The Irish Warrior (17 page)

With a muffled curse, he clamped his arm around her waist and hoisted her up, swinging them over so she sat astride him, his torso supported on a sharp rise of grassy earth. He looped cords of her hair around his palm and pulled her face down to his.

“Spread yer legs,” he said in her ear, his free hand spread possessively across her back. She did as he bid and he sank in farther, pushing hard. “I've only got so much more,” he said hoarsely.

“Getting tired?” she asked, her voice just as ragged as his, but laced with laughter.

“No. Getting close to coming inside ye. Ye'll like it.”

She dropped her head back, rocking her hips in rhythm on top of him. When he spoke so, she felt like her body could do all the things he promised from the pleasure of his words alone.

Plunge, thrust, retreat, plunge. Her head spun and her body sang. Senna gripped his shoulders and leaned into him, her chin by his forehead, her knees digging into the earth. Their passion hammered to a violent crescendo.

Her eyes flew open. “Oh,” she whispered, startled. Another thrust of Finian's hips, another perfect, thick penetration. She threw her head back and moved her body in unbridled lunges, her lower lip locked between her teeth.

“Don't stop,” she whispered. A wickedly carnal undulation of pleasure vibrated through her pulsing body. Up along her back, down her legs, along her neck rippled the Finian magic. Another…quite something…stretching…quiver. Her body lurched to a halt, yanked to the edge. Her face contorted.

He grinned crookedly.

“What is it?” came her wild whisper.

“Let it be,” he coaxed, holding her hips into the rocking rhythm.

“Oh, please, oh please, don't stop.”

“Never. I will never stop,” came his ragged reply.

She tipped toward some inevitable precipice. Hesitating at the edge, he surged into her again and touched some mad, spiraling pleasure point deep inside her. A wave of shuddering wetness crashed through her body, flaming white heat and long, undulating quivers. She leapt off the cliff and flew, throbbing and shuddering and
now
alive.

Finian felt her release ripple along him and his hands flexed around her hips as he plunged into her one last time, exploding into his own quaking, rocking fulfillment. He held her shuddering in his arms—copper hair, parted lips, and burning spirit—and felt his heart shift.

The moment lasted forever. She mewed his name in helpless repetition, each whimpering cry accented by a shudder of warm flesh along his quivering length. He held himself deep inside her, spent, satisfied, and shocked.

“Shocked?”

Pentony, seated at the table, nodded.

Rardove groaned. His eyes were red rimmed, and the small beard he usually kept so carefully trimmed was rough edged and uneven. “That's what he says?” he asked Pentony, who was reading from the scrolled missive which had just arrived, pressed with red wax in the image of a sword-wielding, helmed horseman that marked King Edward's seal.
“Shocked?”

“And displeased,” Pentony added.

“Displeased.”

Pentony nodded without looking over again. No need to witness the deterioration with every sense. Hearing it was quite enough for now.

Rardove cursed and reached for the jug of wine and poured. Just what was required: more drink.

All the nights since Senna left had been filled with sleeplessness, fury, and flagons of wine, evidenced by the roars that exploded from Rardove's bedchamber and sent maidservants scurrying. This morning had not brought much different, except that his rage seemed muted by a monstrous hangover. Even now, by candlelight, his eyeballs were obviously swollen and red rimmed, his nose mottled with little red spots, his cheeks ruddy red. He was a study in crimson.

Mayhap he would kill himself with drink. Today.

Pentony turned back to the royal missive in his hands. “The king is on the Welsh border, waiting for a good wind. When he gets it, he'll sail for Ireland and march here. He's sending Wogan the justiciar, governor of Ireland, on ahead to speak with you. When the weather cooperates, he will come himself.”

Rardove swept up a mug of wine and drank the dregs, then simply dropped the cup. It clattered to the ground. “Good,” he snapped. “The royal hound will learn how difficult it truly is, guarding his marches against the accursed Irish.”

“He will also learn you made the Wishmé dyes without telling him.”

Rardove scowled, but it was bravado, and Pentony knew it. Rardove had cause to fear. The king of England, Edward Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots, had an uncanny way of finding out who was inciting rebellion in his lands. It was the reason there
was
so little rebellion in his lands. Aside from the spy Red, that is, who must be mad to court the fury of this royal will. Edward was a terrifying enemy. Acquisitive, determined, brutal.

And he seemed to have found out that Rardove was trying to make the legendary dyes behind his back.

No, shocked and disappointed were probably pale versions of what Edward Longshanks was feeling. Enraged. Murderous. These were more the thing.

