by Nora Roberts
“Done enough so I want to clear my head and drink a good glass of wine.”
“Well then, we’ll be back in a minute. I just need to . . .” She was already pulling Connor from the room. “Just need Connor for a moment.”
“What is it?” He worried, as she had a death grip on his hand while she pulled him out the back of the workshop, through the kitchen. “Are you upset? I know the ritual was intense, but—”
“It was. It was. It was.” She all but chanted it, dragging him on through the living area, up the stairs.
“Was it the blood? I know it can seem harsh, but I promise you it’s needed to make the potion, to bespell it.”
“No. Yes. Jesus. It was all of it!” Breathless, she shoved him into his bedroom, then back against the door to slam it.
Then she covered his mouth with hers, all but fusing their lips with the heat pouring from her.
“Oh,” he managed, finally clueing in as she ripped his sweater up and away.
“Just give me.” She peeled off the insulated shirt under the sweater, latched her teeth on his bare shoulder. “Just give me.”
He’d have slowed things down—a bit—but she was already unhooking his belt, and what was a man to do?
He started tugging up her sweater—undressing a woman was one of the great pleasures of life—got tangled up with her very busy hands. He considered just ripping it away, then—
“Ah, to hell with all that.”
The next thing Meara knew she was naked, and so was he.
“Yes, yes, yes.” She gripped his hair, assaulted his mouth, moaned with pleasure when he took her breasts.
She’d never been so wild with lust, never known such quaking, roiling need. Perhaps something in the swirling air, the pulse of the fire, the stunning rise and merging of powers and magicks had punched into her.
All she knew was she’d had to have him or go mad.
He still tasted of it, that exotic flavor of magick—potent, seductive, edging toward the dark. She felt the ripples of it still working in him, not yet tamped down.
And wanted that, wanted him, wanted all.
His hands weren’t patient now, but greedy and rough and quick. She wanted that as well, craved being touched and taken as if his life depended on it.
It felt as if hers did.
He whipped her around, forced her back to the door. She had an instant to look into his eyes—fierce and feral—before he drove into her.
She’d thought she’d go mad if he didn’t take her, and now, being taken, went mad.
Her hips jackhammered, challenging him to match her ferocious pace. Her nails bit into him—back, shoulders—her teeth gnawed and scraped. Little pains, quick and hot, that fired into a crazed pleasure that enslaved him. His blood beat hammer strikes under the skin, so he thrust into her harder, faster, deeper in a brutal, breathless rhythm.
She cried out, a sound that joined shock and greed. And again, this time his name with a kind of wonder. When he gripped her hips, lifted her, she locked her legs around his waist.
He ravaged her throat, filled himself with the taste of her as he filled her with his lust until the last frayed tether snapped.
He broke, swore he felt the very air shatter like glass as she tightened around him, as her final cry died off into a shuddering sigh.
Limp, they slid down to the floor in a sweaty tangle of limbs.
“God. My sweet God.” She drew in air like a drowning woman surfacing.
Struggling for breath, he managed a grunt, then flopped off her to lie on his back with his eyes closed and his chest heaving.
“Is the floor shaking?”
“I don’t think so.” He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. “Maybe. No,” he decided. “I think we are—or more what you could call vibrating. There are bound to be aftershocks after an earthquake, I’m told.”
He reached out blindly to pat her, and his hand landed on her breast. A fine place. “Are you all right then?”
“I’m not all right. I’m amazing and amazed. I feel like I’ve gone flying again. It was the way you looked—like you’d been lit up from the inside, and your hair flying around in the wind you’d made, and the power of it all beating like tribal drums. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t control myself.”
“You’re forgiven. I’m a forgiving sort of man.”
She sighed out a laugh, laid a hand over his. “And now here we are, naked and spent on your floor—and your room’s a disaster of a mess as always.”
He turned his head, glanced around. Not a disaster, exactly, he calculated. True enough there were shoes and boots and clothes and books scattered around. And he’d never seen the point—a severe and sharp bone of contention between him and his sister—on making a bed when you were only going to get back in it again.
To please her, he waved a hand, had the shoes and boots and clothes and books—and whatever else lay on the floor—pile up in a corner. He’d deal with it all—at some point.
But for now he waved his hand again, had rose petals raining down. She laughed, grabbed a handful from the air, then scattered them over his hair.
