Morna's Legacy 04 - Love Beyond Measure (15 page)

Cooper must have noticed the same thing, and he squirmed in my arms so that I would set him down. He ran over to Eoghanan’s side, leaning against his left leg as if trying to prop him up. “Hey, you don’t look so good, E-o. You alright?”

Eoghanan placed a hand on the top of Cooper’s head. He tried to smile at him, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He started to grow paler with each passing second.

“I’m verra tired. I think we should go inside. Baodan, would ye help me to me chambers?”

Baodan was at his side in an instant, propping him up against his shoulder. Baodan smiled back at his wife—a silent conversation where I was sure he’d asked her to see to the rest of us. Once Baodan and Eoghanan were inside the castle, Mitsy spoke.

“You’re lucky you got an explanation before you showed up here. Jeffrey had a bit of a meltdown.”

“I did not.” He attempted to argue, but his eyes were still glazed over with lingering shock.

Mitsy nodded. “
Definite meltdown,”
she mouthed the words silently to me, smiling before speaking aloud once again. “Anyway, once we got him settled down, he and Cooper spent most of the night exploring the place. I think they’ll be fine if we leave them on their own. I’m in desperate need of some modern-day girl talk.”

“Hey, stranger.” I stepped inside Eoghanan’s chamber for the first time, three days after we’d arrived. I’d kept my distance hoping that without a distraction, he’d be more apt to stay in bed and rest.

At least, this is the reason I told myself so I wouldn’t feel guilty. Truthfully, I’d taken advantage of his need to rest by giving myself time to think.

All of it was true—the fact that Morna was a witch, her ability to send those she wished hurtling through time—I could no longer deny any of it. And now, I had to accept what that meant.

Nothing more could ever happen between Eoghanan and me.

I’d hoped that a few days away from him would allow me to gain some perspective. That after wandering around the castle and observing all of the strange differences between this time and my own that I would feel out of place, ready to return home.

I didn’t feel that way at all.

I loved it here—the simplicity, the inaccessibility of it. I knew if it was only myself I could stay here forever. All of the castle, as well as Eoghanan’s family, could not be more warm and kind. Accustomed to strange, time-traveling Americans, due to Mitsy and Bri who I’d yet to meet, we’d settled in quite nicely among them.

Cooper seemed to love it as well. He used the castle as a sort of massive playground, determined to discover every secret nook and passageway. Jeffrey, I thought, looked at it as a vacation. After years of working the grind of a law firm, he reveled in being able to do what he considered “manly” tasks like horseback riding and learning how to shoot an arrow.

Still, it was easy for them to enjoy the changes for a short amount of time, an impossibility to ask them to do it forever.

I’d set my mind to speaking to Eoghanan about this, to explaining to him that the three of us would need to return home soon. I walked into his room and, after greeting him, took in the droopy, glazed, plastered look on his face.

“Grace, lass.” He said my name slowly. He was drunk, I could tell by his droopy eyes, but he wasn’t so drunk yet that he’d lost his concern for his own behavior. He didn’t want me to know that he was drunk.

“I apologize for this, lass. ’Tis me own doing, not his.”

It was Baodan’s voice, and I turned toward it. “Why?”

“’Tis time to remove his bandages, but the blood has dried the cloth to him. When I went to remove the bandages from the side of his face…” he paused, “I doona think he screamed like that when the blade tore through him. I thought it best to give him something to dull the pain so that the rest of the removal may not be so painful.”

“Ah, good idea. Do you need me to leave? I can come back later.”

“No, doona leave, Grace.” Eoghanan called to me, swinging his feet over the side of the bed to try and stand. “I’d like for ye to remove them from me.”

Baodan gave me no chance to answer him, moving across the room to push his brother back down on the bed. “Ye doona truly wish that lad. When ye are sober, ye will regret asking it of her.”

Eoghanan persisted. “Aye, I do wish it. I am no all that drunk, Baodan. Now, leave us be.”

