Gallowglass

by Jennifer Allis Provost

  “As ye wish.” He disappeared into the common room; from the rattling, I understood that he was checking the locks one last time. Then he was in the bedroom with me, softly closing the door behind him.

  He approached the bed and stood over me for a moment, then he bent to kiss my forehead. I closed my eyes, memorizing the feel of his lips against my skin. With that, I got under the covers and turned toward the wall. I felt the mattress dip under Robert’s weight, the warmth of his body, and was grateful that he was lying between me and anything that could hurt us.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Karina

  It was still dark when I woke, but the moonlight streaming through the window told me that the rain hadn’t started up again. No rain was good, since it meant that the fuath, water demons that they were, were denied a rather convenient means of transport.

  As my eyes adjusted to the soft light I realized I was staring at the bedroom door, which meant I was lying on the outside edge of the bed. That was more than a bit strange, since I was positive that I’d taken the side next to the wall, and that Robert had laid down between me and the door. In the midst of wondering when Robert had left I realized that his arm was wrapped around my waist.

  I almost laughed aloud, practically giddy with the knowledge that he hadn’t left me. I pressed back against him, soaking up his warmth, pretending that we were a perfectly normal couple, in bed together for perfectly normal reasons, not because we were marshaling our defenses against a jilted fairy queen.

  A cloud floated across the moon, plunging the room into pitch blackness. Figuring that was as good a time as any, I rolled onto my back and looked at Robert sleeping on his side, the preacher I’d made out with under a bridge, and then invited to my bed. Even though he had never been celibate like a priest, I couldn’t help the guilt that fluttered in my belly. As I traced his strong jaw, I was overtaken with a different sort of flutter.

  I tried to keep my touch light, but his eyes opened anyway. After he’d blinked a few times, I asked, “How did we switch sides?”

  Robert propped himself up on his elbow, and gazed down at me. “Ye did a fair bit o’ thrashin’ about.” He smoothed the hair back from my forehead. “Bad dreams, was it?”

  “If it was, I don’t remember them,” I replied.

  “Just as well,” he murmured. The moon picked that moment to come out from behind the clouds, filling the room with light and making it nearly as bright as day. Robert’s eyes widened and his jaw tensed; I followed his gaze, and saw that the intense moonlight had made my thin sweater all but transparent. And I wasn’t wearing anything underneath my sweater.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, yanking the blanket up to my chin. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Do no’ fash,” Robert murmured, tracing the contour of my jaw, and then my neck. “Ye are lovely to look at, Karina.”

  My cheeks heated, and I hoped that Robert couldn’t see my blush in the moonlight; when he grazed his thumb across my cheek, I knew I’d failed. Since I was already red-faced, I decided to add in some daring. “You should take off your shirt.”

  “Why is that, pray tell?”

  “We’ll, um, be even that way.”

  Robert’s eyes glinted and his mouth twitched. “Fairness is a virtue,” he said, then he sat up on his knees and pulled his shirt over his head. I almost gasped at what he revealed, all smooth golden skin and rippling muscles. Who would have thought that a man of God would have such a sinfully beautiful body?

  Robert tossed his shirt onto the floor, then he pulled the blanket off of me and swung his leg over my waist, straddling my hips. He gave me a good, long look, and asked, “Pleased?”

  “Yeah.” I raised myself up on my elbows, and looked him in the eye. “I like… fairness.”

  He smiled, then he leaned forward and captured my lips with his. When we’d kissed beneath the bridge we’d been ravenous for each other, but this time was different. Now, Robert was kissing me like a man who came from a time before television, before the Internet and a thousand meaningless distractions. He came from a time when the best way to spend your evening was making love.

  Robert kissed a path from my lips to my jaw, then he worked his way lower, pausing to nuzzle my neck. He kissed my breast through the sheer weave of my sweater, his calloused hand kneading the other. I moaned, but when I tried to return his favors he grabbed both my hands in one of his and pinned them above my head. I swore, desperate to touch him, wrap a leg around him, anything, but he only laughed.

  “Let me touch you,” I said, struggling beneath him.

  “Love, I ha’ been waiting to touch you for so long,” he murmured, pressing a kiss between my breasts. “To sleep so close to you, yet so far apart, was worse than any torture visited upon me in Elphame. Please, just this one time, let me.”

  “And next time?”

  Robert’s laugh rippled across my skin, the sound arousing me as much as his hands. “If ye are so concerned about when next I love ye, I must no’ be doing such a good job now.”

  He kissed me before I could protest, and laughed into my mouth when I bucked my hips against his. Once he was sure I’d stay silent, he resumed his journey down my body. Robert’s lips meandered from my breasts to my belly, then he pushed up the hem of my sweater and took his sweet, delicious time acquainting himself with my navel. He paused when he reached the edge of my yoga pants.

  “Strings?” he murmured. “Why have ye black strings about your waist?”

  I looked down, and saw him tracing the side strap of my lacy string bikini. Not only had I packed such an impractical garment for a research trip to Scotland, I’d purposefully donned it earlier that evening. “That’s the side of my underwear.”