“You’re a foolish romantic, Connor.”
“There’s not a thing foolish about romance.” He drew her over, pillowed her head on his shoulder. “There, that’s altogether better.”
She couldn’t argue, and yet. “We should go down. They’ll be wondering what we’re up to.”
“Oh, I’ll wager they know perfectly well what we’re up to. So we’ll take a little time.”
A little, she decided. “I’ll need my clothes again—from wherever you sent them.”
“I’ll get them back to you. But not quite yet.”
She let herself be content with her head pillowed on his shoulder, and the air full of rose petals.
14
AS SEPTEMBER TICKED ON TO OCTOBER, BRANNA dragooned Connor and Iona into helping harvest the vegetables from her back garden. She set Iona on picking the fat pea pods, Connor to digging potatoes, while she pulled carrots and turnips.
“It smells so good.” Iona straightened to sniff at the air. “In the spring when we planted, it all smelled fresh and new, and that was wonderful. And now it smells ripe and ready, and that’s a different wonderful.”
Connor sent Iona a baleful stare as he shoveled. “Say that when she has you scrubbing all this, and boiling or blanching or whatever the bloody hell it is.”
“You don’t complain when you eat the meals I make all winter with the vegetables I jar or freeze. In fact . . .”
She moved over, plucked a plump plum tomato from the vine, sniffed it. “I’ve a mind to make my blue cheese and tomato soup tonight.”
Knowing his fondness for it, Branna smiled when Connor gave her the eye. “That’s a canny way to keep me working.”
“I’m a canny sort.”
Harvesting put her in a fine mood. She might pluck and pick through the summer, but the basics of bounty she’d jar up for the coming winter gave her a lovely sense of accomplishment.
And the work, as far as Branna was concerned, only added to it.
“Iona, you could pick a good pair of cucumbers. I’ll be making some beauty creams later, and I’ll need them.”
“I don’t know how you manage to do so much. Keep the house, a garden, cook, make all the stock for your shop—run a business. Plot to destroy evil.”
“Maybe it’s magick.” Enjoying the scent of them, the feel of them in her hand, Branna added more tomatoes to her bucket. “But it’s the truth I love what it is I do, so most times it’s not much like working.”
“Tell that to the man with the shovel,” Connor complained, and was ignored.
“You’ve plenty dished on your own plate,” Branna said to Iona. “You don’t seem to mind spending each day shoveling away horse dung, hauling bales of hay and straw, riding about the woods nattering to tourists who likely ask most of the same questions daily. Add all the studying and practice you’ve
done on the craft since last winter when you could barely spark a candlewick.”
“I love it all, too. I have a home and a place, a purpose. I have family and a man who loves me.” Lifting her face to the sky, Iona breathed deep. “And I have magick. I only had hints of that, only had Nan as real family before I came here.”
She shifted to the cucumbers, selected two. “And I’d love to be able to plant a little garden. If I learned how to can things, then I’d feel I’d done my part when Boyle ends up doing most of the cooking.”
“There’s room enough for one at Boyle’s. Do you plan on staying there once you’re married?”
“Oh, it’s fine for now. More than fine for the two of us, and close to everything and everyone we want to be close to. But . . . we want to start a family, and sooner rather than later.”
Branna adjusted the straw hat she wore more for the tradition of it than as a block from the sun that peeked in and out of puffy white clouds on a day that spoke more of summer than fall.
“Then you’ll want a house, and not just rooms over Fin’s garage.”
“We’re thinking about it, but neither of us wants to give up being close to all of you, or the stables, so we’re just thinking about it.” Bending back to her work, Iona picked a bright yellow squash. “There’s the wedding to plan first, and I haven’t even decided on my dress or the flowers.”
“But you have what you want in mind for both.”
“I have a sort of vision of the dress I want. I think— Connor, fair warning, as this will bore you brainless.”
“The potatoes have already done that.” He plucked them out of shoveled dirt for the bucket.
“Anyway, I want the long white dress, but I think more a vintage style than anything sleek and modern. No train or veil, more simple but still beautiful. Like something your grandmother might have worn—but a bit updated. Nan would give me hers, but it’s ivory and I want white, and she’s taller—and, well, it’s not really it, as much as I’d love to wear a family dress.”
