As the silence stretched, the new woman birthed so recently experienced a desire to test herself and her power and perhaps to test him as well. How many female hands had she seen him swipe away? Her challenge showed in her eyes and her hands moved to play along his arms. She felt his muscles ripple in response as he gripped the sheets tighter. Her fingers moved up to torment his earlobes and he moved his head closer to give her greater access. She waited for the motion that would end her foolish dream that hers would be the hands he would not swipe away.
Nial had no second sight but he didn't need it to know what was afoot. The open honesty of her eyes trumpeted her intent. She wanted to test him by playing the game. The fame of the Maclee swipe was one of the reasons females toyed with his person so openly. They touched to see if their hands were the ones he would not swipe away. He had waited all his life to play this game with her. She had more reason to doubt him than most, so this would not be the only time they would play. Despite his assurances, they would play again.
She rubbed his chest with the tips of her fingers in swirls and circles that centered around his navel. Her tentative caresses bathed him in fire that kindled a sharp clawing need, a pain long awaited and sought during countless empty encounters. He took other women to ease a physical need. When he hungered, he ate and when he thirsted he drank. He avoided tending his sensual needs for as long as his drives would allow because he was aware that every woman he dallied with hoped she would be the one. Each time he had been aware that she was not, so he kept his entanglements short to try to avoid inflicting more pain than necessary.
But this time, although the play of her virginal hands was on his body, it reached his soul. He held on as fiercely as he could and he would hold out as long as he could, but she would outlast him in this battle. He didn’t want to scare her away when he surrendered. He could hold back the dark tide of desire for just so long before the wave broke. He could feel it building as her hands drifted lower to dip inside his navel, moving in and out of the crevice in motions his groin demanded he imitate. He couldn’t stop the thrust of his violently aroused tarse against the sheets as his rampaging ardor battered at his sanity.
He sensed her intent to bare him a moment before she did it. He could not raise his hands to stop her, for she would interpret that as the swipe she expected. He spoke instead. His voice was a barely human growl and shouted his craving although he spoke only one word as her hands grasped the coverlet to flick it away.
“Wait.”
“What? The Maclee swipe isn’t verbal.”
He could see the teasing in her eyes and hear it in her voice. But he also heard the passion, and glanced to her breasts to see it in the fullness of the mounds and in the tightly aroused nubs. Her legs moved restlessly, telling him that she was wet for him. His hands would find the moisture of her passion coating the curly hair that guarded the gates of her paradise that he alone would conquer – but not today.
“This is not the Maclee swipe. This is a man who is afraid and asking you to wait.” His tone was as level as he could make it, but he couldn’t help that he panted between each word.
“Afraid? The hero who foolishly ran out into traffic knowing he faced sudden death. Afraid? Not likely. Why did you do it? You should not have risked so much for me. You could have died. You would have died without the faeries' assistance, which you couldn't have expected. You've ridden since you were a toddling child so you knew full well the risk you took. Why?”
There it was. The question. His Heather was bold but likely God in his wisdom knew that a faint lass would never do for him. Still, he hadn’t expected to face the verbal query and the physical query simultaneously. His currently scattered wits could not disguise what he felt for her now, so he better not try. She would see an attempt at evasion as a denial of the question she hadn’t voiced. Perhaps she would even see it as a second and more brutal betrayal and he would never do that to her again.
He sat straight up in the bed. He wanted to take her hand as he spoke but feared she would see that too as a physical evasion. This total honesty business was intimidating.
“Heather?” He extended his palm outward, asking that she place her hand in his.
"Nial, you're scaring me. I don't know what you're asking. I don't know what you want. Oh, I can tell what you appear to want but you can't mean what you're hinting. I won't believe you mean it. No, I won't. My girlhood dreams have no basis in reality. I'm grown up now and I know that. There is no Prince Charming. There are only frogs."
Frogs? She couldn't want to discuss amphibians now. This must be that female logic his married friends groaned about. He'd rather face a cohort of armed warriors barehanded. He couldn't muddle through her meaning. All he understood was that she was scared. That made two of them. He'd try again.
He held out his hand out once more, his eyes meeting hers until she chewed her lower lip and slowly placed her tiny hand in his. His fingers curled over it like they'd never let go. Then he decided to ease into answering the question about the past first. Get the pain over with.
“You know that I grew up under the dratted curse. If I don't find my fated mate and wed the wrong woman I will face a life of agony. You know some of the stories. For God’s sake, you know about my parent's marriage. Father's life was full of torment. The pain of not being wed to his Fia never left him and on his deathbed, her name was the last word he uttered. I like to think they are together now. After his fights and battles with my mother, he could surely use some peace and contentment in the hereafter. Yet I can’t blame Mother either, for she had to live her entire married life with another woman in her bed.”
Her eyes showed her sympathy, and she reached up her free hand to wipe the tiny dots of moisture that had escaped his control from the corners of his eyes as he spoke of what he had never voiced until today.
