Rhys slept the sleep of the dead. When he woke, he shot up from the pallet to the clatter of something falling outside. He groped for his sword and came up with air. Then he spied his sword, still in its scabbard, at the edge of the long skid mark it had made after he’d torn it off last night.
Images inundated him, hazy uncertain images of a woman’s pale flesh, of hair scented with heather, of hot yielding flesh. He flung his arm across the pallet, but only her imprint remained upon the wool grown cold.
He jerked up, fully awake. He probed beneath the blanket for his mask, but no leather caved beneath his hand. He spied one of the ties dangling across his arm and realized he’d lain bare–faced beside her during the night, dead to the world, dead to the revulsion which must have spread across her features in the bright cold light of morning. So the wench’s courage had failed her. Twisting the leather up over his head, he stumbled up from the pallet expecting to hear the sound of hooves.
He swung open the door and strode out into day. He blinked at the sharpness of the blue sky. The whole of Wales stretched out beyond the clearing. Patches of green spruce spotted the brown hills and blue–white ice frosted the tips of distant peaks. By the pine trees his horse whinnied a greeting and stamped the frosted earth. Aileen stood by the fire, flexing one of his newly carved spears underfoot.
“So you’re awake, high time for it.” She set her weight upon the middle of the wood. “I checked your breathing hours ago to make sure you still lived.”
She was still here. He blinked at the impossibility of that. She had crushed her hair back into the netting, but half of it tumbled across her face. Her cloak sagged over one shoulder, revealing the skewed neckline of a creamy linen tunic. Patches of red flared at the nape of her neck, over her shoulder, upon her ear.
“I’m making soup,” she said, as the wood of one of his spears cracked and yawned open with splintered teeth. “I’m famished, and the only way this soup is ever going to be done is if I build a bigger fire.”
He couldn’t find words. He couldn’t believe she was still here. Then he remembered how she’d responded beneath him, how she squirmed and reached for him in the middle of the night. He still had that, then—a cock which could give a woman pleasure, if a woman ever dared to get close enough to close her legs around it.
“This soup,” she said, poking the pieces of the spear into the flames, “will be done a lot faster if I had a man breaking this wood for me.”
He was standing and gawking like a green boy. “Those,” he said, “are my spears.”
“Are they?” She glanced up at the row of spears leaning against the hut “What a waste of good oak. At least I’m giving them a better end than you planned for them.”
He stared at her stirring the soup bubbling in the pot. He stood there wondering what she was about. He’d expected to wake alone to the echo of distant laughter and a mind grown silly, for Marged said there were places in these hills where it was dangerous to sleep lest the faeries steal off with a man’s soul.
“Don’t just stand there looking at me.” She clattered another stick under the bubbling brew. “I’ve never had much of a belly for soup without a bit of meat in it. You must have snares here and about?”
High above his head, a hawk screeched, then tilted its wings and dipped down past the edge of the hillside into the black crease of the valley below.
For one fierce, angry moment he wished he believed in faeries, for then he’d have an excuse for the bright–eyed trail of his thoughts. As it was, he could only blame them on fog in his head. She’d stayed. Why had she stayed? Was it that Aileen the Red was far too practical to leave this place alone and bumble her way back through a countryside crackling with cold and quivering with threat?
Maybe that was it: It was far better to stay with the devil you know.
He heard himself say, “It’s not the soup I want, Irish.”
Her bright gray gaze flew to meet his and new color washed out the evidence of his bite marks upon her skin.
He curled his fingers. “Come here.”
He wanted to feel her writhing naked beneath him. He needed to know he hadn’t dreamed the night.
“I’m no hound to be summoned at your whim.” She whirled the stick in the soup. “And I won’t be, wherever this leads us.”
“This will lead us to my bed. Early and often.”
“I know that.” She showed him her profile. “I knew when I chose to come up here that I’d be taking a lover.”
A breeze whirled over the edge of the hill and flattened the scrubby grass, and Rhys tried to absorb that comment—I knew I’d be taking a lover—without a stab of jealously for the other men she might have chosen.
