“Red,” he whispered against her hair. “I’m sorry, I can’t wait. Forgive me.”
He kept one arm wrapped around her, kept her backside pressed tight against him when he turned her and guided her onto the edge of the bed, bending her so that her face nestled where he’d lain. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with his scent. He spread her legs with his knees, fumbling at his buttons and praying he didn’t go off too soon. This had been such a long time coming, he didn’t know what to expect.
Hello, old friend.
Ian felt a full-body smile come over him. Red felt it too, or had read his damned mind again.
Beth purred and buried her face in his bedsheets, pressing her hips back against him, waiting for him to enter her. There was no finesse left by the time he opened his breeches and threw up her skirts. Finding her wet enough, he drove himself inside her, sheathing himself to the hilt.
Ah, God. Sweet Jaysus.
A stallion finished in a minute and he did too, thrilled that he’d accomplished that much, at least, but hating himself for her sake, for giving such a disappointing performance when she deserved so much better. Red Beth, in whose body the source of pleasures lay, whose clever hands and kind heart had saved him from himself.
How can I thank you? I wanted to die. I would have, if not for you.
She heard him. He could tell, because when she turned her head to smile softly at him, he saw that her pink lips were quivering and her brilliant blue eyes were filled with tears. She deserved so much better than this, than him, and he told her so.
He told her with words. He told her without words. He told her with his hands, his mouth, his touch, his breath as he pulled her into his arms and unwrapped her like the treasure she was. Her dress went first, then the single petticoat she wore to flaunt convention—but then, she’d been working. Working to cleanse him. Working to heal him. Freeing him from the laudanum and restoring his manhood.
The stays were a surprise. “They’re for my back,” she told him, eavesdropping again. “I hate them, but they help.” Her chemise was utilitarian and well constructed, with generous gussets under the arms that suited someone who tamed foxes and gathered honey and could have the most vicious horse eating out of her hand like a child’s pet pony. And under the chemise, there was what he remembered, what he dreamed of, with and without laudanum: the trim waist and pomegranate breasts and just the slightest swell of a woman’s belly above nether curls that were as wild and red as those that crowned her head.
He pulled her onto the bed with him, his own clothes be damned. This was for her, the least he could do after all she’d done for him.
He dried her tears with his thumbs and bent his head and kissed her. Every fiber of his being, every breath, he owed her more than he could say, more than he could ever repay. Darlin’ girl, do you know what you’ve done to me?
Of course she didn’t. He didn’t know himself, so there was nothing for her to pull from the whispers of his mind. Quieting himself, he focused on the woman in his arms, with her trim ankles and pretty feet. He undid her buckled shoes and pulled them off, dropping them beside the bed. He ran his fingers on the inside of her thighs and smelled the musk of their joining. He untied her garters and pushed her stockings to her ankles, taking care to pull them off as she’d put them on, figuring it was the least he could do. Attention to details in lovemaking counted; even something as small as right-turned hose could never be underestimated.
The cheeky thing laughed, delighted with his philosophical approach to coitus.
Ian smiled. She had no idea.
Really?
Now who was reading whose mind?
It didn’t matter. She’d seen too much of him to hide, and he’d learned more of her than he had any woman in his life, even the one he’d left with child. Someday he would tell her, but not now. Now he wanted to think of Beth. Only Beth, who slept with foxes and talked to bees and communicated with horses and whispered to trees and made a man dare to dream again.
He kissed her feet, those pretty, pretty feet, and worshipped her ankles. Like a sculptor’s apprentice, he explored the masterpiece that was her body so closely he could have copied it, had he a block of marble and the tools and the skill to breathe life into stone. She could. She had. He was proof. He said nothing, in case it came to naught, but he swore he felt himself thickening even as he thought about it.
He refocused his attention on Beth, lying breathless in his bed, at his mercy after he’d been dependent upon hers since the new moon. He wondered, what would she do tonight, when the full moon—the Buck Moon—rose over the wooded hills and called to her pagan blood?