She picked a cherry tomato, popped it warm into her mouth. “God, that’s good. Anyway, I’ve been looking online, to get the idea, and after Samhain, I’m hoping you and I and Meara can go on a real hunt.”
“I’d love it. And the flowers?”
“I’ve gone around and around on that, too, then I realized . . . I want your flowers.”
“Mine?”
“I mean the look of your flowers, your gardens.”
Straightening again, Iona waved a hand toward the happy mix of zinnias, foxglove, begonias, nasturtiums. “Not specific types or colors. All of them. All that color and joy, just the way you manage to plant them so they look unstudied and happy, and stunning all at once.”
“Then you want Lola.”
“Lola?”
“She’s a florist, has a place just this side of Galway City. She’s a customer of mine. I send her vats of hand cream as doing up flowers is murder on the hands. And she’ll often order candles by the gross to go with her arrangements for a wedding. She’s an artist with blooms, I promise you. I’ll give you her number if you want it.”
“I do. She sounds perfect.”
Iona glanced toward Connor. He crouched on the ground studying a potato as if it had the answer to all the questions printed on its skin.
“I warned you I’d bore you brainless.”
“No, it’s not that. It got me thinking about family, about gardens and flowers. And the bluebell Teagan asked me to plant at her mother’s grave. I haven’t done it.”
“It’s too much of a risk to go to Sorcha’s cabin now,” Branna reminded him.
“I know it. And still, it’s all she asked. She helped heal Meara, and all she asked was that I plant the flowers.”
Setting down her bucket, Branna crossed over to him, crouched down so they were face-to-face. “And we will. We’ll plant the bluebell—a hectare of them if that’s what you want. We’ll honor her mother, who’s ours as well. But none of us are to go near Sorcha’s grave until after Samhain. You’ll promise me that.”
“I wouldn’t risk myself, and by doing that risk all. But it weighs on me, Branna. She was just a girl. And with the look of you, Iona. And I’m looking at you,” he said to Branna, “just like I looked at Sorcha’s Brannaugh, and I could see how she’d be in another ten years, and see how you were at her age. There was too much sorrow and duty in her eyes, as too often there’s too much in yours.”
“When we’ve done what we’ve sworn to do, the sorrow and duty will be done.” She gave his grubby hand a squeeze. “They’ll know it just as we do. I’m sure of that.”
“Why can’t we see, you and me together? And with Iona the three? Why can’t we see how it ends?”
“You know the answer to that. As long as there’s choice, the end is never set. What he has, and all that’s gone before, it blurs the vision, Connor.”
“We’re the light.” Iona stood with her bucket of pods, garden soil staining the knees of her jeans. And the ring Boyle had given her sparkling on her finger. “Whatever he comes with, however he comes, we’ll fight. And we’ll win. I believe that. And I believe it because you do,” she told Connor. “Because with your whole life leading to this, knowing it did, you believe. He’s a bully and a bastard hiding behind power he bartered for with some devil. What we are?” She laid a hand on her heart. “What we have is from the blood and from the light. We’ll cut him down with that light, and send him to hell. I know it.”
“Well said. And there.” Branna gave Connor a poke. “That’s our own Iona’s St. Crispin’s Day speech.”
“It was well said. It’s just a mood hanging over me. A promise not yet kept.”
“One that will be,” Branna said. “And it’s not just that and digging potatoes that’s put you in a mood—a sour one that’s rare for you. Have you and Meara had a fight?”
“Not at all. It’s all grand. I might worry here and there at the way Cabhan’s taken too fine an interest in her. When it’s one of us, we have weapon for weapon, magicks to magicks. She’s only wit and spine, and a blade if she’s carrying one.”
“Which serves her well, and she wears your protective stones, carries the charms we made. It’s all we can do.”
“I had her blood on my hands.” He looked down at them now, saw the wet red of Meara’s blood rather than the good, dark soil. “I find I can’t get around it, get past it, so I’m after texting her a half dozen times a day, making up some foolish reason, just to be sure she’s safe.”
“She’d knock you flat for that.”
“I know it well.”
“I worry about Boyle, too. And Cabhan hasn’t paid any real attention there. It’s natural,” Iona added, “for us to have concerns about the two people we care about who don’t have the same arsenal we do.” She looked at Branna. “You worry, too.”
“I do, yes. Even knowing there’s nothing we can do we haven’t done, I worry.”
