Incarnate: The Moray Druids #3 (Highland Historical) (4 page)

Her breath caught on a sob, and her body jerked. 

Instantly, Malcolm lifted to his elbow and leaned to look down at her. 

Vían hid her face from him, but not in time.

“Why the tears?  Are ye hurting?” he asked, his voice full of concern.

Damn him.  Damn him for being a good man. 
“Nay,” she croaked.  “I just…just…” She tensed with a hiccup, and then sobbed again.  “Please don’t think I’m touched in the head, I can’t tell you why I’m like this.”  In truth, she couldn’t.  It had been maybe a quarter century since she’d even had the energy to cry.  Her despair had dipped below such shows of emotion. 

Was he making her feel?  Was he making her care? 

Dear God, how much of this could she take?

“How long has it been since anyone’s held ye?” he queried gently.  “Since ye’ve been touched by another with affection?”

She sucked in a shaky breath.  “It seems like… ages.  Centuries, maybe.”

He smiled against her neck, and pressed a kiss behind her ear.  “Did ye know that our bodies require human touch?”

She shook her head as he ran his fingers over their previous path, and back up again, seeking the places that caused her to arch and moan.  Distracting her from her tears. 

“No matter how much ye feed a bairn, it willna thrive without the tender arms of a mother or nurse and will most likely die.  Every caress, every embrace, every time our hands hold, like so.” He traced her arm until he laced his fingers with hers.  “It creates a substance within us that is vital to life.”

“Magick?”

“Nay.  It’s just how we mortals are made.  Call it what you will.  Social beasts, souls in need of affectionate connection with another.  Compassionate companionship.”  He released her hand to cup her face, kissing the tear from her cheek.  “’Tis a gentle thing you’re feeling,” he murmured.  “And I’m glad to be the one to touch ye.  To ease yer loneliness.  To liberate these tears of need.” With utter tenderness, he pressed his lips against her temple, then her eyelid, then her cheek, and jaw. 

Seized by raw emotion and instinct, Vían turned in his arms until she faced him and threw her leg over his hips.  Forcing him to his back, she climbed atop him and filled herself with his hardening length.

Next time
.  Next time she’d say the spell, but this moment was for her. 
For him
. 

And what they could never have together.  

“Give me yer name, woman,” he gasped, his hands falling to her hips to help her set a rhythm as his eyes lazily enjoyed the sway of her generous breasts.  “I want to know what to name to call when I’m inside ye.”

“My name is Vían,” she told him, then leaned in for a desperate kiss. 

Now he knew the name of the woman he’d one day despise.

It never ceased to amaze Vían how quickly men could drop off to sleep after sex.  She’d barely climbed off of his lean, talented hips before Malcolm had collapsed onto his back, pulled her to drape over his body, and given up consciousness in almost his very next breath. 

She’d spent the last fifty years in a dark chasm, and thus didn’t even like to blink, let alone fall asleep and miss one moment of her freedom.  Besides, the flutters of his auburn lashes entertained her, as did the twitches of his limbs as he slept. 

In fact, he reposed as though he and slumber were strangers.  Perhaps he was as consumed with saving the earth as the Wyrd Sisters were with ending it.  It would explain why he seemed so lean, hard, and stern. 

It made the fact that he’d been nothing but gentle and patient with her that much more extraordinary.  Here, on the floor of this hovel, he looked nothing like a king, but every inch the Earth Druid.  The forest indeed seemed to welcome him. 

Vían didn’t know how long she watched him sleep.  Long enough for the fire to die to glowing embers and the silver light of dawn to pierce the many cracks, holes, and weaknesses of the hovel. 

She’d become accustomed to encompassing silence, so the sounds of the forest fascinated and lulled her.  The rhythm of Malcolm’s breath and the beat of his heart became the percussion to the forest’s midnight melody, and the music transfixed her for splendid hours. 

His body woke before he did, muscles lifting to press into her, and his manhood thickening beneath her thigh as it rested in between his legs.  His breaths came deeper, and more quickly, and when she shifted atop him, he groaned and stretched. 

Now was the time.  The spell of the night was broken, and everyone had to face the hard truths in the light of day.  If she were to work her curse on him, this would be the moment. 

Vían bit her lip, hard, to cause herself physical discomfort that could match the sharp pang of guilt and sorrow. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.  “There’s no other way.”  Splitting her legs over him, she reached down to his hard, throbbing sex, meaning to guide it inside her and awaken him with the last bit of pleasure she could give, before she took everything from him. 

The gentle nicker of a horse warned her a second before the entire hovel shook with the impact of the door being kicked in. 

Malcolm shot up, his arms coming around her in a protective vice before he rolled her between the wall and the shield of his body. 

“
Odin’s bones
, Malcolm, your pale backside is the last thing I need to see this early in the morning.”  A dark masculine voice trembled with half amusement, half disgust. 