She raised a brow at him. “You look surprised. You shouldn’t be. You’re the first man who’s shown any interest.”
Rhys resisted the urge to scoff. What would she tell him next? That mothers burrowed their children in their skirts whenever she passed? That penitents tossed alms at her feet to ward off curses? That men lived in fear of this reed–slim creature of fiery hair and eyes of silver; they’d sooner kill themselves than lie down with her?
“I never could take a lover on Inishmaan.” She scraped the side of the pot as she peered into the froth of the brew. “There wasn’t a man on it who fancied looking at me in that way.”
“Your island is but a spit of rock.”
“Where else was I to look? Did you think I’d be seeking a man amid the mainlanders? There wasn’t one of them who would dare to look me in the eye—never mind bundling me off to the bushes. You know that. The stories they told about me found their way all the way here, after all.”
He found himself remembering the day he and Dafydd had sailed into Galway Bay and set ashore to ask about Aileen. He found himself remembering the sudden silences that greeted their inquiries, the gazes sliding away, the voices dropped to whispers. He remembered the day on Inishmaan when he’d first seen her emerge out of the mist like some sort of faery–wraith—ethereal, exotic, and otherworldly to those who believed in such things.
So maybe she did know what it was to live both inside and outside the world. Even as the thought formed, he hated the bond that tightened between them, hated the twist of that shriveled organ in his chest.
“There was a time,” he said, “when you cursed me to the bowels of hell.”
“Who better than a demon,” she said, turning the silver of her eyes upon him, “to lay down with a witch?”
The steam curled tendrils around her flushed face. Her tunic gaped to show the tight nipple he’d sucked into his mouth one night … and then he didn’t want to talk any more. Other urges overcame him, more intense, more immediate.
He strode across the distance that separated them and took the stick out of her hand. “Forget the soup.”
She gifted him with the brightness of her gaze. He breathed down upon her, thinking she could be a striking woman when the mood was upon her, strong and tall and fierce. He would set Marged upon her so she would learn to do her hair in the ways of the Welsh noblewomen at Aberffraw. He’d send a man to purchase silk—the blue–green of spruce, the red of deepest wine. Let the men at the court of the Prince of Wales sit back and wonder what woman found the courage to lay with the leper–lord of Wales.
Aileen.
Oh, there were a thousand ways he would pleasure this woman’s body, a thousand ways he’d make her moan. When they returned to the llys, he’d treat her to smooth linens and the softest of furs.
“Come, Irish.” He filled his lungs with the crisp air of the New Year. “I’ll show you the way it should be done.”
***
Aileen had always considered herself a woman of iron strength, of principle, but at the look on Rhys’s face all those sureties shattered into nothing. With his hand lost in her hair, he nudged her to follow him. She stumbled with him on liquid limbs. She trailed him in a dreamy sort of dance as the horizon shifted, as they wove their blind way toward the hut. His eyes glowed bright w
ith an expression she’d never seen before, something beyond the mind–numbing lust which had seized them both last night. She thought, he is going to kiss me.
He’s going to kiss me.
The silence of the hut enveloped them. He loomed before her, all heat and clear blue eyes too bright for the darkness. He tugged something between them. Her cloak slipped off her shoulders and whooshed to the floor. He yanked at the ties of her tunic.
He rasped, “Take it off.”
She smelled him—warm wool and sweat—as she set her clumsy fingers to the knots at her neck, the ties of her sleeves, the knot of her belt. She fixed her gaze upon a pulse throbbing in his throat as the wool crumpled to her feet, revealing her undertunic. Rhys still cut a royal figure, even swathed in the stained and ragged silk, and wearing boots caked in mud. Now she knew well the muscles that rippled beneath his clothing. But she was raised on thin fish stew and hard work—and her body showed it. Tremors riddled her skin, from much, much more than the cold.
“All of it, Irish.”
She plucked at the ties of her undertunic. She was new to this, but she didn’t grow up amid a family of eight children without coming upon Ma and Da more than one time fixing their clothing with a flush upon their faces. The deed could be done well wrapped.
