WindLegends Saga 9: WindRetriever (27 page)

"From Gezelle's abortion to Grice's death," Chase remarked. "A lot of blame for one man to take."

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"He's vowed to kill Conar," Legion said quietly. "In his present frame of mind, I think he'd really try."

"It's hard to believe his love for Conar could have turned so sharply to such hate," Chase commented. "That boy practically worshiped the ground your brother walked on, Legion. He endured two beatings on Conar's behalf in the Labyrinth just to keep Conar from being hurt again."

"There's a fine line between love and hate," Teal said. "I know that well enough."

"Yet you don't blame Conar for Roget's death," Chase said. "Anymore than Paegan blames him for Rylan's."

Teal looked out across the compound where he had spent many torturous days as a lad under the not-so-gentle tutelage of Hern Arbra. "We each lost a brother in Rysalia, Conar included.

But we lost something else, too."

"What was that?" Legion inquired.

"Our belief that we would live forever." Teal stopped, bent over and picked up a leaf from the spreading chestnut towering above them. He held the leaf up to the men. "Everything has its season like this leaf. When our time and our mission in life is over, we fall, just as this leaf has done." He looked up at the tree. "We tumble from the tree and fall to the earth where we wither and die and eventually go back to the soil from which we sprang." He let the leaf drift from his fingers to the ground. "Do you blame the tree for that or do you blame the gods?"

"Why blame anyone?" Chase asked.

"Because it is human nature to do so," Teal answered. "Better to put the blame on someone else than to believe the same thing will happen to us one day."

"But why blame Conar?" Legion demanded. "Doesn't Chand realize how much Grice's death affected that man?"

Teal shook his head. "It doesn't matter." He reached out and put the palm of his hand on the tree trunk. "Conar is our tree, Legion; we, the branches. It has always been that way." He patted the wood. "Chand blames the tree, not the gods, for Grice's death."

A shout from the training compound drew the men's attention and slow smiles broke out on each face.

"And that," Teal said, pointing to one of the men sparring on the field, "is our sapling.

Growing up to be another powerful, sheltering tree."

Legion looked at Tristan, his nephew, Conar's oldest legitimate son, and nodded. "The next generation," he concurred.

"To carry on after this tree is felled," Teal said softly. He patted the tree once more then shoved away from it, turning his back on it. "Let's hope his branches will be as loyal as Conar's have been."

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"That was abdominally rude, milord," Rachel sniffed. She stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at Conar. "Can you not be polite at all?"

Conar snorted. "That was as polite as I can get, Mam'selle," he warned her. "If you want polite, go seek out Ben-Alkazar."

Rachel's lips pursed tightly together and she turned away, clenching her hands as she paced the chamber. "Those women mean you no harm," she finally reminded him. "They only mean to protect you."

"I won't let those women keep slinking along in my wake, Rachel," Conar shot back. "I'll not have Meghan walking all over me, either!" He drained his glass of milk then set the tumbler down too hard on the table. "I've told her and told her about those blasted women and their supposed 'body guarding' and I'll be damned if I'll allow it! Do you hear me?" His voice had risen to thunderous volume.

"I would imagine you could be heard in Diabolusia, McGregor," she said dryly.

"Good!" he snarled.

Shaking her head at his stubbornness, Rachel knew she would accomplish nothing with him now. The silly man had his dander up and when Conar McGregor got ornery, as he was at that very moment, you might as well be talking to the wall for all the cooperation you'd get. She decided to change tactics.

"What time tomorrow will we be leaving for Gilead?"she inquired as she went to turn the covers back on the bed they had been sharing for nearly three months.

Conar glanced over at her, squinting at her sudden switch in the conversation. His suspicious nature brought a mulish tightening to his mobile mouth. "Why?" he asked, his voice thick with caution.

His wife’s brow quirked. "You haven't changed your mind about me coming along on the raid, have you?"

Her answer did nothing to mollify his suspicion of her motives. "We leave at dawn," he answered, studying her reaction.

Rachel stopped plumping his pillow and gazed off into space. "That means we should arrive in Gilead about nine. If everything goes as planned, we should be back here by sunset." She looked around at him. "Does that seem right to you?"

Conar nodded slowly, still wondering in what direction her seemingly innocuous questions was taking them. He had the feeling she was attempting to manipulate him and being handled in such a way by a woman, any woman, had always made him uneasy and angry.

"How does roast mutton sound for supper?" she asked as she went about unlacing the ribbons of her camisole.

Those dark sapphire eyes narrowed. "Did I miss something here, Mam'selle?" he asked in a silky tone.

Rachel wiggled her shoulders, allowing the lace-edged camisole to drift over her arms and settle at her waist. She saw his gaze go to her naked breasts and nearly smiled for that had been her intention. Her hands went to the rucked material and she began to push in down over the flare of her hips.

"Miss what, milord?" she asked. She saw him wet his lips with the tip of his tongue as the Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 123

camisole dropped to the floor to pool at her bare feet.

Conar's attention drifted slowly upward from the thick triangle of ebon curls between Rachel's long, tapered legs to settle on her expressionless face.

"What?" she asked innocently.

The right side of Conar's mouth slowly lifted in a sardonic grin that would have been lecherous if the man's gaze hadn't been so damned cool. When one tawny brow crooked up in challenge and his powerful hands went to the buckle of his belt, Rachel knew she had him.

"You don't play fair, Mam'selle," he said as he pulled the black leather belt from his waist.

"Me?" she asked, lifting her slim arms above her head in a long, languid stretch. "What have I done, milord?"

Heat blazed in the Serenian's face as the twin peaks of perfection before him tipped toward the ceiling, their dusky nipples an invitation he had no intention of declining. He walked to her and reached up to take her elevated wrists in his hands.

