She pressed her palms against the wall also, denying him further contact. Murdoch wanted her to caress him first. He wanted her to need the brush of flesh against flesh as much as he did. He gentled his kiss, almost pleading for her to break through that restraint between them.
Instead, she slipped away, ducking beneath his arm so quickly that he didn't see her move. He missed her immediately, and the longing nearly spilled out of him before he shut it off. He turned and glared at her, hiding his pain. “Why did you do that?”
“To show you I can. And will.” She glanced appraisingly at his accursed ring. “I must return to Aelynn. If you won't come with me, then you have no right to touch me.”
“You'd have to be insane to ask me to return.” He paced the floor, frustrated on so many levels he couldn't stand still. The ground trembled and a hairline crack appeared where he walked. He didn't do these things on purpose. They simply happened when he confined his excess energy too long.
He drew a deep breath and sought a release to keep from opening up the floor. He raised an image of Lissandra in his head, pictured cupping her breasts, stripping back the cloth. . . .
Throwing him a look of outrage, she cursed and walked out.
Now, that was an interesting twist. She'd
felt
his thoughts? He didn't think she'd done that even when they were young and reckless.
She'd just said he had no right to touch her . . .
if
he wouldn't return to Aelynn. The significance of her earlier statement finally filtered through his lust. Was there a chance in hell that he could have her if he did return? He almost blacked out from holding his breath as he considered the possibility.
Lis had
left
Aelynnâan unthinkable act in itself. And she'd done it for
him
. No, she'd done it for Aelynn, because she believed that balls of blue flame carried the spirits of the gods. Considering his fiery state of arousal, he would soon suffer from blue balls of a different sort.
With the first insane niggling of hope prying at his skull, Murdoch strode after her.
“I directed my energy as you suggested,” he called when she headed into the woods.
“Find another damned direction besides me,” she shouted back, clearly as aroused as he and running from temptation.
He crowed in unholy triumph at having finally cracked her icy shields.
Then he stopped to consider what he'd done. He'd never affected anyone with his thoughts before. Why Lis? He was prone to raising thunderclouds and splitting open the earth. What kind of monster did that make him when he used his uncommon abilities to pressure a woman into a sexual relation?
One who wouldn't let his woman walk off into the woods alone. He started to storm after her like a love-sick youth and slowed when he realized what he was doing.
His woman?
He no longer had the right to play slap and tickle as if they were still children, regardless of the desire he sensed in her with every fiber of his being. He couldn't resist following, but he slowed his paceâuntil her shout of alarm startled birds into flight.
Murdoch broke into a run. Trees whipped past him in a blur, and he burst into a clearing, prepared to tear the head off any molester without regard to his injured arm.
He slammed to a halt, fisting his fingers so tightly they should have broken in an effort to prevent calling down lightning. Instead, the earth trembled.
Lissandra calmly gripped a bearded stranger by his beaked nose and, even as Murdoch watched, brought her knee up in a direct blow to the man's groin. Her attacker collapsed on the ground, curling up with a groan, before Murdoch could assimilate the string of events.
Wincing over the other man's pain helped to restrain the urge to smash her attacker into bloody pulp. “I warned you about these woods.”
“And I told you that you didn't have to worry,” she retorted.
With his first irrational urge to kill conquered, he studied the moaning man, not recognizing him as anyone from the village. But strangers escaping Paris, running from the Tribunal, or deserting the army often kept to these wilderness areas. “We'll need to haul him off to the authorities.”
“Leave him. He'll not be assaulting another woman anytime soon.” With composure, Lis brushed her hands on her skirt as if halting rapists were an everyday event. She glanced at him. “That's the third time you've tried to protect me.”
“It's what I do,” he grumbled. It was what he'd give his life to do if the damned woman would let him.
She slanted him a look that he couldn't easily interpret. “You have obviously forgotten the many ways I can neuter a man's desire.”
Murdoch squeezed the bridge of his nose rather than cover his privates as he had a sudden inclination to do. “If I'd remembered, I would have thought twice about kissing you.”
“You couldn't have kissed me if I hadn't wanted it,” she corrected. “That part of a man's brain is very simple and straightforward. When I touched the villain's nose, I directed all my energy to the overheated element. Depending on how much energy I direct, I can neuter him for life or merely turn off his interest.”
Murdoch processed this information against his memories of their stolen kisses in a country far, far away and in a time that no longer existed. She'd never neutered
his
desire. “Is that why you didn't touch me just now?”
“Of course not. I have no need to exercise such restraint.
I
learned to control my energies.” She left the thought dangling with the implication that, unlike her, he had no such discipline. “If you push too hard, as you often do, I prefer to walk away. Would you rather I release my restraint and twist your nose?”
He winced. “Ours was never an easy relationship.”
“It is no relationship at all. We want each other. We can't have each other if we live in different worlds with different goals. There is no future for us.”
“Sensible,” he agreed bluntly, hearing the finality in her voice and resenting it, even though he knew she was right.
Except she kept saying
if
, as though an alternative existed in an impossible world where he'd killed her father and earned the hatred of an entire island's people.
She sighed and picked her way daintily across a fallen log, apparently deciding it was safe to leave her moaning molester behind and that Murdoch was no longer a danger to her virtue either. “I could call up my spirit guide again,” she said, “but the answer is always the sameâour paths are dark. Apparently even the spirits don't know how our story ends.”
He laid his palm across the small of her back and steered her around a puddle, and when she didn't resist, he kept his hand there, absorbing her heat and the graceful sway of her hips. It had been too long since he'd had reasonable discourse with a woman who understood exactly what he was. If she meant to leave, he'd steal every pleasure he could now.
