She hesitated when she reached the buttons of his fly, and he saw the nervous flicker in her eyes. And saw her conquer it. He knew her experience was limited, and with men, entirely disappointing. He shouldn’t allow her to disrobe him like this, kneeling in front of him like some ancient worshipper. If he let her go on, his cock would spring free at eye level and brush her full lips, and he suspected she’d never been that close to a man.
Another button popped open and blood rushed to his cock to take advantage of the freedom she was granting him.
“Beth,” he said, trailing his finger along her shoulder. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” she said.
He pushed the robe down, revealing his mark on her shoulder, then tracing it, the quicksilver dancing beneath his fingertip. “My mark is making you bold, but I don’t want to take advantage.”
Another button. She was looking up at him, gauging his reaction. Little minx. There were pinpricks of light in her eyes now, whirling, Druid stars. Magic.
She pushed his jeans down over his hips. “There’s power here,” she breathed, and cupped his heavy balls. “Power over you, touching you like this.”
He caught her hand and stopped her. “I’ve seen inside your mind, Beth. I don’t want you to do anything that will trigger your memory of what Frank Carter and his friend did to you.”
“You are nothing like them,” she said. “And I have hidden from that memory for too long, let it eat at me and isolate me. I don’t want to be alone anymore.” She took a deep breath, and something in his chest ached for her, for the effort she was taking to confide in him.
“They drugged me,” she said, “and after a while I couldn’t move, but I was conscious through it all. First, they tried to get me to find Frank another site to dig. The funny thing was that I looked at the map and it was alive. I could feel all kinds of different sites, some stronger, some weaker. It was like there was something inside me that came awake under the drug. And it was stronger than I was, because it stood up to Frank. When they realized I wasn’t going to do what they wanted, Egan . . .”
This was the hard part. “He pulled my shirt up and my pants down and jerked off on me. It sounds so simple, crude, almost comical. But I couldn’t bare to be touched by anyone afterward. Didn’t want to touch anyone. Until you.”
She tugged her hands free of his and demonstrated how she wanted to touch him.
It was good. So good. He’d never felt anything like this before. He’d always been the aggressor. If anyone had felt fear, it had been his lovers. Fear of his beauty, fear of his strength, fear of the pleasure so intense it was addictive.
Now he was standing in front of the first real Druid he had encountered in two millennia, with his balls in her hand. He was giving her complete control, because she needed that to feel safe. It should have been terrifying, but it was arousing as hell.
And then frustrating as hell, when she dropped her hands. “Kick your jeans off and turn around,” she ordered.
He obeyed. A first, for him, in the bedroom. He felt her fingers explore his back, his buttocks, the inside of his thighs. Her touch felt so good, he worried that if she went on like this, he would embarrass himself. “What are you doing?”
“Making my inspection,” she said. There was an edge to her voice.
“Beth, there is only you.”
She paused, but the inspection continued.
An ordinary man would have said anything to be inside her now, to end this torment and have her. But he was Fae, and his word, in this case, would be his bond.
And he was willing to give it. He turned and seized her questing hands, pushed her onto her back. When she made no protest, he kneed open her legs until he was poised over her center.
“There will only,
ever
, be you.”
T
he
geis
moved. She felt
it, although it was difficult to feel anything that wasn’t Conn’s hardness poised against her softness. But it moved. He saw it. His eyes followed as the quicksilver writhed and danced.
Conn’s words—his sincerity—had done it. She’d felt the magic in the air. He’d made a binding vow.
Without requiring anything of her in return. But she gave it anyway, the answer to his unspoken question: “Yes.”
She expected him to enter her then, and she hungered for it. Instead, he slid his length back and forth over her most sensitive flesh and watched the play of emotions across her face.
“That’s it, my love,” he coaxed as she widened her legs and arched her back. She lifted her hips, tried to capture him, but he chuckled and eluded her, and resumed his measured pace.
“Please,” she begged, wrapping her ankles around his waist and trying to drag him inside her.
“Not yet.”
“When?” She tried to put a pout in her voice, but it came out a moan.
