“I am the woman I am today because of those things which molded me.”
“Mayhap you would have still been she without the suffering.”
“We will never know. Let us not think upon it,” Clara finished.
He nodded. “I will try.”
“That is all I ask of you...and Matthew.”
Bracus glowered at the mention of Matthew when they were together.
Her eyes flashed to his. “You understand that his circumstances predicate his feelings in this matter.”
“I do,” and he lowered his voice, “but you are not Margaret.”
“I know, but I am symbolic of all females for him. His mother, Margaret, all. You said yourself that a male of the Band, in those circumstances would be quite...”
“Damaged,” he finished for her and she nodded.
“It is a miracle that he pursues me, that he wishes contact, that he trusts at all.”
“Clara, he is a fine warrior. But he may be too broken for even you to repair. You cannot entertain being with him solely because you feel sorry for him.”
Clara turned on him, fire blazing from her eyes. “I do not make decisions based on sympathy, especially ones concerning my future mate.”
“Trying to talk her out of our courtship, Bracus?” Matthew said, approaching at a leisurely pace. But any fool had only to look into his eyes to see the rage, caged there like an wild animal.
Bracus tensed, hauling Clara against him protectively and she struggled against him.
It was Matthew for Guardian's sake, she was not fearful!
Matthew's eyes flicked to the hands which held Clara and rolled to her eyes. She knew not what her face held but Matthew reacted and with a roar he charged Bracus.
Clara could not have them fighting over her she thought, sweeping out of Bracus' arms just as he relaxed his hold on her, anticipating Matthew.
She rushed him and got wrapped up in her skirt, Matthew's fist connecting with her body as she moved through the air in an elaborate fall created by tangled legs. At the last instant Matthew's superior reflexes pulled the blow but it glanced off Clara's shoulder and her arm fell numb to the elbow. She shrieked in pain as she fell and landed on her back.
Joseph and Phillip rushed into the circle and Bracus bellowed, “Hold him.”
“No!” Clara yelled, her opposite hand gripping the wounded shoulder. “It was but an accident. Do not punish him.”
But Bracus had murder on his face as Matthew dropped to his knees beside Clara. His were pools of sapphire fire, regret lay in them like a shroud of sorrow. He reached a hand out, the largeness eclipsed by the shaking when Philip and Joseph jerked him to his feet as instructed.
Bracus came to him and swung his fist into his muscled torso, the skin around the flesh rippling outward at the impact and Matthew gritted his teeth and bore the assault.
Clara struggled to her feet coming at a limp, her shoulder making her lame and unbalanced. “Do not touch him!” She shouted, beating a small fist on Bracus' back, her other arm hanging limply.
He struck him again and Matthew did not defend himself. He behaved like he deserved it and it broke Clara's heart.
Clara would stop this, she took the flat part of her instep and kicked out, connecting with the back of Bracus' knee. It unbalanced him and he stumbled. It was the best that she could manage.
He turned on her in a rage and she stumbled back, falling again. He stormed to her and she whimpered, only wanting the violence against Matthew to stop. She put her hands up above her face, as she had many times in the past. An imperfect solution.
But it was what she knew.
Then Matthew was there, shielding her body from Bracus.
Bracus stilled. “What? Do you think I would beat her? As you just did?”
“It was but an accident. You know I would cut off my own hand before I would strike her. It is you that is beyond control. What would you have done had I not been here?”
“She needs to see reason,” Bracus stated, evading the question.
“You mean, she needs to choose you?” Matthew said, pulling Clara into the hollow of his body, reddened and bruised where Bracus had struck it.
Charles jogged to them. “What goes on here?” he looked at Clara in Matthew's arms and glared at them. “Are you hurt? Have they injured you?” He looked between the two silent Band members then his gaze landed on Philip and Joseph.
“What say you? What in the name of the Guardian is going on here?” They were quiet and Charles repeated, “This is our queen. Speak now.”
They began at the same time and shifted their weight nervously.
Clara began instead, “It is my fault. I have incited some kind of rivalry that we cannot escape from by my indecision with Matthew and Bracus. They fought and I came to be in the way.”
Charles' mouth fell open. “Really? This slip of a girl got between two raging bulls?” Sarcasm laying upon his words like molasses.
Matthew's eyes narrowed on Charles'. “Mayhap your memory grows shorter. I remember very well the circumstance at the alliance when you charged like a bull which raged. Clara was in the way and it mattered not.”
Clara put her face in her hands again. This was all so difficult.
Bracus crouched down beside her and she flinched and his eyes tightened. “I would never hurt you. You know this. Why do you react thus?”
“I know that you would never hurt me. But Bracus, I have been hurt. I cannot shut off my responses like a spigot.”
“Enough!” Charles said and Bracus stood, looming above him.
Charles stood his ground. “Mayhap when you wish to abuse each other, you do it out of the presence of Clara. Then there can be no instance of injury upon her?”
Bracus' fists clenched. He knew that this worked to this man's advantage, looking the victor, looking so calm. But he was not Band, he did not understand their temperament.
Only Band knew Band.