Behind them, the would-be rapist cursed and staggered to his feet. Murdoch glanced back to see the coward lurching through the underbrush, apparently intent on putting as many miles between himself and Lis as possible. An excellent result, and done without swords. Interesting.
He returned to following the path of Lis's devious mind. Normal women thought in roundabouts he couldn't follow. Lis added depth and volume to the spiraling paths. “I'm a danger to everyone around me. You would do better to go home.”
“I will not return without an Oracle. I believe the gods have given me this duty as a test.”
“Gods are just a woman's feeble attempt to make sense of the universe,” he argued.
She cast him a disbelieving look. “Look at your ring and tell me that.”
The ring glowed malevolently. He glared back at it. “My life is not dictated by a piece of onyx and pearl.” Nor a pretty face, he added mentally, but he was a little less sure of that as the ice in Lis's eyes froze his soul.
“Onyx and pearl that are so much a part of you that you can't take them off,” she reminded him tartly. “No matter how much you tamp it down, your anger consumes you. It is in everything you say and do. I assume that wound on your wrist is a result of temper, and that is the reason you won't tell me about it.” She entered the cottage and rummaged about in their supplies for the makings of dinner.
“One of the committee clowns watched me work all morning,” he muttered, as if that were an answer to her inquiry.
“Oh? Is a mortal responsible for wounding a warrior?” she taunted, producing an onion and peeling it.
“A load of timber is responsible,” he muttered. He didn't want to talk about it, but he didn't want to leave her here alone either. “It fell from a roof.”
“Timber? And you had to catch it? Why?” She peeled another layer.
He paced. He could ignore her questions and walk out, or stay and let her irritate him into responding. He didn't want to leave her alone. Stupid of him. “There were children playing in the lane. The boards could have fallen on them.”
Only the bloody tear in his arm had prevented the villagers from screaming sorcery at his swift action in diving from the roof to catch the stack of falling timber. Apparently his injuries made him human in their eyes.
Had he been truly human, he would have broken his neck leaping from the roof, and the timber would have crushed his arm and no doubt his head and rib cage, but the villagers lacked the imagination to grasp that.
Lis threw an enigmatic glance in his direction, as if she knew what he wasn't saying. “Saving the children was heroic. But why did the timber fall?”
“Because the clown stared at me all morning.”
Her face lit with mischief and understanding, and he almost chose Lis's method of nonconfrontation and walked out right then.
“Your temper built until the foundation shook,” she guessed, rightly.
He paced some more. He ought to kill a rabbit or catch a fish or do
something
useful, but he was oddly compelled to see where this conversation would take them. He hoped it would take them to bed. “I may hurt myself, but I never intentionally hurt others. I would never hurt you.”
She stopped chopping the onion to look at him through eyes the glorious silver blue of a morning sea.
“No, you can't hurt me. I have always known that under your anger is a man who simply wants to be loved and respected. I gave you that when I was a child. In return, even when I was six and you were twice my age, you let me follow you everywhere, and challenged the other boys to swordplay if they laughed at me. I
know
you, as no one else does.”
Back then, he would have killed to protect the fascinating fairy child she had been. They were not children any longer. She was wrong. He could hurt her now. He'd already done so, and he doubted that she'd ever forgive him.
He released his tension by clenching and unclenching his fists over his head, then lowering his arms slowly. He looked for a heavy weight with which to repeat the exercise.
He needed his sword. He placed his pillow against the wall and smashed his fist into it, releasing his bottled-up energy in an act that harmed no one but himself. His knuckles suffered pain, and he dislodged one of the solid timbers. That satisfied his frustration, temporarily.
“You used to punch noses instead of walls.”
“Everyone thinks I'm some kind of freak, and they're right. I'm no Oracle.”
“You're the next-best thing we have to a god, yet you insist on throwing your gifts away.”
He couldn't take it anymore. Not her apparent serenity over the sins of his past. Nor his knowledge of the violence simmering so close to his surface that it could turn to evil in the blink of an eyeâas it had done too recently for him to even think about.
And most of all, he couldn't tolerate his damnable weakness in playing house with her as if they were still innocents.
He stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
Wooden shingles slid from the roof.
Nine
Lissandra let the tears leak down her cheeks and blamed the onion.
Nothing had changed. She still adored the man Murdoch could have been. He still hated the man he was.
She was still frustrating him with her reasonableness. He was still tearing her into pieces with his unsettling turbulence.
The list could go on, but she was tired of analyzing why they'd grown apartâeven before her father's death.
Only when they kissed did everything seem possible. She had all too often wondered what might have happened when they were younger had they acted on their urges and engaged in sexual congress. But the temptation had become a trap around which they'd continually dancedâusing desire as blackmail and bribe for what they wanted and couldn't have. Had Murdoch been any less honorable, she would no doubt be his slave by now, so hungry for satisfaction that she could not see right from wrong.
Which made it even more difficult to reject him now. The look he'd given her when she'd pulled away after his kiss had been so wistful. . . . She'd hurt him, and he'd understood why she'd hurt him. The loss of her childhood hero pained her. The child in her ached to believe again.
The
woman
in her just ached
.
Especially after the stunt he'd pulled in mentally disrobing and caressing her. She'd actually
felt
his touch. She'd be lucky if she ever slept again without the image of Murdoch's hand on her breast haunting her, drat the aggravating creature. If she knew how to inflict the same tormenting mental image on him, she would return the favor.
How long could she turn her back on Aelynn's problems while waiting for the perverse man to admit the gods had chosen him? Or must she abandon him here to find his own way?