Especially when he learned Rardove knew the legend of the dyes to be legend no longer, but fact. Rardove had samples to prove it, made by the only dye witch who'd been able to produce the coveted dyes in the last five hundred years: Elisabeth de Valery.

Senna, her daughter, was Rardove's last chance to make them again.

A long shot, by all accounts, Senna was like a single arrow winged over the ramparts from a hundred yards away, but there you had it. She was whelped from a long, ancient line of dyers, and while she claimed she had not been trained, that might not matter: legend said it was a talent carried in the blood.

The mother had it, for certes. She'd rediscovered the ancient recipe, written it all down, then run away.

That, at least, ran in the blood, Pentony thought. Mother and daughter, both had the wits to flee as soon as they were able. Unlike Senna, though, Elisabeth had taken the secret of the dyes with her.

Also unlike the daughter, Elisabeth had been married, to a wool merchant. Gerald de Valery, a man she apparently loved to great depths—deeper than Rardove. Love triangles were never good things.

But then, Pentony suspected Elisabeth had never been triangulated whatsoever. All her love had been for de Valery. Why she'd come for the dyes still baffled him.

But come she had. After she was wed, after there were children whelped and homes to keep, Elisabeth left Gerald de Valery and came to Rardove. To the Indigo Beaches. The promise of crafting the legendary dyes apparently proved a greater temptation than heart and home.

Temptation, passion, craving. Fatal weaknesses for the family. The mother: dye making. The father: gambling. Senna appeared to be the strongest branch on that family tree.

A shadow suddenly appeared at the door. The baron didn't look up. The soldier peered nervously between Pentony and Rardove. Pentony waved him in.

Armored from heel to neck in plate and mail, he glittered dully in the flickering candlelight. He strode to the front of the table where Rardove slouched, his gaze riveted to some invisible spot on the far wall.

“My lord, we found a man who may be Red.”

Rardove's spine unbent as he sat up, looking at the soldier, then behind him. No six-foot Irishman lurked in the shadows. His gaze came back to the fore. “Where is he?”

The soldier stared intently at the wall directly above Rardove's head. “At the abbey.”

“What? What is he doing there, and not here?”

“She…kicked us out.”

“She?”

“Mother Superior.”

Pentony was shocked to find his lips twitching into a grin.

“She did what?” Rardove repeated, incredulous. “Kicked you out? She's a
woman,
” he sputtered, waving his hand at the soldier's belt. “You have a sword.”

The soldier cleared his throat. “Aye, my lord. But she has God.”

Rardove's face went absolutely unreadable. It looked like he didn't best know how to explode. His face turned slowly, like an autumn oak leaf, into a bright, flaming red.

“Get out!”
he roared. The soldier skittered backward and fled the room before the echoes faded.

Pentony rose and began assembling the sheaves of parchment scattered across the table. “Ireland has become quite a hotbed of treason of late,” he observed mildly. “You, O'Melaghlin, Red.”

There was no verbal reply, but it felt as if a towering presence had suddenly built in the room, like a stack of storm clouds. Pentony looked over his shoulder. Rardove was staring at him. Pentony stilled, sheaves of paper in hand, while the strangest combination of amazement and…joy dawned on Rardove's face, as if Pentony had beautiful, naked women dancing behind him. How terribly odd. Or perhaps just terrible, for no reason he could name.

“God. Damn,” Rardove exhaled.

Uneasy, Pentony dropped the scrolls and let them roll over on themselves, like small flat creatures nesting.

The baron got to his feet. “Goddamn, you're goddamned brilliant, Pentony.”

God had been damned quite enough in the past minute, even in this place of sin. Something was amiss.

Pentony was surprised by the cold, wavy sensation moving through his chest. Was that nervousness? Worry? It had been too long to know for certain.

“My lord?”

Color was flooding back into the baron's face, florid, healthy, disturbing. He snapped his fingers. “Sit. Write.”

Pentony did neither. “Write what, my lord?”

“Write about treason,” Rardove retorted, almost gleeful. “As you said, terrible treachery abounds in Ireland. The Irish have grown far too bold, and this intrigue with Red proves it. 'Tis time to crush them.”

“Crush them?”

The soles of Rardove's boots cracked against the wood planks beneath the rushes. “This alliance between Red and the Irish threatens the king's peace along every shore of his realm. Edward will not like to hear of it.”

