Ian traced the velvet curve of her cheek, ran his fingertips down the curve of her white swan neck, and palmed her breast, testing its weight, delighting in its firmness and the feel and taste of her pink nipple. Making love outside, he noticed a faint smattering of freckles, vestiges of a childhood spent being kissed by fairies. It shouldn’t have surprised him.
He traced them with his fingers, finding them delightful and discovering she had a ticklish spot on one side of her neck. Laughter not being conducive to serious lovemaking, he steered clear of it as best he could, but she seemed extra sensitive today and he kept finding places that made her jerk and giggle.
Finally, he gave up and moved between her parted legs, reaching down to take himself in hand and part her nether lips and push until he was just inside. She held her breath, knowing what was coming next, and he gave it to her, all of himself in one huge, heavy thrust.
“Oh, yes….”
He didn’t know if the words were his, or hers, or theirs, but it didn’t matter.
She felt like heaven.
She felt like home.
Chapter Twelve
The next day, Philip moved in.
Beth had gone to the woods to fetch Sophie from Herne, and when she returned, she came back with the fox and a ghost.
She didn’t mean to. She’d stopped by the overseer’s cottage in hopes of helping him cross over. The space needed cleared for the new overseer she felt coming, and when she couldn’t get suicidal Philip to give it up, she did the next best thing.
She talked him into moving.
She’d hoped he would find her cottage comfortable enough but Philip had been an overseer; his concern even from beyond the grave was the welfare of the plantation. She thought it was guilt that kept him here: his accident cost them a valuable stallion; his death left them scrambling to cover. Whatever the reason, Philip stubbornly refused to go the Light and just as stubbornly refused to consider staying in Beth’s cottage. And so to the big house he went, where he quickly found a friend in the music room, and now the fiddle had a pitch-perfect voice to go with it.
She could not begin to express how grateful she was. Philip could have been like Thomas Marshall, one of those day-long singers who warbled slightly off key, oblivious to anything but his own delight in the tunes that played in his head. She figured that Philip must have sung while he shaved, because they would hear him in the morning, him and the fiddle, then nothing more the rest of the day, at least from the ghost. He was present, of course, and the first time that curiosity or something else drew him upstairs and Beth ran into Philip in the hall, she knew she had to find a way to keep him from the Captain’s bed chamber. Let the Captain keep his hedonistic memories of buxom twins and sexual marathons. She was certain his idea of a ménage à trios would never include a ghost.
Or Herne.
Beth shook herself, refusing to consider it, but banishing the thought only sent it tumbling from her head to her loins. Remembering her dream of Pan and the silenus, she felt her body quicken despite herself.
Goddess.
She’d had the same dream, more than once, and had awakened, stirred by the memories. If she found thoughts of being shared by Pan and a silenus arousing, thoughts of the Captain and Herne should not have disturbed her so, when it was not in her realm of possibilities. She wasn’t sure that Herne would even let the Captain come into her circle again.
When they’d returned from Annapolis and she had gone to the woods to fetch Sophie, she had stopped by the hives and talked to the bees, but they had said nothing beyond the trivial. It was the oaks who knew Herne’s secret, and had finally whispered it, after all these months and years.
Another reason she’d brought Philip back with her.
The Captain was clueless, of course. She hoped. But she would have to tell him before Lammas. Pagan holy days started at sunset; two of them, Beltane and Lammas, bridged months: April into May, and July into August. This year, the first of August fell on a Tuesday, and she was hard put to find a way to keep it off his list of grievous days.
She sought out her mother, needing the comfort she provided with just her presence. Her mother, who had fed her from her breasts and nursed her through illnesses and helped her after she’d given her virginity to a man who could never be hers.
She would not ask it of her. Not again. Never again. It had gone against every fiber of her mother’s being to do it the first time. And the second time, when the first didn’t take away what he’d left behind. She was seventeen. She hadn’t known, but her mother did. And so, when she lay near dying in the belly of a ship of indentures bound for America because she couldn’t keep anything—anything—down, somewhere between the invalid sips and the hurling up and the quiet questions when it was just the two of them, her mother had figured it out and asked what she wanted to do. Saint that she was, she gave her the option that had once saved her life as surely as the Captain had changed it.
Because of him, she was a free woman.
Because of him, she was with child.
Beth thought of the nursery of little Atwoods, of the dreams she’d seen in their mother’s eyes when she’d named them all, numbering noses and recounting her baby’s dimpled fingers and toes. She must tell him—would tell him, eventually. It was so new, the night of the Buck Moon. There had to be some irony in that, to have suffered such a high fever and been snatched from death’s maws only to find he’d returned robbed of a man’s desire. The fever alone could have killed any seed left in him. But somehow, some way, something had survived with him. Whatever was there had built up, little by little, and when he was finally able to plow her field, his seed had fallen on fertile ground.
It would be a while before she showed, and there was Herne and Lammas to deal with first, and Zephyr’s race after that. And beyond that, well, she was nearly afraid to look, sensing a darkness she did not understand, only that it could threaten everything she held dear.
