Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (35 page)

“ ’Twas my fault, wasn’t it,” she said, “that
things went so awry in the tower.”

“Nay,” he said. “The fault was all mine.” He
turned to leave, but she reached for him again, her hand light on
his arm. His gaze came back to her, indulgent and faintly
curious.

“I ran when I should have stayed... when I
wanted to stay. You taste truly wondrous, Mychael ab Arawn,” she
said, “like forests, and rain, and dark, thundering clouds. Like
salt water from a faraway sea, like honey warmed by the sun, and
I... I had hoped for another kiss.” She was treading onto perilous
ground. To put words to desire was a binding spell, an incantation
of seduction well known in
artes magicae
. She did not want a
spell to be what held him, yet she would have him know the truth of
why she’d followed him. “One kiss, no more. I swear.”

As she spoke, his countenance changed from
curiosity to an expression she couldn’t interpret beyond the
tension bracketing his mouth. His eyes were dark, unreadable
without the firelight to illuminate their depths. Slowly, he
brought his hand up to cup the curve of her jaw. His fingers spread
across her cheek.

“You ask for a kiss, one kiss and no more?”
The question was laced with resignation. “One kiss, when I would
give you a thousand.”

He was so close, she could scarce find her
breath, while his breath—sweet draft—warmed the air between them.
If she’d asked for too little, if that was what had put the sadness
in his voice, she would gladly take more.

Daring all, she rose up on tiptoe, bringing
her mouth near to his. “Even a thousand kisses must needs begin
with one,” she murmured, then brushed his lips with her own, a
gossamer kiss. As if moved by her touch, his other hand came to
rest on her waist. On her second kiss, he met her partway, and his
hand slid to the small of her back. The third kiss was his to
take.

Mychael opened his mouth over hers, his arm
tightening around her, inexorably drawing her closer and closer.
Christe
. He was going to drown in her. He could tell, could
see it coming, yet naught could have kept him from accepting what
she offered. Kisses. A thousand of them. Taking her home would have
been the right thing to do, considering her innocence, but he
didn’t have the strength to take her home when her hand was
tunneling through his hair. And God’s truth, when her body pressed
against him and her mouth clung to his, she didn’t feel
innocent.

Nay, he didn’t have the strength to take her
home. He only prayed he had the strength to take her slow.

To that end, he did naught but kiss her, and
kiss her again, losing himself in the wet warmth of her mouth and
the taste of lavender. Her tongue played with his and a hot-edged
sweetness poured through him, leaving fire in its wake. Her teeth
grazed his lips and nipped at his chin in soft, teasing bites, and
he wanted to devour her with the same, to put his mouth on her
everywhere, to taste and discover. She was the river nymph of his
woodland idylls, the enchantress of his waking dreams, the one he’d
conjured so many times with a stroke of his hand and an aching need
to be loved. In all his dreams, though, the nymph had not been as
beautiful as the woman he held in his arms. No fantasy had ever
been so delicately formed. No man had ever imagined the wild tumble
of braids and leaves and loose strands of hair that framed her face
in such silky disarray.

He ran his mouth over her cheeks and brows
and lashes, wanting to infuse himself with her, with the fragrance
of flowers rising from her skin. She was every green living thing,
winding around him, tying him to her with tendrils of desire,
binding him with pleasure. And ’twas then, within the heated
tenderness of her kisses, that the first truth of what she’d done
with the braiding of his hair came to him. She’d bound him to the
trees, aye, and in return the trees were binding him to her.

As the sweet sap of lust rose in him, so did
the sap rise in the pines and birches and oaks. No metaphor, but a
true rising. He could smell it, though autumn was upon them, and he
could smell the same happening to Llynya, could smell the
intensifying scents of roses and sweet woodruff on her skin, the
scents of meadowsweet, violets, and peonies, flowers long out of
bloom, but redolent in the late September night—because she was
aroused.

Kisses alone would not suffice for the
sprite. Innocent or nay, she wanted him with the same degree of
longing he felt for her, and he wanted to have her lying beside
him, taking him in, her arms wrapped around him, her mouth kissing
him, dampening his skin, her hands touching him, inciting him with
pleasure. He wanted to know what it was to have a woman, and she
was the woman he would have. No half measures would do. He wanted
no more to be alone—and neither did she.