He didn’t answer. But he should have said, “When you least expect.” Because when her eyelids fluttered closed and her head fell back and she didn’t think she could get any closer to heaven, he slid inside her to the hilt.
She convulsed. It was the most complete and perfect connection she had ever known, a world removed from the cold, clumsy prodding Frank had treated her to. Her back arched, her toes curled, every muscle in her body tensed and then released, and she relaxed into a boneless heap beneath him.
He placed a hand at the small of her back and rolled them, still joined, onto their sides. Every move he made sent aftershocks coursing through her body, made her shudder and gasp. She snuggled her head into the curve of his shoulder, wondering if he had enjoyed that as much as she had. She’d been too caught up in her own pleasure to share his. And she was too spent now to reciprocate the small touches he was showering her with, the feathered kisses, the soft stroking, that kept her on a high plateau of sensation.
He was banking the fires of her arousal, and she wondered if that meant the Fae recovered faster than human men. With Frank, she had been grateful for his general lassitude. Once, disappointing as the experience always proved, was
always
enough.
Then Conn flexed his hips and she realized he was still hard. She looked up, startled, and he smiled at her. “Didn’t you . . .” she trailed off.
“I enjoyed your pleasure,” he said, fondling her nipple and trailing his hand down her belly. “I plan to enjoy it many times before I join you. Put your knee over my hip,” he instructed.
“I don’t think I can—”
“You can. Trust me, Beth.”
She lifted her knee tentatively. He tugged it higher over his hip, ran a hand down her calf, then back up her leg, and touched here
there
. While he was still inside her. To that he added the slightest movement of his hips, creating an irresistible rhythm between their bodies.
It was good, almost too good. But also embarrassing. “You’re not supposed to have to touch me there.”
Conn laughed. “Who told you that? Let me guess. Frank. He said that, Beth, because he was selfish and lazy.” He captured her hand, which had been toying with his nipple, and pushed it down between them. “I suppose Frank told you not to touch yourself either.”
She blushed furiously.
He pressed her fingers against her swollen nub. “Dare now. Show me how you touch yourself when you’re alone. Blame it on the
geis
if you like, but don’t deny me this.”
She didn’t. She moved her fingers tentatively, and she felt him twitch inside her. It gratified him, her self-pleasuring. His hand rejoined hers, first mimicking her movements, then offering counterpoints.
This climax, when it came, was deeper and longer lasting that the one before, but he gave her no time to recover. He guided her, still trembling, onto her hands and knees. He did not try to touch her mind, but when she closed her eyes she was naked on the forest floor, being taken from behind. The image he had shown her in the gallery. Ancient and primal. Hunter and prey. But when he finally let go inside her, it was she who cried out in triumph, and he who groaned his submission and collapsed atop her.
They stayed in bed until late afternoon. Every time she thought she was wrung out, couldn’t possibly respond to him again, she proved herself wrong.
Finally, Conn suggested that they should eat something. She sprang up from her bed, and used to living alone, headed, naked, for the door.
“Elada is still out there, Beth.” Conn threw her discarded robe to her.
The television, she realized, was no longer on in the living room. “Oh my God, I forgot. He must have heard me when I—”
“No doubt,” Conn said, amused, as he searched the room for his clothing. “Hope for his sake that Miach allows him to keep a woman in South Boston. The sorcerer holds his allies too close, I fear.”
“That’s why Liam and Nial went along with Brian,” Beth said, remembering the argument in her living room during the kidnapping. “Miach won’t let them leave, won’t let them see women outside the community, or pursue their own interests.”
“You feel sorry for those who kidnapped you? Allowed the Prince Consort to torture you?”
“No, but I empathize with them. My own family was working class and anti-intellectual. They didn’t want me to go to college, even though I had a full scholarship. They wanted me to stay home and make a life in the town where I grew up. But it was too small for me. I know they were trying to protect me from hurt and disappointment, but they stifled me, the way Miach is stifling his sons.”