Her voice came out a whisper. “It’s as cold as the morning here.”
“We’ll be making enough heat.”
“We can make it well enough without stripping down to flesh and bone.”
“I want to see you.”
She gazed up into that masked face. Yesterday he’d torn off that strip of black leather and exposed the ridges and puckers of his ravaged face. He had bared himself to her. Now he expected her to take that same risk.
She gathered the tunic in her hands. Now he can see my knees, knobby bony things that they are, and the cut upon one of them from kneeling down in the rocks by his wounded bondsmen. Now he can see the freckles clustered on my thighs. And now…. Fresh color burned her cheeks. Now he’d know that she didn’t wash her hair with some root to give it the hue which had earned her nickname.
She was the daughter of Conaire of Ulster, she told herself, even if she did look as skinny as a cat caught in the rain. With a defiant snap, she wrestled the cloth over her head and tossed it to the floor.
“Am I to stand here and freeze all day,” she whispered, “or are you going to share that heat you’ve been promising?”
She let her eyelids flutter shut and tilted her head back. Surely now, he’d kiss her. She yearned for a kiss unlike any other, the kiss she’d been aching for since Samhain in the darkness when the moon–tides had throbbed in her blood and he had spread her legs with his thighs and mocked the loving act that before this day ended she’d know for real—again.
His lips found the base of her throat instead. He trailed a hot tongue across her pulse as his callused hand scraped across her belly. She gripped the rolling bulk of his shoulders to support legs suddenly turned to water. The perfume of his hair inundated her senses, fresh winter air and oak–spice. The bristles of his beard scraped the line of her jaw.
He did things to her with his hands and fingers and lips as the gray circle of light from the smoke–hole crept across the ground. All the unimaginable, forbidden, unspeakable joys of hungry flesh revealed to her, all the voluptuous pleasures of a world she’d never thought to know. He charged her blood with a heat that burned away every last shiver of shame. The trail of his fingers across her breast, the rasp of his hand through her hair, all transformed her into a ravenous creature, greedy for more, ever more, so eager for him that she found herself tasting the warmth of his salty skin, trailing the tips of her nails across the hair whirling on his chest. She tasted that, too. She scraped her tongue against the coarseness of it, closed her eyes as it tickled the tip of her nose. She dug her teeth into the hard swell of his chest and felt the vibrations of his groan shiver against her mouth.
The pallet sank as he lifted himself atop her, blocking out the light, blocking out everything but the sweet pressure of his naked body. He filled her to the brim with his heavy cock and then began the breath–stealing rhythm of a stroking so much more powerful than anything she’d ever known. Then it came again, that quivering sensation that had taken her so much by surprise before. It swelled in her now, a wondrous confusion that tugged her deep, like the suck of the sea. Rhys seemed to understand somehow. He drew her wrists up above her head and changed his rhythm to match the racing of her heart.
She thought perhaps she had screamed. She didn’t know. She didn’t remember as he flung his head back and swelled within her and filled her deep with liquid warmth. She lay beneath him on the woolen pallet listening to the rasp of their breath. She flexed her fingers over his back as the world drifted to her: The soup bubbling over the pot, the trill of a winter bird swooping over the hut. Her body throbbed. Her lips throbbed—but with a painful, sore kind of ache.
Then she realized that despite all the loving, he hadn’t kissed her on the lips.
Not even once.
Chapter Thirteen
It was the mornings Aileen liked best.
Aye, the mornings when the fire in Rhys’s room had long sputtered to ashes. The mornings when a fresh breeze siphoned in and swirled the stagnant smoke, when the hounds barked for food and the cows moaned for release from the ache of their udders. The mornings when she and Rhys lay cocooned beneath a mountain of soft furs, a pocket of human warmth amid the chill of winter.
This morning was no different. Though she’d stayed up late at the Candlemas feast, she blinked her eyes open at the first lowing of the cattle. In the mornings Rhys could sleep like the dead, and after a month of sharing his bed she finally knew why. He spent every night thrashing about and grinding his teeth and spewing meaningless broken syllables at his invisible tormentors before finally shuddering into exhaustion.
