Beyond the Highland Mist

by Karen Marie Moning

  Falling back on the bed, she melted beneath him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his hungry head closer.

  “Love me … oh, love me,” she whispered.

  “Always,” he promised into her wide-open eyes. He cupped her breasts and lavished them with kisses, savoring how wildly she responded to him. This time was different. She was really seeing him, Sidheach, not some other man she’d had before, and hope exploded in his heart. Was she coming to crave him as he did her? Could it be his wife was developing a hunger for him that matched his own appetite?

  “Oh, please …” Her head arched back against the pillows. “Please …” she breathed.

  “Do you want me, Adrienne?”

  “Yes. With every ounce of my body …” and soul she was going to add, but he claimed her mouth with deep, hot kisses.

  She wanted him, eyes open and seeing him. He could tell, this time it was real.

  When her hand closed around his engorged phallus, a groan ripped from his throat.

  “I saw you, you know,” she whispered, her eyes dilated and dark with passion. “In the Green Lady’s room. You were lying flat on your back.”

  He stared at her in mute fascination, the muscles in his neck working furiously as he struggled to say something intelligible, anything, but only a husky purr came out as her hand tightened on him. So, she had watched him too? As he had spied on her every chance he got?

  “You were lying there in your sleep like some Viking god, and that’s the first time I saw this.” She squeezed her hand gently for emphasis. He growled. Emboldened by his response, Adrienne pushed him back and scattered kisses across his sculpted chest. She ran her hungry tongue down over his abdomen, tasting each defined ripple in turn. She explored his powerful thighs and throbbing manhood, pausing to drop a tantalizing kiss on the velvety pink tip of the shaft a stallion would have envied.

  “Did you find it passing … fair?” he croaked, “what you saw then, and see now?”

  “Ummm …” She pretended to ponder his question, then licked a long, velvety stroke up his shaft from base to tip. “It’ll do in a pinch.”

  He tossed his dark head back with a smile and roared. “A pinch … a pinch? I’ll show you …” His words trailed off as he pulled her roughly into his embrace. His mouth claimed hers and he rolled her onto her back.

  Too late to pull back or worry about seed or children, far beyond rational thought of any kind, and adrift in a musky madness named Adrienne, the siren witch who owned him, he slid between her legs and positioned himself above her.

  Just before he ceded to her beckoning heat, he said, “I have always loved you, lass.” Quietly and regally.

  Tears shimmered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. He touched a glistening drop with his finger and marveled for a moment at how good it felt to have her accept him at last. Then, past waiting, he plunged into her. More tears misted her eyes at the sudden pain. Above her, barely in her, the Hawk clenched his jaw and froze. He stared down at her a speechless moment, stunned and awed.

  “Please,” she urged. “Don’t stop now. Please, I want this.”

  “Adrienne,” he breathed, his face dark. “Virgin,” he muttered dumbly. Ebony eyes held her gaze a breathless moment as his body lay rigid atop hers.

  Then she felt an involuntary jerk rage through him and he pushed past the barrier, ripping into her with barbaric intensity. “Mine,” he swore roughly, his black eyes flashing. “Only mine. First… best… and last.” His beautiful head arched back, and she buried her hands deep in his hair. Again she felt that involuntary shudder that rocked him from head to toe.

  There was momentary pain, but waves of heat quickly replaced it and the stars called her name, beckoning her to come fly. This time it was even more intense, calling from deep inside her where his hot shaft filled her all the way. An instinctive voice told her how to move, how to gain her pleasure and assure his in the same breath.

  “Don’t… move,” he gritted against her ear, struggling to not spill the moment her sleek tightness encased him. He was beyond aroused, driven nearly insane by passion coupled with the knowledge that the smithy had never been where he was now. Not even the legendary Ever-hard, whoever he was. He was her first man, her first and only lover.

  “I can’t help it… feels too … oh! … Delicious!” Her hands caressed his back, then her nails lightly scored the bronzed skin of his shoulders as he rocked her slowly beneath him.

  “Stop moving, lass!”

