The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (22 page)

Aileen.

Oh, there were a thousand ways he would pleasure this woman’s body, a thousand ways he’d make her moan. When they returned to the
llys
, he’d treat her to smooth linens and the softest of furs.

“Come, Irish.” He filled his lungs with the crisp air of the New Year. “I’ll show you the way it should be done.”

***

Aileen had always considered herself a woman of iron strength, of principle, but at the look on Rhys’s face all those sureties shattered into nothing. With his hand lost in her hair, he nudged her to follow him. She stumbled with him on liquid limbs. She trailed him in a dreamy sort of dance as the horizon shifted, as they wove their blind way toward the hut. His eyes glowed bright with an expression she’d never seen before, something beyond the mind–numbing lust which had seized them both last night. She thought, he is going to kiss me.

He’s going to kiss me.

The silence of the hut enveloped them. He loomed before her, all heat and clear blue eyes too bright for the darkness. He tugged something between them. Her cloak slipped off her shoulders and whooshed to the floor. He yanked at the ties of her tunic.

He rasped, “Take it off.”

She smelled him—warm wool and sweat—as she set her clumsy fingers to the knots at her neck, the ties of her sleeves, the knot of her belt. She fixed her gaze upon a pulse throbbing in his throat as the wool crumpled to her feet, revealing her undertunic. Rhys still cut a royal figure, even swathed in the stained and ragged silk, and wearing boots caked in mud. Now she knew well the muscles that rippled beneath his clothing. But she was raised on thin fish stew and hard work—and her body showed it. Tremors riddled her skin, from much, much more than the cold.

“All of it, Irish.”

She plucked at the ties of her undertunic. She was new to this, but she didn’t grow up amid a family of eight children without coming upon Ma and Da more than one time fixing their clothing with a flush upon their faces. The deed could be done well wrapped.

Her voice came out a whisper. “It’s as cold as the morning here.”

“We’ll be making enough heat.”

“We can make it well enough without stripping down to flesh and bone.”

“I want to see you.”

She gazed up into that masked face. Yesterday he’d torn off that strip of black leather and exposed the ridges and puckers of his ravaged face. He had bared himself to her. Now he expected her to take that same risk.

She gathered the tunic in her hands.
Now he can see my knees, knobby bony things that they are, and the cut upon one of them from kneeling down in the rocks by his wounded bondsmen. Now he can see the freckles clustered on my thighs. And now. . ..
Fresh color burned her cheeks. Now he’d know that she didn’t wash her hair with some root to give it the hue which had earned her nickname.

She was the daughter of Conaire of Ulster, she told herself, even if she did look as skinny as a cat caught in the rain. With a defiant snap, she wrestled the cloth over her head and tossed it to the floor.

“Am I to stand here and freeze all day,” she whispered, “or are you going to share that heat you’ve been promising?”

She let her eyelids flutter shut and tilted her head back. Surely now, he’d kiss her. She yearned for a kiss unlike any other, the kiss she’d been aching for since Samhain in the darkness when the moon–tides had throbbed in her blood and he had spread her legs with his thighs and mocked the loving act that before this day ended she’d know for real—again.

His lips found the base of her throat instead. He trailed a hot tongue across her pulse as his callused hand scraped across her belly. She gripped the rolling bulk of his shoulders to support legs suddenly turned to water. The perfume of his hair inundated her senses, fresh winter air and oak–spice. The bristles of his beard scraped the line of her jaw.

He did things to her with his hands and fingers and lips as the gray circle of light from the smoke–hole crept across the ground. All the unimaginable, forbidden, unspeakable joys of hungry flesh revealed to her, all the voluptuous pleasures of a world she’d never thought to know. He charged her blood with a heat that burned away every last shiver of shame. The trail of his fingers across her breast, the rasp of his hand through her hair, all transformed her into a ravenous creature, greedy for more, ever more, so eager for him that she found herself tasting the warmth of his salty skin, trailing the tips of her nails across the hair whirling on his chest. She tasted that, too. She scraped her tongue against the coarseness of it, closed her eyes as it tickled the tip of her nose. She dug her teeth into the hard swell of his chest and felt the vibrations of his groan shiver against her mouth.

The pallet sank as he lifted himself atop her, blocking out the light, blocking out everything but the sweet pressure of his naked body. He filled her to the brim with his heavy cock and then began the breath–stealing rhythm of a stroking so much more powerful than anything she’d ever known. Then it came again, that quivering sensation that had taken her so much by surprise before. It swelled in her now, a wondrous confusion that tugged her deep, like the suck of the sea. Rhys seemed to understand somehow. He drew her wrists up above her head and changed his rhythm to match the racing of her heart.

She thought perhaps she had screamed. She didn’t know. She didn’t remember as he flung his head back and swelled within her and filled her deep with liquid warmth. She lay beneath him on the woolen pallet listening to the rasp of their breath. She flexed her fingers over his back as the world drifted to her: The soup bubbling over the pot, the trill of a winter bird swooping over the hut. Her body throbbed. Her lips throbbed—but with a painful, sore kind of ache.

Then she realized that despite all the loving, he hadn’t kissed her on the lips.

Not even once.

Chapter Thirteen

I
t was the mornings Aileen liked best.

