Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) (29 page)

Susanna squeezed Katarina’s hand again. “It is
good
to see you, and to see you looking so well.”
 

She smiled in surprise. “Do I look well?”

“Very well, my lady,” Susanna said firmly, then, adding in a mischievous whisper, “One would almost think being locked up in a tower suits you.”

She left soon after, and when the door shut, Katarina tipped her face up to the ceiling and blew out a breath. Then she brought it down, and turned to him.

“Thank you.” There was nothing else to say, but the words were horridly inadequate.

He bent his head in a nod.

“What happened?” she asked. “How did he take it? Bermingham?”

“Does it matter?”
 

“No. It does not. So, now, Aodh, what would you have of me?”
 

“The same thing I have ever wanted. It has not changed.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She came a step closer. “You have wanted a number of things from me. You want me to marry you, and to commit treason, and to swive you.”

A smile broke the dark intent of his face. “
I
swive
you
, lass.”

She waved her hand. “I am certain I could swive you too. However it is meant to work.”

The smile faded. “I can show you.”
 

She took another step toward him. “I suppose you gave up a great deal, to keep Susanna here with us.”

“I gave up nothing. That man is a calamity
.
”
 

“You gave up something. For me.”

“Did it make you happy?”

“Deeply.”
 

“So come, and make me happy.” He held up his hand. “I have something for you.”
 

She drew up in front of him.
 

“Give me your hand.”

He reclined in the chair, but everything about him spoke of vitality and movement. Even the dark inked lines on his neck and arms seemed to move in the sunlight with each subtle shift of his body.

Slowly, she unbent her elbow and held out her hand. He dropped something into it, and folded her fingers around it.

She opened them and stared down at the strange gift. It was a fat three dimensional glass object, crystal clear.

“What is this?”
 

“A prism.”

The stone was heavy in her hand. “And what is that?”

“I will show you.” He got to his feet and moved across the room. He shuttered the window, plunging the room into darkness, then arranged coverings until only a single beam of sunlight rayed into the chamber.
 

She watched, bemused. “What are you doing?”

“Patience, lass.”

He dug around in one of the chests and extracted a piece of parchment and held it vertically behind the prism, at a slight angle. Holding the stone up into the light, he let the single ray of sun through it. It emerged on the paper as a prism of color, a rainbow projected onto the parchment.
 

“Oh,” she said, enchanted.

He made a gesture, beckoning her, and she reached out with her thumb and index finger and very carefully took it from him. “Hold it there,” he ordered. He backed up with the parchment, and took another, curving glass stone, cut slightly different, and lowered it down, passing it, too, through the beam of sunlight. The rainbow stayed projected on the parchment. Then he slowly pulled the parchment back further.

The rainbow became a single beam of white light again.

“What did you do?” she said at once. “What happened?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He pulled the paper back further, and the rainbow slowly reappeared, the colors now blurring up the page in the opposite order.

Her eyes widened, and she looked up to smile at him in astonishment, then returned to watching the show he’d given her. “It almost makes one think the colors are…
within
the light.”
 

His gaze flew to hers. “Aye,” he said, a low hum of agreement.

“But that cannot be,” she said, although not in a rejecting way. In a…hopeful way.
 

“Anything can be, Katy.” He ran his hand through the beams of light, and they fluttered in bands of color across his hard fingers. “Go on, touch it,” he urged softly.
 

She bent and put her face into the rainbow streams of light.

Her nose became streaked with red and orange and yellow. She moved slightly, and it turned violet, blue, the slightest sliver of green. Her eyes came up to his, and the light shafts sprayed across her face, across her eye in red and gold, like a pathway leading in.
 

He lowered the second prism and came to her, folded her fingers around the stone and brought her fisted hand to his lips. He kissed her knuckles. Just skin and bone, it was as if he’d broken her open.

“Why are you giving me this?”
 

“Because it makes me think of you.”

“Aodh,” she whispered. “Please, stop.”

“No,” he murmured. He knew precisely what he was denying her; as if to prove it, he turned her hand over and kissed her inner wrist.
 

She shivered. “Why are you trying to win me, Aodh? Why does it matter so much?”

His hand slid to her waist. “My intent is not to win you.”

She stared up into eyes so blue it almost hurt to look into them. Blue like the sea, blue like blood under the skin. “Then what?”
 

“You are a fire that was almost extinguished, Katarina. And I need your flame.”

“Oh, Aodh, no.”

He tugged on their entwined fingers, guiding her forward as he backed up, leading her to the bed.

“This thing you want of me, Aodh, it almost ruined me. It destroyed my parents. I do not care if you need my fire;
I
do not need it,” she said, hoping he would save her from herself, because she was swiftly losing the fight.

He showed no mercy, just kept backing up, leading her forward like a wild creature, coaxing her to the secret truth of them: passion bound them in a fated way.
 

“I have spent my entire life trying to suppress that which you desire.”

“I know,” he said, and dropped onto the bed.
 
As he went down, he pulled her with him. “I cannot let you do that.”
 

She lowered herself to straddle him, her other hand still closed around the prism.
 

He began unlacing the crisscrossing ribbons on the sides of her tunic. He swept the gown up over her head, so she was clad only in her chemise.

