Captive (The Druid Chronicles Book 2)

by Christina Phillips

  Morwyn’s fingers tightened around his, as if in silent sympathy. She wouldn’t offer such solace if she could see into the evil pit of his soul.

  “They burned the hamlet to the ground. Murdered the men, raped the women and children and took whatever they didn’t kill as slaves.” Bren should have died that night, along with Eryn. But by the malevolence of the gods and the cursed ministrations of the Druids, he’d survived.

  Morwyn didn’t speak. But she didn’t look away either. He threaded his fingers through hers, rested his jaw against their joined hands.

  “Someone escaped. Roused the local rulers.” His kin. And they’d sent a contingent of warriors and two of the most highly skilled Druids.

  It had been too late. Drifting between this world and the next, he’d fought the Druids, his hoarse voice pleading with them to attend Eryn. To save his beloved.

  But they’d ignored him. And used their powers to harness his maddened spirit, to wrench it back into his corporeal body, to anchor him once more on the mortal plane.

  He was the one they had been sent to save. And by the time they finally deemed him capable of being moved, there was no one left in that ravaged hamlet who could benefit from their formidable skills.

  “Is it possible . . .” She hesitated, obviously unsure whether to continue. “Perhaps your wife was beyond their help before they arrived.”

  Smashed to a bloodied pulp, unable to move and scarcely able to draw breath into his damaged lungs, he’d still heard Eryn’s every terrified cry as the attackers had brutalized her. When he’d finally pushed his broken body onto his side to try to protect her, one of them launched a spear in his direction. And the world turned scarlet.

  Later, the Druids had proclaimed that the gods had guided the weapon, sparing his life, and he’d believed them. How else could he have survived such blood loss unless the gods wanted to keep him alive for their further vindictive pleasure?

  He rubbed her knuckles across his roughened jaw. Focused on her dark eyes, so full of compassion. He could almost allow himself to believe she felt something more than lust for him.

  “Perhaps she was.” It was the first time he’d ever acknowledged the possibility aloud, even though the thought had tortured him incessantly over the years. “But they had no intention of even trying. They ignored her as if she were nothing but a piece of bloodied meat.”

  Morwyn didn’t answer right away. Her other hand cradled his face, a tender gesture devoid of sexual overtones. A touch of comfort.

  She whispered words in a language he didn’t know. Yet eerie shivers snaked along his spine, as if somewhere deep inside his subconscious he recognized the foreign incantation. But before he could grasp their significance she trailed her fingers through his hair and the sensation splintered.

  And then she spoke. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  ***

  Back in their room Bren watched Morwyn light two lamps and place them beside the bed. The ache in his heart was still there. Would always be there as a constant reminder of how he’d failed Eryn. But somehow, since sharing that small, vital segment of his past with Morwyn, the pain no longer crippled every breath he took.

  Unease slithered deep in his gut. He didn’t deserve even that modicum of peace. He searched his mind for Eryn’s face, focused on the fragile memory and heard once again her agonized cries as he’d struggled against oblivion.

  But the familiar guilt-soaked pain didn’t rip through his chest and tear open his heart. Instead, the hazy image of Eryn smiled at him, a tender smile, as if she forgave him for being unable to save her that night.

  The smile he saw so often during his tangled nightmares. Her unequivocal forgiveness, a shining star piercing his blood-drenched existence. The forgiveness he’d refused to acknowledge for so many torturous years.

  He couldn’t allow her to forgive him. Because he could never forgive himself.

  “Gaul.” Morwyn’s voice dragged him back to the present. She was standing in front of him, tall and proud, her dark braid snaking over her shoulder to her waist. Her gaze caught his and didn’t waver. “Within these four walls . . . do you trust me?”

  He trusted her enough to tell her something he’d not told another soul in six years. He’d trusted her not to poison him in Camulodunon, or thrust her dagger through his heart when they arrived back in Cymru.

  Did he trust her?

  “As much as you trust me.”

