by Egan, Alexa
She blinked up into his almond-shaped eyes, surprised both at the joy she found in his arrival and the ease with which she’d overcome her initial discovery of it. She sported with a legend. Bedded a myth. Possessed her very own frog prince.
If only he could be saved by a mere kiss from his fair damsel’s lips.
She spooned into his furnace heat, his bare chest pressed against her back, his erect manhood nestled into her backside. “You’re home,” she whispered.
He pushed aside the heavy fall of her hair to nibble the sensitive spot behind her ear, his hand draping over her hip to lie beneath her breast. “Do you know how good that sounds?”
His lips burned a path down her neck to her spine, his hands caressing and kneading her breasts until her nipples stood puckered and jolts of electricity sizzled along her nerves. Rolling her over, he lowered his mouth to suck at her bottom lip before he kissed her, his tongue swirling and retreating in a teasing give-and-take that had her answering his kisses with her own.
She closed her eyes, swimming away on the bliss of Mac’s caresses, a smile lifting the corners of her mouth. It was only as a hand skimmed the inside of her thigh to nudge her legs apart that memories slashed like daggers into her consciousness. Her breath clogged her chest, cold splashing across her bare flesh, and arms that had been comforting were now confining.
Mac’s voice seemed to come to her from down a long tunnel. “Open your eyes, Bianca. Look at me.”
With reluctance, she did as she was told, seeing not Lawrence’s ruddy face and drink-dilated pupils but Mac’s familiar chiseled features, the slant of his dark brows, the aquiline nose with the bump on the bridge, the strong chin bearing a day’s stubble of beard. Yet the first wriggling notes of panic remained in the turning of her stomach and the instinctual need to escape the prison of his arms.
As if sensing this, Mac rolled away, though his eyes remained fixed on hers, the calming expression in the clear green-gold depths easing her humiliation.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, her voice raspy and choked with shame. “He lives inside me like a virus. His words. His anger.”
“Look at me, Bianca,” Mac said evenly. “Look at me, and we’ll go from there.”
She nodded. Pushing her hair back off her face, she lifted herself on an elbow, telling herself she was studying him as an artist might consider a composition. As if she would sketch him, she observed the way muscles connected to bone, how light and shadow emphasized the stark austerity of his war-hardened body. As her awkwardness dissipated, she focused on the individual scars and lingering bruises covering his torso.
As she grew bolder, she let her fingers follow the path of her gaze. He lay with his arms behind his head, a smile playing on his lips as she traced the ridge of his collarbone down over his chest, which rose and fell in quick breaths. For an instant their eyes locked and she faltered, uncertain of this new and titillating freedom.
“You’re safe with me, Bianca,” Mac said, his voice a deep rumbling beneath her palm. “You control what happens here now.”
She nodded, accepting his reassurance, and returned to her cautious yet thorough appraisal of his body. Her hands moved to his rippled abdomen, then finally his manhood, erect amid the bush of curling hair at his groin.
He closed his eyes as she explored the velvet softness of his skin, the hardness of his member. But as she let her fingers glide from root to tip, a gasp escaped his clamped lips.
A steady building pressure throbbed against her own center as she learned his body with her hands and mouth, the shape, the scent, the movement of his muscles, and the expressions chasing each other across his face. With each stroke, his breathing grew more ragged, his pulse leaping wildly at the base of his throat. Exhilaration raced like champagne within her blood as this strange new power thrilled and excited her. Bending above him, her hair fell like a golden curtain around her as she took him in her mouth.
Mac gasped, his hips jerking off the bed. The wet, throbbing heat between her legs increased until she felt both light as down and stone heavy with arousal.
Slinging a leg across his hips, Bianca leaned forward to capture Mac’s face in her hands. The rough stubble of his jaw rasped against her skin as she kissed him, a desperate craving scorching her blood. His tongue thrust deep as if he were making love to her mouth.
