Lady of Conquest (27 page)

“How did Nimbus find me?”

“It wasn’t difficult. ‘Tis hard to be subtle with a thousand Castilians trailing you about the countryside. Nimbus even traveled with you for a few days, following your every move.”

“I never saw him.”

Conn shrugged. “When Nimbus doesn’t want to be seen, he generally isn’t.”

“Does he know you captured me?”

Conn snorted, the familiar grin sending a pang through her heart. “If he did, he would undoubtedly be here hanging off my legs, begging me to give you another chance.”

“That, of course, is impossible.” Gelina didn’t bother making it a question.

“Completely.” The dangerous gleam reappeared in his eyes.

She refused to look away, searching in vain for some trace of the friend she had known within their recesses. Finally she lowered her eyes in disappointment. He stood and paced in front of her, each step carrying him further away from her into the black void of his anger.

“Do you know I am sworn to avenge the death of a Fiannic soldier without mercy? I am also sworn to provide gentleness to all women.”

“Gentleness has always been a problem with me, hasn’t it, Conn?” The venom in her words stopped him in his tracks.

“Perhaps it wouldn’t be if you broke the unfortunate habit of murdering my soldiers.” His palm itched as he fought the urge to slap her, the insolence in her taut mouth daring him. “If you were a man, I would have killed you with my bare hands by now.”

“If I were a man, you would have never had the chance. I guess you were going to let your men do the dirty work for you again. ‘Tis why you offered that reward.” Gelina’s fear dissipated as her anger grew.

“I offered a reward for your return. Your safe return.”

“You’re lying. The truth isn’t in you. Rodney told me himself that you wanted me returned to Tara dead or alive. Offered a nice lot of gold coins, didn’t you?” Gelina couldn’t stop the words that spewed from her wounded heart. “You’ve got a nasty habit of lying. You lied about Rodney’s death. You probably lied about my father. The only thing that surprises me is that you’re man enough to admit you sent the rutting pigs who killed my father and raped my mother. You’re a bastard, Conn, who pretends to be an honorable man when it suits him.”

She stood, hands clenched at her sides, her chest heaving. With her eyes darkened in rage, she reminded Conn painfully of her brother. If a sword had been gripped in her hand, he knew they would have repeated the conflict of their first meeting.

His quiet voice broke the taut silence. “Sit down, Ó Monaghan. Now.”

Disobeying his command was a fleeting thought as Gelina threw herself down, slamming her back into the wall, welcoming the pain it brought. Her white knuckles revealed the depth of her anger.

“For twenty-four hours a day I have thought of you, searched for you.” She looked up, shocked at the raw pain in Conn’s voice. “I didn’t know why you ran away until I found out your brother was alive. Then I found out you had allied yourself with Eoghan Mogh.” He ran a hand through his shaggy curls. “I plotted ways to trap you. I lay awake at night staring into the darkness, thinking of ways to get revenge on you. The things I thought of . . .” he said hoarsely, running a hand across his eyes.

“I left because you lied. My brother was alive. My place was with him, not with some hypocritical king who soothed his conscience by playing the noble patron.”

Turning away from her to hide how deeply her callous words cut, he sighed. “Then I am left to believe only one thing. You were in contact with your brother from the beginning. You knew when I left for Britain that I was being sent to my death. Perhaps the night I caught you in the stables, you were returning from a rendezvous with Eoghan Mogh.”

His accusation drew a gasp from her. “ ‘Tis not true! I did not know Rodney was alive until the day I ran away.”

“I believe you.” His sarcastic laugh belied his words. “Nimbus told me all about your dear brother. He told me how he watches you, the look in his eyes, the way he touches you.”

“What are you trying to say?” she said through clenched teeth, beads of sweat standing out on her forehead.

“Perhaps you and your brother are closer than you have led me to believe, Princess. Perhaps you are closer than your tainted blood should allow.”