Thus it was empathy, not boldness, that
brought his hand to her belt and loosened the buckle; the desire to
soothe and not just desire that guided him as he loosened her hose
from
en coulisse
and let them slide down around her ankles.
With a single tug, her braies unwound from around her hips and
drifted into a soft pile at their feet. He broke his kiss to slip
her baldric over her head, then reclaimed her lips and began
unlacing her tunic. She could have stopped him at any time, but she
did not. In truth, her own hands were not idle, and as she was half
undressed, so was he. He felt the chill of the wind on his legs
when she loosed his chausses. She had his tunic unlaced before he’d
finished with hers. He shrugged out of it and tossed it aside.

When her tunic slipped, verily of its own
accord, off her shoulder, revealing the rise or her breast, he put
his mouth on her and took his first taste.
Sweet heaven
. His
groin tightened, and his hands slid around her hips to the warm,
bared curves of her buttocks. He held her thus, within the circle
of his arms and mouth, and felt as if he’d taken her inside
himself.

Her hands tangled in his hair, holding him.
“Mychael.” His name was a benediction, a sigh, not a call for
restraint. He’d come to Bala Bredd to heal, and she’d come for
love, and between the cool night air and the thick clouds of
warming mist rising off the pool, the two were proving to be the
same.

He cupped her face with his palms and kissed
the corners of her lips.

“I would lay with you, Llynya,” he said,
speaking his heart’s truth. After the debacle of the morning, he
would not have her mistake what he wanted, and regardless of what
he felt, he’d not push her further without hearing the same from
her.

“Oh, aye,” she breathed against his lips with
another gossamer kiss, and a warm flush of anticipation coursed
through him.

Taking him by the hand, she pulled him down
with her onto the soft pile of their cloaks and discarded clothing.
He went willingly, readily, and with a silent warning to himself
not to overwhelm her. He was considerably bigger than she and
unschooled in the ways of love, and a definite streak of nerves ran
through his excitement—a receipt for disaster, if he did not take
care.

Yet when he looked at her, he wondered if
’twas possible to touch her and not be moved to take the greatest
care. Moonlight shimmered on her bare skin and wound through her
tattoo, silvering the blue leaves on her shoulder as she worked off
her boots and hose. When she finished, she shrugged out of the rest
of her tunic, letting it slide into her lap, and the pale light ran
like quicksilver down her arm, limning the runes and ogham marking
her as Liosalfar.

’Twas a sobering sight. He knew what she was,
yet the full display of her tattoo seemed at odds with the rest of
her, with the fineness of her bones, with the softness of her
breasts and the slender curves of her legs. Battle was coming, and
given a choice, he would not have her fight.

He ran his finger down the full length of the
tattoo, following the path of leaves and vines to her wrist.

“A warrior,” he said, failing to keep a
rueful note out of his voice. “I wish it were not so.”

“Would you have another then?” she asked. He
glanced up, startled by her question. Then he saw the flash of
anger in her eyes and realized his mistake. “A harvest maid,
mayhaps?”

A warrior, aright, he thought, not daring to
release the grin he felt twitching at his lips.

“Nay, sprite. I would have no other than you,
ever,” ’Twas true. He knew it the moment he spoke the words, and he
didn’t understand it any more than she appeared to believe it,
considering the look she was giving him.

“Edmee told me Massalet followed you like a
dog all summer long.” Her eyes were definitely green, and not just
in color, and that amazed him almost as much as having her sit
across from him naked, arguing.

“For certes she happened to be in the same
place much of the time,” he admitted.

“And?” she prompted, looking more the
Liosalfar and less the doe-eyed nymph with every passing
moment.

He quickly checked on the whereabouts of her
dagger, thinking he should never have stopped kissing her long
enough for a conversation to begin. The dagger was safe, a good
foot and a half closer to him than her.

“And I never noticed her enough to make her
anything but snippish with me. You ken ‘snippish,’ don’t you,
sprite?” His grin slipped free, and she was on him in a trice,
pushing him over with a soft “oomph” of effort.