  “Under wear?” Robert’s rich brogue made it sound like oondahrr weahrr.

  “You know, what you put on before your pants. I got you a package at Hamilton’s.” God, were we really having this conversation?

  “Ye mean those wee trews that came folded up like a trio o’ handkerchiefs?”

  “Yeah.”

  Robert chuckled. “I have no worn them but once. They were chafing me where I do no care to be chafed.”

  “Oh.” My gaze moved lower, and stopped on the bulge below his waistband. I shivered, achingly aware there was only a thin layer of cotton keeping him from me.

  His fingers slipped under the waistband of my yoga pants, tracing the top edge of my panties. “Perhaps I am just needin’ to observe how this under wear is meant to be worn,” he murmured, tugging the stretchy black fabric down and over my hips, inching backward until he was standing at the foot of the bed. Once the pants were off, and he saw the scrap of black lace I was wearing, he stripped out of his sweats and returned to my side of the bed, looming over me like some sort of erotic god, all golden skin and blue, blue eyes.

  “Karina, love,” he murmured, “tell me you will ha’ me.”

  I rose up on my knees, and pulled my sweater up and over my head. “Robert, love, I will have you.”

  He kissed me hard, placing a knee on either side of mine and backing me down the bed until his body covered mine. Robert kissed my cheeks, my eyes, my mouth, then his lips traveled from my mouth down to my navel and then back to my jaw. My panties disappeared, and I was finally able to hook a leg around Robert’s hips, eager to have as much skin to skin contact with him as possible. I gasped when he slipped a finger inside me, and whimpered at the second.

  “Are ye maiden, love?” Robert asked, his voice thick.

  “No. Is that bad?”

  “No’ at all,” he murmured, trailing his lips across my neck. “I do no’ wish to hurt you, ‘tis all.”

  I shifted my hips; based on the weight pressed against my thigh, I seriously doubted that this would be pain free. “I don’t think you’d ever hurt me.”

  “Aye, I’d die e’re I let ye come to harm.”

  He withdrew his fingers and replaced them with his heavy, hot erection, slowly, gently stretching me. When he w
as fully inside me he paused, his forehead pressed against mine, and kissed me softly. “Love,” he murmured against my lips, “Karina, me love.”

  Instead of replying I kissed him back, long and demanding. He answered by withdrawing ever so slowly, then thrusting into me, faster and faster until I forgot my name. I gripped his shoulders, my nails digging into his skin, and saw stars exploding behind my eyes. The last thing I remembered was Robert, whispering in my ear and holding me as if I was cherished.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Karina

  The next morning dawned bright and glorious and perfect, my opinion of the day owing no small part to the man in my bed. Making love with Robert had been amazing, trashy bodice ripper paperback romance amazing, and I was almost able to forget about Nicnevin and the killer seal pups and the rest of the monsters. Almost.

  Still, we had escaped from all of them so far, and I’d been with Robert, and… and the morning was just good, you know? After Robert had woken me in the most delightful way possible, I suggested that we bathe. I soon learned that sharing a bathroom with a man from the seventeenth century was somewhere between hilarious and annoying.

  “I have been meanin’ to ask ye, love, why do ye require so many kinds o’ soaps?” Robert asked, staring bewildered at all the tiny bottles arrayed next to the sink.

  “They’re not all soap,” I said, peeking around him; it was a rather small bathroom, and it definitely hadn’t been built for two. “That one’s conditioner, which is for after shampoo.”

  “Shampoo?”

  “Shampoo is soap for hair,” I explained.

  “Your hair requires its own soap?”

  “And that one’s hair gel,” I continued, ignoring his last question, “and that one—”

  “Is something else to make me bonnie lass even more beautiful,” he finished. “Really, love, with all these potions ye apply on and about your person, I am beginnin’ to wonder what ye really look like.”

  “Careful, or I’ll stop using them.” I mimed claws and crossed my eyes. “Then you’ll be stuck with another wee beastie.”

  Robert laughed, a deep rumble that was fast becoming my favorite sound in the world. “Wee ye are, but beastly ye shall ne’er be.”

  It was an unusual compliment, but we were an unusual couple. I turned on the shower, and waited for it to get steamy. Robert eyed the spray warily, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. Probably because the cottage was a rental, the bathroom hadn’t been updated for decades, and the combination of Pepto pink tile and metallic floral wallpaper was enough to give anyone the creeps. Despite the lackluster décor, the water pressure was at least ten times stronger than what was delivered by the elderly pipes in my apartment back in Queens.

  “Love, ye have no plugged the drain,” Robert said as he reached toward the stopper, but I caught his hand.

  “We don’t need a plug,” I said as I stepped into the tub. “This is what we modern folks call a shower.”

  “Ye intend to bathe standing up?” Robert stared at the showerhead, intrigued.

