The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (21 page)

T
here existed in Ireland an herb called
faud shaughran,
the faery grass. Whosoever was fool enough to tread upon it would find herself tearing mindlessly through night and day, through brambles and woods too thick for sun to penetrate, over choppy seas and up the cliffs of mountains, so fast and furious it was like flying, it was said—a mindless headlong journey that paid no attention to exhaustion but forced the enchanted one on, for the herb rendered her powerless.

So here Aileen stood, sucking air into her lungs and trembling fit to shake her bones out of her skin. Rhys ridged his teeth against the heel of her palm. She stood snared in the blue blade of his gaze while her heart raced, raced, and all her body shuddered with a fierce, unyielding emotion.

He pulled her toward the tiny hut with its frosted thatch and pitted walls. She was gliding, not walking, and the wind itself pushed the door open for them. He thrust her forward. She edged around the cold black ashes of an evening fire and stopped in front of a makeshift pallet of fir boughs. The light sifting down through the smoke–hole dusted the edge of the crumpled blanket.

He came up behind her and snapped the netting off her hair. Burrowing beneath the tumble, he sucked his way down the line of her neck then came up short on the edge of her mantle. Throwing an arm around her shoulder, he pinned her against him and then tore the ties asunder. He yanked the mantle out from between them and sent it flying across the room. Every hard inch of his big body pressed against her back—heaving, just as she heaved—and radiating heat like a kiln.

Then she was leaning back into him, willingly, savoring the feel of his body so close, savoring the touch of hard man’s muscle. She bent her head back at the shock of his lips on her shoulder. She curled fistfuls of her tunic as her mind separated from her body and her body fluxed to the commands of some primitive instinct. She did things with a shift of her hips that she’d never dared imagine. And she did them to a man with half a face and a slipping grip on reason.

Oh, but hadn’t she spent the last fortnight weighing the risks and the consequences of seeking him out? She couldn’t shake him out of her thoughts. Hadn’t she brooded all through a gloomy Christmas while her heart battled with her mind, her instincts with her sense? She’d told herself, aye, he’s a warrior, an unbeliever, a man she should hold in contempt. But her heart screamed to heal the wounds that festered inside him. It wasn’t in her power to wipe away a thousand whispers of contempt, the sword–slice of betrayal, the unhealed bruise of constantly witnessing fear and disgust in people’s eyes, not with her salves or even her healing hands. But Da’s teachings rang in her ears.

There are many ways to heal, Aileen—with your herbs, with your hands, and with your heart.

So she’d come to this place ignoring Dafydd’s warnings. She’d come to this place knowing the moment she laid eyes upon Rhys’s grizzled face and unfocused eyes there would be a price to pay for her boldness. No healer could open herself up to the fire of another’s agony and remain unscathed. In the end, she had come for reasons she had not dared to acknowledge. Not until now, as she reached up and buried her hand in the tangled silk of his hair. Not until now, as she arched her back to press the stretch of his arm against a breast grown tender and bottom–heavy.

I want him.

Her legs buckled. Her knees sank in the pallet. Even like this, with him pressing against her back, she wanted him, even with his fingers digging into her side and his teeth sharp on her shoulder. She hadn’t come here expecting herb–scented reeds and tenderness. Such trappings were for beautiful women, gentle lovers, noble sentiments, none of which existed in this hut. None of which existed as he peeled himself away from her, flattened a hand on the small of her back and forced her belly–down on the pallet.

He pulled up her tunic. Cool air washed her calves, and then seeped higher, to chill the bare skin of her thighs. The hem of her tunic rode up under her. He settled the bundled fabric at her waist as he left her bottom as bare as the day she was born.

His bare hands shocked the hollow of her back, then razed down, down, shamelessly down, molding her buttocks into the shape of his grip. Before she could even release the breath she’d held at the first feel of his callused hands on her bare flesh, he kneed her legs apart and trailed his thumbs into that part of her grown liquid. She bucked at the intimacy. He probed his cold fingers in deep. Her thoughts whirled too fast for her to discern whether she’d moved to avoid the sweet invasion of those hands or to grind up against them.