With a groan, she lowered herself onto him, her muscles stretching to take him completely. Another plunge, and she felt her urgency growing and spreading. No imprisoning arms held her captive, no chilling dread sat like a rock in the pit of her stomach. Just trembling spasms of building anticipation as the two of them caught and held a rhythm, the crush of their bodies causing her desire to coil tightly, release only a thrust away.
Mac’s hands grabbed and held her to him as he answered her thrust for thrust, his pace steadily pushing her closer to the point of no return.
With a moaning, she felt every nerve in her body explode, amazement bursting in her mind like fireworks. Even as aftershocks vibrated through her, each one ripping her into a thousand pieces, she felt Mac climax, his body coming off the bed as he spilled his seed, sticky and hot, inside her, finally reaching to drag her down against him, the sweat of his skin salty on her lips, the taste of his mouth as intoxicating as brandy.
She lay sated and relaxed upon him, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart beneath her ear, his arms encircling her loosely. He dropped a kiss on her forehead, another on the top of her head.
“Is it always like that?” she asked, eyes closed, body still humming with frissons of delicious pleasure.
“No, mi am’ryath,” was Mac’s drowsy answer. “This is something special.”
* * *
Despite a leg going numb and an itch on his left shoulder blade, Mac never moved as Bianca dozed in his arms, her hair spilling softly over his chest. Instead he reveled in the way she fit perfectly against him like a puzzle piece, in the girlish silken curls framing her ears, at the way she bit her lip as she slept, tense and on her guard even in her dreams.
He ran a hand idly up and down her ribs, his body slack with satisfaction and yet already stirring as she shifted provocatively against him.
“Oh, no,” she said when his hands crept north along her inner thigh. “If we don’t rise from bed now, we never shall.”
“I thought you were asleep.”
“No. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
She shrugged, her gaze elusive, her expression giving nothing away she did not wish him to see. “I’m thinking about food. Let’s go downstairs. I’ll help Marianne cook breakfast while you help Jory with the feeding of the animals.”
He nuzzled her neck as if he might imprint her scent upon his mind. “How completely domestic. Like an old married couple.”
A chance remark, but it had an instant chilling effect, as if someone had slid a knife blade between them. Then she smiled, and while the moment passed, the memory lingered, underscoring how fractured the ground they walked upon was every minute spent together. They wouldn’t speak of it, but they both felt reality closing in despite their attempts to hold it at bay.
She rolled to edge of the bed, standing to stretch her arms above her head, giving him a perfect view of her ripe, hourglass curves before she grabbed up a wrapper.
As she moved about the room, Mac lay back to watch, surrendering to the fantasy of a life in which hard decisions were unnecessary and Bianca never left his side.
The vision came as clear to him as the sunlight spilling over the chamber floor, turning her hair white-gold, her skin pink. A farm like this one where weeks turned into seasons and then into years in perfect tranquillity: a warm, lighted kitchen to come home to, bodies twined together within a feather-soft bed at night, children banging up and down the passages in a joyful noise.
His gaze fell to the taut, creamy satin of her stomach.
Would they be dark like him or inherit the golden curls of their mother? Green-eyed o
r blue? Right-handed or left? He caught back a breath as this morning’s daydreams jogged loose last night’s revelation.
Would they be Imnada or human?
For that question, he already had an answer, although it turned all he thought he knew on its head. But then, what belief of his hadn’t been shaken to the core over the last weeks? If someone approached him claiming to be the goddess moon personified, he would not bat an eye.
“Mac?” Bianca turned from bundling her hair up in a twist of pins and combs. “Is something wrong?”
“Jamie’s Imnada.”
Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed before clearing in dawning comprehension. “That makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Last night I thought Jory and Marianne were concerned he’d gone to drink with his chums or to set a few traps on the squire’s lands, but if he was . . . out there . . . no wonder they worried.”
