Byzantine Heartbreak (26 page)

But Cáel just stood there and Ryan’s fist landed heavily against his cheek, throwing Cáel’s head around with a hard smacking sound that made even Ryan wince.

Cáel bent over and spat blood into the still damp sand, then ran his tongue around his teeth, inspecting them. He straightened and pressed his fingers against his cheekbone experimentally and looked at Ryan. “Feel better?” he asked.

Ryan stared at him. “Do you?”

“I did deserve that,” Cáel agreed. “But not for the reason you think.”

Ryan glanced at Nayara, hoping she would look as puzzled as he felt.

She was smiling.

Ryan shook his head. “You’re both utterly nuts,” he declared.

“I feel saner than I have in a long time,” Nayara told him. “And you’re still dodging my question.”

Ryan curled his hands into fists, rolled his head back to look up into the iron grey sky hanging low overhead and screamed “
Fuck!”
at the top of his lungs.

Nayara shook her head. “Not an answer.”

“Keep this up and I’ll jump away again,” he warned.

“We’ll just track you down again,” Cáel told him. “Nayara deserves an answer.”

“
Why
?” Ryan demanded, his anger leaping higher.

“Six hundred years together isn’t enough justification?” Cáel asked reasonably.

“Why are you even here?” Ryan asked him.

“I wasn’t expecting to be,” Cáel replied calmly. “I pushed Nia into coming. She pulled me into the jump. As to why, you’ll have to check with her.” He smiled a little. “I have a feeling the price for her answer will be answering her question first.”

“Yes, it is,” Nayara agreed coolly.

Ryan wrapped the cloak even more tightly around him and shivered. “You’re working together against me.”

“You don’t pout well, Ryan,” Nia chided. She tilted her head enquiringly again and...just waited.

Cáel had wrapped his cloak around him against the wind and was watching Ryan, too.

Ryan realized that both of them were quite serious. They had tracked him down, taking weeks to do it and were going to make him talk even if they stood here and nagged until the tide came back in again.

“Can’t we at least go inside and talk about this?” Ryan asked. “This wind has a bite to it.”

“No,” Nia replied.

“And have you put this off another hour?” Cáel added. “Time’s up, Ryan. You can’t duck this anymore. Answer the question. Then, maybe, we’ll think about moving.”

Ryan shuddered and he knew it was from more than just cold. And the trembling didn’t end once the ripple had passed through him. It settled deep into his bones. He began to shake with it. His heart was hurting.

Nia laced her fingers together. It was an angelic pose, for a woman who had by-passed innocence long before Ryan was born. “Now, Ryan,” she said softly. “Explain why you object to Cáel being in my bed?”

He couldn’t seem to get control of his breathing. He was almost panting.

“Ryan?” Nia asked softly.

Her eyes, her beautiful eyes, were not letting him go.

Ryan squeezed his eyes shut, snatched a shallow breath and the shreds of his courage and jumped. “You’re mine,” he gasped. There. He’d got it out. But that wasn’t all of it. The pain was exploding in his chest. “So is he,” Ryan exhaled. “Oh, god.” He sank to his knees, thrusting his hand out for balance as the truth seemed to rise up and overwhelm him. “I love you,” he said and his voice was hoarse with the thick congestion of emotions in his chest. “Both of you.” He hung his head. “I can’t stand the idea of losing you, but I already have and I don’t know why.”

Hands were on his shoulders, lifting him up. He didn’t know whose. There was too much actual physical pain choking his throat and ramming against his chest for him to look.

Hands on his face, lifting it. “You said it,” Cáel murmured.

“You’ve seen it,” Nia whispered, her voice close by, too.

Ryan managed to open his eyes. He was mortified to feel them fill with tears, blurring his sight. Cáel was kneeling on the sand in front of him and Nia crouched beside him.

They blocked the wind. It was a small thing, but it seemed terribly significant to him.

Cáel was the one cradling his face. His big thumb wiped under Ryan’s eyes, removing the offensive tears. “That’s all you needed to do, Ryan. Just acknowledge it.”

Ryan took three shuddering breaths to be able to speak again. “Sadists.”

Nia touched Cáel’s shoulder. “Hold him, Cáel.”

He looked puzzled, even as he reached forward to wrap his arm around Ryan’s shoulders.