As soon as she finished creating boundaries with spellwork, she went to the music room, where Philip was listening to the fiddle play, and explained the way of it to him. Although he might not like it, he seemed to understand. He was welcome to stay, but if everyone was going to get along, there were rules that even ghosts must obey.
Listening to Beth tell what she’d done, Ian shook his head. He’d spent years roaming the seas, sailing with pirates and commanding ships. The life of a gentleman farmer should be boring by comparison, but then he never imagined he’d share it with anyone like Beth.
Beth, who slept with foxes and talked to bees and kept ghosts downstairs where they belonged.
While she seemed happy with her spectral success, something else was bothering her, he could tell. He could guess. God, could he guess. But he waited, all patience and solicitousness and civility when what he really wanted was to carry her upstairs away from Philip’s cold presence and feel her come alive in his arms. He waited, and she waited, until it was too late to do anything more than agree to disagree.
It was their first fight, and although it was Monday, Tuesday was involved.
“What do you mean, I can’t come?”
She had the audacity to burst into tears. Surely she knew. Surely he wouldn’t be the one to tell her why her nipples were already so sensitive, even when he’d shaved twice just for her.
She carried him inside her, and he couldn’t come with her?
When Beth blinked, hard, and bit her lip, he knew that she knew that he knew. Evidently it changed nothing, not where Lammas or full moons or new moons or any other time in her sacred circle was concerned. He wasn’t pagan, and Herne had decided he did not belong.
Herne, thought Ian, was jealous.
Beth went still, still enough that he heard her heart drop.
The bastard.
Herne was a mean, jealous bastard, which felt pretty much the same regardless of species or archetype. Well, he didn’t like the thought of Beth being out in the woods with a nature spirit who wanted her for h
imself. And he knew that’s what it was. Of course, it was beyond normal comprehension. If he hadn’t had his own mind-expanding opiate experiences, he might have questioned his sanity. But he had a fiddle that played itself and a ghost who favored English folk tunes and a pagan lover who was taking her fox to her Lammas circle but not him.
Going to the woods where a nature spirit wanted her and there was nothing to stop him, now that she carried his child.
Red, don’t do this to me. To us.
She would not argue. There was nothing to be done but accept how it must be. If Herne would not let him come, she must go alone and he must let her and that was that.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
There was nothing else she could say.
Because they still burned witches in Scotland, she went to her cottage after dark, and pulled back the rug, and took her bundle from its hiding place beneath the floorboards and made sure she wasn’t followed when she went into the woods with Sophie. If Ian thought the hardest thing he’d ever had to do was let her go, he didn’t know what it would cost him to keep quiet when she returned that night, unharmed and untouched and still pregnant, as far as he could tell. And five days later, on the new moon, until she returned from the woods, he’d tormented himself, wondering if she would come back with or without his baby. Just a speck, it was, the tiniest sprout, viewed by some as only the promise of life and by others the same as an infant born. Either way, as powerful a circle as she cast, it would not take much to dislodge it.
But he’d let her go, not because he wanted to but because she needed him to. He played the fiddle for Philip and watched the back door, and when Beth finally came and he could not smell her moontide, he took her to bed and loved her like Herne never could.
“Marry me.”
Lying in the circle of the Captain’s arms, Beth paused from the pattern she was drawing on his manly breast. Hirsute and hard, smooth and plump—such were their delightful differences.
She loved his body but especially his chest, with its black curls covering slabs of carved muscle. If she kept her eyes above his heart, she could ignore the puckered pink wound where he’d been shot. He was nearly healed, she sensed, although there were likely a few more pieces of him waiting to be brought home. One, or two.
Or five or ten….
He’d known a lot of trauma in his life. At each and every awful turn, whether it was something he saw, something he did, or something he’d had done to him, he had lost a part of himself. Most of him was back, collected and set in place and anchored there with love. Like a candle robbed of rays of light, every bit of restored spirit banished that much more of the darkness, and in turn, brought a fuller measure of peace to his soul.
She pressed a kiss to his chest. “Under what name?” she asked, rather than point out that she couldn’t. Not yet.
Ian blew out a breath of pure frustration. He made himself a mental note to never play cards with her, even when his charges were cleared and her gris was done. He’d called and she’d bluffed, and damned if she didn’t have the upper hand and he was the one going to have to fold.
“Mine,” he said, convinced that he’d somehow manage it before the baby came. He had to. If anything happened to him, he wanted it legal. Wanted them both protected. Not that Christiana would turn them out, but they lived under English rule and what was law one day might be treason the next.
Cheeky thing, she was eavesdropping again. Like in the beginning, when she could look at him and know the words he might never speak and, if he was lucky, she might let him know something of her mind in turn.
“Soon,” she promised, which was as close as he could get to a yes.
“When we take Zephyr to race, I’ll see Atwood. Have him make a new will. You’ll be taken care of, the two of you….”
The words spun out in the morning air, rife with knowledge and succulent with promise, like the luscious curve of her pomegranate breasts and the gentle swell of her fertile belly.
She smiled and gave him a “pregnant pause.”
She thought she was being so funny.
“Thank ye,” she said, which was still the closest he’d gotten her to admit to her eavesdropping.
He wondered, Have you thought of names?