Malcolm instantly relaxed, though his voice was laced with rage as he addressed the interloper.  “Bael, if you doona get the fuck out of here, I’ll forget ye’re my brother-in-law and—”

“Malcolm you gave us a fright!”  A flame-haired woman bent into the hovel, filling the poor structure to the brim.  “What in the name of the Goddess are you doing all the way out—”  She cut off when Vían poked her head above Malcolm’s shoulder, her lovely blue eyes widening to the size of saucers.  “Oh, my!” the lady exclaimed.  “I thought… we assumed you were in danger… not…Oh my!  Pardon us!” 

Burning a bright pink, even in the dim light, the woman seized onto the dark-haired lummox next to her, and tugged at his arm toward the now ruined door. 

The man relented, black eyes glittering with mirth.  “My liege,” he said in a strange, foreign accent before executing a mocking bow to Malcolm’s back side, and ducking out of the hovel. 

Their chuckles could be heard through the thin walls. 

Malcolm’s groan of frustration was more of a menacing growl.  His morning erection still pulsed against her thigh, and he’d yet to let go of her.  “Sometimes family isna the blessing others make it out to be,” he grit out. 

Vían began to panic.  What would she do now?  How could she face the Wyrd Sisters after her failure?  They’d know she’d lain with him, and that she’d chosen not to carry out her charge. “I… suppose you must be going now.”  Fighting to keep her voice even, she mentally berated herself for the weakness he brought out in her.  Was this the last morning she’d ever see?

“Aye,” he sighed, pulling away and running his hands over his tired eyes.  “Gather what things ye want to take with ye.” 

“What?”

Malcolm’s jaw cracked on a yawn, and he reached for his discarded kilt and tunic.  “I’ll get ye home so we can finish what my sister and her husband so rudely interrupted.”  He kissed her forehead, and pulled his tunic over his unruly auburn curls.

Vían gaped at him in absolute shock, frozen in place. 

He pulled his kilt over his tantalizing backside and then turned to her as though to ask her why she hadn’t moved yet.  Upon seeing her face, he crouched down to her and touched her cheek, obviously taking her astonishment for outrage. 

“I doona mean to offer ye the dishonor of being my mistress,” he amended, green eyes sparkling with mischief.  “I mean to make an honest woman out of ye.”

He couldn’t mean…

“What are you saying?” she breathed, her heart slamming against her ribcage. 

“I’m saying I mean to make ye my wife.”  He grinned before leaning in for a kiss.  “Now get dressed, dawn is upon us.”

***

Malcolm felt lighter than he had in months as he guided his steed over the moors toward Dun Moray.  He ignored the silent, astonished glances of his sister and the smug, lifted eyebrow of his brother-in-law as they each followed behind him on their own horses.

He supposed he deserved both.  Since Morgana had returned home from exile in England with a Berserker mate, he’d lectured both of them over the unwise speed of their union.  He would reap what he’d sown, and try to keep a good humor about it.  Morgana was full to bursting with questions, Malcolm could feel them swimming inside her, but she wouldn’t ask him until Vían was no longer clinging to his back in dazed silence.  If nothing else, his sister was a lady.

There were a myriad of noble reasons why he should marry Vían.  He’d been found in her bed, such as it was, and therefore honor bound him to her.  Though Picts didn’t believe as the English did, that a woman exploring her sexuality was more sinful than a man doing the same, it still was a man’s responsibility to take care of his offspring. 

And what if their night together had resulted in a child?

The very idea terrified and humbled him.  He was an Earth Druid after all, they were known to be more fertile than your average Celt. 

And yet, that still didn’t encompass the reason he was now taking a bride home rather than searching for the Grimoire as he was bound to do. 

The moment he’d seen Vían trembling and wounded on the ground, something inside him had shifted.  For so long, he’d been consumed by his work, by the responsibility of being the king of a proud and clannish people, and by the charge he’d been tasked with by the Goddess. 

A de Moray Druid. 

With her soft amethyst eyes and skin that seemed as though it had never been kissed by the sun, Vían made him feel like a man. 
Just
a man.  A creature of blood and bones and hunger and lust. Nothing more. 

In truth, he could have stayed with her in that hovel and lived out his days roaming the forest, fishing the lake, and planting wee babes in her belly every night by their fire.  They’d tell stories, shape clay, weave baskets, and let the forest help them to forget that an Apocalypse loomed on the horizon.

“Is that Dun Moray?” Vían’s question shattered his brooding fantasy as they broke over a rise and the Moray valley spread out beneath them.  It shimmered like an emerald in the autumn sunlight, the village alive with activity.

“Aye,” Malcolm answered, the mantle of obligation again beginning to weigh upon his shoulders.