Pentony had a flash of understanding. Hear of
this,
rather than of the fact that Rardove had both found and lost a dye witch, all without mentioning it to his liege. Putting out the hue and cry on someone else was an excellent way to deflect attention from one's own crimes.

It was a frighteningly clever maneuver.

“Edward will be enraged to find more Celts aligning against him, with what he has brewing in Scotland.” Rardove looked over, saw Pentony staring, and waved his hand through the air. “Write, man. Write!”

Pentony sat and dipped the tip of the quill in the inkwell, more by long years of habit than obedience. “Who?” he asked, although he already knew. He wrote slowly.

“Wogan, the justiciar. He is riding to us? Well, let us send riders to intercept him along the way, and tell him of the intrigues of the Irish.”

Pentony's pen scratched across the parchment.

“No, I shall not wait placidly for war to be launched upon me,” Rardove said, in a voice as close to thoughtful as he could come. He ran his fingers through his beard. “Send word to all the neighboring lords as well. And all my vassals.”

Pentony's pen scratched to a halt. He looked up slowly. “Why, my lord?”

Rardove strode to the window. He moved in and out of the narrow bands of sunlight that squeezed through the shutters. Flipping the rusty iron latch up, he flung them wide. Sunlight poured in. It hurt Pentony's eyes.

“The lord governor of Ireland marches north,” Rardove said loudly. “The king of England is marching too. The harvest is in. It is time to make war on the Irish.”

Finian lay on his back and stared at the stars. For almost twenty years, he'd devoted himself to a two-fold goal. Recover Irish lands, notably the Wishmé beaches, and never, ever get entrapped by a woman.

Yet here he was…

What?

Bedding a woman. He threw his arm over his face and thought it again, liking how it sounded. That's all he'd done. Bed a beautiful and intelligent woman. Nothing else had happened.

He groaned into the bend of his arm. There was no fooling himself here. Nothing would ever be the same again. Because he'd more than bedded her. He'd possessed her. Dived into her like she was a river and he the rain.

And he was not done yet. Like water on parched skin, he was absorbing her, never even knowing he'd been dying of thirst.

She lay collapsed atop his chest, her legs draped on either side of his hips like streamers, trembling slightly. He was still inside her, and had no desire to pull out. Even now, minutes later, soft quivers still occasionally rippled through her body, caressing him softly as his fingers curled around a length of her hair, idly lifting it, then letting it fall. Even in sleep, her body still responded.

He felt her shift. She lifted her head and looked at him. He smiled faintly.

“Ye're awake.”

She nodded.

“Will ye tell me something?”

“I will tell you anything.”

No,
he thought.
Do not say such things.

“What did ye mean,” he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, “when ye said ye're not an innocent?”

She nodded, as though this was what she'd expected. “I was married before.”

“When?”

“Ten years ago. I was fifteen.”

He digested this tidbit. He found he did not like its flavor. “For how long?”

“One night.”

A corner of his mouth curved up. He ran the tip of his thumb across the edge of her lips. “Ye seem destined for short relationships, lass. Why so brief?”

“He died.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. It was hard to see her face. He shifted slightly, so the moon would shine across her features, and then he saw she looked sad. “Me. I happened. He was old, and cruel, and that was that. I was with child, but lost it. It was…a terrible time. The physick said I could have no more.”

“Och, lass,” he murmured. He reached up and brushed the whole of his palm and fingers across the side of her head. Warming her cool cheeks, not asking anything more.

Senna didn't want talk either. She didn't want anything of the world, and certainly not the old world. She didn't want anything but Finian.

“'Twas a wondrous thing you just did to me,” she said into his neck.

He ran his hand down her side, over the dip in her waist. “I'm pleased to hear it,” he rumbled in that calm, playful, seductive voice. “What ye did to me was most fine, too.”

“When will you do it again?” Senna whispered shyly, glad of the curtain of curls that had fallen over her face.

Strong fingers parted the curtain and Finian's dark eyes peered in at her. “When do ye want me to do it again?”

Shocking herself, she tightened her inner muscles around him and squeezed.

He closed his hand around the back of her head and pulled her slowly down. His eyes were dark and inscrutable but they did not hold humor, Senna saw that much. There was something other, something solid, considering; as she had never seen such a look before, she didn't understand it.

And as hot and passionate as had been their previous encounter, this one was gentle and solemn.

His tongue touched hers as if seeking something delicate, something that might be swept away if he moved too quickly, like a glistening in a spiral of sand under clear water, or a feather on a rock. Senna's heart flipped over and she responded in the same slow way. His eyes held hers as his tongue slid into her mouth, his thumb caressing her chin.