It was the full moon but it wasn’t a Tuesday, and she’d just given him the most glorious gift he could imagine. He sought to return the favor. He kissed her feet, behind her knees, pressed his mouth to small red curls and found what he’d left of himself, before, when he’d covered her like a stallion and pumping a minute had drained him dry.
He hoped there were more bees for that, or herbs to burn on ginger slices beneath pinched-neck little cups.
Ian urged her legs apart and moved between them and proceeded to worship her body like an odalisque’s. He marveled that she was even here, when she’d seen him at his worst and read his mind and had to know at least some of what had been done to him. He was ill-used and she was everything a man could want: a perfect blend of form and function, infinitely desirable, with a beauty that reached from the inside out.
He held her hips and moved lower, opening his mouth and closing it over her Venus’s mound. With lips and tongue, he tasted her, teased her, found the sensitive bud hidden above the moist folds and claimed it in an intimate kiss that made her gasp and writhe beneath him. He lifted his head long enough to wet a finger, then kissed her curls again as he pushed it inside her.
A long, slow slide to her center had her panting, but a second finger left her breathless. She watched him, clearly astonished, as he teased and tasted, stroked and spiraled, possessing her cunny with his hand the way he’d wanted to with his cock, taking her to peak after peak but never letting her go over, not until her hands forsook the grip she had on his sheets and she knit her fingers in his hair and begged him not to stop.
As if he could.
He already felt it coming, the wave that started with a tremor, building the way a tsunami was formed. He braced himself for it and plowed ahead, intrepid sea captain that he was, until he’d wrung an orgasm from her, and another, and another, until her hands fell away from his head and both of them came up for air.
He stroked her cheek and kissed the tender palm of her hand before stripping off the clothes he’d worn far too long. He’d spent days in a bed with her beside it; a rare treat, it was, to finally have her share one with him.
Hello again.
Beth was pleased, in every sense of the word. The treatment had worked. It mattered not to her, how much was due to burning herbs and bee stings and how much was from the rituals she’d done before they’d started the process. The Captain was flying colors at full mast again, and that was what counted most.
He really was an attractive man. Prison had aged him beyond his years, but he’d managed to turn back the clock since his coming. He had a full head of thick, black hair, and those stunning green glass eyes. His face was comely—to be honest, not the handsomest man she’d seen but far removed from the worst. His beard was so heavy, he would have to shave twice a day to keep from tearing up her tenderest skin, should he make a habit of kissing her like a Frenchman.
His chest was wide, boasting a thatch of hair that arrowed down the front of his body. His nipples were as hard as hers, and his manhood was awakening again.
He leaned back enough to smile into her eyes.
See what you do to me?
It could have been his thought, or hers, or theirs. All she knew was the pleasure of exploring his body in a way she never would have allowed herself, had he remained a mere patient. She’d focused her healing skil
ls on him then, taking inventory, making cursory glances, checking mental boxes. But now, now, she was free to know him, in all the ways a woman could know a man, to learn what made his breath catch and his calves knot and his hips plunge and his toes curl, what would drive him to the edge of keen desperation and finally, finally push him over the precipice.
Lying in his arms when he’d finished again and she could taste him still, she nearly wished it was Tuesday, if only to have some good to go with the bad. Then again, if the Buck Moon hadn’t come on Friday, the scars he yet carried inside might have kept him from this, and that would have been too sad for her to bear.
Chapter Eight
Tell me about Tuesdays.
His hand went still. Fingers that had been tracing careless circles on her shoulder in the sweet aftermath hovered, poised to flee if she weren’t careful.
She didn’t mean to think it. It just happened. But he’d heard her, and it was too late to wish it away.
The Captain tapped his fingertips against her skin, weighing, considering. Finally, he pulled her into his arms and urged her head upon the hair-cushioned pillow of his chest where she could listen to the whispers of his heart but could not look into his eyes and see.