He nudged her legs wider. Those fingers probed her open so that she felt the breath of an open breeze. His warmth left her, and for long agonizing moments she lay trembling on her belly with the blanket crushed in her fists listening to the snap of his belt, the clang of his sword on the ground, the harsh drag of his breath into his lungs. So this is to be the way of it then. How fitting it was that he’d take her like this, so that she couldn’t look into his face. How fitting that even in this most intimate of human relationships, he hid himself from her still.

Then his weight crushed her to the pallet and all rational thought fled. His hands seized her hips and dragged her down. He pinned her at the source of the heat and then lurched against her hard enough to bring a surge of tears to her eyes. She’d been summoned to enough pallets the morning after a bedding to know there would be pain in the first joining, so she braced herself for the sting of it. With each hungry lunge, she felt her own body stretch to accommodate to his, and she braced for the inevitable.

And it came, the pain, aye. She hadn’t realized he’d be so thick, so hard, so long, the penetration exquisite. But it wasn’t the pain which gripped her when his harsh breath warmed the nape of her neck and one hand curled into her hair and yanked her head back so he could suck her earlobe into his mouth—nay, not pain. That came and went and though the healer in her knew she’d feel it again when the deed was done, right now that made no difference. His hips surged against hers. His hands dug into her with urgency. She knew with a sort of delirious joy that he wanted her, wanted
this
, just as much as she had.

She began to shudder. A shuddering that had nothing to do with cold. It thieved her of speech, blinded her to the splattered walls, dulled the stench of horse rising from the blanket, and then launched her into such a blinding white place that for all she knew she could be lying amid a bed of feathers in the grandest castle in all of Wales.

With a strangled grunt he stiffened for a long, sweet moment, and then he collapsed upon her. She lay smothered under his weight while drifting down from that high, white place, thinking, this is life.

This is life.

***

Rhys slept the sleep of the dead. When he woke, he shot up from the pallet to the clatter of something falling outside. He groped for his sword and came up with air. Then he spied his sword, still in its scabbard, at the edge of the long skid mark it had made after he’d torn it off last night.

Images inundated him, hazy uncertain images of a woman’s pale flesh, of hair scented with heather, of hot yielding flesh. He flung his arm across the pallet, but only her imprint remained upon the wool grown cold.

He jerked up, fully awake. He probed beneath the blanket for his mask, but no leather caved beneath his hand. He spied one of the ties dangling across his arm and realized he’d lain bare–faced beside her during the night, dead to the world, dead to the revulsion which must have spread across her features in the bright cold light of morning.
So the wench’s courage had failed her.
Twisting the leather up over his head, he stumbled up from the pallet expecting to hear the sound of hooves.

He swung open the door and strode out into day. He blinked at the sharpness of the blue sky. The whole of Wales stretched out beyond the clearing. Patches of green spruce spotted the brown hills and blue–white ice frosted the tips of distant peaks. By the pine trees his horse whinnied a greeting and stamped the frosted earth. Aileen stood by the fire, flexing one of his newly carved spears underfoot.

“So you’re awake, high time for it.” She set her weight upon the middle of the wood. “I checked your breathing hours ago to make sure you still lived.”

She was still here. He blinked at the impossibility of that. She had crushed her hair back into the netting, but half of it tumbled across her face. Her cloak sagged over one shoulder, revealing the skewed neckline of a creamy linen tunic. Patches of red flared at the nape of her neck, over her shoulder, upon her ear.

“I’m making soup,” she said, as the wood of one of his spears cracked and yawned open with splintered teeth. “I’m famished, and the only way this soup is ever going to be done is if I build a bigger fire.”

He couldn’t find words. He couldn’t believe she was still here. Then he remembered how she’d responded beneath him, how she squirmed and reached for him in the middle of the night. He still had that, then—a cock which could give a woman pleasure, if a woman ever dared to get close enough to close her legs around it.

“This soup,” she said, poking the pieces of the spear into the flames, “will be done a lot faster if I had a man breaking this wood for me.”

He was standing and gawking like a green boy. “Those,” he said, “are my spears.”