But Ryan suspected. “Nia, no,” he said, as she put her arms around Cáel’s neck and his. She pushed them sideways, leaning forward herself, making them fall from their knees toward the sand. It wasn’t a long drop, but Nia didn’t need much. She was that good.

* * * * *

Near Adoáin, Navarra, Spain. 2262 A.D.

Strong sunlight bathed them. There was no wind.

Nayara furled back her coat and lifted her face to the sun. The scents lifting up from the trees and bushes were achingly familiar.

“Where are we?” Ryan demanded, standing up.

“You can’t tell?” Cáel asked dryly. “Look at her.”

Nayara opened her eyes. “We’re home,” she told them.

“Told you,” Cáel said, looking at Ryan.

Ryan glanced at him, scowling.

Nayara looked around. The open hillside was lonely and deserted as always.

“Hell of a view,” Cáel remarked. “Is this north or south we’re looking at, Nia?”

“South,” she said.

“Spain, then?”

She nodded. “We’re in Spain.”

Ryan made a small sound. "
That
home. Basque country. What year?”

“Twenty-two sixty-two,” Nia said.

“Far enough back to keep us human,” Ryan murmured. “I’m surprised you can’t see signs of human occupation anywhere from here.”

“It’s too stony and dry. Barely anything grows here, even with forced rain.” She turned and headed for the track that led to the house. “Come and get warm. I’m sure you’re hungry, too.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

As always, when she first saw the big rambling house when she topped the rise, Nayara’s heart squeezed a little with pride and the ache of homecoming. It was one of the reasons she always jumped to the hillside, rather than make her arrival a room inside the house.

She had designed the homestead on ancient Celtic homes found in the area, for Basques originated from wandering tribes of Celts and their homebuilding had been efficient. They had always taken advantage of local materials and built to protect against local weather patterns.

Nayara had also stolen freely from the best of the Spanish and Roman designs. She had ended up with a farmhouse—for hers was a working farm—that was cool in summer, warm in winter, while using less energy to make it so. It had a natural beauty about it that made it a wonderful retreat when life had simply become unbearable.

Nayara had been retreating here for two hundred years.

The building was covered in vines, with terracotta tiles on the roof, ironwork grills in the windows and olive trees shading the roof.

Goats cropped at the lawn surrounding the house, while a stable boy kept an eye on them, discouraging them from munching on the rest of the garden.

Her heart swelled with peace and contentment. This time the feeling was nearly overwhelming, because of the two men standing on either side of her.

Ryan glanced at her. “It looks wonderful,” he said. “But why didn’t you ever tell me about this place? I know about all the others. Even that beach shack of yours in Australia that you think you hid from me.”

“I let you think I was hiding the beach shack so you wouldn’t go looking for this one,” Nayara told him.

Cáel chuckled, as Ryan tried to look indignant and failed.

“I wanted to tell you,” Nayara admitted. “After Salathiel, I kept waiting for things to get better between us. For everything to go back to normal. But it didn’t. You kept drifting further and further away and the nice warm moment when I could tell you about me and where I really came from and the farm I had just set up in the hills back there...well, that moment never came.”

Ryan looked down at his feet. “You seemed to want it that way. I thought you wanted it that way.”

“You might have asked,” she chided him.

“You might have said something,” Ryan returned. “You had no trouble directing how matters would be between us when Salathiel was alive.”

Nayara blinked as something cuffed her lightly on the back of the head. She glanced over her shoulder. Ryan did, too. Cáel stood behind them. “Enough,” he said. “What’s done is done. You both shied from each other. Salathiel was too strong a ghost. Acknowledge it and move on, or he’ll linger and keep tearing at you. Personally, I’d like to kick him where it hurts, but I’ll never get the privilege. Nia, the goat boy has spotted you and he’s looking very excited to see you. We’d better go down, hadn’t we?”

Nayara turned back to look. Hanish was waving hard, his whole body swaying with the movement of his arm. She could see his big grin from here.

Yes, this had been the right place to bring them.

They climbed down the gently sloping hill to the bottom where the house was tucked up against the south side of the small valley. Hanish didn’t desert his post, but he was jumping up and down on the spot by the time they reached him and he had called others from the house and the working sheds to come and greet them. Nayara introduced Cáel and Ryan by their real names to the head stockman and her housekeeper, Ederne, before turning to the woman with a pleading look. “Please tell me you have some paella ready?”