As if he wanted to protect her.
As if she couldn’t see anyway.
“Tuesdays have not been good for me this year,” he began, thinking back to when the unfortunate trend had started. “Valentine’s Day, I thought I had it made, with a pretty purse won at the gaming table and a whore to share a bed. The bitch was part of a plot, it seemed, with me as bait to catch my friend Justin. When I tried to fence a ring I’d won, I was arrested and charged with a piracy I didn’t commit.”
That he never denied any piracy was duly noted.
“I fear I must go back a wee bit,” he said, “to the days of our troubled youths. One night Justin and me found ourselves in a hot pickle, taken by a press gang in Limerick. When we…objected…aboard ship, we got a hundred lashes each that first time.”
Beth had bathed his scars, had dared to trace one with her fingers, when he was at death’s door and she was willing to try anything to keep him from going through it.
He smiled ever so slightly and blew out a puff of masculine pride. “One of the two buckos I’d laid low years earlier recognized me; he knew my real name. Justin and I had been taken by Stede Bonnet but we never went back. He wouldn’t, and I couldn’t. There was a child, and she had only me. Christiana. You’ve met her. My niece—”
He was still protecting her. Did he really think she didn’t know?
“My daughter,” he admitted aloud. “I knew nothing about her. Didn’t even know she’d come into existence until Bonnet raided the Bess. I whacked off her hair and put her in boy’s clothes and called her ‘Christian.’ Now that she’s married to Justin, I’ll be expecting those grandbabies you promised.”
Beth smiled and kissed his stomach. “Aye.”
“Back to Valentine’s Day. Tuesday. I find meself betrayed, and jailed, with the Brits and the Frenchies fighting to see who gets to hang me. Desertion or piracy, and not really guilty of either. Not really,” he whispered, regretting his other sins.
“Soon, on one Tuesday hence, I find myself thrown into prison at Port Royal, where the English take hospitality to a whole other level. Some months later, on a Tuesday, my daughter breaks me out of jail, but it’s a trap. You’ve seen the wound. You know the rest. I land here, on a Tuesday, and a lovely bit who sleeps with foxes and talks to bees won’t let me die like I want. I suppose I should thank you.”
Beth ran her fingers through the hair on his chest, found the disc of a hard brown nipple, and drew a circle widdershins. “Ye already hae.”
“That?” Even without looking, she could feel the smile that lit his face and shone as warm as sunshine. “You haven’t seen anything yet, sweetling. Keep at it, and you may wish you’d never started it.”
Ian fell into a companionable silence. Now that he’d had her twice, for a short and the long haul, he was content simply to hold her in the circle of his arms and wonder what it would take to keep her there. By the time he’d worked up the courage to ask, she had already drifted away.
Beth opened her eyes, expecting filtered sunlight and found instead a candle he’d left burning for her. The Captain was nowhere to be seen and she was naked and the full Buck Moon was high in the midnight sky.
She’d fallen asleep.
She couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep.
Beth threw on her clothes, feeling frantic, wondering wildly what she should do. In the end, she had no choice but to go. Even now, she could feel Herne’s impatience with her, silly human.
How dare she keep him waiting.
Sophie was as bad, concerned at the closed doors that had kept them apart. She must have been circling the house, because she came running from the front when Beth stepped into the sultry night air.
The moon was brilliant, so full that her belly hummed with its energy. Beneath a canopy of stars, its beams illumined the formal gardens behind the Captain’s house, turning them into a midsummer dreamscape that no poet could do justice. Sophie ran circles around her as they threaded through the intricate boxwood hedges outlining fragrant flower beds, and the unnatural topiaries that were constantly begging her to rescue them.
“I’m sorry.” She told them the same thing she did every time they asked, unable to do more. Not yet, anyway.
