“Oh,” she breathed as he unbound her hair and let it tumble free down her shoulders.
“Why did you bind it?” He combed his fingers through her heavy mane.
“That potion was terrible. Even my own hair rubbing against my skin was too much to bear.”
“ ’Tis too much for me to bear, this mane of yours,” Hawk said, playing it gently through his fingers. His eyes turned hooded, darkly heavy with sensual promise. “You have no idea how often I imagined the feel of this silvery-gold fire spread across my shaft, lass.”
Desire enveloped Adrienne as she pondered the image his words conjured.
He backed her slowly toward the bed, encouraged by the haze of desire in her wide eyes.
“The thought interests you, lass?” he purred smugly.
She swallowed hard.
“You have only to tell me, whisper to me what pleases you. I will give you it all.”
She gathered her courage. “Then kiss me, husband. Kiss me here … and here … oooh!” He obeyed so quickly. His lips were hot, silky and demanding. “And here …” She lost her voice completely when he slid her gown from her body and tumbled her to the bed beneath him.
“I want to pull the drapes around this bed and keep you in here for a year,” he mumbled against the smooth skin of her breast.
“ ’S’ all right, with me,” she mumbled in response.
“Aren’t you supposed to be fighting me, lass?” Hawk drew back and studied her intently.
“Um …”
“Yes, do go on,” he encouraged. He knew his eyes must be dancing with joy. He knew he must have an absolutely absurd expression on his face right now. Was it possible? The taming had begun and was working?
“Just touch me.” She wrinkled her brow. “Don’t ask me so many questions about it!”
He rumbled with soft laughter and promise of infinite passion. “Oh, I’ll touch you, lass.”
“Too deep. You’re in too far.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’ve given it thought, fool. We must end this. Queen Aoibheal is on to us. Even your time by her side has not allayed her suspicions. I, for one, do not wish to suffer the consequences of her wrath. The woman is simply going to have to return to her time.”
King Finnbheara waved his hand.
And the Hawk collapsed onto the bed. Stunned, he looked around the empty room.
Adrienne fell to the floor of her modern kitchen with a thud.
“Did you see what I saw?” King Finnbheara gasped.
Adam was stunned. “She was nude. He was panting. She was—oh shit!”
The King nodded emphatically as they both gestured. “She stays.”
It was one of the golden rules. Some things could never be interrupted.
“You really are from the future, aren’t you?” Hawk whispered hoarsely, when Adrienne reappeared scant moments later, a few feet away from him on the bed. While Adrienne had been drinking in his study, Lydia had told him of the disappearance in the garden. The Hawk had tried to convince himself that Lydia was mistaken, but his guards had confirmed that they’d watched his wife disappear and reappear several times in quick succession.
So, she could still return to her own time, even without the chess piece. The black queen is not what she seems. The seer had spoken true.
Adrienne nodded, still dazed by her abrupt transfer through time. “And I can’t control it! I don’t know when it’s going to happen again!” Her fingers flexed convulsively on the woolen coverlet as if a tight grip might prevent her from being taken again.
“By the saints,” he breathed slowly. “The future. Another time. A time which hasn’t happened yet.”
They stared at each other, dumbstruck, for a prolonged moment. His raven eyes were deep with shadows, the beautiful golden flecks extinguished completely.
Suddenly Adrienne realized all too clearly that she never wanted to go back to the twentieth century. She didn’t want to be without him for the rest of her life! Desperation curled cold fingers around her heart.
It was already too late. How she loved him! The abruptness with which she had been reminded that she had no control over how much longer she could stay; the knowledge that she might be shuttled back, never to return; the fact that she had no idea how, or if, she could come again by herself terrified her.
To be consigned, no, condemned, back to that cold and empty twentieth-century world, knowing that the man she would love for eternity had died almost five hundred years before she’d even been born, oh dear God, anything but that.
Awestruck by her realizations, she gazed at him, her lips parted, openly vulnerable.