He looked down on Clara. “Choose.”
Clara looked up at him. “I am queen and I will choose whom I shall be wedded too. No amount of bullying will speed my decision. Once we are settled at Cape Cod and the answer to my kin is known, I will announce who shall join me at the throne. Until then, I need distance. It should go without words but I will say them nonetheless: it went against you that you would direct the Band to hold a comrade and beat him. Look around us,” Clara gestured to the wilderness, “we are not safe and you use your strength against each other.”
Matthew stood with Clara against him and she yelped as her shoulder tweaked. Bracus lurched forward but she held up her hand. “Do not. I unhappy with both of you. Matthew should not have sparked this fight but you took out your frustration on my ambivalence against him. I will not abide it. We are almost there,” Clara said, pulling away from Matthew and staring at them both. “Both of you stay focused on our journey, not the underlying matter of our relationship.”
“Well said, Clara,” Charles said, leading her away by the elbow. As they walked away, Charles looked back and smiled at the Band. Fools, that look said.
Bracus looked at Matthew. “He looks better at each turn. His lack of violence an aphrodisiac to Clara.” He gave a level look at Matthew. “I am sorry, my brother. I behaved shamefully.”
Matthew looked back at him. “I accept. Let us come to an understanding here.” Bracus looked back at him. “We do not compete so much with each other as we do with him.”
Bracus looked thoughtfully after where Clara and Charles had walked off together. “You are right, he has the advantage of many years with her. He knows her as we do not.”
“She is select. That is our one advantage we will always have.”
“Her blood calls to us,” Bracus stated and Joseph and Philip nodded.
“And ours to her,” Matthew said.
Bracus smiled. Simple biology would make her theirs. Charles a distant third.
Which man was the real question.
Matthew and Bra
cus stared at each other for a tense moment, finally breaking off to break down camp.
The sea lay waiting.
And with it, Clara's answer.
CHAPTER 14
A meal of stewed rabbit lay in a lump in Clara's stomach. She had never felt less like eating in her entire life. The altercation between Matthew and Bracus lay as a stone inside her belly. She sighed and turned on her side, wincing. She had forgotten her shoulder.
And it had been a glancing blow.
She shuddered. A male of the Band would do incredible damage to someone under their fists. The vision of Tucker's pulverized head floated behind her eyes.
She moved to her back and tried to relax her body. Mealtime had been a tense affair. Everyone strung along a tight-wire, the sea within grasp, answers to her questions like an adrenaline surge in everyone's system. Mayhap one days' travel more, Bracus had promised. Clara had felt something integral shift inside her when she caught sight of the sea in all its shimmering glory. It was as if she had returned home after being away on a long sojourn. But she had not. Her home was a months' travel from this spot.
Her sphere; the Kingdom of Ohio.
She felt a stirring inside her and just as she would have looked about her a hand covered her mouth and the sound she made was swallowed by the warm palm on her face.
She gazed into Matthew's face, which was upside down.
He put a finger to his mouth for silence and her vision lingered on the lips beneath it.
She nodded and he took his hand away. She quietly stood, thinking this was the worst of ideas.
Being alone with Matthew.
But her body had no such compunction, she grasped the hand he extended and followed him deeper into the forest.
*
They leaned up against a tree, its bark surely cutting into Matthew's back but he did not complain.
“Let me see the wound on your shoulder that my clumsiness put there.”
“It is nothing,” Clara lied.
He turned her in the circle of his arms until they faced each other. The moon was waning but three quarters. Without the strong, steam powered lights of the sphere and the vast wilderness all round, the stars and moon lit everything in a bright phosphorescent glow. It was an entirely different effect and Clara gazed up at Matthew, illuminated by silver, his body a shadowed and muscled bulk around her.
Her expression did not tell him no as his fingers traced the collarbone revealed from the nightdress which rode the top of it, smelling of the lemon soap of the clan and fresh hung laundry. When his fingers traveled to where his fist had brushed her he paused. “I must know,” he said.
She gasped as his warm fingers grasped the shoulder, the shadow of his knuckles a mar on her pale skin.
His head lowered until his breath was above the spot.
Then his lips pressed against the tender area. “I am so sorry,” he whispered.
Clara did not care about the pain, his lips took everything away. She did not think on Bracus, Charles or the paradox of her blood.
Everything drowned in the face of this moment with Matthew.
His forearm curled about the small of her back and drug her against him as his lips rode a path from her injured shoulder to the hollow of her throat, fire from his lips a trail which blazed where his mouth had been.
Clara's arms came about his neck and he lifted her off the ground, pressing her against him so tightly she could hardly breathe. Her hand ran pathways through his hair and held on to the back of his head, using the gentlest of urging to find her mouth.
When his mouth came to hers she opened it to him and his tongue licked her lips sensuously, one at a time and she groaned.
It was then that he put his hands about her waist, the fingers meeting and turning her, he pressed her back against the tree. Matthew lifted his face and looked deeply into her eyes, which were glittering pools of onyx in the unrevealed light of the moon.
“I love you,” he said simply, kneading the smallness of her ribcage.