  “I thought I was supposed to move … too,” she mumbled, very nearly incoherently. “Please …”

  “Be still. I would teach you slow first. Then the next time will be for the wild, rough love.”

  “Wild, rough love now,” she demanded quite clearly, and it broke the tether that had been holding him so tautly in check. He raised her legs and drove into her, pushing the worry of her virgin sensitivity from what little of his mind remained. He came into her the way he’d wanted to from the very first moment he’d seen her—rough and claiming. Hard and demanding, with possession. Hungry and almost brutal, branding her his.

  Adrienne spiraled beneath him, the tips of her fingers trailing against the stars as she fragmented into a thousand shimmering pinpoints. She felt him stiffen, then pulse heavily inside her. They exploded together in perfect rhythm, perfect harmony.

  Hawk lay breathing harshly atop her for a long time while she contentedly petted her husband. His silky hair had come free from its thong. She traced the soft skin of his solid, muscled back. Beautiful man, she mused, and the thought no longer carried any taint of fear. She stroked his hair in silence, marveling at her life and how rich it was with him in it.

  It was in silence that at last he raised himself from her and went to stand by the window, staring out into the night of Uster.

  “Och, lass, what have I done?” he whispered to the glass pane.

  Silence from behind him. Adrienne’s eyes moved lovingly over every inch of her man.

  “I judged thee inconstant and shrewish. I judged thee, sweet falcon, to be the worst of faithless vipers. My dark imaginings feathering in my heart with spiky wing. And I could not have been more wrong.”

  Still silence. He didn’t know that behind him his wife had a tender smile curving her lips.

  “Lass from future’s distant short, you were dumped into a man’s lap, wed to me sight unseen and have lived through hells of your own before ever coming to me. I have only given you one more hell to add to it. Full of my—och, wife, what have I done? Oh God, what have I done to you?”

  “You loved me.”

  It wasn’t a question, but he answered it readily. “I do. More than life. My heart. I didn’t just pick a sweet turn of phrase to name you, but spoke from my soul when I named you thus. Without my heart I couldn’t live. And I couldn’t breathe without you.”

  “Are you a man who has more than one heart?”

  “Nay. Only this one. But it’s bitter and dark now from the pain I’ve brought you.”

  He stared out the window into the bottomless night. Virgin blood on his shaft. Virgin tears on his hands. Virgin wife who’d never lain with Adam, and in all her years, with no man. A trembling gift she’d had to give and he’d forced it from her with his own dark passion.

  “Sidheach.” The word was a steamy caress from her lips.

  It must have been a figment of his imagination. Hawk thought he would suffer his life long the torture of waiting in vain for a word he knew he would never hear tumble forth from her lips. “I have so abused you, my heart. I will atone, I swear to you, I will find a way—”

  “Sidheach.” He felt her hands on his sides, her arms slipping around him from behind. She couldn’t keep the truth from him any longer. She had to tell him, had to have whatever time the fickle gods would allow them to enjoy. She rested her cheek lovingly against his back, and felt a shudder steal through his powerful frame.

  “Do I dream a twisted dream?” he whispered hoarsely.
/>   “I love you, Sidheach.”

  He whirled about to face her, his eyes dark and shuttered. “Look at me and say that!” he thundered.

  Adrienne cupped his darkly beautiful face in her hands. “I love you, Sidheach, flesh-and-blood husband. ’Tis the only reason I was ever able to hate you so well.”

  A shout of joy burst from his lips, but his eyes were still disbelieving.

  “I’ve loved you since that night by the sea. And hated you harder for every minute of it.”

  “But the king’s whore—”

  “Say no more. I’m a selfish woman. Adrienne’s husband is who you are now. No one else. But I thank the good king for so perfecting your skills,” she teased saucily. Some things were better left to heal, unpicked at. And it didn’t threaten her anymore, because she understood that it was the noble, chivalrous part in him that had forced him to do whatever he’d had to do to protect those he loved. Although neither he nor Lydia had told her much, she’d been able to figure out a few things for herself.

  He laughed at her audacity, then sobered quickly.

