“Ash.”
She sighed, entranced and warmly intoxicated—by wine and want and by the beauty of him. She smiled and he stepped forward as though drawn. A light laugh escaped her with the thought that she might draw him with her smile. But she did not believe it and her smile turned sad.
“You’re safe,” he said.
“I’d thought so,” she answered, not yet willing to cede her dreams to reality. As long as they stayed here in this little island surrounded by mist and magic he was hers. And wasn’t that what Beltaine was at its core? A night of abandonment … to dreams and wishes, wants and hopes? And she had never before taken advantage of its magic. She deserved one Beltaine night.
“I’d thought I was safe,” she murmured again. “But now, I’m not so sure.”
He tilted his head and the movement placed his face in shadows so that when he spoke his voice seemed disembodied, carrying through the moisture-laden air with startling intimacy. “Why is that?”
“You’re here and so too am I and I doubt much whether that is a safe thing,” she answered simply.
She heard him catch his breath. “Do you fear I would hurt you?”
“Never.”
A short telling pause. “Unwise, little Titania.”
Titania. Oberon’s queen. He might have read her thoughts.
“Unwise for whom?” she asked gazing into the dark shadows that hid his expression.
“Exactly.”
His shirt rose and fell in deep, increasing measure but in no other way did he move. Intuitively she knew he would not make a gesture nor say a word, that he was forcing her to decide what next happened.
Two days hence and she would be married and belong to another. Two nights hence and he would leave.
It was Beltaine, she told herself with frantic insistence. Beltaine existed apart from the rest of the year. Its revelries were above the laws governing the rest of the days and weeks. No one was held accountable for what they did on Beltaine night.
The rest of her life she would be another’s but not tonight.
She wet her lips with the tip of tongue, her fear of his rejection nearly paralyzing her, her mouth dry. She didn’t know what to say, how to win him and he stood so silently, an attitude of fearful expectancy about him.
Instinctively and utterly without design she leaned forward, her head lifted, and she raised one hand, palm up, in supplication. “Please.”
She saw a light shudder pass through his body.
“Please, Ash.”
Abruptly, as though some cord binding him had suddenly been severed, he surged forward and dropped heavily to his knees beside her. Roughly, he pulled her up and into his arms. His mouth fell on hers with undisguised urgency. He bent her over his arm, holding her there.
With a sob she wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, holding fiercely to him. He rained kisses on her mouth and cheeks, hungry kisses, desperate kisses, kisses long denied and passionate. His free hand moved, roving over her body in trembling haste, as though collecting the measure of her, the feel and form of her—a blind man learning to see.
She cupped his jaw between her hands, hoarding each sensation—the rasp of his beard against her palms, the silky coolness of his hair between her fingers, the hard angle of his jaw.
His tongue moved insistently against the seam of her lips. She opened her mouth and the warm tip delved deep within. Her head spun.
Her hands skated down his strong throat to his collarbone and beneath the loose shirt to his heated flesh. Sinful, satiny skin. She wanted more, she wanted to arch her body against his naked flesh like a cat.
She pulled at his shirt until he became aware of what she wanted. He broke off the kiss. Her head fell back into the lee of his arm. He stared down at her.
“We’re near a place where there is no return,” he said, his breathing ragged. “I am not a nice man, Rhiannon. I’ve little honor and less restraint. This is the extent of both noble traits. From here out I will take whatever I can, whatever portion you’ll allow even knowing it was never meant to be mine.”
His face was set, and his words were brutal and honest but she didn’t want to listen, hear, or heed them. She touched his cheek. He turned his head and pressed a hot kiss against her palm.
“It’s Beltaine night,” she whispered hoarsely. “Nothing we do tonight counts against the dawn.”
For one long second he looked down at her and she thought she saw a wound within their silvered depths. He smiled with terrible resignation. She opened her lips to ask him why, but he set his finger against her mouth and hushed her, easing her down onto her back and straightening up on his knees. With one smooth, economical movement he grasped the edge of his shirt and peeled it from his body. She stared in awe at the masculine beauty he revealed.
