound’s. I flicked a guilty look his way. Perhaps it was only my imagination but he appeared more crestfallen now than before.
When I arrived at the courtyard, Tris was already there, pacing in nervous excitement. Not waiting for greeting, he swept me into his arms, his mouth greedy against mine.
“Has God put you at peace, then?” he asked when we parted for breath.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you still love me?”
“Yes.”
“Then Mark be damned.” With a flick of his hand he was unlaced. Wrenching high my skirts, he lifted me up to his waist. Wrapping my legs around him, I felt him rising, hard and swift. I leaned over his shoulder as he entered me.
Was it my imagination or did I see emerald eyes blazing in the dark?
Queen's Heart: An Arthurian Paranormal Romance (Arthurian Hearts Book 2) Page 14