  “I must wed you again. I want the vows. Between us, not some proxy.” Was it magic that had tossed her through time? When she’d disappeared right out of his arms, he’d finally accepted it, that his wife had come to him from time’s distant shores, and what could that be except magic? A magic he could not control.

  But what if they could make some wee magic of their own? There were legends that wedding vows taken within the circle of the Samhain fires, on that powerful eve before the feast of the Blessed Dead, were binding beyond human understanding. What if they made their wedding vows, pledged before the mystical Rom, on such a sacred night? Could he bind his wife to him across any boundaries of time? He would try anything.

  “Aye,” she breathed with delight, “make it so.”

  “I’m only sorry I missed it to begin with. And had I known that it was you waiting for me at the Comyn keep I would have come myself, my heart. On the very first day of the troth.”

  But his eyes were still troubled and she raised a hand to brush the shadows away. He caught it and placed a kiss tenderly in her palm, then closed her fingers over it.

  “Do you trust me, lass?” he asked softly.

  Trust. Such a fragile, tenuous, exquisitely precious thing.

  The Hawk watched her, the emotions flashing across her expressive face, wonderfully open to him now. He knew she was thinking of those black times of which she’d never spoken. One day she would confide in him all her most private thoughts and fears, and she would come to understand that no matter what had happened in her past, it could never change his feelings for her.

  Adrienne gazed lovingly at the man who’d taught her how to trust again. The man she’d lost her heart to hopelessly and helplessly. This man who liberally dripped honor, valor, compassion, and chivalry. Neither her past nor his had any relevance to love such as theirs. “Trust you, Sidheach? With all my heart and further then.”

  His smile was blinding. “Adrienne …”

  “My lord?” her voice was soft and warm and carefree as a girl’s.

  When he took her in his arms, she shivered with desire. “My lord!”

  Adrienne didn’t see that above her head his eyes grew dark. How was he going to protect her? How could he assure her safety? How quickly could he get to Adam and find what was going on? Because no matter what winding corridors his mind wandered trying to unravel the strange happenings that involved his wife, they all seemed to come circling back to a grinding halt directly in front of that damned smithy. And it wasn’t mere jealousy, although the Hawk would readily admit to an abiding dislike for the man.

  It wasn’t the black queen that had brought Adrienne to him, or so cruelly ripped her from him. That was a fact.

  So what was it?

  Someone or something else had that power. The power to destroy the laird of Dalkeith with one blow—by taking his cherished wife away from him. What game, what terrible, twisted amusement was being played out upon Dalkeith’s shore? What power had taken an interest and why?

  I came here to hate you, Hawk. But I did not come here to hate the woman you claim as wife. Adam’s words echoed in his mind, and he began to see just the vague outline of a carefully plotted revenge. But that would mean Adam Black had powers the Hawk had never quite believed existed. Bits and pieces of Rom stories he’d heard as a lad resurfaced in his whirring mind, raising questions and doubts. Stories about Druids and Picts and, aye, even the nefarious and mischievous Fairy. Lydia had always said that any legend was based in some part on fact, the mythical elements being merely the inexplicable but not necessarily untrue.

  Oh, his love was testing the limits of his belief in the natural world and blowing them wide open.

  But if he conceded belief in such magic as time travel, what magic could he discard as too outrageous? None. He could discard no possibility, however unearthly, without thorough consideration.

  Adam Black had been able to cure the previously incurable poison of Callabron. Adam Black always seemed to know too damned much. Adam Black admitted flatly that he had come to Dalkeith for revenge.

  The Rom had moved far from the smithy’s forge. The Rom who believed the myths and legends.

  And the Hawk, indebted to Adam for his wife’s life, had forced himself to overlook all the oddities, attributing them to his intense dislike of the smithy, convincing himself that he was seeing dragons in the puffy shapes of harmless clouds.

  He would never let her go, but someone or something else could take her from him at a moment’s whim.

  He would seek it, destroy it, and free her—on his life he vowed it.

  For there was no life for him without her.