Now she turned to find him blind and deaf to the world, lying on his side, his arm curled under a pillow. She reached out and dared what she’d never done in his waking moments, but what she’d dared every morning since she’d taken her place in this bed. She slipped her hand between them and pressed her palm flat against his chest. She felt like a thief laying her hands upon him at his most vulnerable. But only in these few predawn moments could she feel the essence of him seep out from the edges of his battered heart, like a light around the frame of a door.
Tears pricked the backs of her eyes as she set to the healing. Before, whenever she lay her hands upon the weak or the wounded, she’d sensed the pain as a separate thing—a density or a weakness. With Rhys, the pain drove nails through her heart.
She was starting to understand the man, piece by piece. Even last night, when they’d all feasted in the mead–hall, she’d gotten another glimpse of the man he once was. The meal had teetered close to merriment for Lent was only a week away. A bard had wandered his way here through the hills of Wales, a well–dressed bard from Aberffraw, filled with news of the outside world. The men had gathered around him and listened to his stories, then set loose their heels in the night to the trill of his harp. At one point while she’d scrambled about making sure every man’s cup was filled, Dafydd, his head turned with the drink, had pushed the bard away from the harp and summoned Rhys to it.
To her surprise, Rhys had walked to the instrument and trailed his fingers over the strings. The hall went so silent that she could hear the crackle of the hearth–fire and the held breath of two dozen men.
Rhys played with the rusted perfection of a man who once knew well the lay of the strings. The shimmer of the music filled the room. By some trick of light, it seemed as if Rhys’s mask dissolved into shadow and he sat as whole as any man. She saw clearly for the first time the strong, stunning beauty of the man—how breathtakingly handsome he must have been, before all this.
Now in their bed with her hand pressed against his heart she stared at the skin of the right side of his face, bubbled and boiled and swirling on his b
ones. She thought about her sister Cairenn. Cairenn was the one to whom all eyes turned wherever they traveled. The Widdy Peggeen sewed finer clothes for Cairenn than any other. Old Seamus gave Cairenn the best of the catch. Aileen imagined what would happen if Cairenn were ever afflicted like this. She imagined her sister’s bewildered confusion if the approval of the world suddenly turned to disgust for no more reason than the onset of a rash.
Rhys shifted beneath her hand. She loosened her palm and let her fingers trail down the ripples of his abdomen. His hand came up from under the covers to cup her breast. He moved closer and laid his hot lips upon her shoulder. The furs shifted, cold air sifting in, then closed again to contain them in their cocoon of warmth.
She breathed a happy sigh and knew there would be no more sleep this morning. His hands worked their magic upon her without a word spoken between them. So much warmth, so much comfort, with fur tickling her nipples and his hair soft upon her belly, flesh sliding against flesh. She found herself dreamily spreading her legs as he eased himself between her thighs until she gasped with the pleasure of it. She wrapped her arms around him, loving the rhythm of his movements, loving what little surrender he ceded when his hands flexed over her hips, when all spiraled out of control into that blinding white light.
Aye, Rhys …. She lay in abandon while he lifted himself off her. She felt something soft trail across her lips.
She blinked her eyes open. The light of the smoke–hole gleamed like a halo around his black hair. His finger stroked her lower lip, back and forth, back and forth, a slow tender stroking, his gaze intense on what he was doing. Air frozen in her lungs, she willed him to raise those shuttered blue eyes as the moment stretched.
Kiss me, Rhys. Kiss me.
She lifted a heavy arm and curled it around his neck, urging him down with the lightest pressure. She arched her neck and lifted her lips toward him.
Kiss me.
His finger trailed off her lips, down her chin, then away from her. The bed moved as he shifted his weight and flapped the blanket back. The chill air seeped in and destroyed the warm cocoon. He swung his legs over the bed, padded naked toward the door, and splashed his face with water from the bowl on the table.
The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) Page 16
