His hand, the hand that had been tangled with hers, slid slowly across her arm. Just as it had before, when she had brought him the bathwater. Just as it had when he had taken her in his arms and made her feel all that she did not want to feel. All that she knew she was not capable of feeling.
"I am not afraid. Why should I be afraid?" Her voice trembled like her hand.
Under the inadequate protection of her lashes, she could see him: the black cloth strained darkly across his thighs, the bronze-gold fairness of his skin, the wide expanse of his chest with its deep-shadowed muscle, dark-gilded hairs. Male. With a beauty mat was feral. Perfect Yet not so. She could see the ugliness of the scar left by one of King Osred's men. Goadel was Osred's kin. Goadel was near, somewhere unknown. Had to be.
He leaned closer and the sense of his nearness was enough to drown her. Just like last time.
"It is you who should be afraid." Her voice flailed at him. Ugly. Harsh with the sum of all her fears. "It is you who are in danger."
"Why? Because Goadel will bring death to me, and will bring you all that you want?"
"Yes."
"But Goadel is not what you want, Alina. Just as Hun was not what you wanted. Not truly."
"How can you think that?"
He said nothing, but his hand slid from her arm, brushed the frail barrier of her veil aside, found the delicate exposed skin of her throat. Settled there. So that the slight column of her neck fitted into the hard curve of his palm.
He did not do anything else. His hand did not push lower, to the uptilted curve of her breast, only a breath away from the hard-muscled wall of his chest The warmth of his skin. He just let her feel his presence, let her sense his closeness until her whole body trembled and her bones ached with it
He had such life. He was like the sunlight made real. She could see him breathe and the way the light through the trees cast dancing shadows across his skin. Then she could not see him at all because she was too close. Her head leaned into his hand and the longing for him was tearing at her with beast's claws.
"Tell me now what you want."
"I cannot." The words were hard as stones scraping. Her breath touched him.
"Then I will show you."
She could feel the tautness in the hand on her skin. The weight of his body leaned over hers. He would touch her and there would be no defence for her. All that she had tried to do would be lost. There would be no way to stop him. There had never been any way. She had lost. The sordid heat of misery and helplessness mixed with the burning desire, and she wondered whether that was how her mother had felt. Just such helplessness.
"Alina—"
"You can do as you will. There is no way I may stop you."
But she could. Just by looking at him. Brand's muscles froze. The fear that he had sensed was hidden inside her, the fear he had glimpsed in her face the last time he had held her, lived in her eyes. She had denied it. She had said she had wanted Hun. She had said her actions had been guided entirely by choice. Yet now she trembled, and her body burned to his touch. The weight of her head lay helpless against his open palm.
He had expected anger, the echo of the bated fury that lived inside him. He knew with every drop of blood in his heated veins that there was a desire that matched his, because it was the other side of the same coin. That was how it was. Like an inescapable fate for them both.
But now there was her fear.
He wondered whether she hated him and whether that was stronger than anything. There had been so many times when he could believe he hated her. But the sight of her fear was something he could not bear.
Why had she stayed with him when he was ill? Duda had said that she had done all to make him well. That she would not leave him and had been jabbering at him in Pictish.
He could not remember that. All he had were fever dreams in which he could see the delicate perfection of her face, and she had told him she could not do without him and that they would abide together. But that much could not be true. She had said words like that before and men she had left him.
"What is it that lies hidden in your head, Alina?"
She said nothing, neither in pleading nor fury, and all her thought hoard remained locked behind the smoky darkness of her eyes.
For all the burning fire in him, he would not have constrained her if she had pulled away. But she did not The sleek, dark head full of secrets lay against his flesh and then her hand moved. Her fingers fastened on the flesh of his arm, curving round the blood-thickened muscle that strained to… One of the fingers dragged.
It was the hand that had suffered a childhood damage never fully explained.
She had sought him out. She had made up some transparent nonsense about hearing Duda crashing around in the undergrowth when they both knew it could not have been him. That it must be Goadel's man, directed here by the half brother she cared so much about. Looking to take her just as Hun had.
Hun. The thought of the foulness of that creature having been near her turned the corded muscle under her lamed fingers to fire-hardened steel.
He realized she was trying not to weep.
The steel-hard muscle moved, with a force that would crush bones. He tried to loosen the strength of his grip. What he could not stop any longer was the recklessness of what he felt.
He knew she did not want this, and if she feared him as much as he thought, the tears would come. Or she would scream and claw at him with her damaged fingers.
But her arms fastened round his back in a grip that had as much power in its own way as his. And if it did not stop the tears, there could be no doubt of what she wanted in this moment.
A wanting that held its own destruction. He understood nothing of her and everything. All that he under-stood was compassed in the need with which she clung to him and the sobbing sound of her breath, and the soft touch of her skin.
Her lips found his mouth.