Hawk sensed the change in her; some kind of wordless admission had just occurred in that part of Adrienne he’d been trying to reach for so long. She was gazing at him with the same unfettered expression he’d seen that night on the cliffs of Dalkeith when she’d wished on a star.
It was all Hawk needed to see. He was on her in an instant. His awareness that she could be ripped from him at any moment made time infinitely precious. The present was all they had, and there were no guarantees for tomorrow.
He claimed her body, raining down upon her a storm of unleashed passion. He kissed and tasted, desperate with fear that any instant her lips might be torn from his. Adrienne kissed him back with complete abandon. Heat flared between them as it should have, as it would have from the very beginning had she permitted herself to dare to believe such passion, such love was possible.
Falling back on the bed, she melted beneath him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his hungry head closer.
“Love me … oh, love me,” she whispered.
“Always,” he promised into her wide-open eyes. He cupped her breasts and lavished them with kisses, savoring how wildly she responded to him. This time was different. She was really seeing him, Sidheach, not some other man she’d had before, and hope exploded in his heart. Was she coming to crave him as he did her? Could it be his wife was developing a hunger for him that matched his own appetite?
“Oh, please …” Her head arched back against the pillows. “Please …” she breathed.
“Do you want me, Adrienne?”
“Yes. With every ounce of my body …” and soul she was going to add, but he claimed her mouth with deep, hot kisses.
She wanted him, eyes open and seeing him. He could tell, this time it was real.
When her hand closed around his engorged phallus, a groan ripped from his throat.
“I saw you, you know,” she whispered, her eyes dilated and dark with passion. “In the Green Lady’s room. You were lying flat on your back.”
He stared at her in mute fascination, the muscles in his neck working furiously as he struggled to say something intelligible, anything, but only a husky purr came out as her hand tightened on him. So, she had watched him too? As he had spied on her every chance he got?
“You were lying there in your sleep like some Viking god, and that’s the first time I saw this.” She squeezed her hand gently for emphasis. He growled. Emboldened by his response, Adrienne pushed him back and scattered kisses across his sculpted chest. She ran her hungry tongue down over his abdomen, tasting each defined ripple in turn. She explored his powerful thighs and throbbing manhood, pausing to drop a tantalizing kiss on the velvety pink tip of the shaft a stallion would have envied.
“Did you find it passing … fair?” he croaked, “what you saw then, and see now?”
“Ummm …” She pretended to ponder his question, then licked a long, velvety stroke up his shaft from base to tip. “It’ll do in a pinch.”
He tossed his dark head back with a smile and roared. “A pinch … a pinch? I’ll show you …” His words trailed off as he pulled her roughly into his embrace. His mouth claimed hers and he rolled her onto her back.
Too late to pull back or worry about seed or children, far beyond rational thought of any kind, and adrift in a musky madness named Adrienne, the siren w
itch who owned him, he slid between her legs and positioned himself above her.
Just before he ceded to her beckoning heat, he said, “I have always loved you, lass.” Quietly and regally.
Tears shimmered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. He touched a glistening drop with his finger and marveled for a moment at how good it felt to have her accept him at last. Then, past waiting, he plunged into her. More tears misted her eyes at the sudden pain. Above her, barely in her, the Hawk clenched his jaw and froze. He stared down at her a speechless moment, stunned and awed.
“Please,” she urged. “Don’t stop now. Please, I want this.”
“Adrienne,” he breathed, his face dark. “Virgin,” he muttered dumbly. Ebony eyes held her gaze a breathless moment as his body lay rigid atop hers.
Then she felt an involuntary jerk rage through him and he pushed past the barrier, ripping into her with barbaric intensity. “Mine,” he swore roughly, his black eyes flashing. “Only mine. First… best… and last.” His beautiful head arched back, and she buried her hands deep in his hair. Again she felt that involuntary shudder that rocked him from head to toe.