Baodan retreated from Eoghanan’s side, but lingered in front of me a moment, a question in his eyes.

“I don’t mind. Really, we’ll be fine.”

Nodding once, Baodan left, closing the door behind him. As I walked toward Eoghanan, he smiled a lazy smile that made my insides flutter. I’d yet to see such an unrestrained grin from him. He usually thought too much to appear this relaxed. It was an incredibly endearing look.

I had a sneaking suspicion the conversation I needed to have with him wouldn’t happen today.

“Are you sure you want me to do this? I’m not really qualified. I’m not a witch or a nurse, so…”

I now stood right next to his bed, and he reached up and pulled me down so that I sat on its edge. “Aye, lass. Yer hands will be far more gentle than me brother’s.”

“Okay,” I ran my fingertips over the exposed scar that ran down the side of his face. Whatever Morna had placed upon it had altered the skin completely. Only days before the line had been red, angry, relatively new. Now its shade was a close match to the rest of his skin and had the look of a much older scar. It had healed as much as it ever would. “It looks so much better, Eoghanan.”

“Aye?”

I couldn’t tell if he’d heard a word I said. His eyes were closed, and he was enjoying the feel of my fingertips as they trailed his face. When they reached the base of his neck where the remaining wrap started, he grabbed my hand, bringing it up to his lips and kissed my palm.

“I love yer hands, lass, and the way ye make me feel when ye touch me. Do ye remember when ye cut me hair?” His words were slow, slightly slurred, and incredibly sexy.

“Yes, I do. What about it?”

He still gripped my hand, trailing slow kisses up my arm as he spoke. “All I could think of was what these hands of yers would feel like digging into me shoulders as I claimed ye, pushing meself deeper and deeper inside ye. How ye would shudder beneath me…”

“Okay…” I jerked away, standing up as fast as I could, doing a strange little dance where I shook out my hands and hopped from foot to foot to clear my head and the disastrous thoughts that were flooding it as he spoke. “I think you are further into the bottle than you think, mister. Whether you thought it or not, you would never say that out loud to me sober.”

He smiled, getting up from the bed so that he stood in front of me, smiling that same lazy grin. “Aye, mayhap so, Grace, though every word is the truth.”

For the moment I was glad that the majority of his body was still wrapped up tightly, but I was about to have to unwrap him like some sort of man candy present, and if he didn’t stop talking, I worried I might jump him and beg him to do to me just exactly what he’d imagined.

“Are you ready to get started?” I didn’t allow him the chance to answer, gripping the top of the fabric near his neck, tugging to test out just how tightly it was bound. “Does that hurt?”

“No, no in the way that me face did.”

I nodded, continuing to pull at the bandage, “Good. I’m going to keep going then.”

He said nothing. For the following minutes I worked quietly, pulling and then reaching around him to gather the fabric, repeating the motion over and over. He didn’t scream, didn’t wince, he simply watched me so intently that tension began to build quite evidently in the room. Each time I leaned forward to wind the cloth around his back, I was tempted to linger.

I wanted nothing more than for him to grab me, kiss me, and take me to his bed, but my rational mind told me to keep to my work. No matter how much I wanted to tell that rational voice in my head to go hang, I inevitably had to leave here; it would be foolish to complicate things further.

“Where have ye been, Grace?”

The question caught me off guard. Despite the fact that I feigned ignorance, I knew exactly what he meant. “What do you mean? I’ve been right here.”

“No, ye have been anywhere but right here, lass. Ye have plans to leave.”

He didn’t ask it as a question, and his keen observation caused my hand to still for a brief moment. I’d unwound him to the bottom of his waist. All that was left was his right leg, but I hesitated to go further. I didn’t imagine he had on boxer briefs beneath the wrapping.

“I…” I couldn’t very well lie to him. Of course I had plans to leave. “I don’t really have a choice. There’s only a few more days before I’m due back in New York.”

