The Emerald Isle Trilogy Boxed Set

by Vincent, Renee

  She heard Dægan’s breath escape him as if she had said something rather uncanny.

  “I need air,” Dægan finally said. “Will you ride with me?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dægan took Mara to the end of the island, a place that bore the closest resemblance to his home in Hladir, of sheer rock cliffs, foaming white sea, and a vast plain of tranquil water spreading out to hold up the midnight sky. It was just how Dægan liked it, a place of solitary peace with the constant shuffle of the ocean below drowning out the rest of the world’s clamor.

  Many times, it was just him and the moon, his silent, yet ever-watchful friend reflecting in the blue-black water above the horizon. But tonight, after what he had endured, he needed Mara with him, his best vice for gaining serenity.

  Dægan dismounted his horse and reached for her, carrying her in his arms to the edge of the great Inis Mór’s cliff. To his relief, the air was cool and refreshing, compared to the still denseness of the bathhouse, though he feared the common cloud cover would soon bring a sudden and teeming storm, shortening their visit.

  He set Mara down and, like most people who come upon a daunting edge, she first peeked over the side. She gasped upon seeing the violent water churn and crash into the blunt face of the isle, leaving an airy froth floating in the aftermath. As she stepped back, the sheer size of the sea took away the breath which she seemed to have held in amazement.

  With the light from the moon, she was able to see for the first time what he’d been boasting of. On the edge of this cliff, was the door to another world far from the mundane one in which she lived. There seemed to be no limit to the sea, no boundaries in the horizon, no brink to fall from. One could sail forever and eventually touch the silvery moon with outstretched fingers….

  “Do you like it?” Dægan asked, watching her gaze off into nothingness.

  “I feel so small. So unimportant,” she tried to explain.

  Dægan put his hands upon her shoulders. “Yet part of it all, nonetheless.”

  “Aye…”

  “For me, this place puts everything into perspective. No matter how big I feel, or how proud I get, I look out and know there is something even bigger out there than my haughty self. Something wiser than I could ever conjure up, something greater than I could ever hold in my hand…something beyond words or imagination. I come here often, hoping to figure it out. Hoping to find what my mind thinks is lost, what my heart thinks is missing.” Dægan sat down, casually tossing pebbles over the side. “I have yet to find those answers.”

  Mara knelt in front of him. “Does anyone?”

  “You seem to have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at you. You are confident in your God. Unwavering as you believe in the things He does for you. Even when you endure a hardship like losing your mother as a child, you find not blame in the God who stood by and watched.”

  “I believe not that He simply stands by and watches.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “Well, I think He is more active in our lives than we know and…that he intervenes using others around us.”

  Dægan narrowed his eyes. “Like puppets?”

  “Nay, like messengers, or heralds. People who do His work without even knowing. They do so because that is who they are. The humble of heart, I suppose.”

  Dægan sat thinking. His heart was far from humble and that was not the man he was brought up to be. He was taught to be a proud man, a strong man, a man who would not gain anything unless by the sweat of his own brow. His father, Rælik,was that kind of man, and he, the same. To be humble would mean to forget who he was, to deny his father’s own sweat and blood that came with the name he passed. To be humble…it almost seemed impossible.

  Until he took one look at Mara.

  She was the one thing he’d gladly give up everything for—his name, his wealth, his very pride. But did he have to give up a brother as well?

  “Dægan,” Mara said, her tone as gentle as the breeze. “Are you all right? You seem so distant tonight.”

  He pulled her into his arms. “Forgive me. I am just…” He had no words to describe his thoughts, only a painful perspective in holding her, a tangible sense of irony. “Why does everything have to come with a high price? Can I not have you without…?”

  He couldn’t finish for fear he’d break down again in sorrow. He had shed many tears upon his brother’s very face, on the cold floor of that lonely stable in Luimneach, and those were more than he wanted to discard, more of his manhood than he cared to part with.

  “I am so sorry, Dægan,” Mara said as she touched his face. “I see your pain and if I could take this burden from you, I would.”

  He sighed and looked away. “If you could truly take this burden, I would not give it to you. Never, would I want you to feel this pain. This empty, hollow, helpless feeling as those around you lay blame upon you. ‘Tis only natural for people to find fault elsewhere. ‘Tis what makes their heart feel less heavy in their own chests. And what can I do but live with it and hope with all that is in me never to forget it, never to heal, because in healing, do I fear I will forget my brother.”

  “Nay, Dægan,” Mara crooned sympathetically.

  “Aye, I am to suffer. I am to feel this pain.”

  “With your gods, perhaps,” Mara corrected. “But not with mine. What you suffer, He suffers. What you ask, He gives. What you need, He provides. This is God. Should you just believe.”

  A cold splatter of raindrops hit their faces in a sudden plummet from the low-hanging clouds above. Dægan unselfishly removed the cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it around her, still holding fast to its fur. “He is all those things, even for a man like me?”

  Mara joined her forehead with his. “In the eyes of God, we are all his children, even you.”