“This is wrong,” she whispered.
 

“I do not care for such things. I care only if it pleases you.” He tipped forward and touched his tongue to her breast, still covered by the soft linen. Her nipples peaked to gemstone hardness. His gaze swept up.

“Tell me, Katy, does that please you?”

A ragged cry broke from her lips.
 

He moved his mouth to her other breast, graced it with another hard stroke of his tongue through the thin linen shift. She curled her fingers into his hair.

 
“We are doomed if we do this thing.”

“Surrender to it.”

“Were I to do that, everything I am, everything I have, would be lost.”

“Maybe that is the very thing you need.” He lifted the chemise.

“Then I would have nothing.”
 

“You would have me.”
 

She gave a broken sob. “Don’t you see, you will
destroy
me?”

His hands stilled. “I vow it, I will not. Your heart knows.”

“What does my heart know?”

“Look where it has brought you. To me. Again.”

He was right. She was wrecked. “You will ruin me.”

“Get up, then, Katy. Get up and walk away.” His body was taut with restraint. “I’ll not stop you.”

Her thighs trembled from holding herself up above him. “I am locked in.”

“The door is not locked.”

“The castle is.”

“I’ll have you on a ship, to anywhere you wish. Just walk away.”

“You would…let me leave?”

“You must leave, Katy. You are mine, or you are gone. There is no other way.” His gaze was like a cord, a tether. She felt bonded to him by a single, shivering strand of sight.

“I do not want to leave,” she whispered.

“Good. Then let us begin.”
 

Begin.
How like him, to word it so. Everything about him felt like the edge of the cliff. Irrevocable, life-changing.
 

He cupped her face and claimed her with a kiss.
 

It was an openmouthed, unforgiving, conquest of a kiss, his hands holding her face, pulling her down to him. She returned it with full ardor, their tongues tangling. They paused only when he leaned her back with a muttered instruction, so he could sweep the chemise up over her head and fling it away. Then she was naked before him.
 

He made a dark sound of approval. Cool air washed over her breasts and no matter that she’d been bared to him once before, the urge to hide was the strongest thing in her. It came to the fore, and she began to cover herself.
 

“No, Katy. I want to see you.”
 

He took her wrists and gently lifted them, parting her arms, holding them up in the air, stretched out wide, so he could stare at her body.
 

The breath burst from her. She closed her eyes, unable to withstand the force of desire she saw in him. For she knew it was in her too.

“I’m going to take you now.” Threat, promise, warning, it was all those things, and her body felt as if he’d strung her up on bolts of lightning. “Hard and deep.” Her wrists hung in his hands as he leaned forward and flicked his tongue across her breast. “I’m not going to stop.” He grazed her with his teeth, and her head dropped forward. “Until you’re laid out, tossing your head and crying my name.” His gaze swept up. “And then I'm going to take you harder.”

Breath, blood, fire: in the end, she was a simple thing. Aodh had reduced her to her most elemental forms.
 

She lifted her head slowly, inch by inch, as if dragging it through honey. “I cannot marry you, Aodh.”
 

“To be honest, Katy, I’m not thinking of marriage just now.”

The words poked a hole through the mounting tension, and she laughed. And trembled, now scared beyond measure, far more than when the castle had been taken. A castle was stone and wood; it was meant to be captured. But Aodh had conquered her.
 

She’d thought herself insurmountable. A cold mountaintop.
 

Oh, but he’d summited her with hot kisses and cold insights. It was enough that he saw her, truly saw her. Even unto what had happened with the swords. Because she had so
clearly
wanted to fight, and he had seen that, and honored it—given her her fight—when no one else would.
 

He’d given her a map of the world.

He’d given her a prism of light.

Aodh even knew enough to lock her away, for it was her freedom she prized above all else. And he’d unleashed passions she’d never known were inside her.

He knew precisely where to aim, saw every chink in her armor.
 

Oh, what a formidable enemy he was, but he would be an even more dangerous ally. Lover.

“Just give me a chance,” he rasped.

“I will give you more than that,” she whispered, surrendering to it. To him.

At once, he slid his hand between their bodies, and began to unlace his breeches. Her hands followed after, greedy to feel the hard thrust of him. If she was going to do this thing, she was going to do it with all her heart. All her body. Give everything she could short of treason, and take everything Aodh would allow.

With a muted curse he put his hands on hers, stopping her. He slid off the bed and stood, swiftly freeing himself of garments: kicked off his boots, tore off hose, tunic, breeches in swift sweeps, until he stood naked before her.
 

She felt blown back by the force of his hard, male beauty.

The entire left side of him was marked, down past his waist, just as she’d wondered.
Hoped
.
 

The inked lines roped from the back of his skull to the column of his neck, over his powerful shoulder and down his back and chest. They swirled like spells down his flat, ribbed stomach, over his hips, down the hard muscles of his thigh, through the hair of his shin and calf, all the way to his toe.
 

And rising up from the center of his magnificent, ensorcelled body, jutting out from the dark thatch of hair between his thighs, was a bold, thick erection, curving back almost to his belly.

Unthinking, knowing only that she needed to touch him, she began to drop to her knees, reaching for him.