“New York. Do ye mean for yer article?” He reached behind himself to grab the roll of bandages I held. “Put them down, lass. Stand up and look at me.” After pulling me to my feet, he continued, “Yer magazine will receive the money promised to them with or without yer article. The mysterious benefactor…I believe ’twas Jerry.”

Of course it was. “How do you know about that?”

“The telephone ’twas right outside me bedchamber. I heard him speaking to yer boss, though I dinna understand it until the evening when ye told me about yer job.”

The telephone. I had a sudden flashback to my phone conversation with my sister and the noise I thought I’d heard behind his door. “The telephone…you heard me, huh?”

He smiled, reaching up with his right hand to tuck some hair behind my ear. The movement in his shoulder was much improved. “Aye, though I could only hear ye, no whoever ye spoke with.”

“My sister.”

He nodded, “I thought as much.” Smiling with one half of his mouth, he released my arms and leaned down to unwrap his lower waist and leg.

I could see the cloth dropping from my peripherals, but I kept my eyes upward, determined not to look at him. It would be my undoing.

In a matter of moments he was naked, but much to my gratitude, he wrapped a blanket around his waist, sitting back down on the bed. He reached for my hand and I joined him, looking at him with sympathy. He held his liquor relatively well, but he’d not feel good tomorrow.

“How does it feel? The scar?”

“I feel like meself for the first time since it happened. I canna believe Morna allowed me to lay there for so long when she could have healed it in a couple of days; though I know now why she did.”

That look in his eyes was back; the same look that would never show itself so boldly had he been sober.

“Why’s that?”

“Why do ye think, lass?” He kissed me, a hard, rough, consuming kiss so different from what I’d expect from him.

Whether it was the new freedom of movement he had or the loosening of his inhibitions from the alcohol, I didn’t know, but he quickly pushed me backward onto the bed, trailing kisses down my neck, dipping his tongue into the crevice between my breasts.

“Eoghanan.” His name came breathless on my lips. My breasts were rising and falling at a rapid rate, reaching up to meet his kisses, to accept his tongue.

“Hush, Grace.”

He slipped one hand behind my head, pressing our mouths together in a kiss so deep that it verged on the edge of painful. I yelped as he nibbled my lower lip and then moaned against his mouth, losing any will or desire to resist him further. Whatever he wished to do with me…tonight, I would let him.

His knee nudged my legs open, and I happily let them spread apart, trembling as he cupped a hand between them.

He let out one long, shaky breath and paused, resting his forehead on mine. “I couldna want ye more, lass.”

He kissed me and crawled off, leaving me wanting and confused. “Then, have me.” The words sounded ridiculous, even to me, but I wanted nothing more.

“No. If I had ye now, I would no be able to let ye leave, and ye have said that ye must.”

“I know it seems like you’ve got a big decision to make, but can I let you in on a secret?”

I sat with my legs dangling in the castle’s pond, leaning back on my hands as I watched Cooper making a mud pie along its shore. I turned to hold out a hand to help Mitsy who was lifting the bottom of her dress so that she could join me.

“Sure, shoot.”

Mitsy kicked off her shoes and allowed her feet to sink into the water, sighing as it soothed her pregnancy-swollen feet. I could remember exactly how she felt.

“Oh, that’s nice. That’s really nice.” The bottom hem of her dress dropped into the water and she cursed, “Damn these dresses. Usually they’re not that bad, but now I just want to live in a pair of yoga pants until this baby decides to drop out of me.”

I laughed, patting her arm in sympathy. “I understand.”

She waved a hand in dismissal. “Anyhow, back to what I was saying. Don’t battle it.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

Mitsy wasn’t the type of person I would have pegged as being intuitive. I liked her immensely, but it surprised me that she’d been able to so easily figure out what I stewed over.

“Was it so easy for you? Deciding to stay here?”

“Yes. Not right away, I guess. But as soon as I realized that everyone that I loved was here, there was nothing else left for me back home. Modern conveniences meant nothing compared to all of that.”