“Are they?” She glanced up at the row of spears leaning against the hut “What a waste of good oak. At least I’m giving them a better end than you planned for them.”

He stared at her stirring the soup bubbling in the pot. He stood there wondering what she was about. He’d expected to wake alone to the echo of distant laughter and a mind grown silly, for Marged said there were places in these hills where it was dangerous to sleep lest the faeries steal off with a man’s soul.

“Don’t just stand there looking at me.” She clattered another stick under the bubbling brew. “I’ve never had much of a belly for soup without a bit of meat in it. You must have snares here and about?”

High above his head, a hawk screeched, then tilted its wings and dipped down past the edge of the hillside into the black crease of the valley below.

For one fierce, angry moment he wished he believed in faeries, for then he’d have an excuse for the bright–eyed trail of his thoughts. As it was, he could only blame them on fog in his head. She’d stayed. Why had she stayed? Was it that Aileen the Red was far too practical to leave this place alone and bumble her way back through a countryside crackling with cold and quivering with threat?

Maybe that was it: It was far better to stay with the devil you know.

He heard himself say, “It’s not the soup I want, Irish.”

Her bright gray gaze flew to meet his and new color washed out the evidence of his bite marks upon her skin.

He curled his fingers. “Come here.”

He wanted to feel her writhing naked beneath him. He needed to know he hadn’t dreamed the night.

“I’m no hound to be summoned at your whim.” She whirled the stick in the soup. “And I won’t be, wherever this leads us.”

“This will lead us to my bed. Early and often.”

“I know that.” She showed him her profile. “I knew when I chose to come up here that I’d be taking a lover.”

A breeze whirled over the edge of the hill and flattened the scrubby grass, and Rhys tried to absorb that comment—
I knew I’d be taking a lover
—without a stab of jealously for the other men she might have chosen.

She raised a brow at him. “You look surprised. You shouldn’t be. You’re the first man who’s shown any interest.”

Rhys resisted the urge to scoff. What would she tell him next? That mothers burrowed their children in their skirts whenever she passed? That penitents tossed alms at her feet to ward off curses? That men lived in fear of this reed–slim creature of fiery hair and eyes of silver; they’d sooner kill themselves than lie down with her?

“I never could take a lover on Inishmaan.” She scraped the side of the pot as she peered into the froth of the brew. “There wasn’t a man on it who fancied looking at me in that way.”

“Your island is but a spit of rock.”

“Where else was I to look? Did you think I’d be seeking a man amid the mainlanders? There wasn’t one of them who would dare to look me in the eye—never mind bundling me off to the bushes. You know that. The stories they told about me found their way all the way here, after all.”

He found himself remembering the day he and Dafydd had sailed into Galway Bay and set ashore to ask about Aileen. He found himself remembering the sudden silences that greeted their inquiries, the gazes sliding away, the voices dropped to whispers. He remembered the day on Inishmaan when he’d first seen her emerge out of the mist like some sort of faery–wraith—ethereal, exotic, and otherworldly to those who believed in such things.

So maybe she did know what it was to live both inside and outside the world. Even as the thought formed, he hated the bond that tightened between them, hated the twist of that shriveled organ in his chest.

“There was a time,” he said, “when you cursed me to the bowels of hell.”

“Who better than a demon,” she said, turning the silver of her eyes upon him, “to lay down with a witch?”

The steam curled tendrils around her flushed face. Her tunic gaped to show the tight nipple he’d sucked into his mouth one night . . . and then he didn’t want to talk any more. Other urges overcame him, more intense, more immediate.

He strode across the distance that separated them and took the stick out of her hand. “Forget the soup.”

She gifted him with the brightness of her gaze. He breathed down upon her, thinking she could be a striking woman when the mood was upon her, strong and tall and fierce. He would set Marged upon her so she would learn to do her hair in the ways of the Welsh noblewomen at Aberffraw. He’d send a man to purchase silk—the blue–green of spruce, the red of deepest wine. Let the men at the court of the Prince of Wales sit back and wonder what woman found the courage to lay with the leper–lord of Wales.