“Liam and Nial aren’t his sons, Beth. They’re his grandsons. Great-grandsons, really, several generations removed. I don’t think Miach has fathered a child himself in decades, perhaps longer.”
“Oh.”
“It becomes more and more difficult, the older we are.”
“Oh.” She needed to sit down.
“It is likely for the best, Beth. Fae pregnancies are precarious and difficult. They develop fast and often end . . . badly. Miscarriage is frequent, and prematurity common. I would prefer not to put you through such travail.”
“Frank never wanted children,” she said. She had never been certain she did either, with Frank anyway, but the thought of not being able to have children, not being able to pass on the Druid heritage she was only now discovering, made her startlingly sad.
“The vow I made, Beth, it was binding on me, not on you. If you should want a child with someone else—”
“No!” She didn’t want anyone else, ever. But Conn might. “You’re Fae, you’ll outlive me by hundreds, maybe thousands of years. You can’t possibly keep such a vow.”
“When we bind ourselves to mortals, we share their mortal span. When you die, I’ll die.”
“I don’t understand. What happens? I mean, if I get hit by a car tomorrow do you just . . .”
“No. More like the landlady’s sister. I won’t have the will to live without you.”
“How could you do this—make this sacrifice—without explaining that to me?”
“How is it different from what you would share with a mortal man?” he asked sensibly. But she didn’t feel sensible. She knew that elderly people, after they’d been together for decades, tended not to outlive each other for very long, but this . . . She realized the enormity of what he had done.
The last few hours had been so damned perfect, just the two of them, and now the world was back, and so were the questions she had to ask.
“What else haven’t you told me?”
I
love you.
It was
too soon to say such a thing to a mortal, but he had lived for millennia, knew himself and the world so well that there was no room for doubt. He loved her.
But that wasn’t what she meant. And to say it now would smack of avoidance, so instead, he said, “Your family, though they had probably long forgotten it, had good reason to keep you close, to try to limit your education and your ambition. When the Romans began to subdue the Celts, they encountered the Druids, and knew victory hinged on breaking them.”
“I know that much. The Romans wiped out the Druids in the first centuries A.D. Their politicians and chroniclers waged a propaganda campaign against them, accused them of human sacrifice.”
“Not the Romans alone, Beth. Oh, they were brilliant tacticians under the Caesars, make no mistake. They did excellent reconnaissance. They knew the Druids had magic, knew there was something hidden in the hills that gave them power. And if it gave them power, it must also be a vulnerability. So the Romans raided the mounds when the Druids were busy ‘worshipping.’”
“You mean tapping magic from the imprisoned Fae,” she guessed.
“Yes. Even had the Druids the best of intentions, drawing power out of a living thing is never a pleasant process. As it was, the Druids had no reason to be kind to us. We’d exploited them for millennia. But when the Romans raided the mounds, they found and freed the tortured Fae. And we helped them complete the slaughter.”
“That must be where the Roman propaganda about the Druids comes from—finding them torturing the Fae in their mounds. Not human sacrifice, but close enough.”
Now was the hard part. “No. That part wasn’t propaganda, Beth. Magic comes naturally to the Fae. It’s part of us. But the Druids were human, in the beginning. They had to get their magic elsewhere, and unlock its potential in themselves. Power like that requires sacrifice. Nothing less than the taking of a life will release a Druid’s full powers.”
She paled. “You mean someone has to die for me to . . .”
“You don’t have to do
anything
, Beth. You can remain as you are, and I will protect you from anyone who tries to force you to release your power.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone. I couldn’t.”
“But you could be made to, by a Fae who was strong enough.”
“The Prince Consort,” she whispered. “He told me to grow stronger.”
Conn swore. “I have to find the Summoner. Until I do, you won’t be safe. Miach is right; without it, I’m weak, and no match for the Prince Consort. And until the sword is found, there is always the chance you may fall into the hands of half-breeds or Fae who will force you to use it.”
They dressed and went out into the apartment, discovered that Elada had taken up residence in Beth’s tiny office. “Does he have to be here?” she whispered to Conn in the kitchen.