"You know damned well what you're doing, Rachel," he growled as his hands slid slowly down her raised arms. His palms slid under her arms, circled her back and continued down until they cupped her luscious rump. With a possessive grunt, he jerked her against the thick bulge in his breeches. "
That
is what you've done."

The hardness of him, the heat of him pressed intimately against her, made Rachel nearly groan with satisfaction. As it was, the sound she made was something like a purr as she lowered her hands to the thickness of his blond hair.

"Did I do that?" she asked, running her fingers through that tawny mane. She lowered her head and ran her tongue along the sensitive column of his neck.

His hands tightened on her naked rump and then he lifted her, drawing her long legs around his waist, shifting her slight weight about his hips. "You know you did, you conniving little bitch,"

he said in a throaty whisper.

Rachel's smile was saucy as she draped her arms around his neck and wiggled against him.

"I could do more to you, you know," she reminded him.

Conar snorted. "I intend to see that you do," he answered as he turned and walked to the bed with her.

Over the last few months, Conar had used Rachel to diffuse the tension building in his overworked body. Sexual release had always been a means for him to cope with the complexities of his day to day life. As a young man, he had taken any female who'd shown even the slightest interest in him, using them and discarding them as he did his worn-out clothing. When he had met, then married, Liza, he had buried himself in the silken folds of her sweet flesh to blot out the tragedies that had plagued the two of them from the very day they had first encountered one another. With Gezelle and Amber-lea and the whores he had practically raped during his tenure as the Raven, sex had been a means of alleviating the guilt he felt, a balm for the loneliness that Liza's absence had created in his very soul. With Catherine, the act had been a blessing, a need that had been fostered by nearly two years of abstinence. With Rachel, sex had become a driving release of pent-up frustrations that seemed only to become more intense with each violent coupling.

"Do you intend to stand there staring at me all eve, milord?" Rachel asked as she stretched on the silken coverlet.

His fingers went to the buttons of his cords. "I like looking at you, Mam'selle," he replied.

Her attention went to the eager flesh that leapt from the breeches as he pushed them down over his hips. She smiled. "So does he," she said sweetly. Her smile turned lustful as he loomed over, his right knee dipping the side of the bed as he swung his other leg over her, straddling her Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 124

tempting body.

He was sheathed inside her even before his full weight settled on the bed. Her legs wrapped around his waist, drawing him to her, imprisoning him in a warm, moist cell that drew him further still into the dungeon of Rachel's desire.

"Take me hard, McGregor," he heard her mutter as her fingernails raked at his scarred back.

"Thrust deep, my lover. Plunge into me."

He obliged her with a strength and power that left them both gasping as his manhood penetrated to the hilt within her willing flesh. He hurt her. He knew he did. But it was what both of them wanted. What both of them needed at that moment. He rode her as he would have a dockside doxy, slamming into her with thrusts that were meant to give pain, and pleasure, at the same time.

"Yes!" she screamed, her nails digging bloody furrows into the flesh of his back, but he felt no pain. She doubted he would ever feel sensation in the carnage of his ravaged back ever again.

"Is this what you sought, woman?" he panted against her neck. His shaft ripped into her, withdrew, then cut another path through the very core of her.

"I want you," Rachel said, clinging to him as though she never meant to let him leave her.

"I want you, Conar." Tears slid down her cheeks from the happiness his lovemaking never failed to bring to her heart. "I want you."

"You have me," he hissed. He could feel the surge of his seed building, the explosion threatening to erupt at any moment. His hands dug into her buttocks, lifted her so that his penetration would be as deep as humanly possible for him to attain. "Have all of me!"

Rachel's legs clenched around him and she arched her hips up into the heat of his groin.

The tiny itch that had started in the core of her was building, becoming a maddening agitation that made her grind against him, swiveling her hips as he plummeted into her as far as his rigid flesh would allow. She felt him tense, felt his arms go as unyielding as stone and she clung to him, calling out his name, burying her teeth in the throbbing column of his neck.

"Rachel!" he bellowed as his shaft leapt within her, emptying himself into her pulsing velvet sheath. He arched his head back, squeezing his vivid blue eyes closed, calling out her name once more as he shot life-giving streams of seed into the fertile soil of her womb.

Her climax came, wrapping around him, gripping him with tiny tugs of welcome and she felt him shudder against her, pleased that he had given her pleasure. As he collapsed, spent, against her, she enveloped his sweaty body against her and held him, cooing softly to him, smoothing the damp hair back from his forehead as his cheek lay against her shoulder.

"I love you," she whispered. Her arms tightened possessively around him. "Before all that is holy, I love you."

Conar opened his eyes and stared across the room they shared. Her admission did not surprise him. Some part of him had known all along that her affection for him had become something he wished with all his heart it had not become. He regretted it, felt guilty about it. He would just as soon leave their relationship strictly on a sexual basis, but even though it was that for him, it had gone far beyond that for Rachel. He hadn't wanted her to love him. Hadn't meant for it to happen. Just as he had not meant to do what he knew he had done tonight.

"Milord?" she questioned him, sensing the burden of his reaction to her words. "I expect nothing of you." She caressed his neck. "I swear it."

"I know," he sighed, gathering her to him. His sweaty body stuck to her as he shifted his weight from hers and turned to his side, drawing her with him and into the safety of his arms.

Cradling her head against his damp shoulder, he stroked her silken back. "I know you don't, Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 125

Rachel."

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Sajin Ben-Alkazar's frown continued to deepen as he read, then re-read, the letter from his sister. When at last he was satisfied that he had not misread the missive, he crumpled the parchment page in his powerful fist and slammed his hand against his leg, his lips pursed tightly together. With a snarl, he sailed the offending letter across the room.