The moonlight outlined the hard ladder of his ribs and played with intimate sensuality over the muscles of his chest. Dark hair covered his breastbone in a triangle and more dark hair grew low on his ridged and taut stomach, disappearing beneath the waistband of his breeches.
His arms were long, the biceps well developed, his wrists supple and powerful beneath their scars.
Slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, he put one hand then the other alongside her hips, tipping over the basket of hawthorn blooms as he did so and scattering the shadowed ground with white petals. He lowered himself until his chest just brushed against her.
“Nothing counts,” he whispered hoarsely and then his mouth claimed hers.
He hadn’t lied to her. There was nothing of restraint or composure in his actions, nothing courtly or obsequious in his manner. He quite simply, quite ruthlessly lay siege to her senses.
One arm snaked beneath her, hauling her up against him as the other hand reached between them and jerked her bodice down, exposing her breasts. He lifted his head, something feral and possessive in the gaze that met hers. She should have been afraid of his ill-contained violence, but she wasn’t. She drew a deep shuddering breath and her breasts grazed his chest.
He looked down at the dark puckered tips, smiled, lowered his head, and licked a nipple.
She gasped, embarrassed and panicked by the unfamiliar sensations that shot through her. She grabbed handfuls of his long dark hair in her hands, trying to pull him back. He ignored her, taking the hard nub deep into his mouth, until it grazed the back of his tongue. He drew hard on it, suckling her with devastating deliberation.
Her gasp turned into a moan. Sensation after sensation assaulted her untried body, pulled chords of response from her nipple to a point between her legs. Her fingers loosened in his hair. Her back arched. With a sob, she silently offered more of what he’d so roughly taken.
The sound seemed to set a spur of need through him. His hands traveled down over her quivering belly to the waistband of her skirts. He grasped bunches of the cheap material, rucked it high above her thighs, all the while plying her breasts with his attentions, dazing her with physical sensations she’d never imagined existed.
Dimly she became aware of cool night air tickling her thighs and whispering gently over the down-covered vee at their apex. Reality spun into focus with a shattering jolt. She snatched her hand down to cover herself.
He grabbed her wrist, easily pulling it up and away and pinning it beside her face.
“Ash—”
His lips found hers. His tongue plied the interior of her mouth with deep, rich strokes. He nudged his knee between her legs. Reflexively, she clamped them together.
He would have none of it. He forced his knee between her legs, spreading them apart, and at the same time she felt his fingers there, at the very entrance of her body. Mortification brought a strangled sound to her throat.
“It doesn’t count,” he muttered against her lips. His tone was dazed and dark and bitter and lost, but his mouth was sweet and pleading and tender.
Gently he caressed her mound until he found the sleekness beneath. She jerked, but the movement only moved his fingers deeper int
o that nether cleft. The trembling that had begun deep within her spread and centered there. She moaned as he rubbed and fondled her.
Her legs went lax with the exquisite sensations he roused. He cupped her mound, his callused palm pressing tight against her as his fingers gently eased into her very body, stretching, testing—driving her mad. She had no idea her body could be played like an instrument, that so much pleasure could center in as small a nubbin as the one that Ash caressed with such mind-wrecking genius.
And it wasn’t enough. She shuddered with the unsatisfied craving he’d inspired. Her hips lifted, instinctively trying to force a deeper contact.
He stopped. She sobbed and he covered her mouth with his own, drinking her need as though it was an opiate. Then the heel of his hand moved against her, building the sensations all over again, carrying her toward the brink of that unnameable place. Dimly, she heard her own ragged breathing. Her eyelids fluttered, shutting out the night sky above—
He stopped again. She sobbed in frustration, clutching at him.
“Aye, daor. Want and want more and then maybe you’ll begin to know my own desire.” His fingers moved deep within, his palm rubbing quicker and quicker. There. Nearly … almost … !
