“I don’t fear you! The Goddess protects me.”
Linnet groaned. Why must this foolish mortal defy him! She feared for this would-be lover. When Zamiel bore down on him, her own simmering anger boiled over.
Firing into motion, she leaped between them. Although knives seemed to stab her eyes, she glared straight into the white fire of Zamiel’s gaze.
“How dare ye?” she raged. “Ye don’t want me yerself, do ye? Ye couldn’t bear the sight of me! But I’ll have a man in my bed tonight, will ye or nill ye. An end to this living hell—an end to my madness. Now get out of my way!”
In some remote corner of her mind, the meek mouse of a Linnet stood aghast at her own screaming defiance. But that part of her was small and distant, obliterated by the red heat of fury.
For a heartbeat she gazed into the face of Heaven, familiar yet transformed—his fine-edged beauty bright and deadly as a blade, a storm cloud of ebony hair swirling around his face, lightning eyes flashing in the darkness.
Her own eyes were burning, tears streaming down her face, dark spots dancing in her vision. But she’d be damned before she cowered before him.
Now the brilliant light flickered and dimmed. A celestial wind gusted over her, dried leaves and petals skirling past in a cloud of poppy fragrance. When her vision cleared, his wings were gone, his divine fire extinguished.
Merely mortal, he stood before her, eyes raw and smoldering like embers in his drawn features.
“Linnet,” he rasped, throat seemingly shredded by the bronze voice of Heaven that had issued from his lips.
Mutely his hand rose, palm up, beseeching.
In the soft starry darkness around them, the fires burned unabated. The night was alive with whispers, trembling with possibility, men and women lost in ancient ritual. On this enchanted eve, no one would come running to behold a manifestation of divine power. Behind her, the auburn-haired man was scurrying away, breathing curses, abandoning his wooing in unrepentant haste.
Another chance gone to break the spell.
The realization enraged her anew. Ignoring Zamiel’s outstretched hand, she dashed away her tears and faced him down.
“Ye have no right, Zamiel! No right. This is my choice, do ye hear me? Ye had yers earlier and made it, aye?”
“Linnet.” He looked desperate. “I have to tell you—”
“Nay, ye do not! Whatever it is, ye should have said it then.” The salt-scented breeze tossed her curls around her face. Impatient, she flung her hair back. “Gentle Mother, Zamiel, I won’t be a plaything of this Goddess, the Fae, my fate or what have ye—not for one minute longer! I’ll take a lover tonight if it kills me, do ye hear?”
His face darkened, a storm gathering in his violet gaze. Still, he fought for calm.
“We should talk. Linnet, I’m leaving.”
The words should have come as no great surprise. She’d always known their fellowship would be fleeting at best. She’d thought herself prepared to bid him farewell when the time came.
Yet the words struck low and deep, like a knife to the belly.
The acid burn of anguish spread through her—the familiar pain of abandonment. Everyone she’d ever loved had left her, starting with her own mother. Somehow, like a fool, she’d dared to believe it might be different this time. She’d believed she could trust him, but he’d scorned her like everyone else. And now he was leaving.
She pressed a hand to her stomach, as though she could contain the pain that way, and sought refuge in the tingling flood of anger.
“Go then. I’ll not stop ye. I’ve other business tonight.”
“Hell’s Bells,” he growled, low and dangerous. “This is madness. You’re an innocent, Linnet! Your passions are inflamed by what’s happening here, all around us—by what we did earlier. I know you want to regain your memory, but not like this.”
“Ye can’t stop me,” she taunted. Grief and heartbreak made her rash, until the words that poured out were not her own, but stones she flung for the sole purpose of hurting him.
“I won’t be innocent much longer, aye? I’ll have a man between my thighs before dawn. Nay, I’ll take them one after the next, like a Cheapside doxy. I’ll take them in my hands and work them to a frenzy. I’ll spread myself for them, let them taste me, let them plunge deep inside me—”
“No, you will not.” A visible tremor rippled through him, drawing his brows together, flooding his face with color. “If they damn me to Hell for it, I swear, you won’t do this thing. If you’re determined to play the whore, by every angel in Heaven, I’ll be the only man in your bed tonight.”