“So, it’s really true… You’re King of the Picts.”  She said this as though the fact disappointed her, somehow, and that endeared her to him all the more. 

Most women of his acquaintance chased him with the vigor of a pack of wolves.  His crown being the prize rather than his heart.  “Do ye think ye could take to being my Queen?”

“That remains to be seen,” she whispered, and pressed her cheek to his back.  “Why would you want me?  I know naught of your world.  I have no family.  I’m nobody… nothing.”

The forlorn words were made all the more bleak by her tone.  She truly believed that about herself, which was a tragedy, and he planned to spend the rest of his life changing her mind.

“To me, ye’re everything,” he insisted, hoping she could hear the raw truth in his tone.

“How can that be?  You don’t know a thing about me.  I don’t know a thing about you. We’ve only just met.”

A wise and careful woman, his lass.  He liked that.  “I know that ye’re practical and resilient, which I appreciate.  Ye know what ye want, and ye go after it.”  He was glad she couldn’t see his lips twitch with the memory of how she’d persuaded him into her bed.

Not that it took much persuading.  

“I know that ye’re proud and lonely and that ye carry around a painful secret that ye doona want to share with anyone, least of all me.”

Her gasp was audible. “How do you—what makes you think that?”

“I’m more perceptive than yer average man, lass,” he tossed her a smile over his shoulder as they began to descend the hill into Moray Valley.  “And we all have secrets.”

“What are yours?” she asked after a pause. 

Malcolm considered putting her off, perhaps until they knew each other better, but something about the open vulnerability in her question pushed him to answer her.

“When my father was killed, everyone thought I was in exile while Macbeth ruled, but in truth, I was in the hands of my enemies.”

“The English?” she asked.

“Nay.  Druids.  Dark Druids.  Women who have taken the powers of the Goddess and twisted them for their own evil purposes.”

Vían was quiet behind him.  Offering no words of sympathy, no empty platitudes, and somehow that prompted him to continue. 

“I had no concept of time when I was in their clutches.  They held me for months, but it felt like an eternity…”  His hands tightened on his reins as the memories washed over him, spilling chill bumps over his flesh.  “The worst of it is, I would have been able to break any chains wrought of iron or prison of stone, but… they didna imprison my body, they invaded my mind, held it captive with their black Magick.”

Vían’s arms tightened around his middle, offering him more comfort than any words.

“They tried to rip me from myself.  To bring me to their side.  And when they failed to do that, they used… terrible means to trick me into giving up my Druid powers to them.”

“Obviously, they failed,” she offered, her voice tighter than he’d yet heard it.

“Aye,” he ground out.  “But their attempts they… changed me… and not for the better.” Bit by bit, Malcolm had felt his heart grow colder, his thoughts more bitter.  He’d nearly lost himself in that place, in his own head, and the abyss he found within frightened him more than any physical pain he could imagine. 

Even more than death.

“You ask me why I’m taking ye home,” he murmured, placing a hand over the soft arms banded about his waist.  “It’s because when I’m with ye, I feel like myself for the first time in ages, and that is the most precious gift anyone could give.”

Her breath had sped behind him, and she gave a few suspiciously rapid sniffs.  It melted his heart that she was touched on his behalf.  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll come for you again?”

“They will,” he shrugged.  “They already have.  But we’re all stronger with someone by our sides to remind us what we’re fighting for.  I see that now.”  He cast another look at Bael and Morgana, who were locked in a conversation of their own a ways off.

“You… know what they’re after?” she asked. 

Malcolm realized that this was a lot for a wee lass to take in, and that he’d likely just gave her cause to fear for her life.  The best thing he knew to combat fear was information. 

“There is a prophecy in the de Moray Grimoire that says that when four elemental de Moray Druids cast behind one gate, they are fated to bring about the Apocalypse,” he explained.  “We are only three.  My sister, Morgana, my cousin, Kenna, and I.  As long as one of us are behind castle grounds, we are able to ward them off, for now.  ‘Tis why Kenna didna join the search for me, I expect.”

“How do you know the Wyrd Sisters cannot come for you?” she queried.

“Because my castle is warded.”

“Warded how?”

“Do ye see the symbols carved in those stones?” He pointed to impossibly sized monoliths that they were beginning to pass.  “They’re placed all around the valley, and are strong enough that neither the Wyrd Sisters nor their minions can cross—.”

With a cry, Vían’s arms were jerked from around his waist as she was thrown from his horse and into the grass by the invisible barrier that protected his lands. 

Malcolm slowly turned his horse, meeting Morgana’s wide, blue eyes before he could bring himself to look at the woman who stared up at him from the ground.

A cold, bitter fury built in his gut as he realized, he’d never told her the names of his enemies, and yet she’d called them the Wyrd Sisters.

Because she was in league with them.