  A small smile quirked the corners of her lips, but vanished in an instant. With a stab of surprise he realized she wasn’t as confident as she appeared. He wrapped his hand around her braid and tugged gently, tracing the knuckles of his other hand along her jaw.

  “I trust you more than perhaps I should.” Again she smiled and again he caught the flicker of uncertainty behind her words. “I fear it crept upon me unawares.”

  How easy it would be to tell her the truth. Morwyn was strong, brave. She’d know the necessity for silence. For stealth. She could even assist in his cover, provide alibis for when he needed to meet with Caratacus.

  The vision glowed bright in his mind for one glorious moment before turning to ash.

  He would never put her in such danger. The life he’d chosen was a solitary one, and the fewer people who knew of his true identity, the safer they all were. Besides, he’d promised to escort her back to her home village. He wondered why she hadn’t reminded him. He wouldn’t offer. Perhaps she’d decide to stay in the town.

  For a while.

  “Within these four walls,” he said, “I trust you with my life.”

  She cradled his face in a tender gesture, as if she were holding something infinitely precious. He savored the sensation, relished the thought, even as cold reality seeped through his consciousness.

  Morwyn had no such finer feelings for him. And even if she did, should she discover the depths to which he’d sunk, the atrocities he’d committed, her affection would wither and pollute her soul.

  Another reason why he could never allow her to discover who he truly was.

  “I don’t want your life.” Her voice was soft and her fingertips grazed his throat, hovered as if fascinated over his pulse. “I only want to look at you. As you have looked at me.”

  Instinctively he tensed. “No.” It was harsh. Nonnegotiable. The thought of her recoiling from the hideous sight of his body caused his guts to clench in denial.

  She rested the palms of her hands against his shoulders, and her heat seeped through the material of his tunic and branded his flesh.

  “Please.” Her voice was a breathy whisper. “Just this once. Just for this night. Let me see you as you are.”

  “That’s the one thing you never want to see, Morwyn.”

  She gave an oddly vulnerable smile that caused a strange pain deep in his chest. “I’ve seen the scars of battle before, Gaul. For a warrior, you’re astonishingly vain about preserving the illusion of your beauty.”

  A short laugh huffed from his mouth. Unexpected. He didn’t mean to laugh. Except when he was with Morwyn he couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “I have no such vanity with regard to my beauty.” What an extraordinary choice of word she’d used. “But these aren’t battle scars. They’re—” The words choked his throat. Because they were his scars of shame. Of degradation. The scars that reminded him every moment of every day that he had survived.

  Something flickered in her eyes, as if she knew what he could never say. As though she had known from the moment she’d made her request how much capitulation would cost him.

  Silently he pulled back from her and removed his belt. As he undressed, Morwyn didn’t break eye contact and didn’t offer to help. She simply looked at him, and as he ripped his undertunic from his body and tossed it across the floor he glared at her, daring her not to flinch or shudder or turn away in disgust.

  Still her gaze meshed with his as she stepped toward him and grazed the tips of her fingers over his shoulders and along his biceps. Her warm breath dusted
his chest, the evocative scent from her hair teased his senses, and despite his shame, desire speared his groin.

  Finally she looked at him. Her breath stumbled and again he tensed. Waiting for her rejection. Expecting it.

  Her lips brushed across the ragged scar where the spear had penetrated, its deadly trajectory only narrowly missing both heart and lung. His hands fisted by his sides, blunt fingernails gouging his palms. No woman but Eryn had ever touched him so. But with Eryn, the only scars he’d possessed were honorable.

  Gentle fingers, as light as the whisper of a feather, explored the deep gashes carved into his chest. Reminders of the antiquated spiked club one of the attackers had slammed into him before he even comprehended their presence.

  Her lips followed, tender and erotic, searing his skin with a flick of her tongue and tantalizing graze of her teeth. Hot breath breezed against his abdomen as she soothed every grotesquely twisted ridge of healed flesh and muscle, her kisses igniting the embers glowing through his blood.

  Jagged breath hissed between his clenched teeth and, hypnotized, he watched her slid down his body until she kneeled before him, hands splayed across his arse. Her dark hair, still braided, teased his inner thigh as her tongue traced a leisurely path around his navel.