Mac pushed himself up against the headboard, rubbing a hand over his chin as he thought. “But how? Jamie Wallace is a half-breed. Part human. Unmarked. According to the teachings, he shouldn’t be able to shift. Hell, he shouldn’t even exist.”
Bianca threw him a swift glance, her eyes dancing with amusement. “Just what every adolescent wishes to hear. Will you tell him he’s a freak or shall I?”
Mac’s mouth hardened into a straight line, his brain afire with this new twist. “I’ll say naught to Jamie, but I’ve got some questions for his father.”
Reluctantly, he rose from the warmth of their shared bed to bend over the washbasin, splashing water on his face. Yet, it wasn’t the sudden cold that sent a shiver up his spine but the brush of fingers across his upper back.
“Does it ever pain you?” Bianca asked softly.
He looked over his shoulder, only able to see the very edge of the scar, the flesh stretched and ugly. “Seldom now, though for weeks after I thought I might die. Months more that I wished to.”
“Was it the war? Waterloo? I heard the fighting was fierce there and the casualties tremendous.”
“Its origins lay on the battlefield, but no. The Ossine removed my clan mark as part of my exile.”
“They burned it off you?”
“It is the law.” Mac closed his eyes and saw the cold-eyed emotionless stares of the enforcers as they approached where he stood shackled within the Gather’s circle. He recalled his futile struggles against the silver chains pinning him down and the stink of his flesh, the pain like being thrust into a furnace as the visible symbol of his belonging was charred away. Only the stripping away of his signum, the mental bonds connecting him to the clans, had been more traumatic. “Burning is the only way to obliterate the mark completely. The fortunate ones die from their wounds within days.”
A small, hard gasp escaped her lips, her fingers dropping away. “That’s barbaric. Inhuman.”
He turned to cup her face, using his thumb to trace the rounded curve of her cheek. “But we’re not human, mi am’ryath. Not completely.”
Her eyes flickered and she would have drawn away, but Mac caught her wrist. “We don’t just wear the skins of animals, Bianca. We possess their spirits, their very souls.” He felt her breath against his chest, smelled the citrus spice of her skin, knew when her tension eased into something different. Something he began to cherish despite himself. “We will destroy any threat to our survival without a qualm. But we will also fight to the death to protect those we love.”
* * *
Jory’s eyes, dark and angry as storm clouds, met Mac’s. “They’ve lied to us for countless ages, Flannery. We aren’t forced to marry within the clans or risk extinction. My children inherited my gifts along with my blood. And yet, they’ll never bear a clan mark nor be entered into the Ossine’s scrolls. They’ll forever be considered rogue. A target for any zealous enforcer.”
Rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, Mac paced off the perimeter of the stillroom. “Why would the Gather do that? Why, when our numbers are dwindling, would they cut off our chance to grow strong again?”
“Who can say? All I know is my son becomes more bitter and reckless with every passing year. I’ve been able to control him so far, but the day is coming when he’ll force a confrontation with the Imnada. I know it. Marianne knows it. It’s our greatest fear.”
“That’s why you sent the rebel clansman from your holding away. That’s why Marianne nearly took my head off with her cleaver.”
Jory gave a tired shrug. “Perhaps I did wrong by encouraging the children. Recounting the legends and schooling them in the laws and teachings. Perhaps it was my way of holding on to what I’d lost. Of making sure I didn’t forget.”
“You couldn’t know where it would lead.”
“No, but it’s raised the younglings with a false hope. Jamie resents this exile. He views the Gather elders and the Ossine as his enemies. The rebels seek to take advantage of that and recruit him to their side, but I refuse to allow my son to be caught up in a war that isn’t his.”
Mac slid into a chair. “Yet, if he carries your blood and your powers, he should be recognized. Given the mark and brought into the clan. It is his war.”
“A war that can’t be won.”
“Jory, listen—”
“No. You listen, Mac. I’ve told you about the younglings’ powers. That’s where I end it. You can stay until St. Leger contacts you, and I’ll help with Adam’s journal, but don’t push my hospitality or my patience.”