“So I knew first hand what I faced. After the fair, when circumstances, the clan elders and your father began pressuring me for a marriage with you,” her eyes closed. She looked away and would have gotten up from the bed. He could see her preparing to leave. “Nay, Heather. Please. Listen to all of it. Please.” He continued in a rush, knowing her tolerance might expire at any second. “I expected that you would be the test I had to resist to find my fate. In my blind and selfish way, I was so sure of that fact that I never looked at you. I never really saw you. I never looked even after I felt a connection with you I had not known before. I told myself it was friendship.”
She gave him a sad half-smile and tried to rise again. "I understand. I've heard much of how kind you are to the women you try to let down easily. We are friends. I said so just last night now, didn't I?"
He tugged her back down. “Nay, lass. You’re getting ahead of me again. Sweet,” he said, tilting her chin up to look deeply into her eyes, “the day they demanded a decision, I set up a scheme with Sorcha. We were to be kissing in the garden when you came for my answer. I thought that would scare away the girl with dreams in her eyes and let me keep the friend. But things went awry because I was tricked.”
He told her about the black widow and her eyes widened. “She just vanished in a puff of smoke?”
“Indeed. As I said, it was the faerie flag and the power she thought it represented that she craved all along.”
“Well you got what you wanted all the way round, then. We are friends and the dreams are gone from my eyes. They won’t trouble you again,” she snapped the words, her pain painted across her face.
This time when she turned to rise, he snatched her to his chest and held her in an iron grip borne of terror. She spoke aloud his greatest fear. “Damn it, sit down now,” he roared.
She started visibly. "Nial, none of this is like you. You are tranquility personified with females. You're never rude and I've not once heard you use profanity in the presence of a lady. Clearly, I've somehow provoked you, but I don't know what I did to upset you or to cause such a reaction. If you will just let me get up I swear I will go away. You can ge
t on with your search without me or my parents or the elders interfering."
He swallowed deeply. Well, he gulped really. He put up a hand to wipe the sweat now rolling down his face and the hand shook. Nial was nervous, she was certain of it. She had never seen him nervous over anything and if anyone in all of Skye had she would have heard the tale before now. Strangely, his nerves calmed her a bit and she waited.
“Heather, you asked why I would risk my life to save you. I did it because if I had not done so, I would have condemned myself to my father’s life, and I would have never known the joy my grandparents shared,” he said with his heart on his sleeve and his soul in his voice.
She shook her head no, stopped and nearly drowned in the eyes that shined with ....no, she shook her head harder.
He nodded yes. "Perhaps words are the wrong way to convince you."
He continued to nod yes to her no as he tightened his arms and drew her close. His mouth approached hers in the kiss he had sought all of his life. When his lips met hers at last, at long, long last, he felt a tug in his chest as his soul left his keeping. There was emptiness for a moment before he felt hers enter him. The kiss was tender and sweet but he could only keep the knot on his passion for moments before it slipped his control. He broke off the kiss when his craving for more became nearly irresistible.
He drew back and looked at her. Her golden eyes bore the first confused sparkling of desire, but doubt still colored her countenance. He knew that she didn’t assign his meaning to his words. She was his fate, but she must now learn that he was hers. She believed in the Maclee swipe, and that he would give it to her. He was a master of that particular game, but he never before played it for such high stakes. He lay back on the pillows and bent his elbows to place his arms behind his head. If she wanted to play, he would risk no motion that she could misinterpret.
The sparkle of a thousand sunrises was in her eyes. “I can play? I can even remove the covers?”
“One caution. Last night, when desire overtook me on the dance floor and I drew you to my groin you were shocked and delivered a sound slap that I doubtless deserved, though I will not pretend I enjoyed the experience. My staff is unusually large at rest and...”
She interrupted. “I’ve heard that you're hung like a horse.”
“I was trying to be delicate, minx. My point is that you were frightened and ran from me last night. I am currently much more aroused, and consequently much larger than I was then. If you continue, you must first promise that you will not run from me. If I shock you, just stop or cover me again. Promise?”
She nodded, her eyes never leaving the sheet. Then she grasped the edge and thrust it from him. He wore white trousers that had been tight and were now beyond indecent. The top of his sex rose above the trousers and was visible because she had bared his chest. When she didn’t touch him right away, his gaze flew to her in alarm to find her pink, panting for breath. She knelt on the bed, and rubbed her thighs together as a betraying spot of moisture appeared on the front of her gown. She was aroused, and he groaned with the knowledge that he couldn’t touch her because this was about proof. It was about allowing her touch, not indulging his need.
Her hand crept towards his throbbing erection, treating it like a python about to strike, which wasn’t far from the truth. Then it crept slower still and he realized that she awaited his swipe. With a sudden rush she closed the last wee distance. She skimmed his length, measuring with a shy feather stroke of her fingertips. He writhed from a mixture of intense pleasure at her touch and intense pain from clenching against the release battering him. She closed her fingers, tightening her grip, and he thrust against the pressure applied just where he needed it.
She stopped but did not withdraw her hand. She stared at him with a glowing, puzzled expression. The question puffed from her lips in separate pants that he heartily wished were expelled a little lower. “All of the women who touch you here get brushed aside. Nial, aren’t you going to swipe my hand away?”
He was silent for a moment and then just shook his head no.