Gratification exploded within her, bringing with it crescendo after crescendo of pure, physical pleasure. Her back arched, pulled taut by her crisis, her limbs went rigid, her hands clutched into fists. And then it was over, the tension seeping from her, leaving her sated and spent.
She felt him ease his fingers from her. Weak and shaken, she opened her eyes. A crooked smile twisted his sensual mouth. A mouth she could not for the life of her look at without wanting to kiss.
“It’s all right, Rhiannon.” His voice was soft, gentle. “It truly didn’t count. You’re a virgin still.”
She barely heard him. Dear God, she must truly be depraved. Because simply looking at him, the darkness and light molding to his hard body, the moonlight trapped in his dark-lashed eyes, caused desire to pool anew in her breasts and lips and between her legs. She struggled up, heedless of the cool air on her naked breasts or her hair tumbling down her back. Her eyes riveted on the bemused expression that was slowly replacing the gentle mocking one he’d worn.
She stretched out her hand and touched his throat. The skin was hot and damp beneath her fingertips—as though he’d exerted himself in some arduous test. Her touch moved slowly downward. His muscles tightened reflexively beneath it. She covered his heart with her palm, her hand riding the heavy rise and fall of his chest.
She needed him. A piece of the heart he held so carefully apart. Once again she had no words for what she wanted or why, having never allowed sentient thought to frame the words.
“Please, Ash.”
A hoarse sound, brief and heartbreaking. Anger or regret? She could not say. But then, without a word, he swept her into his arms and snatched his cape from the ground. He rose and carried her out from under the dark moon shadows cast by the hawthorn’s boughs. She wrapped her arms around his throat and rested her cheek against his chest and listened to the deep, even beat of his pulse.
He carried her out into a grassy clearing bathed wholly in soft light. He spread his cloak and laid her gently down. With unconscious grace, he lowered himself beside her.
“Can something that does not exist be killed?” he asked her, gently stroking the tangled hair from her brow.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured. His fingers moved lower, brushing over her breasts. The tips budded beneath his teasing. She could not think when he touched her like this. But hadn’t that been her goal this night? Not to think? Hadn’t she told him that?
“Look there,” he said in a low ragged voice, sweeping his arm out over the moon-bathed field. “If I am Oberon, then this is my dawn. This is my moontide noon, and here … it counts.” He said the last savagely, intently.
Something elemental and vital seized at her emotions, demanded recognition, but then he rolled his hips into hers, driving all thought from her mind.
His member bulged against her mound, provocative and erotic. He rocked his hips against her, and desire, so lately sated, bloomed again, this time ripe and mature. She gasped in startled pleasure. He met her gaze as he bunched her skirts about her waist and gripped her thighs, moving them apart. Something hard and masculine touched her center.
His gaze did not release hers. His mouth was tense and hard, his eyes gleaming as he held himself still, letting her accustom herself to that part of him. She moved and the thick knob rubbed deliciously against her, dragging little moans from her.
Helplessly, she pulled his head down to hers and opened her mouth, hungry for his kiss. Wine. Cinnamon. Heat. Her head spun and whirled, her senses flashed and floated. She wanted to be absorbed into his hard body, to meld herself with his strength, burn with the passion she sensed he trembled on the brink of unleashing.
He slid his hands behind her knees and lifted them over his hips, poised in the very entrance to her. Then he slipped his palms beneath her buttocks, effortlessly lifting her. His erection rubbed wet and silky between the soft folds. She squirmed, her breath hitching in her throat at the promised pleasure.
He closed his eyes. His lips curled back from his teeth, clenched tightly together. She watched him, wanting more, wanting all of him.
“Please, Ash.”
Moisture beaded his brow. His skin was dusky, his eyes savage.
“Moonlight doesn’t make this any more real, make it count for anything more,” he said. “It’s madness to want things you can’t afford, and I can’t afford you.” His words tumbled out in a rush, violent and inarticulate. He dropped his head and kissed her again, deeply, passionately before lifting his head. She returned it desperately, uncertain why he’d stopped, what she’d done.