  And lower.

  He speared his fingers into her hair and gripped her skull. She looked up at him, and in the glow from the lanterns he saw her smile.

  “Do you want me to stop now?” Her voice was uneven, throaty, and stoked the flames licking inside his skin.

  He didn’t want her to stop but warning pounded in the back of his mind, a throbbing counterpoint to the lust thundering through his blood. For the last three years he’d controlled his sexual encounters with the same degree with which he controlled his military persona.

  With detached efficiency.

  Except from the moment he’d met her, Morwyn had managed to shake his world sideways, caused him to question the essentiality of remaining silent, and nothing about their frenzied couplings was remotely detached.

  His head jerked in denial, overriding his brain, and again she smiled. Pure decadence in the face of salvation. He screwed his eyes shut, fingers still tangled in her hair, and her hand trailed over his hips, between his thighs, and cradled his aching balls.

  Her other hand slid around his shaft and he dragged open his heavy eyelids and fixed his gaze on her. The tip of her tongue peeked between her lips and then she leaned into him, breath scorching his sensitized flesh, mouth opening, sucking him inside. Slow, deliberate, but inexorable, her lips stretching around him, her tongue flattening beneath him, her teeth scraping against him as she took him deeper than he’d ever been before.

  An agonized groan filled the room and echoed in his ears, but he hardly cared. Pulses hammering, he stared, mesmerized by the sight of Morwyn on her knees between his spread legs, his cock buried inside her wet mouth.

  Fingernails scraped his sac, trailed along the insides of his thigh and probed between his arse cheeks. Her fingers were everywhere, exploring and teasing, gentle, then demanding. Driving need and desire and blinding wild lust thundering through his arteries, boiling in his gut, pounding the length of his rock-hard erection.

  “Gods, Morwyn.” His voice rasped and fingers dug into her scalp. He locked the muscles of his thighs, tried to prevent the inevitable, but as if anticipating his strangled thoughts, she increased the suction around his cock and clamped one hand over his backside.

  He thrust into her mouth, hard and violent, unable to prevent the primal need to possess and conquer. She didn’t pull back, even though such escape was futile, but met his thrusts, savored them, swallowing his length farther into her welcoming throat.

  Harsh pants rent the air and he couldn’t take his eyes from her. A sliver of sanity wanted to pull her from him, toss her across the bed and plunge into her, feel her come around him as he pumped himself into her. But even as the thought formed she slid a finger between his buttocks, probed the sensitive flesh, and reason splintered into infinity.

  Nothing existed but Morwyn and this moment and the primeval urge for completion. Silky tendrils of her hair spilled over his fingers, and while one hand played with his arse her other captured his balls, caressing and tweaking and cupping his weight.

  Too much. Need flooded, pumped through his shaft, hammered into her mouth. Hot and brutal and demanding, every thrust jerking her head back, and he could feel her glorious suction, a cocoon of sheer sensation; the mind-blowing ecstasy as she swallowed and milked him and swallowed again.

  The sweetest oblivion beckoned. And he fell.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  In the silent moments before dawn, Morwyn stirred in her lover’s arms. It was the first time she’d thought of him as such, and yet it felt so right. In her heart, she had always called him so.

  Her head on his shoulder, his arm cradling her in a possessive embrace, she traced his innumerable scars with gentle fingers. They disfigured, but she didn’t find them unsightly. In truth, she had seen worse, although rarely had the victim survived. The only reason her insides clenched with horror when he had first undressed was because of the agony such injuries would have caused him.

  She knew it wasn’t their physical presence that tortured his soul. It was his entrenched belief that he was responsible for his wife’s death. The scars were merely a visible outlet for his misguided convictions.

  If only there were a potion she could concoct to ease his mind. But that wasn’t her specialty. Gawain, Druid of truth and judgment, was trained to soothe such intricacies of the mind. Gawain, whom she would never see again.