A tingling heat flooded through her, all the way to her fingertips, the heady rush of outrage and wild elation.
“I’ve the blood of two kings and the Fair Folk running through my veins. Ye don’t have the right to make that choice.”
“The hell I don’t,” he growled, advancing on her.
Her hand flashed out to strike him. Relentless as death, he caught her wrist and held her. As she fought to twist free, he hauled her hard against him and kissed her, swallowing the furious words bubbling on her lips.
His lips and tongue seared her, branded her, claimed her for his.
Desperate, she balled her free hand into a fist and struck his shoulder. Gripping her forearms, pinning her against his chest, he kissed her until her senses swam and the world reeled around her. Gasping to fill her burning lungs, she fought him, to no avail. She even tried to kick him, but her foot glanced harmlessly from his booted shin.
“Little hellcat,” he murmured tenderly against her mouth. She hissed like the cat he’d named her.
Beneath the drugging warmth of his kisses, her will to resist him was weakening. The angry pain of her scorned and lacerated heart was fading, overcome by the pulsing passion he could stir in her so easily. She leaned into his tensile heat, inflamed by the hard bulge of his codpiece against her womb. They were so nearly the same height that he wouldn’t need to lift her to have her thrusting against him, like the young lovers whose passion she’d watched.
Already her nipples were peaking under her insubstantial gown, unshielded by any hard-boned corset. Already she was matching him kiss for kiss, challenging him in the war for dominance between them.
Already her knees were folding as he gathered her in his arms.
Together they sank to the sweet-scented earth beside the dwindling fire. A screen of long grass rose around them, walling them into a private world, with only the glittering net of stars to witness.
Even as he kissed her, his deft hands were sliding beneath her skirts, fumbling in his eagerness. The soft leather of his gauntlets grazed the sensitized skin of her thighs.
Breaking free, she said fiercely, “No gauntlets. I’ll have all of ye, or none.”
For an instant, he hesitated, and her heart plummeted. She steeled herself for another rejection.
Then he muttered a breathless curse and stripped away the gloves. When his hands resumed their upward journey over the undefended terrain of her inner thighs, his palms burned like twin coals, radiating a preternatural warmth. She shivered with sudden fever, night air teasing the moist heat of her woman’s place.
She was on fire for him, burning for him. When his lean fingers cupped her damp folds, the fires blazed higher. With a wordless cry, she dug her heels into the earth and arched her hips into his touch, demanding everything his hands promised.
Briefly, he pressed his brow against her shoulder. She sensed the fierce battle raging within him. Then one finger eased into her snug channel. She gasped and contracted around him.
“By the Seventh Angel.” He raised his head to peer into her face, eyes lightened to lavender and glowing softly. “I vow to you, Linnet Norwood, I’d rather have this night in your arms than face eternity without you. I can bear to endure the ages alone no longer.”
His gaze dropped to her parted lips, moist and tingling from his kisses.
“Tell me the truth, love,” he whispe
red, as though he feared who else might be listening. “Do you want this? For once we embark on this course, there’s no going back—for either of us.”
“Aye,” she said, voice trembling with need. “I want this.”
And she meant it forever.
He groaned and kissed her to seal their bargain. She kissed him back, offering him her heart and soul on tiptoe, just as the black-haired lass had offered her breasts taut and aching to her lover’s mouth. Lodged snugly in her channel, his finger worked her, until her flesh tightened and milked him in rippling spasms. When his thumb found the throbbing pearl of her need, she bucked against him, riding him, thrusting shamelessly against his friction.
He broke away panting, eyes heavy-lidded and gleaming, black hair tumbling like a curtain around his hungry face.
“Take this off,” he growled, tugging at her gown.
With shaking hands, she bared herself to his gaze, lifting the gown over her head, letting it fall where it would. Beneath, she wore nothing. The night air tickled her skin, but the fire bathed her in its flickering heat. His eyes devoured her, top to bottom. Her nipples hardened and goose bumps rose against her skin.