  CHAPTER 27

  ALTHOUGH THE HAWK INSISTED ON LEAVING EARLY THE NEXT morning, he also made sure they took their sweet time on the way back to Dalkeith. He sent half the guards to ride ahead and commanded the other half to stay well behind him and his lady, to allow them privacy. He would return to Uster and oversee the rest of the manorial courts in the future, after this battle was done.

  Adrienne was thrilled by his urgency to return to Dalkeith to seal their vows. She was equally thrilled by the three-day journey, with long dalliances in chilly pools of bubbling spring water. Longer interludes of passion on springy moss beneath the canopy of brightly fluttering leaves. Moments in which he teased, coaxed, and taught her until the blushing virgin grew confident in her newly discovered womanhood, thrilled to feel a woman’s power over her man. She soon became expert in the subtle ways of touching or speaking, of wetting a lip and beckoning with her eyes. She knew the stolen caresses and the instant responses that turned her sweet, beautiful man into a throbbing, hardened savage.

  She was mildly stunned to discover that autumn had painted the hills with the inspiration of a master; leaves in brilliant shades of pumpkin, bloodwine, and buttery amber rustled crisply beneath the horse’s hooves as they rode beneath boughs of harvest gold. Squirrels chirped and skittered through the trees with gravity-defying leaps. Scotland in all her majestic glory, airbrushed by love, colored the simple gifts of nature into a tapestry of miracles. Adrienne had never realized the world was such a wonderful place.

  She would remember the leisurely return journey to Dalkeith as her honeymoon; a time of phenomenal passion and tender romancing. A time of blissful healing and loving. Quite simply, the happiest days of her life.

  Late on the second day, as they lay on a Douglas tartan of blues and grays, an unaddressed hurt surfaced to poke at Adrienne and she couldn’t stay her tongue. Gripping the Hawk’s face between her hands, she kissed him hard, hot, and tempting, then pulled back and said, “If you ever forbid me from you again, my husband, I will tear down the walls of Dalkeith, stone by stone, to get to you.”

  The Hawk shook his head, his thoughts completely muddled by the tantalizing kiss and further bewildered by her words. He claimed her lips in a long, equally fierce kiss, and when she lay panti
ng softly beneath him, he said, “If you ever fail to see how I am faring after being wounded, I will add a stone tower onto Dalkeith and lock you in there, my captive love-slave, never to refuse me anything again.”

  It was her turn to study him with a bewildered expression, her lips full and rosy from the heat of his kiss. “If you mean after you were injured by the arrow, I tried to see you. Grimm wouldn’t let me.”

  Hawk’s gaze battled with hers. “Grimm said you never came. He said you were sleeping soundly in the Peacock Room with naught a worry in your mind, save how soon I would die and leave you free.”

  Adrienne gasped. “Never! I was right outside your door. Arguing and fighting with him. Still, he swore you refused me entrance!”

  “I have never refused you entrance. Nay, I opened my very soul and bade you enter. Now you’re telling me that you came to see me that night, and Grimm told you I had given orders that you were to be refused?”

  Adrienne nodded, wide-eyed.

  Dark fury flitted across the Hawk’s face as he recalled the agony he’d endured, believing she’d not cared enough to see if he still lived and breathed. Suddenly he understood his friend’s stiff behavior that night. The way Grimm’s gaze had not seemed quite steady. The nervous way he’d built up the already blazing fire and had poked aimlessly at the crackling logs. “Grimm, what mischief do you play?” he murmured. Could Grimm wish Adrienne ill? Or had Grimm only been trying to protect him, his friend and brother-in-arms, from further harm?

  Regardless, his actions were unacceptable. No matter how long-standing their friendship, lies were never tolerable. And Grimm’s lies had driven a wedge between him and his wife, a wedge that had sent the Hawk rushing off to Uster. What if he hadn’t returned for Adrienne? How far might Grimm’s lies have taken them apart from each other? What might Adam have done to his wife if he hadn’t returned for her?

  The Hawk’s mouth tightened. Adrienne laid her palm against his cheek and said softly, “Hawk, I don’t think he meant any harm. He seemed to be trying to protect you. He said I had brought you nothing but pain, and that it was all his fault.”