“And I, you,” she replied honestly.
He dipped his head again as a large palm rode up to where her heart beat and he used a finger to trace around the sensitive tip of her nipple that lay beneath her nightdress and it hardened She moaned, pushing against his finger and he heard her small sound of pleasure, covering her breast with his entire hand. Unlike the assault by Prince Frederic he cupped her sensitive flesh tenderly, moving his mouth and covering the cloth which encased it, sucking and teasing the nipple which rode underneath the thin fabric. Clara felt the electric heat begin there and surge to every extremity she had.
Every one.
She tried to swim to the surface of her consciousness and tell Matthew to stop. But it would have been a lie. She wished not to stop.
She wished for more.
He was so in tune with the vibrations of her body he lifted his head and looked at her. “You but need ask me to stop and I will.”
The thought of him stopping struck her with grief and she ground against him slightly and she watched the breath catch in his throat. “Do not tease me, my queen, I am not as most men. I give you your leave but at great cost.”
“Do not stop,” she whispered.
“Ask me,” Matthew said.
“Please do not stop,” and Matthew smiled, taking her away from the tree, holding the back of her head as he ravished her mouth with kisses that were almost bruising, her lips swelling in response.
Matthew lay her upon a bed of moss and straightened, stripping off the tunic over his head and she watched the beauty of his body as his muscles flexed and rippled with the movement. He lay beside her and tucked her head into the cradle of his body, fanning her hair out and away from her body.
His hand carved into the hair which lay at her temple, his head bending down to gently kiss where his hand lay buried in her hair, then moved across her brow to linger between her eyes. His lips moved again to her mouth and she kissed him fiercely. His hands left her hair and gathered her into his body, their bodies married together, hip to head.
Matthew had lost all sense, he knew what he did was unfair, that he must not press the advantage that he had over her, but she was as a beacon to him. He must be with her, touch her. Pressed against his body like this he could think only of her.
His hands moved along her sides, cupping her breasts that lay like luscious globes beneath his hands, the smallness of her fitting underneath him perfectly. He was struck anew at how this tiny female could move him so passionately and he thought about how it had been to see her in the arms of those that wished to harm her.
*
Matthew sprinted, the fighting of the few Band and the fragment a clanging and meaty thing. He tried to pick out the females, Clara was not easy, her hair dark against the night. His eyes searched.
Finally, he opened his senses to her as a select, letting that internal barometer seek her heat like a moth to a flame.
His head whipped in the direction of the pulse of heat he had felt and with it, fear.
Clara was afraid.
He ran.
His gills opened fully and he used the oxygen to propel him toward that small heated signal. There! He saw her being held by a much taller figure, blending with the gloom.
It was the nightdress she wore in white that allowed her to be seen even at the distance he was from her.
He ran harder when he heard her scream in pain, a figure partially obscuring her form. Even from a distance he recognized who assaulted her.
The vile prince had his hands upon her body.
He would die.
Matthew crept up behind the prince and watched the man he would later know as Tucker widen his eyes in alarm. He had but a moment to see Clara's eyes fill with relief before his dirk was against the flesh of the prince. He pressed the blade until he felt the flesh beneath it give and began to slash in a practiced arc.
As he watched the blood splatter across Clara, he belatedly saw the delicate throat slits fill
with the blood of the prince, the shock of the sight made his blade waver, the cut more shallow than he intended.
He dumped the prince and leaped over him to get at the man which held Clara. He drug him to his body and began to hammer his fists into the male's face until he heard bones crunch to his satisfaction and dumped the body.
He crashed beside Clara and saw that she was drowning in the prince's blood, her gills struggling to aid her breathing and her main airway blocked.
She was Band, Matthew noted in a shocked daze as he called to Evelyn to bring the water which would evacuate the throat slits...
*
He crushed her to him, raining kissed upon her, her throat, her face, her breasts. He moved atop her and pressed himself into the hollow of her hips, his weight on his elbows.
Matthew looked down at her fragile beauty, belying the woman he knew lay underneath. He would always protect her.
He watched her eyes widen just as he felt a blade at his throat. He rolled off her and swung his leg at where he thought the arm would be and connected with Bracus.
He watched the shiny arc of the dirk as it spun off into the woods and he sprung from the ground, his body hovering in front of where Clara was.
Clara squealed and righted her nightdress backing up into a little ball, covering what she could.
Bracus' eyes flicked to hers, his eyes raking over her disdainfully. They settled on Matthew's. “She was unprotected while you had your way with her.” he shrugged. “I could have been the fragment, the abominable prince...anyone. You neglect her for your brainless pursuit of burying your flesh.”
Clara gasped and Matthew struck a blow to Bracus' chin. Bracus roared and charged him. They met with a smacking of flesh that Clara was sure would wake all within one hundred yards.
They struck and fought each other, grunting and rolling about, Clara moved away from where they fought. Seeing a brow of one break open and begin bleeding.
Finally, Matthew tore Bracus' arm up between his shoulder blades and turned him to face Clara.
The Savage Blood (Savage Series, Book 2) Page 10