Ederne grinned, showing missing teeth and nodded. “Always, always,” she said, in heavily accented common tongue. “You should have told us you were coming, Missy,” she added in her own dialect.

“I understood part of that,” Ryan said, sounding surprised. “She’s not happy you arrived without notice.”

“Ederne is always unhappy about my abrupt arrivals, but I haven’t yet figured out how to leave advanced warning.” Nayara pushed the front door open. “Welcome home.”

* * * * *

None of the staff working silently around Nia seemed surprised by their strange costumes, or by her sudden appearance with two men in tow. They calmly served the three of them one of the best servings of paella that Cáel had even tasted, made as it was with freshwater fish and shellfish and the most tender lamb he’d ever tasted, along with the lightest touch of spices. Served piping hot, along with freshly baked crusty rolls and a very good white wine, that was as cold as the paella was hot, it was one of the best meals Cáel had eaten in a while.

He pushed his plate aside and sat back to watch the always fascinating process of Ryan and Nayara eating. It was still new to him to see them indulge in this mundane human practice. Clearly, it was a novelty for them, too, for they took far longer over their meal than he did, savouring each mouthful of food and wine and lingering over the taste. They spoke very little, their minds and attention on the meal.

Cáel looked around the room. It wasn’t a room in the normal sense. To begin with, it was round. There were other rooms leading from it, but this room was the centre of the house and it served as a multi-purpose room for a variety of functions; eating, gathering, entertainment.

In the middle of the room was a stone pit that held a large fire. The stonework was good masonry work and there was a ledge on the top of it wide enough for sitting or resting objects on. Cushions scattered along the ledge and some low piles of reading boards said the ledge was used for both.

There was a fire crackling in the pit now, even though the day was not that cold—not for the upper northern mountains of Spain. The roof above the pit was open to the sky, although it could be closed over if necessary.

The long table the three of them sat at had been pulled up near the fire, but not close enough to roast them. The table had been hewn from local wood and hand crafted and was the most solid looking thing in the room apart from the fire pit. The chairs they sat on matched. The chairs were softened with cushions on the seat, but they wore the satiny gleam that came from generations of hands and bodies wearing them smooth and polishing them from constant use.

“I can see why you love this place,” Cáel told Nayara.

She smiled at him and sipped her wine, then put the glass down. “This? This is just a small part of it.” She stood and stretched, her lithe figure extending. She had tossed her cloak onto one of the vacant chairs in order to eat, so now she wore the skirt and what was left of her green velvet gown, which clung in all the right places. It didn’t help Cáel’s equanimity to know that she was naked beneath both. He found himself watching how the velvet moulded itself around her breasts, his breath pausing.

Then he noticed that Ryan was watching her, too, his fork in mid-air. His jaw flexed and tightened.

Then Nia lifted first one boot, then the other, up onto the seat of her chair and pulled out the long knives she had kept sheathed there for the last two weeks. Cáel had seen her pull the knives at least once.

Nia laid them on the table next to her empty bowl.

Ryan put his fork down.

“Come and see,” she said, glancing at them both.

She led them through one of the double doors. The doors, Cáel noted, were ancient, solid oak, with reinforced steel behind it. They had very modern locks on it and old fashioned bars. This was a bulkhead door, designed to be a shield in times of trouble. There was more to the design of this house than mere aesthetics.

But for now, the doors lay open on either side of the walls.

On the other side was a private oasis.

Ryan halted, ten paces in, looking around.

Cáel found himself pausing quite naturally next to him. The room...the area...seemed to deserve it.

The roof soared a good twenty feet, held up by a small series of pillars that glowed with the soft milky gleam of marble. Various sections were separated by lattice screens or swathes of rich tapestry or embroidered chiffon or satin.

From behind one of the screens, water bubbled, indicating a pool or bath. And at the far end of the room, raised upon a tier reached by three shallow, broad steps and hidden behind a curtain of gauzy chiffon, was an enormous bed under a canopy of golden cloth.

“Christ, you’ve rebuilt Constantinople,” Ryan said.