There was momentary pain, but waves of heat quickly replaced it and the stars called her name, beckoning her to come fly. This time it was even more intense, calling from deep inside her where his hot shaft filled her all the way. An instinctive voice told her how to move, how to gain her pleasure and assure his in the same breath.
“Don’t… move,” he gritted against her ear, struggling to not spill the moment her sleek tightness encased him. He was beyond aroused, driven nearly insane by passion coupled with the knowledge that the smithy had never been where he was now. Not even the legendary Ever-hard, whoever he was. He was her first man, her first and only lover.
“I can’t help it… feels too … oh! … Delicious!” Her hands caressed his back, then her nails lightly scored the bronzed skin of his shoulders as he rocked her slowly beneath him.
“Stop moving, lass!”
“I thought I was supposed to move … too,” she mumbled, very nearly incoherently. “Please …”
“Be still. I would teach you slow first. Then the next time will be for the wild, rough love.”
“Wild, rough love now,” she demanded quite clearly, and it broke the tether that had been holding him so tautly in check. He raised her legs and drove into her, pushing the worry of her virgin sensitivity from what little of his mind remained. He came into her the way he’d wanted to from the very first moment he’d seen her—rough and claiming. Hard and demanding, with possession. Hungry and almost brutal, branding her his.
Adrienne spiraled beneath him, the tips of her fingers trailing against the stars as she fragmented into a thousand shimmering pinpoints. She felt him stiffen, then pulse heavily inside her. They exploded together in perfect rhythm, perfect harmony.
Hawk lay breathing harshly atop her for a long time while she contentedly petted her husband. His silky hair had come free from its thong. She traced the soft skin of his solid, muscled back. Beautiful man, she mused, and the thought no longer carried any taint of fear. She stroked his hair in silence, marveling at her life and how rich it was with him in it.
It was in silence that at last he raised himself from her and went to stand by the window, staring out into the night of Uster.
“Och, lass, what have I done?” he whispered to the glass pane.
Silence from behind him. Adrienne’s eyes moved lovingly over every inch of her man.
“I judged thee inconstant and shrewish. I judged thee, sweet falcon, to be the worst of faithless vipers. My dark imaginings feathering in my heart with spiky wing. And I could not have been more wrong.”
Still silence. He didn’t know that behind him his wife had a tender smile curving her lips.
“Lass from future’s distant short, you were dumped into a man’s lap, wed to me sight unseen and have lived through hells of your own before ever coming to me. I have only given you one more hell to add to it. Full of my—och, wife, what have I done? Oh God, what have I done to you?”
“You loved me.”
It wasn’t a question, but he answered it readily. “I do. More than life. My heart. I didn’t just pick a sweet turn of phrase to name you, but spoke from my soul when I named you thus. Without my heart I couldn’t live. And I couldn’t breathe without you.”
“Are you a man who has more than one heart?”
“Nay. Only this one. But it’s bitter and dark now from the pain I’ve brought you.”
He stared out the window into the bottomless night. Virgin blood on his shaft. Virgin tears on his hands. Virgin wife who’d never lain with Adam, and in all her years, with no man. A trembling gift she’d had to give and he’d forced it from her with his own dark passion.
“Sidheach.” The word was a steamy caress from her lips.
It must have been a figment of his imagination. Hawk thought he would suffer his life long the torture of waiting in vain for a word he knew he would never hear tumble forth from her lips. “I have so abused you, my heart. I will atone, I swear to you, I will find a way—”
“Sidheach.” He felt her hands on his sides, her arms slipping around him from behind. She couldn’t keep the truth from him any longer. She had to tell him, had to have whatever time the fickle gods would allow them to enjoy. She rested her cheek lovingly against his back, and felt a shudder steal through his powerful frame.
“Do I dream a twisted dream?” he whispered hoarsely.
“I love you, Sidheach.”
He whirled about to face her, his eyes dark and shuttered. “Look at me and say that!” he thundered.