The unexpected force of her touch, the hunger in it, overcame reason. His response had no control. The bitter aching swell at his loins came to full blood-throbbing hardness in one breathless instant.
She did not draw back. The recklessness in her heart must match his, surpass it, because she had called forth the storm. The anger and the passion and the near hatred of the last months of his life were ignited.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She would die.
She could fix on no other thought. She would die from the sheer force of him, and from the force of what she felt. His body pinned hers against the richness of the forest floor. She could smell the sharpness of flowering wood-meadow grass and crushed bracken and the hot human scent of him.
His mouth was bruising heat, his body bigger, fiercer than she had dreamed. More than she could control or comprehend.
She did not care. She wanted only what had for so long been denied.
She knew enough to understand that men did not give in such acts as this. They only took. But she would let all that fierceness have its course if only she could be with him. She had been told enough to know what she should expect and that—
She knew nothing at all. The terrifying force in him changed, or some other strand, unidentified, took "shape in it. His mouth moulded itself over hers, expertly sure. The touch of his hands, inescapable and with a strength beyond her reckoning, was enchant-ment. Wildfire. It made her feel such things, things she wanted…
She wanted this. She wanted what he did to her. As much as she wanted what she did to him, the way her hands touched the hard planes of his body and the way she could feel all of his warmth and his power. The way she could feel her own power. Like something called up in answer.
And then the miracle happened and she was not being kissed. She was doing what she had first tried to do out of all the reckless need of her heart. She was kissing him.
His body moved, taking the weight of hers, moulding its hot strength over her slighter form, and she was moving with him, in a response she could not stop. Her mouth slid over his, press
ed against it, moulding it in the same rhythm, so that she could not tell where one movement began and the other ended. Or even where one being began and the other ended. It was like merging with the other stronger, more powerful half of herself.
But so different. The warrior-tough planes of his body, the shape and the movement of it, were something unknown and strange. And infinitely, maddeningly, desirable. Nothing, no one, could ever feel like him.
Tendrils of delight coiled through her, sharp and potent. She let his body and the feel of him take her until her senses swam and her mind dizzied with it. She held him, her hands pressed against his skin, locking on the long line of his naked back, fingertips buried in springy flesh, thick flexible muscle. She held him with all of her strength, clung to him and if that had been all, if it were possible for loving to be like that, she would have stayed so. But it was not.
His body moved with a sureness and a knowledge she could no longer match, even as his mouth gentled over hers, his kiss deepened. Her lips parted against the dark, wet heat of him and she felt fierce shock as his tongue entered her mouth. His strong hand slid under her hair, cradling her head, turning it towards him so that his access to her mouth was complete.
Her mouth opened to the invasion of his because she could not help herself. His tongue tasted inside her, thrust deeper. He did not stop. She felt the breath quicken in the broad wall of his chest. Felt the heat of the desire in him through his skin, the way she had felt his fever heat. His body pressed against hers, forcing her back against the soft grassy bank at the pool's edge. She gasped, but the sound and her breath were lost against the heat of his mouth.
She could sense the weight of him, held back, as yet, carefully balanced so as not to crush her. But holding her with his nearness, with the heavy solid length of his thigh across hers. She could not move. Her body was spread out against the earth, open to his touch, to the way his hands moved across her, exploring every curve.
She felt so utterly vulnerable, yet her flesh thrilled to the feel of his hands through the smooth barrier of her finely-woven clothing. He could make her burn. She could not stop him.
She could not stop anything he did.
He touched her with an intimacy that made her skin tingle and her breath catch and left nothing of her that was not his. It was as though he wanted to learn through that touch who she was, to know her as time and grief and separation had never allowed.
"Brand?"
She could feel the half-shed tears stinging at her eyes and she wanted to touch him in the same way and she did not dare. Did not know how. Her hands flattened out. They were shaking. She slid her palms gently, tentatively across his back and felt muscle tighten, the sudden sharpness of his breath against her mouth. It was as though the urgency of the need inside him was so strong it would leach through his skin. The same need was in her. But she did not know how to express it, or what to do.
She wanted to speak. She did not know what to ask.
"Brand…" Fire.
His fingers were at the neck of her dress, tugging at the ties with insistence, parting the laces as though they were no barrier at all.
He touched her skin.
His hand palmed her breast and she cried out. Her body arched against him and the burst of feeling inside her was sharp as the claws of a predator ripping through her lower belly. His fingers brushed the tight-ened bud at the centre of her breast and that made the feeling sharper, but he just kept touching her.
His touch was soft now, carefully so, gentle. That should have made it better but it did not. It made the feeling worse, fiercer a thousandfold, so that she thought nothing could exceed the power of that. Then his lips found her skin and she felt the moist heat of him, the secret dark wetness. Then the shock as his tongue touched her, the way it had invaded her mouth, and the tightened sensitive peak of her breast was drawn into the dark heat inside him.