“If that’s your wish.”
“It’s my order, and you’re a soldier,” Jory answered. “You should know how to take orders.”
“I’m very good at taking orders.” Mac smiled. “But I’m even better at waging war.”
* * *
He’d known he shouldn’t be there even as he’d cast off his clothes and fallen into bed beside her. His brain whirred with the reasons the two of them were a very bad idea. And yet, after a day spent studying Adam’s journal, he’d needed the comfort of her body and the reassurance of her quiet words.
He’d found both.
Now, she lay enticingly in his arms, her scent in every ragged breath he took. He glanced at the clock, though it was unnecessary. He knew what time it was. His body burned with it.
He brushed aside her hair to lay a kiss behind her ear, drawing in a last lungful of the sweet citrus smell of her skin before he rolled out of bed.
“Mac?” she said, still half-asleep as her hand smoothed over the depression in the bed where he’d just been.
“I have to go.”
She stretched, every sensual curve and dimpled hollow a source of torturous arousal. Thank the Mother of All for the chill of the bedchamber. At least he wouldn’t completely embarrass himself.
“Stay. Your secret is mine,” she said. “You’ve nothing to hide anymore.”
“Don’t I?” He pulled on his breeches and dragged a shirt over his head, feeling the sun drop in the sky with every beat of his heart. “To shift in freedom is a gift and a joy. To be forced to assume my aspect is best done in solitude. I don’t want you to see me like that, Bianca.”
“Mac—”
“Not now. Not ever.” The sun edged behind the trees, the light gray and flat, the temperature dropping. He pulled on his boots. “This is my life, Bianca. This is how it must be.”
“I hate what the curse has done to you.”
He leaned over to offer her one last kiss. “So do I.”
* * *
The household settled for the night, Bianca lay in bed awake and listening, every sense tuned to the world beyond the walls of her bedchamber.
Would it always be like this if she stayed with Mac? Every night lived alone in neck-tightening suspense. Every day a constant counting of hours until the curse took hold once more. A life severed in two, with both halves blighted by dark magic.
There would be nothing for the two of them as long as the curse held sway. He had not said as much, but it was there in the sorrow caught within his eyes, in th
e gentle distance he maintained between them despite their passion.
If only he would agree to let her travel to London for assistance from her contacts there. Among the botanists, herbalists, and apothecaries, surely one of them would be able to help. Mac worried about her safety, but what other option did they have?
Dratted, irritating, stubborn man. After all that had happened, did he still believe her incapable of taking care of herself?
She rolled over, punching her pillow into shape, and froze, heart in her throat.
Had she just heard a gunshot?
She strained to listen over the drumming of her heart.
There it was again, distant but unmistakable. Was it Squire Fruddy’s gamekeeper after poachers? Or did they hunt larger, more otherworldly game?
She sprang out of bed, wrapping a dressing gown around her against the chill. Peeled back the curtain to stare out into the night, casting prayers to any deity who would listen.
Please, don’t let it be Mac. Please let him be safe. Please let him come home.
Nothing moved, not even a breeze to stir the distant line of trees. She opened the casement a crack. A blast of cold air hit her face, chilling the sweat that lay clammy over her back. She waited, each minute ticked off in deep, steady breaths. She paced the perimeter of her rug. Counted to one hundred. Then did it again.
Finally, she latched the window and let the curtain drop. Another few minutes and she lay back down in bed to stare at the ceiling.
But the fear didn’t leave her.
As long as the curse remained, it never would.
Could she live with that?
Would Mac give her the choice?
16
The sun gilded the tops of the trees and threw long finger-like shadows out over the meadow as Mac and Bianca walked the autumn woods, enjoying the last moments alone before night and the curse parted them. Already his skin prickled, darkness crowding his vision as his tendons knotted and muscles burned. Pausing to catch his stolen breath, he squeezed his eyes shut and clamped his jaw tightly. “Bloody hell.”