Adrienne cupped his darkly beautiful face in her hands. “I love you, Sidheach, flesh-and-blood husband. ’Tis the only reason I was ever able to hate you so well.”
A shout of joy burst from his lips, but his eyes were still disbelieving.
“I’ve loved you since that night by the sea. And hated you harder for every minute of it.”
“But the king’s whore—”
“Say no more. I’m a selfish woman. Adrienne’s husband is who you are now. No one else. But I thank the good king for so perfecting your skills,” she teased saucily. Some things were better left to heal, unpicked at. And it didn’t threaten her anymore, because she understood that it was the noble, chivalrous part in him that had forced him to do whatever he’d had to do to protect those he loved. Although neither he nor Lydia had told her much, she’d been able to figure out a few things for herself.
He laughed at her audacity, then sobered quickly.
“I must wed you again. I want the vows. Between us, not some proxy.” Was it magic that had tossed her through time? When she’d disappeared right out of his arms, he’d finally accepted it, that his wife had come to him from time’s distant shores, and what could that be except magic? A magic he could not control.
But what if they could make some wee magic of their own? There were legends that wedding vows taken within the circle of the Samhain fires, on that powerful eve before the feast of the Blessed Dead, were binding beyond human understanding. What if they made their wedding vows, pledged before the mystical Rom, on such a sacred night? Could he bind his wife to him across any boundaries of time? He would try anything.
“Aye,” she breathed with delight, “make it so.”
“I’m only sorry I missed it to begin with. And had I known that it was you waiting for me at the Comyn keep I would have come myself, my heart. On the very first day of the troth.”
But his eyes were still troubled and she raised a hand to brush the shadows away. He caught it and placed a kiss tenderly in her palm, then closed her fingers over it.
“Do you trust me, lass?” he asked softly.
Trust. Such a fragile, tenuous, exquisitely precious thing.
The Hawk watched her, the emotions flashing across her expressive face, wonderfully open to him now. He knew she was thinking of those black times of which she’d never spoken. On
e day she would confide in him all her most private thoughts and fears, and she would come to understand that no matter what had happened in her past, it could never change his feelings for her.
Adrienne gazed lovingly at the man who’d taught her how to trust again. The man she’d lost her heart to hopelessly and helplessly. This man who liberally dripped honor, valor, compassion, and chivalry. Neither her past nor his had any relevance to love such as theirs. “Trust you, Sidheach? With all my heart and further then.”
His smile was blinding. “Adrienne …”
“My lord?” her voice was soft and warm and carefree as a girl’s.
When he took her in his arms, she shivered with desire. “My lord!”
Adrienne didn’t see that above her head his eyes grew dark. How was he going to protect her? How could he assure her safety? How quickly could he get to Adam and find what was going on? Because no matter what winding corridors his mind wandered trying to unravel the strange happenings that involved his wife, they all seemed to come circling back to a grinding halt directly in front of that damned smithy. And it wasn’t mere jealousy, although the Hawk would readily admit to an abiding dislike for the man.
It wasn’t the black queen that had brought Adrienne to him, or so cruelly ripped her from him. That was a fact.
So what was it?
Someone or something else had that power. The power to destroy the laird of Dalkeith with one blow—by taking his cherished wife away from him. What game, what terrible, twisted amusement was being played out upon Dalkeith’s shore? What power had taken an interest and why?
I came here to hate you, Hawk. But I did not come here to hate the woman you claim as wife. Adam’s words echoed in his mind, and he began to see just the vague outline of a carefully plotted revenge. But that would mean Adam Black had powers the Hawk had never quite believed existed. Bits and pieces of Rom stories he’d heard as a lad resurfaced in his whirring mind, raising questions and doubts. Stories about Druids and Picts and, aye, even the nefarious and mischievous Fairy. Lydia had always said that any legend was based in some part on fact, the mythical elements being merely the inexplicable but not necessarily untrue.
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