“If it helps, I promise I’m with her a lot during the workday. And when she takes out a group—ever since the wolf shadowed her—I braid a charm into her horse’s mane.”
Connor smiled. “Do you?”
“She indulges me, and so does Boyle. I’ve been adding them to all the horses as often as I can manage. It makes me feel better when we have to leave them at night.”
“I gave her some lotion the other day, asked her to use it every day, to test it for me.” Now Branna smiled. “I charmed it.”
“The one that smells of apricots and honey? It’s lovely.” He kissed Branna’s cheeks. “So that’s thanks on a magickal and a romantic sort of level. I should’ve known the pair of you would add precautions. For me, she’s never out of Roibeard’s sight unless she’s in mine.”
“Well, give her over to Merlin for an hour or so—Fin would be willing. And go hawking.” With a hand on his shoulder for a boost, Branna rose. “Put the potatoes in the little cellar and take your hawk out for a bit. I expect you could both use the time.”
“What about the boiling and blanching and all the rest?”
“You’re dismissed.”
“And the soup?”
She laughed, gave him a light knock on the head with her fist. “Here’s my thought. Tell Boyle I’ll need Meara around here in . . .” Branna looked up at the beaming sun, calculated the time. “Three hours will work. Then the rest of you should be here by half-six. We’ll have your soup, and a rocket salad as I’ll have Iona cut it fresh, some brown bread, and cream cake.”
“Cake? What occasion is this?”
“We’ll have a céili. It’s long past time we had a party here.”
Brushing his hands on his pants, Connor pushed to his feet. “I can see I need to develop a sour mood more often.”
“It won’t work a second time. Go store those potatoes, go find your hawk, and be back here at half-six.”
“I’ll do all that. Thanks.”
She went back, picked more tomatoes as now she’d be making the soup for six, and glanced over at Iona after Connor had gone.
“He doesn’t know yet,” Iona said. “He’d tell you if he did. You if no one else. So he doesn’t know he’s in love with her.”
“He doesn’t know yet, but he’s coming around to it. Sure he’s loved her all his life, so realizing it’s another sort of love than he let himself believe takes some time.”
Branna looked toward the cottage, thought of him, thought of Meara. “She’s the only one he’ll ever want a life with, or a lifetime. Others have and could touch his heart, but none but Meara could break it.”
“She never would.”
“She loves him, and always has. And he’s the only one she’ll ever want a life with, or a lifetime. But she hasn’t his faith in love or its power. If she can trust herself and him, they’ll make each other. If she can’t, she’ll break his heart and her own.”
“I believe in love and its power. And I believe that when given the choice, Meara will reach for it, hold on to it, and treasure it.”
“I hope more than I hope for almost anything else you’re right.” Branna let out a breath. “Meanwhile, the two of them haven’t yet figured why no one else in the world has ever made them feel as they do now. The heart, it’s a fierce and mysterious thing. Let’s get all this inside, scrubbed off. I’ll show you how to start the soup, then we’ll see how much we can jar before Meara comes.”
* * *
SHE ARRIVED, TIMELY AND OUT OF SORTS.
Once she’d stalked through to the kitchen, she fisted her hands on her hips, frowned at the shining jars of colorful vegetables cooling on the counter, the soup simmering low on the stove.
“What’s all this? If you’ve called me here to do kitchen work, you’re to be sorely disappointed. I’ve had enough work altogether today.”
“We’re nearly done,” Branna said pleasantly.
“I’m having a beer.” Meara completed her stalk to the fridge, yanked out a bottle of Smithwick’s.
“Is everything all right at the stables?”
Meara snarled at Iona. “All right? Oh, sure it’s been more than all right with us having a summer day in October and every blessed soul within fifty kilometers deciding nothing would do but they ride a horse today. If I wasn’t taking out a group, I was doing rubdowns or hauling saddles in, hauling them out.”
She waved the beer in the air before opening it. “And didn’t Caesar take it in his head to bite Rufus on the arse, and this after I told the Spanish lady riding him to give the horses some space. So then I had a near hysterical Spanish lady on my hands, and I can barely understand her as she’s hysterical in Spanish, and doing half the talking with her hands so the reins are flying about giving Caesar the notion she wants a fine gallop.”
“Oh God.” Iona spoiled the attempt to sound concerned by choking off a laugh.
“Oh sure it’s an amusement to you.”