The old Linnet, the mouse, would have blushed and covered herself with her hands. The new Linnet sank back in the field of poppies and displayed herself to her lover, thighs falling apart to reveal her pink mound of Venus, flushed and glistening with dew.
Dear God, she needed him to touch her there.
“Let me see you,” he said hoarsely, gaze riveted on her secrets. “Let me really see you.”
Her tongue swept out to trace her swollen lips, coating them with cool dampness. Closing her eyes, she glided her hands down her body, grazing the tingling peaks of her nipples and gasping as pleasure arced through her.
“No,” he breathed. “Look at me when you do that.”
Even that, she didn’t protest. Languid, her lids lifted as her palms grazed her ribs, the flat plane of her belly, skimmed the hot folds of her mound and spread herself for his delectation.
“If you could see yourself,” he said. “Your skin fair and gleaming like a pearl against the fiery darkness of your hair, your eyes pools of fire a man could drown in.”
At least I’ve chosen a poet for a lover, she thought, half dreaming, marveling to hear herself worshipped as a thing of beauty.
Awkward with haste, he fumbled out of his leather jerkin and shirt as he continued to list her charms.
“A mouth to make any man alive dream of sin. The breasts of a goddess, with nipples that beg for his mouth on them.”
He tugged off his boots, shed his codpiece, struggled with the points of his hose.
“Long legs to wrap around your lover as he thrusts deep inside you, a round ripe bottom to fill his hands...and your gorgeous, perfect, wet little quim, darling. I can smell your passion from here.”
“You’re mad,” she whispered. “Or blind. I’m pale and plain as a potato.”
“I’m blinded by your beauty,” he murmured. “For you are beautiful, love, body and soul.”
Could it be so? she wondered. Could an awkward girl have blossomed into beauty?
Then Zamiel dropped his hose, and every thought went spinning out of her head.
He’d told her once that Lucifer crafted him in his own image. And his father was the chief tempter, the most beautiful of all God’s angels.
As Zamiel crawled toward her, lean and supple as a panther, her heartbeat quickened to match the sweet pulse of passion between her legs. She wanted every inch of him—his hands on her skin, his mouth on her breasts, his proud jutting length inside her, piercing the virgin barrier she no longer valued. With both arms, she reached for him.
She shivered at the feel of him fever-hot beneath her hands, tight muscle rippling under smooth skin.
The way he closed his eyes and quivered at her touch—this man who’d lived an eternity without the simple pleasure of touch.
He was tight-leashed urgency crouched between her thighs, weight braced on his arms as though he still feared to touch her.
Boldly she sleeked her hands down his back, skimmed his spine with her fingertips, curled her hands around the taut muscle of his derriere and pulled him toward her.
His rampant length brushed the wet heat between her legs.
Gazing into her eyes, brow furrowed with concentration, he fitted himself against her.
“Are you ready for me?” he whispered. A pulse fluttered madly in his throat. “Because I don’t think this will take very long...the first time.”
For a moment, all her senses fixed on the foreign object nudging her channel, she wanted to say, “No, I’m not ready. I’ve changed my mind. Sorry.”
But she wanted this, wanted him inside her, wanted to obliterate a lifetime of aching solitude. She saw the same yearning mirrored in his stormy gaze. She wanted to be as close to him as two bodies could be.
Her hands tightened around his buttocks, and her chin came up. “Take me.”
He stared into her eyes as though he saw straight through to the depths of her soul. He thrust once, the muscles under her hands flexing beautifully. Her fingers tightened and she gasped as he filled her, stretched her beyond belief. A stab of pain made her cry out—one more lover’s voice rising in the warm vibrant darkness of this Midsummer Night.
And perhaps the Goddess honored even her Christian sacrifice on this sacred night, for the pain faded as quickly as it flared. A deep low shock of pleasure rolled through her.
Zamiel braced above her, clearly afraid to move, sweat beading on his brow. “Are you...should I stop?”
She wrapped her legs around him and pressed her heels against his buttocks.