“It’s a wee bit soon, dinnae ye think?”
When she took the thread of conversation and brought it out, into the light, to continue in the conventional manner, Ian smiled. Two for two. Maybe he’d play cards with her after all.
“Not really. I’ve been thinking on it.” So he had. The night of the new moon, when he didn’t know if they’d lose it, all he could think of was what to mark on a grave.
Beth burst into tears.
“I’m sorry, love. Come—come here, now.” He gathered her in his arms and put her ear to his heart and let her hear how it beat for her. “It’s a strong one. It made it past the first hurdle. It’ll go the distance, you’ll see. When your belly’s plump as a ripe watermelon and every time it kicks, you have to pee, you’ll wonder how you ever doubted it.”
She sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “Och, and how d’ye ken sic things?”
“Sisters,” he said simply. “Seven of ‘em, with me the only boy and youngest of the lot. You’re not like to ever meet them, so I guess they’re a safe enough subject to discuss.”
“Mine are back hame, too,” she said. “Two sisters, three brothers. Ye’re nae like tae ever meet them.”
She sounded sad. At least her family was worth missing.
“We have your mother,” he reminded her. “God spare you the two that spawned me. They’d as soon take a knife to that pagan heart of yours as look at you. I never told Christiana, but after I was impressed, her mother showed up on their doorstep. Once I’d found my daughter, learned how old she was, I did the numbers. Marie must have been barely carrying, and they turned their backs on her.” On them. “They sent a blistering letter afterwards. Of course it didn’t get to me until six months out, and it was six more before our ship made an Irish port. Marie wasn’t in Limerick where I’d left her, and it killed me, the not knowing.”
Another piece, she thought, and carefully patched it in with the rest.
“Zephyr will win,” she promised him, “and we’ll clear yer name. George can talk tae his minister so he can post the bans and we can get the rest done. Will that be enough for ye?”
“I suppose it will have to be,” he said. “Damned English law. We’re stuck with it, unless I can talk you into turning Catholic….”
“Turn? It’s been a while,” she said, “but I hae been baptized. I dinnae think a priest would consider it undone.”
The look on his face was priceless. “You’d do it, then?”
“Aye.” Feeling the hope in his heart, how could she say anything else?
Ian took Beth’s hand and kissed it. “Darlin’ girl,” he said. “Don’t you know, it would thrill your mother’s heart?”
“And perhaps settle some consairn,” she added. “Lucy Knowles is beside herself, thinking I’m all but moved in wie ye. I swear tha’ some days she spends as much time straining her neck tae spy on me as stirring iron pots over the fire.”
“Be careful with Herne,” he said, thinking of the more abstract but clearly present danger. “If ever you don’t feel safe, I want you to know that I’m coming to circle, and himself be damned.”
“He willnae hurt me.”
Would you tell me if he did?
Beth tensed up in his arms, bracing herself, as if afraid he might somehow make her choose between them. He told himself that she’d already done that. She’d laid her naked body against his when he was burning with fever and nearly died. She’d brought him back from the brink and watched him restored, and in her womb, she carried his child.
And suddenly he realized that the grandbabies she’d seen him dandling upon his knee weren’t just his, but theirs, along with the magickal future that she’d promised.
But he wanted h
er to promise it would be the two of them.
He did not want to share Beth with Herne.
Chapter Thirteen
He willnae hurt me.
Would you tell me if he did?
She never answered him, and it ate at Ian, the thought that Herne might hurt her and he’d never know it. She’d bear it, like the Scots and Welsh and Irish wives and daughters ravaged through the centuries by Viking invaders and British soldiers, the only difference being no bairn would come of it.
Would you tell me if he did…?
Surely she would. Wouldn’t she?
When the torment grew to be too much to bear, he went to the music room and played for Philip and talked to his ghost, as if a broken man who’d escaped his misery by downing a bottle of laudanum could answer his question on what to do about Beth. Tomorrow he, Ralph, and Theo would be going to Annapolis, a day ahead of the race so that Zephyr was rested for his win. Beth had wanted to come but now she was talking of staying here and not going. She was worried about the baby, what travel would do to a sprout with such shallow roots. He wondered if it was Herne and the full moon on Sunday that mattered as much, and he hated himself for even thinking it.
And so, when it came time, Ian said goodbye to Beth and Sophie and Philip. He went out the front door of the house he’d won on the turn of the cards and traveled to Annapolis to see about saving the plantation that went with it.
Ralph and Theo stayed in the stable to be close to the horses. Ian secured a hotel room. Because it wasn’t Tuesday, he went to his attorney, and Bartholomew Atwood II, Esquire, drew up the new will that Ian signed in front of witnesses. At the end, Barry agreed to come and watch his horse run on the morrow.
The course was laid out, plain as day. It should have been a piece of cake for Zephyr to take home the purse. Afterwards, gentry should have been calling in droves to view the colts he’d been throwing. But a rivalry between two other toffs spilled over and they barreled into Ralph, hurting his knee and knocking him off balance. He barely got Zephyr straightened out in time to show what he could do. Ian protested the race but the results stood with Zephyr in third.
Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two Page 11