Nayara walked back to them. “I didn’t rebuild it, exactly. I improved it.” Her smile was impish. “Plumbing, for instance. And I got rid of the servants and slaves.” Her face shadows over, then cleared. “There was a bonus I discovered when I picked this valley, too.” She beckoned with her hand and they followed her around the lattice screen she had first disappeared around.

It was a sunken spa bath, big enough for eight people and the water was bubbling with a soft chuckling sound. Cáel sniffed. “Do I smell sulphur?”

“Not exactly,” Nia told him. “It’s natural mineral salts. I discovered the hot water spring when I built the house and I diverted the water here. It’s filtered to remove the toxic stuff and the offensive gases and by the time the water hits this bath, it’s just the right temperature. One hundred degrees.” She reached for the button on her skirt. “After two weeks on the road and the last few hours, I know I need to relax. Join me if you want.”

Nayara couldn’t use vampire speed in her human form, but she managed to remove her clothing faster than Cáel could have thought possible. She dropped her boots onto the pile with a little moue of distaste, finally naked, while Cáel stood motionless, more than willing to simply stand and watch her.

Nayara raised her brow. “You’re very slow at catching on, aren’t you?”

Cáel cleared his throat. “I can’t speak for him, Nia. But my brain function is somewhat impaired right now.”

Her smile was slow and wicked and did interesting things to his crotch. “Put it this way, then,” she said. “First one in, I kiss. All over.”

Ryan made a soft sound, deep in his throat. He sounded stressed. But he began to undress as Nia elegantly lowered herself into the bath and leaned back against the edge.

Cáel made a show of pulling his clothes off as if he was in a hurrying, but he managed to fumble things well enough so that Ryan stepped into the bath a few seconds before he did. He found his corner and sat on the ledge there. The heat worked its way into his bones and he realized how good it felt. It had been at least two weeks since he had showered or had the chance to take advantage of modern plumbing. Nayara had been forced to teach him the ancient way to shave with a knife blade, or he would have haired up like a barbarian. Not one of his favourite looks. His travelling skills were quickly amassing.

Nayara picked up a fluted, coloured glass bottle sitting next to the bath. “Salt water soap,” she explained, as she unstopped the bottled and poured some of the contents into her hand. She pushed through the water toward Ryan. “You look like you haven’t been personally acquainted with soap for the entire week you were in Ireland.”

“It’s a very small cottage,” Ryan objected. “And the sea is right there.”

Nayara rubbed her hands together, lathering the soap into a double fistful of thick foam, which she smeared all over Ryan’s upper chest and shoulders, all of him that was above the rippling water. She reached over his shoulders, down behind to his back, then up to circle his neck.

Ryan’s gaze never left her face. Cáel could see his concentration narrow down to Nia’s hands, the movement of her body in the water and his growing arousal.

The tension in the pool was building.

Nia’s washing movements gentled and turned to stroking, her fingers sliding down the length of Ryan’s neck, then along the breadth of his shoulders. She finally looked him in the eye.

Cáel held his breath.

Nayara pushed forward through the water the few inches more she needed to reach Ryan’s lips with her own. She pressed them up against his mouth, gripping his shoulders with her slippery hands to anchor herself.

Ryan finally moved. His arm came around her back, holding her against him and the other hand plunged into her pinned up hair, holding her head steady as he took hold of the kiss and plundered her mouth with a long-damned hunger that he expressed with a deep groan.

Cáel’s body throbbed with the passion of the moment. He had no intention of leaving, or giving them privacy, or anything other than soaking up every second of this. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Ryan broke the kiss, finally, breathing hard and brushed his thumb over Nayara’s cheekbones. “Shh,” he said. “Tears are for sadness.”

“They’re for happiness, too,” she said. She turned and looked at Cáel and held out her hand to him. “Cáel.”

He moved closer to them reluctantly. “You should have your time,” he said. “You’ve waited two—”

Ryan grabbed his arm, yanked him closer and kissed him, stealing the rest of what he was going to say.

It was a rough, fast kiss. It wasn’t intended to be kind, sweet or seductive. It was meant purely to shut him up in a way that sealed the argument. But it had been weeks since Cáel had been kissed by him and he hadn’t realized until now how much he had missed it. His stomach clenched and his body tightened, including his balls and his cock.