It was, in fact, a reverent kiss.

He explored her with erotic tenderness, gliding over her tongue, her teeth, every inch of her mouth, kissing her until she was breathless and hot and whimpering. Slow and languid, tender and sweet, the gentle kiss ignited the same fires as the explosive ones had before. His manhood grew heavy and hard inside of her, and she sighed.

A morning breeze crept up the hill. It lifted her hair, insinuated itself between their sweaty, passion-burned bodies. Senna kissed his eyes, his cheeks and high forehead. Her fingers danced over his eyebrows and lips. Sweet, good, peace. She knew she was lost. Utterly lost.

He stroked her cheek and traced soft kisses across her jawline until she begged for more, until the tenderness evolved into raging passion yet again. He lifted himself inside her, plunging deep, over flesh already quivering in readiness. His thrusting hips pushed her legs apart, his hands gripped her hips and pushed her farther down onto him. Then, without warning, he rolled them over and propped himself up between her bent knees, keeping up a measured, rocking penetration.

She gripped his hips, trying to make him move faster, but he kept his movements deliberate and slow. He buried his shaft deep inside her then pulled himself out slowly, so slowly she keened. With only the thick tip of him resting inside her, she squirmed and writhed.

“Don't torment me, Irishman,” she reprimanded, reaching for him.

Clasping her hip in one hand, he dragged her up against him, the long, slow ride enough for her body to begin humming again. The hum quivered out of her lips as senseless purring. Hot and possessive, he was like a velvet rod, burrowing into her swollen, heated flesh.

He whispered in her ear of how she pleased him, told her how to move, asked her what she wanted. Bending slightly on his knees, he fitted his hips hard into hers and moved his body from side to side. When her hips bucked against his, a corner of his mouth lifted in a crooked smile.

“Tell me, Senna, does this please ye?” he demanded, knowing she was quivering from her toes to the ends of her bouncing chestnut curls.

“Finian,” was her only gasped reply. The trees marching down the side of the valley learned his name. She whispered it like a mantra and he grew satiated on it, affirming him as the only thing in her world, the center of her universe.

'Twas more than good.

Slipping his hand between their locked bodies, he pushed her hips to the ground with the back of his hand. Sliding his thumb between them, he flicked once against the nub at the crest of her.

“Oh,” she cried out, never having imagined such an intense, specific, hard, good feeling.

“Aye,” he agreed in her ear, and did it again.

Senna threw her head back and panted. What she'd done to herself was
nothing
like this. Her head spun, and the slow, huge wave of pleasure rode up her legs and down her back.

“Why don't ye come for me, lass?” he murmured, his finger massaging her. Over and over, his fine touch stroked her pleasure point as his thick shaft thrust deep into her swollen warmth. Deeper he moved, his thumb wicked in its fluttering, sensual torment. Out from this radius her body flamed, burned, knew only his touch.

“Finian,” she gasped between rasping breaths.

“Aye, like that.” He removed his hand and, with a savage tug, lifted her hips and plunged into her. Now he pleasured her with his body, and the wave began to crash again. Her body and mind exploded into a million starry shards of sensual fulfillment, her body pounding out the rhythm.

He erupted within her, drowning his hard manhood into her until she was spread-eagled beneath him, her arms flung wide, her hips pounding up to him, mouthing his name. Swollen pink flesh shuddered around him like a tight fist, pulling him in, draining him. His explosion rocked him to the core, and he held her trapped against his chest, tripping into a well of affection he'd never known existed.

He rolled them over so she was atop again and held her, his slick, shuddering length still buried deep within her womb. His head fell back, his arms around her back. She rested her chin on his chest and closed her eyes.

For Senna, it was enough to keep breathing. Forget sense or reason. There was only Finian.

He who knew too much of women's bodies. He whose careless charm assured her he had dozens of women to warm his bed, none needed to warm his heart. He who was only trouble. Danger and unseen cliffs.

And she had fallen in love with him.

They lay together in silence, their limbs entwined, feeling each other breathe. Then they fell asleep.

 

Dawn crept stealthily over the horizon, throwing the world into the sharp, musky relief of breaking rose and misty green.

The mounted party was spread out in a thin uneven line that stretched half a mile wide. On their tunics was stitched a diving bird, a raven, descending with claws extended. Sharp knightly eyes pierced the ever-present mists from under their helms. If she was here, she would be found.

If the Irishman was with her, he would die.