She thought her body would split in two. It writhed against his like a soul in torment, which was what she was. Her eyes were closed so tightly it hurt and she could see nothing, only blackness. The blackness would drag her down because her mind was so dizzy with it and her body was no longer hers to control.
She was afraid of that and the fear took the sense of her power away from her. He had taken it away with his touch and his mind-aching beauty. With his heat and his sureness and his skill.
That was his skill, seducing people.
There was no defence against it, especially not for a lamed creature like her. It was not only the raw measure of his strength which was to be feared, but that.
The terrifying thoughts came to her out of the blackness and a thin, biting coldness sliced its way through the dizziness of her head. Remembrance was forced further back, to the nightmare she could not free herself from.
Helplessness. Her mother cursing.
She was like her mother. Worse. She was more than helpless, she was trapped by herself. Because inside her burned the terrible need for Brand's touch and what he did.
What he would do.
She felt his hand slide across her leg, drawing her hips against him, so that the full potency of his body touched hers and she felt him as he was, the blood-gorged hardness of male flesh, the fierce pulse of life and the power. She knew the intimate movement of his body and the primitive directness of that brought hot, bright-edged sensation stabbing through her, as though she felt him inside her already.
She could not permit it. The small slice of fear in her brain widened. She could not permit it because she could not face what it was.
Because if the last act happened, some terrible barrier would be crossed and there would be no going back. The joining between them that had been there from the first moment they had seen each other would be completed. It would be irrevocable. And even through her fear, she knew that if she allowed that she would have failed him.
"Alina."
The sound never touched the whispering air of the glade. It filled her mouth, together with his breath and his warmth. It was only sensed, the sound of it born directly inside her, like spellcraft, binding the soul.
His body moved, sending feeling shooting through her skin, as though he were part of her already.
She could not let it happen. All the sacrifice of separation would be for nothing. She would not be able to protect him.
His touch was possession. He would have all of her and if he did, then all that she was could not be hidden. He would know her for what she was: emptiness where he was fire.
Her body tightened, her muscles pushed against the full measure of his unleashed strength. But it could not have the slightest effect. What she had said to him was so. He could do as he would.
Truth had hidden faces.
He could see Alina's truth. Even through the edge of madness. The control it took to stop was of his kind. Ruthless. The kind that sliced through pain. It was a skill honed in hell. That was the last place he would send Alina.
She was afraid of him, beyond the strength of desire or the power of what had once been shared. Beyond redemption.
He rolled back onto the grass, putting the coolness of distance between them. Emptiness filled the living, sense-burning air where she had been, frozen and dead like a wasteland. The evening breeze cut at the heat of his sweat-sheened skin, dead cold, as though winter's breath had come in a moment.
Nay, it was not the air, the death was in him. He stared at the mind-aching arch of the sky, but his eyes were blind. He fought for breath but it was the ragged sound of her breathing that made him turn.
She lay just as he did, staring at the sky. Her fine clothes were a mess, rumpled, gaping off her body so that he could glimpse the small fineness of her underneath, thin skin and small bones exposed to the biting air. He had done that.
Her hands were white-knuckled fists locked at her sides, the fingers bunched round the thick summer grass and the stems of some flower-starred plant, tearing at it. She shuddered. The whole of her slight frame seemed racked by the ne
ed to gain life-giving breath.
Through the deadness inside stirred the familiar, aching threads of the protectiveness that had been so strong it had taken all, mind and duty and honour.
Honour. He did not know how she had managed to force that word past her throat when she had lain in his bed at the monastery. Honour was gone. For both of them.
He watched her fingers twist in the long-stemmed plant. Vervain, subject of endless old wives' tales. He could see the pale purple flower heads. Her fingers slipped, the knuckles white, uneven, shattered and without strength.
He did not even know how that had been done to her.
It was impossible to summon the rage that had sustained him for so long.
Just as it was impossible to call back lost honour. Impossible for anyone to live by it in this world.
If you admitted that—
"Alina."
She looked not at him but at the mangled plant in her hand.
If you admitted the truths you did not want to see—
He watched the averted head and the undernourished body of the woman he had failed to protect.
He sat up.
You had to deal with what was. Not with how you wanted things to be.
She had to' know that she did not have to fear him again.
He took breath. The coldness of the air struck like ice in his lungs. But its sharp clearness spoke of the north, of home. Lindwood. He closed his mind against charred ruins. Not yet.
"Alina."
She flinched.
The cold air settled on his skin. It was not as cold as guilt.
"Alina, look at me."
She turned her head. But not before he had seen the struggle for control. It seemed the most bitter thing he had ever witnessed.
"I am sorry," she said.
"What?"
"I am sorry," said her voice again. "For…for all this." The long-broken hand made a sweeping, help-less gesture that seemed to encompass the entire world. The sum of all the things he did not understand about her or what she did.
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