“Why not?”
“Love, there is one particular set of hands I have awaited my entire life. Those hands I won’t swipe away.” His navy eyes were filled with tenderness and love as he made the statement, fully aware that she would not accept it yet.
“Nial, are you saying…” she trailed off. When she spoke again, a hard edge colored her tone. "No. I must be barmy. You almost had me. You're good. You're very good. But I won't fall for it. I know how that goes. I make the naive suggestion and then you score with a harsh taunt you tell all your friends about. I told you before, I've grown up. You're just another frog. A great big, full of himself toad frog."
Amphibians again? He shook his head to clear away the cobwebs and decided to try once more. Only this time, he'd say it straight out. He'd say it and put it out there, without leaving himself anything to fall back on. After all, if he fell, he'd be alone, a plummet without end.
“Heather, my love, I am saying that you are my fate. I can promise you that I am yours to touch in any way you choose, at any time you choose, and I will never ever swipe your hands away.” His gaze was steady, but hers was nervous and darting.
She didn’t accept the truth of his words. Only time and his actions would convince her ultimately, so he lay impatiently, hoping her hands would return to him. She slithered over on the bed and spread her hair across him, moving to trail the strands over the pulsing head of his staff, mumbling, "If my hair doesn't incite the swipe, nothing will."
When it didn't come, she swayed her brown rainbow back and forth across his jutting organ. "Why didn't that work?" She whispered, starting to pulling her hair away. Then he thrust up on his heels, seeking the ticklish torment. She laughed and replaced her hair with the tips of her fingers, brushing the opening at the end of his sex as she felt a responsive burst of hot moisture from her own. She wet a finger and traced the opening and at the first wet brush a pulse of ecstasy escaped his control. She caught it with her finger. "I did this to you? This pearly fluid is your passion in physical form, isn't it?" She looked directly into his eyes as she slowly raised the finger to her mouth and suckled, unaware of her own low moan of desire.
The act was so unexpected from his lovely little virgin that it carried him beyond the control he had been trying so hard to grasp. He groaned, “Ahh God, sweetheart. I need, Jesus, sweet, I need relief. I …”
As he spoke he thrust himself into her hands, asking without words, helpless against a demand that had become a necessity. All words left him as her hands returned, measuring and pressing and squeezing in untutored, untrained abandon. He couldn’t anticipate how or where she would touch, he could merely thank his creator that she touched at all. His pleasure blazed from his eyes just before it emerged from his manhood. She played in the liquid as it spurted, using it to trace her initials on his belly – a possessive act he would have tolerated from no other female on earth.
When he caught his breath, she still played at her tracing game. Then he sat up. “You can carve your name in my flesh if you wish. Or shall we brand me instead?” He reached for her. “Come here, love. I would taste you again.”
He took her lips tenderly but his tongue soon sought entry to her mouth and tenderness dissolved to raw passion as he felt himself stir again. He smiled against her mouth when she dug her nails into his shoulders as she bit his lower lip. Her tongue rose to duel with his and he was lowering her to the mattress when she halted his advances.
"I have to go. Da is expected this afternoon and we will dine at home as a family tonight."
She was restless and antsy. He knew what ailed her, but dared not test his control by giving her relief now. As it turned out, there wasn’t time, for a knock came, followed by his cousin’s voice at the door. She stood, delightfully rumpled, and he sprang up with her, yelling as he did, “Boz, you buffoon, bloody well shut up for a minute.”
He leaned against the door, hating to let in the outs
ide world.
She sighed regretfully. “I never got to see your, your… I only saw the top of it.”
At her boldness her face flamed red and he chuckled. He tilted her chin and caressed her face with his tongue, and just before his lips met hers again he said, “Perhaps we can remedy that tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Join me for a picnic at sunset love and I’ll take care of you as well,” he promised.
“Take care of me?” She inquired, playing with his chest hair and lightly scratching his pebbling nipples.
“You’re feeling a bit angry and cheated, aren’t you? Like I scaled a mountain to see the peak and left you behind. I’ll fix that tomorrow. If you’ll come,” he said, aware that his world hinged on her response.
“Does your promise about not swiping my hands away hold tomorrow too?” She asked, confirming that he was right, they had a long way to go before she could believe in him again.
“It holds for all the tomorrows there are, love. Can I pick you up at 3?” He pressed for a decision, a promise. He needed a commitment, even if only to another meeting.
She nodded yes, and smiled and was still smiling as he walked her downstairs. He wore no shirt, had stains on his white trousers that advertised what they had been doing, which is exactly what he smelled like. Her lips were swollen and clearly just kissed, her hair fell in wild disarray and her gown was wrinkled beyond repair. He walked her anyway, amazed that his feet actually met the floor and conscious that he wore a stupid grin he’d laughed at besotted friends for donning for years.
He was well aware that Boz missed nothing of their appearance, and he even knew that the bastard was barely biting back a hearty laugh as he opened the door and curried many glances from the passersby. None of the attention bothered him and if she had asked he would have gladly carried a banner proclaiming exactly what they just engaged in.
A Faerie Fated Forever Page 14