Aye, the mornings when the fire in Rhys’s room had long sputtered to ashes. The mornings when a fresh breeze siphoned in and swirled the stagnant smoke, when the hounds barked for food and the cows moaned for release from the ache of their udders. The mornings when she and Rhys lay cocooned beneath a mountain of soft furs, a pocket of human warmth amid the chill of winter.

This morning was no different. Though she’d stayed up late at the Candlemas feast, she blinked her eyes open at the first lowing of the cattle. In the mornings Rhys could sleep like the dead, and after a month of sharing his bed she finally knew why. He spent every night thrashing about and grinding his teeth and spewing meaningless broken syllables at his invisible tormentors before finally shuddering into exhaustion.

Now she turned to find him blind and deaf to the world, lying on his side, his arm curled under a pillow. She reached out and dared what she’d never done in his waking moments, but what she’d dared every morning since she’d taken her place in this bed. She slipped her hand between them and pressed her palm flat against his chest. She felt like a thief laying her hands upon him at his most vulnerable. But only in these few predawn moments could she feel the essence of him seep out from the edges of his battered heart, like a light around the frame of a door.

Tears pricked the backs of her eyes as she set to the healing. Before, whenever she lay her hands upon the weak or the wounded, she’d sensed the pain as a separate thing—a density or a weakness. With Rhys, the pain drove nails through her heart.

She was starting to understand the man, piece by piece. Even last night, when they’d all feasted in the mead–hall, she’d gotten another glimpse of the man he once was. The meal had teetered close to merriment for Lent was only a week away. A bard had wandered his way here through the hills of Wales, a well–dressed bard from Aberffraw, filled with news of the outside world. The men had gathered around him and listened to his stories, then set loose their heels in the night to the trill of his harp. At one point while she’d scrambled about making sure every man’s cup was filled, Dafydd, his head turned with the drink, had pushed the bard away from the harp and summoned Rhys to it.

To her surprise, Rhys had walked to the instrument and trailed his fingers over the strings. The hall went so silent that she could hear the crackle of the hearth–fire and the held breath of two dozen men.

Rhys played with the rusted perfection of a man who once knew well the lay of the strings. The shimmer of the music filled the room. By some trick of light, it seemed as if Rhys’s mask dissolved into shadow and he sat as whole as any man. She saw clearly for the first time the strong, stunning beauty of the man—how breathtakingly handsome he must have been, before all this.

Now in their bed with her hand pressed against his heart she stared at the skin of the right side of his face, bubbled and boiled and swirling on his bones. She thought about her sister Cairenn. Cairenn was the one to whom all eyes turned wherever they traveled. The Widdy Peggeen sewed finer clothes for Cairenn than any other. Old Seamus gave Cairenn the best of the catch. Aileen imagined what would happen if Cairenn were ever afflicted like this. She imagined her sister’s bewildered confusion if the approval of the world suddenly turned to disgust for no more reason than the onset of a rash.

Rhys shifted beneath her hand. She loosened her palm and let her fingers trail down the ripples of his abdomen. His hand came up from under the covers to cup her breast. He moved closer and laid his hot lips upon her shoulder. The furs shifted, cold air sifting in, then closed again to contain them in their cocoon of warmth.

She breathed a happy sigh and knew there would be no more sleep this morning. His hands worked their magic upon her without a word spoken between them. So much warmth, so much comfort, with fur tickling her nipples and his hair soft upon her belly, flesh sliding against flesh. She found herself dreamily spreading her legs as he eased himself between her thighs until she gasped with the pleasure of it. She wrapped her arms around him, loving the rhythm of his movements, loving what little surrender he ceded when his hands flexed over her hips, when all spiraled out of control into that blinding white light.

Aye, Rhys . . ..
She lay in abandon while he lifted himself off her. She felt something soft trail across her lips.

She blinked her eyes open. The light of the smoke–hole gleamed like a halo around his black hair. His finger stroked her lower lip, back and forth, back and forth, a slow tender stroking, his gaze intense on what he was doing. Air frozen in her lungs, she willed him to raise those shuttered blue eyes as the moment stretched.

Kiss me, Rhys. Kiss me.

She lifted a heavy arm and curled it around his neck, urging him down with the lightest pressure. She arched her neck and lifted her lips toward him.

Kiss me.

His finger trailed off her lips, down her chin, then away from her. The bed moved as he shifted his weight and flapped the blanket back. The chill air seeped in and destroyed the warm cocoon. He swung his legs over the bed, padded naked toward the door, and splashed his face with water from the bowl on the table.

She lay back against the pillow staunching a prickle of disappointment. The morning was over. Now the day would begin, with all its duties. Now, they’d both put on their masks. She had never known it possible for a man and woman to lay flesh to flesh, cock to womb, their legs entwined like so much fishing rope, and still not be joined at the heart.

She pitied the woman who would dare to love Rhys ap Gruffydd.

She sat up and dug under the pillow for her undertunic. “I wonder if that ewe had her lamb by now,” she said, to fill the silence as they dressed. “Last night, Dafydd told me that her pains had begun.” She eyed him as he pulled on a shirt over his
braies.
“Will you be going boar–hunting again today?”

“No. To the castle.”

“Again?” She winced as she set her feet upon the cold flagstones. “The master mason isn’t due for three weeks at least, and you and Dafydd have talked of nothing else since St. Agnes’s day.”