The full implication of his words hit her like a slap in the face. Icy white wrath shot through her veins, resulting in a pure energy that propelled her into Conn like a mad creature. She pummeled him with her fists, seeking to take him down any way she could. Scalding tears coursed down her cheeks. Her nails raked bloody furrows down his arms.

Conn’s arms went around her, slamming her to the ground, where they rolled, locked in a desperate tangle of arms and legs. The length of his body covered hers, his weight pressing her to the floor, stilling even the barest hint of movement. His eyes gleamed a scant inch from hers, and for the first time Gelina wondered what she had done.

Conn wanted to kill her. He wanted to tear her to shreds, to silence forever her accusing young voice. Some cruel facet of him wanted to push her over the edge, beyond the boundaries of the past she eluded so boldly. He raised his dagger from its sheath with his powerfully muscled arm, and Gelina squeezed her eyes shut, awaiting the death blow to come.

With a single practiced flick of his wrist, he severed the flame from the torch ten feet away, leaving them in darkness. The tautly stretched rope of his control snapped as the darkness shielded him from her only weapon—her wide, terrified eyes.

The blue of his eyes blocked out the darkness as his mouth descended on hers without compromise. He caught her chin in his hand. His thumb forced her tender lips apart, forging a bruising trail for his lips to follow. His tongue took the deepest corners of her aching mouth, spreading and stroking, leaving her with neither the breath nor the means to protest. Shame and fear flooded her at his merciless rape of her mouth. Her eyes filled with hot tears. As the tears splashed on his hands, his grip loosened.

She wrenched away from him with a cry of despair and stumbled toward the mouth of the cavern. He called her name. She stopped, her face turned to the moonlight. She never heard his footsteps, but he stood behind her, his body barely touching hers.

“You have no right to refuse me. I’m your king.”

Conn had never used those words against a woman before and never thought he would. He knew it was the cruelest thing he could have said, but he couldn’t stop himself from saying it. The exquisite pain of wanting her filled him, driving all traces of honor and compassion before it.

His hands closed on her shoulders. His fingers slid beneath the tunic, pushing it aside and baring her shoulders to the caress of the moon and his lips. Her head fell back as his mouth glided upward along her throat. A shudder wracked him as he felt her moan against his lips before he heard it. She stood as still as a statue in his arms as he gently drew the tunic over her head. He tugged at the drawstring of her breeches and eased them down her hips, feeling the gooseflesh rise on her smooth skin to prick his fingertips.

The pressure of his knees against hers was all it took to fold her against him. They sank together into the folds of his bedroll. His mouth closed on hers in a fierce kiss, drawing her into the abyss of fire that spurred him on.

Gelina spiraled downward into the darkness of his desire. Stripped of her sword and her will, she knew that tonight they fought a new kind of battle and Conn held all the weapons. The damp heat of his mouth against her parted lips, the callused palm cupping her neck, the rough softness of his chest teasing her bare flesh—these were his weapons, and he possessed the expertise to use them to devastating effect. Even through her haze of inexperience she knew the burning sword he pressed to the soft hollows of her body would be swift and merciless, fashioned to invade and conquer her childish arrogance. She clung to his shoulders, shivering and afraid. His kiss sent a sweet fire spreading through her veins, as heady and exhilarating as the whiskey she could taste on his tongue.

Without missing a stroke of his kiss, he untied his breeches. He lifted himself from her, his breathing harsh in the silence. Gelina stared up at him with eyes as opaque as the moon reflected within them. The back of his hand traced the curve of her cheek. Terrified by the web he wove with his mocking travesty of tenderness, Gelina caught his hair in her hands and drew him down to her, her eyes blazing to remind him of the battle to be fought.

His pent-up fury erupted in a lust so violent he never had another thought beyond his hunger for her. Feeling the heat of her young body trapped beneath his, he parted her legs with a relentless knee. Gelina clenched her eyes shut and saw the moon burst into flames behind her eyes.