  A ragged sigh slipped free. Regret for Gawain’s untimely death, regret for her Gaul’s shattered peace of mind. And regret for herself, at the knowledge there was nothing she could do to change any of it.

  “Why the sigh?” Her Gaul’s husky whisper drifted across her cheek and she instinctively melded closer to his naked body, as if by so doing she could somehow alleviate his sorrow.

  “Just recalling the past.” She pressed her lips against his shoulder, savoring the flavor of sweat and sex and man. But not just any man. Her man.

  For now.

  She thrust the harsh reminder aside. Her Gaul was here with her now and she wouldn’t spoil the moment by thinking of the future.

  “A man you loved?” His breath caressed the top of her head and his fingers stroked the heated skin of her arm.

  Silence lingered. Did he really want to know? Or was it merely an idle question?

  She didn’t have to respond. But something tugged deep in her breast, a strange compulsion to share something of herself with him. The way he had with her.

  A bond, of sorts.

  “There was a man.” Her fingers played with the hair on her Gaul’s chest as the first glimpse of dawn illuminated his outline next to her. “I loved him for years . . . blindly.”

  He continued to caress her arm. But remained silent.

  A jagged sigh escaped. She’d not spoken of Aeron since that night. At least, she hadn’t spoken of her shattered feelings for him. He had murdered their queen, destroyed her faith and left a legacy of hatred and incomprehension amongst her fellow Druids.

  None of them could mention Aeron’s name without cursing him to eternal isolation. She’d had to mend her battered heart alone, unable to grieve for the loss of a man who had never existed outside her own mind.

  “But in the end he betrayed me. All of us.”

  Still he didn’t speak, but he rubbed his jaw across the top of her head in silent sympathy. As he had once before.

  Warmth spiraled from her breast to her womb, but it wasn’t fueled by the need for sex. It was a strange sensation. His silence said more than words ever could.

  She frowned, idly teasing his erect nipple with one finger. How odd, yet how fitting, that her Gaul could comfort her without the need of flowery speeches.

  “He didn’t return my love.” She waited for the once-familiar stab o
f pain to accompany her confession, but her heart remained steady. Untouched. Had the last remnant of Aeron’s poison finally leaked from her soul?

  The realization she was at last free of his hypnotic grip sent shivers of strange delight through her mind. Pressing even closer to her Gaul, she hesitated for scarcely a heartbeat.

  He had confided in her. She would confide in him.

  Lifting her head, she whispered into his ear. “He was a Druid.”

  Her Gaul didn’t physically recoil. But his entire body stilled beneath her fingers, as if his muscles and bone and blood repelled her words. A chill shivered through her. Had she made a terrible mistake by telling him? Would he now leap to the conclusion that she, also, was a Druid?

  The chill invaded her mind as a barely registered memory surfaced. When she had tried to comfort him earlier, she’d unthinkingly whispered the ancient Druidic incantation of healing. Without appropriate rituals and sacrifice it was meaningless, yet still the words had slid free. Because her need to offer a modicum of comfort to this man had overcome her sense of self-preservation.

  Had he noticed her slip into the tongue of the ancients? Would he betray her to his Roman officers?

  She pushed up onto her elbow and gazed down at him. The light was muted but she could see the outline of his face, the gleam of his eyes. There was no reason for him to come to such a conclusion. And even if he did, he wouldn’t hand her over to the enemy.

  Her enemy. The reminder dripped like poison across her mind, but she ignored it. Because somehow she knew. He would not betray her trust.

  “You loved a Druid.” His tone was devoid of emotion, as if it meant nothing to him. Perhaps it didn’t. She trailed her fingers across his jaw, fascinated by the rough texture of his night-grown beard.

  “It was long ago.” And here, sharing her bed with the Gaul, it did seem long ago that she’d loved Aeron. Another lifetime. “Before the Romans invaded Cymru.”

  He didn’t answer and she continued to caress his face, tracing his temples, his cheekbones and his mouth, her fingertips committing every plane and angle to memory. Meshed against his chest, she felt his heart rate increase, his breathing become ragged, and he speared his fingers through her tangled hair, pulling her toward him.