With a groan, he closed his eyes and began moving within her, the slide of his manhood lubricated by her own desire. With every thrust, her body hummed like a well-played instrument in a symphony of pleasure. Her tingling nipples brushed his chest, the tight muscles of his back rippled beneath the stinging kiss of her nails as he rode her. Like the young lovers she’d watched so avidly, she found his rhythm and matched it, tilting her hips upward so he could penetrate deeper, harder, to her very essence.
Mindless and moaning, writhing in the rising tide of arousal, rushing swiftly toward the crest, she barely heard the slap of flesh on flesh, his hoarse cries of pleasure filling the night. The delicious aromas of tobacco and passion and Zamiel flooded her senses, the wine-and-spices bite of his kisses setting her drunk.
The climax roared down on them with the force of the heaving sea. He arched back, raven hair spilling around him, his eyes molten white, dark flames dancing above his brow. At the last moment, he cried something...a name...a torrent of incomprehensible syllables in the language of Heaven.
It deafened her like the roaring of a thousand lions, like a blast of thunder inside her head. There on the border of the Faerie realm, the earth shuddered and bucked beneath their writhing forms as though it sought to fling them off.
A blast of lightning washed the air white and sent her spinning down into darkness, into the pulsing vortex of surrender.
Chapter Sixteen
Linnet was dreaming.
She was a little girl again, too tall and pale, awkward and coltish, with curls that never stayed where she pinned them and amber eyes that seemed to unsettle the adults around her. Her eyes also seemed to unnerve her brother Jasper, a stocky youth with hard fists and the small mean light of a bully’s soul burning in his close-set eyes.
Always she tiptoed around Glencross Castle, crept across the floorboards like a mouse with her heart in her throat, and largely managed to remain beneath his notice. God be thanked, she was quick-witted enough to hide or elude him, most of the time. Only after she’d had her first woman’s blood did her luck finally fail her.
She could no longer recall the details of that minor contretemps in the castle courtyard as the November rain sleeted down on her cloak-wrapped form, the fatal encounter that finally set him off. But she tasted again the
acrid bite of terror flooding her mouth as she fled his bellowed threats and red-eyed rage, sprinted through the gates onto the steep path that wound along the castle cliff. Her heart pounded like a hammer against her chest as she scrambled and slid, panting, along the slick path over the dangerous ravine. Beneath her, the roaring waters of the river in flood poured through the jagged rocks.
Still Jasper pursued her, shouting curses, hurling rocks that scraped and bruised her to the bone. Never had his blind rage lasted so long, and he was so much stronger than she! Soaked and shivering, Linnet felt her feeble reserves seeping away. She sobbed as she fled, gasping prayers for her life.
Then the deep-throated roar of a rockslide filled the air. It rose to a crescendo and shook the earth beneath her. Wrapping her arms around her head, she huddled desperately against the flimsy shelter of a boulder and shivered as the avalanche swept around her.
When it passed, the path behind her stood empty. Her brother had vanished like an evil dream.
Barely conscious and badly disoriented, blood pouring from a gash in her scalp, she tried to find her way home. But as darkness fell, she strayed from the trail and stumbled into the dark wood. Through blurred vision, she glimpsed the moonlit shimmer of a waterfall, its vertical surface flat and smooth as a mirror.
Close to fainting, she fancied she saw an image in that mirror, a hallucination or fever dream. She imagined an enchanted land that bloomed with summer, felt the caress of its balmy warmth against her frozen skin, heard the haunting sweetness of fey voices raised in song that seemed to beckon her forward. Summoning her last scrap of strength, she stumbled through the mirror.
She awoke in the Summer Lands, where the Faeries dwelled.
She could still recall the sweetness of the first true friendship she’d ever formed, the poignant blend of hero-worship and affection that bound her, heart to heart, with the young Faerie princess Rhiannon le Fay, the ethereal creature with her lilting voice and cloud of silver hair who healed Linnet’s wounds and miraculously befriended her.
Linnet grew to share the worry that haunted Rhiannon’s leaf-green eyes when she spoke of her ailing mother, the Faerie Queene, and Rhiannon’s elder sister, the sorceress Morrigan le Fay, who must soon take the throne.
Laura Navarre - [The Magick Trilogy 02] Page 26