  Dægan took in a breath, slowly drifting from the virtuous man he should be, to the blatant covetous man he was. He couldn’t help it. He wanted her, every part of her in his avaricious hands no matter where they were. They could be sitting in the middle of the church at Clonmacnois and he’d still want her. “God wants a stronger man than I, a man who yields not so easily to temptation, a man who rises above his weaknesses instead of succumbing to them.”

  Mara stroked his face. “You are not that man.”

  Dægan fought to believe her, to think he could very well be without frailty. But just as he began to ponder that possibility, he couldn’t help but be drawn to the falling rain that settled on Mara’s lips, watching as some slipped inside her mouth, proving that his weakness was as clear as water. He cupped her face and shook his head at her blindness. “I have many weaknesses, Mara, and you are all of them. You and you alone.”

  She softened in his arms. “Me?”

  “How can you not see that? From the moment the word Lochlannach slipped poetically from your mouth, I have been struggling to get back just a shred of resilience. You have taken it and I am all that is left. If you want a formidable man, you will not find one here.”

  She smiled and pulled herself toward his mouth, barely touching his lips with her own. “What is left is all I want.”

  Dægan ignored that she was pressed against him and overlooked the intimacy she forced upon him like a celibate monk, hardly feeling the rain dampening his clothes to his back. “And what does your Christian God want of me?”

  “No more than I. No more than the strength of your heart and the depths of your love.”

  As if the Heavens above couldn’t detain the rain any longer, it opened like a dam, abounding upon them without remorse or pity. Dægan pulled her against him, shrouding her as best he could with his own body as he bent to kiss her. He tasted the rain on her lips—another small blessing. There seemed to be no end to them; those little inherent qualities she had that somehow made his haunting memories disappear and his moral blemishes smooth over into oblivion. Both were easily smothered by the sweetness of her mouth and the magic of her embrace. Sh
e was his only need, his only desire, his entire world that somehow fit within her arms. She was a gift, perhaps from the greater of things beyond the cliffs—the very God he was struggling to accept—the answer he had been searching for all along.

  He pulled away slowly from her lips, his hair soaking wet and dripping. With outstretched arms, he looked up into the sky, relishing the spatter against his face. It was as if the rain were a baptism, a beginning…and conceivably an end; a final farewell to his pagan gods.

  As if liberated, Dægan clasped her face in his strong wet hands, his eyes fixed on her through rain-soaked lashes. “I love you! Like the relentless rains from the Erin sky, my love will always be! For you, Mara, and no other!”

  ****

  The door of the bathhouse flung open and the two staggered in from under Dægan’s cloak, locked in each other’s arms. Once inside, Dægan kicked the door closed while still delving into her eager kiss and fumbling to find the cursed lock on the door.

  Mara already started feeling the warmth of the wood and stone room soak through her, grateful for the oddity of the Norse’s bathing habits as they had put a stagnant, sweltering atmosphere to good use.

  Unable to leave her kiss, Dægan whipped his sodden cloak across the room and removed his boots and kirtle, heavy, too, with rain, dropping them carelessly on the bench behind him. The slapping collapse of his wet garment seemed to slow his wild spontaneity to an attentive act of seduction. The glow of the amber flame, in the corner of the room softened the rigid bones of his face, but it did nothing to ease the callousness of his smile as he circled her.

  Her braid, he moved to the side and breathed in carefully the smell of her body, the way the oils from yesterday’s bath harmoniously mixed with the nostalgia of the Erin rain. His breath came soft and hot behind her ear, while his hands snaked tenderly around her throat and down below her chin to undo the two brooches at her chest.

  Without her realizing, he had released the jeweled clasp and chain, and let the drenched fine cloak fall heavily to the ground. Then he went to work, undoing the laces of her dress. He was talented with his hands, being able to trace the thin vertical line of her spine that connected her slender neck to her finely widened hips with one, while stripping her from her gown with the other, letting it, too, fall to the floor.

  He slowly turned her around to face him, not shy in dropping his eyes to her glistening chest. There was another smile on his face, one of kinder birth than before, as he intimately seemed to memorize each curve of her blushing body.

  Likewise, Mara let her eyes plummet to his waist, seeing his arousal as visible as a winter moon. But her innocent glance must have become an inseparable stare, for he stepped closer, asking, “Do I frighten you?”

  Mara lugged her eyes from his midriff to his face. “Nay, Dægan…”

  Her voice trailed as he slowly neared her face, eye to eye, mouth to mouth, until suddenly his lips pressed so gingerly against hers, endearing at first, then greedily as the kiss lengthened. He coiled his arm around her back as his other hand slid over the silken skin of her buttocks, pulling her close enough to nestle his hardened body against the soft of hers.

  Dægan fell away from her lips. “May I?”

  Mara lifted her brows in wonder. “May you what?”

  Without taking his eyes from her, he dragged a bucket of water across the floor with his foot. “May I show you how sufficient a few buckets of water can be?”

  Mara hesitated at the thought of him bathing her. It was quite a personal thing to bathe another, more so between lovers, and how difficult it would be to stand there and let it happen. “Dægan…”

  He dropped to his knees, sliding his hands down the back of her legs, tarrying around her thighs. “Please?”

  A nervous smile crept in slowly. “You make it very hard for me to forbid you of anything.”