Fast she may have been, but she was no match
for his strength. He caught her in his arms and rolled her over
into the cloaks in one easy motion, pinning her with a soft laugh
and a leg thrown across hers—and as simply and quickly as that,
Massalet was forgotten.

Every fiber of his being was suddenly and
totally focused on Llynya and the rush of arousal pulsing through
his body. She’d said she would lay with him, and the time had come.
Separated from her only by his braies, he rubbed against her and
watched as her eyes darkened.

With the slightest move, her legs parted,
allowing him to nest closer, and a groan escaped from deep in his
chest. “Aye, you ken,” he murmured.

“Aye, Druid boy. I ken what you’re about.” A
mischievously sensual smile curved her mouth. She teased him with
another small move, and his own smile met hers. They would manage,
he thought. Aye, they would manage.

Snowflakes drifted down from the sky to land
on her lashes, and he kissed them off. They cooled her cheeks, and
he warmed the fair skin with his mouth, cradling her head in his
hands.

Her kisses were no less ardent, roaming at
will across his face and down his throat to his shoulders, each one
touching him someplace far deeper than the surface of his skin.
When her hand caressed the lower part of his chest and drifted
tantalizingly across his abdomen, he stilled, his muscles
instinctively contracting in invitation, creating a space for her
hand to delve lower.

When she didn’t, he brushed her cheek with
his mouth. “Please.”

She shook her head.

He thought he knew what stayed her, a thought
she confirmed with her next words.

“Nay. I would not have this end, not just
yet.”

A pained grin crossed his face. ’Twas a fair
enough, if rather faithless conclusion. Yet they were far from any
ending, and he would have her know it.

He lifted himself a bare degree to meet her
gaze, and realized with an odd sense of fascination that their hair
had become entwined, his pale yellow strands winding down around
one dark braid, her rich sable locks twisting upward into gold.
Even as he watched, a slight breeze lifted another dark curl and
started it twisting around the riband she’d worked into his
braid.

Swearing silently to himself, he tore his
gaze away from the enchantment only to meet another when he looked
into her eyes. Forest green and lit deep with reflected starlight,
the dreamy desire in them was his final undoing. She was open
before him, soft and giving beneath him, and all his thoughts
tumbled into one that had naught to do with “slow.”

Filled with a sense of urgency, he tugged off
his braies, and fully naked, fully aroused, he lay back down, half
over her. He was a carnal beast; he knew it, and she incited his
lust with damnable ease. The only surprise was how much tenderness
there could be in lust, for she incited that in equal measure.

Her breath caught as his fingers slid through
the soft hair at the apex of her thighs and into that most
mysterious of all the female regions, the source of endless
speculation among the less pious novitiates, known to him only by
the Latin,
vulva
.

“You’re so soft,” was his first awestruck
discovery, followed quickly by a harshly groaned, “you’re wet.”

The realization washed through him with a
force far greater than any he could control. In a single move, he
covered her, pressing against her damp nest of curls. He was
awkward, she was kind, and when he finally pushed up inside her, he
feared her pleasure was forgotten in the exquisite intensity of his
own. He came all too quickly, but to save his life could not have
conjured a regret. ’Twas God’s plan, he was sure, for the second
time she was already halfway to completion before he’d hardly
started. When her climax came and he was suspended for those few
glorious moments in the flow of her release, he knew he’d been
changed forever. By the third time, his confidence was high, the
rhythms were his, and his goals were clear in his mind.

Llynya had no such goals. Passively replete,
sated with wonder, she was amazed when he came to her again—and her
amazement did naught but increase. Stamina, she realized some time
later, was a gift and a pleasure all its own. There were pinnacles
to be reached and fallen off beyond where she’d already been, and
one by one, he took her to them, always holding himself back,
always pushing her a little higher, until whatever barrier she may
have held between a man of Men and a Yr Is-ddwfn aetheling
disappeared. He became one with her, a part of her. She felt the
exchange taking place, powered by the primal thrusting of his body.
His life’s seed, the damp moisture of his kisses, his sweat, all of
it seeped into her, inside and out. She melted with the infusion,
turning wanton in her need.