The cottage was warm with residual heat and smelled musty from being closed up in her absence. Moving blindly in the dark, Beth found flint and steel and struck a spark to light a candle. Shoving back the rug, she retrieved her bundle from beneath the floor boards and called to Sophie and headed into the night-clad woods.
The oaks were agitated. She might have found some humor in that, but she had upset Herne and he’d paid in kind. She could feel him on the far side of her sacred space, impatiently tapping his foot or cloven hoof or whatever had let him come crashing through the forest when she’d fallen through the ice and nearly drowned.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and stopped when she felt the Captain come into the circle she had not yet cast, as if he belonged there, as if, now that she knew about Tuesdays, he needed to know this about her.
“It’s all right,” she said, though he didn’t know that it was for his own protection. She was surprised that Herne had let him get this far. He had ways of stopping a man, or a beast. She’d seen him do it.
But the Captain had come, and had been allowed into Herne’s woods and into her and Sophie’s circle. “Stay,” she told him once she’d taken off her clothes and cast it, and he had.
She spread her cloth and assembled her altar, and three sets of eyes watched her give thanks and perform her magick, Herne and Sophie and the Captain. And when she had finished drawing down the moon, she went to him and took him into her, the man she had chosen. Human. Like her.
There was no hope for any other.
If Herne didn’t know before, he knew it then.
The oaks spoke of it for days, whispering to her in the way that she whispered to the bees and kept them informed of things. It was part of the beekeeper’s job, and she’d embraced it, though it grieved her when she brought news of a death and had to turn their hives and drape them in black.
Worse was the approach of winter, when she would have to be judge and executioner, weighing the hives and selecting which ones lived and which died. If it came close, she’d ask for volunteers, like she had with the Captain, letting the bees gather in a broken keg she’d encased with a hemp sack. She’d pulled the cork to let them out, one at a time, carrying each in a pinched-neck cup, thanking them, encouraging them, instructing them where to sting, and watching them die when they did.
Today…today she would bury them.
Red Beth took the urn she’d nearly filled with small furred bodies with their unnaturally stilled wings and looked at Ian, a silent question in her eyes. After all that she’d seen, afte
r all that he’d done, after what they had shared, he wondered how she could think he might refuse to go. If he could walk to the stable to watch horses copulate, he could go to the orchard and help her bury bees.
“I’ll get a shovel,” he said, rising from the bed they’d shared every night since his manhood returned. It was Tuesday, but there was no hope for it, not the way she gripped the jar and let him see the tears she refused to shed.
She picked out a spot, not by the hives, but close to her cottage with its trick floor and hidden treasure, where she’d nursed an orphaned kit who repaid her kindness with a rare loyalty that made her less fox and more human, betimes. There are animals that, when you look in their eyes, seem more than that, and Sophie was one of those, like an earthbound angel in red fur and a mask, stealing back and forth between orchard and woods, between this world and the next, sometimes taking Beth with her.
He didn’t know what to think of Herne.
She’d told him, after the fact, that they had not been alone in the woods, that there was another there, a spirit, an energy, a guardian of the woods who’d saved her once from drowning.
Not knowing what to say, he said nothing.
But he thought about it as he trailed after Beth. Seeking the perfect spot to lay her bees to rest, she eschewed the apple trees, which unicorns were said to favor, just in case there were some about, and had him dig a hole beneath the plum tree that spoke first. When they were finished, she recognized what his exertion had cost him and invited him to rest inside her cottage before heading back.
Ian wasn’t sure what he expected, but Beth’s cottage was just as he might have imagined. Like the other cabins, it was comfortably furnished, with a small single bed in the corner and a cupboard and dining set to the side. A pair of upholstered chairs flanked the fireplace hearth. But it was the little things—a vase of assorted feathers, a bowl of colored leaves, a cluster of crystals winking on the windowsill, an unsigned watercolor landscape exuberantly painted for the sheer joy of it—that called him to notice.
Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two Page 7