“I want you, Ash. I need you. Please want me.”
“Need.” His eyes were dazed. He shook his head.
He gripped her hips and pushed into her, stretching her. Impossibly big, impossibly hard. His expression was taut, his eyes lost in the shadows created by thick lashes. His hair fell in a black unkempt mane about his throat. Sweat gleamed on his bunched shoulder muscles and straining biceps. Her fingers dug deeply into his trembling arms, trying to find purchase against the torrent of sensation buffeting her.
“No going back,” he whispered hoarsely. “No second thoughts. Open your legs wider. Yes. There.”
A sharp, brief pain. She gasped. He grated out a sound against the back of his teeth, a curse or a prayer.
He filled her, deeply and utterly, and held still, his arms faintly trembling, sweat coating his chest. Slowly, pleasure returned, then more spiraling waves of pleasure. Nothing had ever felt so good. He moved. A rich, thick slide of silken steel. He retreated. Again. A hard, slow thrust.
Her world spun with heady gratification. Instinctively she met the next thrust. And the next.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Yes.”
He rocked into her and she clung to him, riding the increasing tempo of his thrusts.
“Slowly, eun. Easy.”
But it wasn’t easy! It was hard, passionate work. Her heartbeat thundered. She panted. Struggling to reach that point again, she whimpered as it danced just beyond her reach. He grasped her buttocks, driving deeper.
“Thoir dhomh,” he demanded. Give to me. “Gabh, me eun.”
There. There. And there. Light and dark careened and splintered as pulse after pulse of exquisite, wrenching pleasure beat through her, in her, to her very core. She sobbed with the exquisite release of it.
Then his arms clamped tighter about her. Again he drove into her body. His head snapped back and he lifted himself up on his arms. His hips ground against her own. A deep, body-wrenching shudder racked through him.
And when it was over, his head fell against her damp throat, his breathing harsh in her ear.
“Damn the dawn,” he ground out in a thick, dazed voice. “Damn the bloody dawn.”
Chapter Fifte
en
Beltaine night slipped away, its shadows replaced by the bright raucous colors of sunrise. The freshening wind whipped color in the wan cheeks of maids and boys for whom a night of revelry was no excuse for sloth. By noon even the privileged had awoke, emerging to resume the business of celebration. By midday most of Fair Badden had once again congregated in the town square around the gaily decorated maypole, waiting for the next round of activities.
Not all, however. At the Fraiser’s house, Ash Merrick sat at the long, scarred kitchen table, a mug of milk cupped between hands that unaccountably trembled. He grimaced at the white liquid.
Milk, for God’s sake. He really had forgotten who he was. Last night he’d carried Rhiannon’s slumbering form back to her room and left before Edith Fraiser scurried back to find Rhiannon’s bed empty. It was a small enough act of kindness and one he owed her after having taken her maidenhead on the day before the eve of her wedding.
He drew his hand across his face. He hadn’t intended to take her.
Or had he? He still couldn’t believe he’d succumbed to the misguided impulse to find her and keep her safe from predators—two-footed as well as four. He’d found her all right. Half lying against a tree, her head thrown back, and her long, delicious throat arched as if for a lover’s kiss.
But it hadn’t been the sweet abandonment of her pose, or the swell of unbound breasts, or even the length of exposed thigh that he had been incapable of resisting. No, ’twas her feet that had overset every last shred of decency in him.
Bare and elegant, long and slender, they’d emerged from beneath the garishly decorated milkmaid’s skirt. Though the pink soles of her feet were stained with grass and dirt, the nails of each small toe were nonetheless clean, glinting in the moonlight like abalone shells.
He would have bet his last penny that not one other of Fair Badden’s young ladies pretending to be simple country lassies had gone unshod. Only Rhiannon Russell had kicked off her shoes and felt the grass springing wet and fresh between her toes. The hint of wildness, the suggestion of a sybarite waiting to explore a sensual world, had filled him with lust.
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