With one splintering movement he drove himself into her. He halted, his world narrowing to her sharp intake of breath and the fingernails that dug like tiny daggers into his back. He could not turn back. His need drove him deeper, deafening him to her low cry of pain. With each brutal thrust, he brought himself closer to the point where he could forget, retreating to a mindless place where no thought would follow until her body lay still and conquered beneath his.

Having been taught to kill with his bare hands in over a hundred different ways, Conn had risen from many prostrate, broken forms in his lifetime. He had never faced the dread he faced now. He sat back on his haunches, spent and afraid.

The narrow stream of moonlight caressed a face in sweet, childlike repose. Only the even rise and fall of her chest assured him that she lived. With a trembling hand he touched between her legs, then stared without comprehension at the blood on his fingertips. Having no more will to face what he had wrought, he tucked his tunic around her, donned his breeches, and stumbled into the warm summer night.

Unable to face the glittering stars, he sat with his back against a rock and stared into the mud. Black despair gripped him as he contemplated what he had become. An eternity of dark time passed.

“The stars have been plentiful this summer.”

The familiar, matter-of-fact voice jolted him like a ghost from the past, and he looked over to see Gelina emerge from the shadows, hugging his tunic around her. It hung halfway to her knees. Her face was ashen in the moonlight.

She studied the stars for a long time before daring to shoot a glance at him. His haunted gaze held hers steadily. Some instinct told her that if she cared to slit his throat at that second, he would gladly offer her his dagger.

“I suppose it was inevitable, Conn.” She turned her eyes back to the sky, biting her swollen lip.

“Don’t comfort me,” he hoarsely replied.

“It hardly matters.” He shook his head at her words, then buried it in his arms as she continued. “My mother was not a strong woman, you know. She wasn’t like me. After the men had finished with her and left, she rose and stumbled around the hall, muttering and whimpering like a beaten dog.” Gelina looked at Conn to find his eyes locked on her.

“I wanted to go to her. I wanted to tell her that Rodney and I were alive. I tried to call out, but Rodney just held his hand more tightly over my mouth. It was as if he knew what she should do under the circumstances.”

“The soldiers didn’t kill Deirdre?” Conn asked, horror shining bright in his eyes.

“They did many other things to her but they didn’t kill her. When she found my father’s body, she took his sword, placed it at her breast and fell on it. She never even looked for us. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive her that. I think the dishonor drove her to her death, not the grief. So she was weak.”

Conn stood, weaving on his feet. Even in the moonlight, his pallor was unmistakable. Gelina stared in alarm at the dark stain rapidly spreading across his chest. Blood dripped to the waistband of his breeches, soaking into the dark material.

“Do something for me, my Gelina,” he said, his speech slurred. “I am going to fall down. After I do, I want you to do one of two things. Kill me, or leave me.”

Before he could finish speaking, he slid to the ground. She threw herself behind him, trying to break his fall as he faded from consciousness.

Sitting in the cold mud with his head awkwardly cradled in her lap, she leaned down and whispered, “Since you’re probably going to die, you might as well know—I love you nearly as much as I hate you.”

His eyes fluttered just once as he murmured, “Me too.”

Nimbus’s short legs flopped like rags; his hands clutched at Sean’s side as they galloped over the drumlins. After a day of riding this way, he could feel the matter between his ears turning to pudding along with his now boneless legs.

“Whoa!” With a bellow belying his size, he jerked the reins from Sean’s hands and pulled back on them with clenched fists.

“What did you do that for, you runt?” Sean yelled as the horse stumbled to an awkward halt, nearly unseating them both.

“Because I’m exhausted. There must be a hundred caverns along this range. We'll never find them!” Throwing a leg over the horse’s back, he neatly kicked Sean in the elbow as he slid to the ground, landing on the balls of his feet with as much aplomb as he could muster.

Rubbing his elbow, Sean dismounted, resisting the urge to shove his companion off the cliff they traveled along. With a snort of disgust, he unpacked a flagon of goat’s milk and a round of cheese.