  Dægan’s reaction to those words nearly sent her heart to slam out of beat as his eyes befit well the scoundrel smile he flashed in response. Before she could even think to change her mind, he dunked the soap into the bucket and lifted her foot to his knee, rubbing her calf and shins with the bubbly lather. After cleaning her entire right leg, he wasted no time in doing the left, and then stood to lather her stomach, breasts and arms, taking great care to be gentle.

  And overly thorough.

  Nervously, Mara lifted her chin as he crept up her neck and around her shoulders, finding it amazingly difficult to look him in the eye. Having a man actually cleaning and caressing every part of her body without a cause for shame was more than she expected this night. Every sweep and slippery stroke of his hands coerced a desire low in her stomach, an aching that consumed her every thought. She closed her eyes, following the enjoyable play of his hands as he left no part of her untouched.

  All too soon, she found him pressed against her soapy body, whisking her near-orgasmic daydream away with one wolfish smile.

  “My turn.”

  Mara couldn’t breathe, but the lack of oxygen hardly inhibited her mind from inventing an excuse. “Have you not already had your bath this evening?”

  “Not by the pleasure of your hands.”

  Dægan gathered them, along with the soap, and placed them on his chest. “Come now, love. Touch me.”

  Eventually, without his coercion, she stroked her thumbs across his nipples, feeling their unexpected tautness, and then back again, creating the start of satisfaction on his face. Mara simpered as well, liking the freedom to touch him wherever she so dared, and the liberty of enjoying every wicked moment of it.

  She circled her hands around his chest, slowly at first, taking in every dip and bulge of his torso from navel to neck, then uninhibitedly around his shoulders and arms. Her curious exploration turned into a sensuous display of greed, and, quite honestly, she adored the feel of him.

  His skin was smooth, stretched taut against his bulging muscles, and had it not been for the soap that lathered him, she dared to taste it beneath her tongue.

  Uninhibitedly, she caressed the flat of his stomach, feeling him tighten with anticipation as she dipped further below his waist, and gripped his erection. She felt him shudder like he was a newly taken adolescent boy.

  Mara fancied the sound of his uncontainable groan. Its low and deep hum pulled at the very tiny threads of her unraveling restraint. She liked the feel of him in her hands, the slippery hardness of his body that seemed to change and thrive with every movement of her fist. She watched his breath catch and his eyes close. He was submissive to her every command and yet wildly savage in his naked form.

  Suddenly, he slipped from her hand, dropped to pick up a bucket of clean water, and dumped it on the both of them.

  Mara gasped at the sudden shock of cool water running down her back, making fast to scream, but as soon as she was able to catch her breath, another bucket descended upon her, washing the last of the lather from their bodies.

  Dægan took her in a swift embrace, finding her mouth again, as it was already open, ready to complain. He claimed her lips, taking whatever sounds she had released in surprise, and then her breasts. He brushed his tongue over a hardened nipple with so much fervor that she, herself, felt the very passion upon which his chained desire aggressively tugged.

  She was addicted to his touch, his moods of fire and ice, the unpredictable shift of tenderness and greed. She wanted more. So much more, and was not afraid to tell him. She begged him, and he seemed to nearly come out of his skin with excitement.

  Dægan carried her to the bench and sat her on his lap. He slid his hand down her stomach and between her legs, gently spreading his fingers within her warmth. He found her to be suitably ready for him, yet she was not prepared for the unexpected finger that entered her.

  Naturally, she protested the sinful intrusion, but not so much that he’d stop, for it brought a feeling of heat and languid pleasure she’d be stupid to shun.

  ****

  Dægan moved his finger inside her, ever so slightly, and stroked
her outer flesh with a careful thumb, watching her melt into his broad shoulder. There was nothing he wanted more than this. A blissful, ever-sweet reward which she was giving unto him; her compliant surrender of body and soul in one timely siege.

  He was controlling every wild pulse and every sensation that came and went with just the touch of his hand. And he cherished this moment for he witnessed her beautiful orgasm taking place right in his arms—by his doing, by his hand alone. What a vantage point he had in holding her, in being profoundly taken by her smoldering green eyes, drunk with desire. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  He had to have her!

  Reclining on the bench, he shamelessly pulled her on top of him, setting her astride his hips. Her wet softness drove him mad, and spurred him into a ravenous animal whose only need was to mate. But he, being stronger and even more gracious, held the full width of her hips for dear life, slowly easing himself inside her like it was a deliberate, well considered move.

  Or at least he wanted it perceived that way.

  ****

  Mara knew better. Through his dwindling constraint, she saw the wanton vision of blue in his eyes pierce through his darkened lashes and his face twist in delightful anguish over the feel of him burying his manhood into her silken flesh. He was an angelic sight, if angels could be brazen, and how pleasing to know that this stunning piece of Heaven was all hers.

  She dropped down upon his chest as their bodies united as one, exhaling at the glorious feel of extreme fullness within her body. She rocked, only giving up inches and hearing his response in muffled groans.

  She fed on those masculine grunts and huffs, amazed at how much control she had from her more dominant position, partial to the way he’d stifle another husky groan in her neck, or hide another stolen breath in her ear.