  “Yes. And you’re going to stand up with me.” I tugged Robert’s hand, and once he was in the tub I pulled the pink plastic curtain closed and positioned him directly below the showerhead. At first he looked a bit scandalized, then he rolled his shoulders and shook his head like a dog.

  “’Tis warm.” He looked down at me, and grinned. “’Tis nice.”

  “Told you.” I nudged him out of the way, and got my own hair wet. “Can you hand me the shampoo?”

  “Which bottle was that one, now?”

  “The one that says shampoo.”

  That remark earned me a gentle slap on the rear, but he grabbed the correct bottle. That led me to re-explaining that yes, shampoo really was a soap designed only for use on one’s hair, and a subsequent demonstration with Robert as the test subject. Robert insisted that he wash my hair next; he was something of a hands-on sort of guy.

  “You are in incredible shape,” I murmured as we rinsed our hair, me tracing the puffy white suds as they slid across his shoulders and down his chest. I wondered if the term ‘chiseled abs’ had originated with gallowglasses. I never thought men really looked like that without airbrushing. “These muscles are all…muscle-y.”

  “Swingin’ a claymore for three centuries will do odd things to one’s form,” Robert said, as he massaged conditioner into my hair. I never knew that the scalp was an erogenous zone, but holy crap was it ever. “All me life, I only wished for the soft, white hands of a scholar, not anything close to this warrior’s form.”

  I looked at my own hands, and how my years of gathering rocks and fossils had left me with ragged nails and rough, calloused palms. “I suppose I’m a scholar, but I don’t think I’ll ever have hands like that.”

  Robert plunked a kiss on my forehead. “’Tis one o’ the many reasons why we’re a match.”

  I leaned my forehead against his chest, enjoying his hands in my hair, the warm water cascading down my back. All too soon, he backed me underneath the spray and rinsed my hair.

  “About your collar,” I began, as I reached for the body wash. “It really doesn’t hurt?”

  “It does not,” he murmured. I soaped up the sponge and went to work on his chest, giving the collar a few pokes in the process. “Ye can no’ remove it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he replied, grasping my hands and kissing my soapy fingertips, “ye do no’ have the key.” He plucked the sponge from my hand, turned me around and began washing my back. He almost distracted me away from my line of inquiry.

  “So, where is this fabulous key?” I asked, then I moaned as he did something positively decadent to my lower body. After he explained this key situation to me, I was asking him if he’d really been alone for the past three hundred years.

  “Nicnevin herself possesses it. And,” he continued when I opened my mouth, “I will no’ have ye tryin’ to obtain it.”

  “But why?” I turned around and traced the edge of the collar; despite Robert’s insistence that it didn’t cause him any pain, I knew it weighed upon him, just maybe not physically. “If she has the key, then she still controls an aspect of you.”

  “Aye. That she does.”

  “So—”

  “So nothing.” Robert dropped the sponge, and drew my face close to his. “Karina, heed me. I do no’ wish ye to be goin’ after this key. Dealings with Nicnevin ne’er end well, and ye are far too dear to me to allow that.”

  I touched his face, and traced a line from his cheekbone to his strong jaw. “What if you’re too dear to me to allow her to continue controlling you?”

  He smiled, but his eyes were sad. “I am already damned. You, love, still have all the chances in the world.”

  A smart girl would have let it end there. “I’ll undamn you!”

  “Karina, leave it be.”

  I scowled. “I don’t want to leave it be! I want to—”

  “Tell me about the boy what gave ye the stone,” he said over me. “Jared, was his name?”

  Frowning so hard my forehead ached, I turned off the water, whipped back the shower curtain and grabbed a towel. Robert put his hands on my shoulders, but I shrugged him off. “Karina, love, I meant no harm.”

  “Jared and I both attend Carson University in New York City. It’s where Chris teaches, too.” I rubbed my hair with the towel so intensely the friction could have started a fire. “When we met, Jared was a junior and I was a freshman. I had a rough time when I first got to Carson; too many classes, bad study habits, things like that. He saw me struggling and gave me the stone. He told me it was lucky.”

  Robert grabbed a second towel, and set about drying my back. “And ye loved him from then on.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t look at him. “Yeah. I did.” I combed my hair in silence for a few moments before I continued. “Whenever that stone was in my pocket, I aced whatever test I was up for, whether it was English or geology or calculus. I began to think it
really was lucky. When I told Jared about my newly stellar grades, he laughed and said that rose quartz was for love, not luck.”

  Having finished drying both himself and me, Robert dropped the towel and put his hands on my hips, his forehead resting against the back of my head. “We started hanging out after that, studying together. When he became a TA—that’s a teacher’s assistant, they help the university professors—he always asked me to help him with lesson plans, grading, stuff like that. We were together all the time.”

  I dropped the comb, and gripped the counter. “When I decided to go for my masters and then doctorate, Jared pulled some strings and got me admitted into his program. He’d already earned his undergrad and was working toward his masters, and had worked for the department since then as an adjunct. Things between us were just like they had always been, us working and studying together, then one night we were in the office late, grading tests, and since it was the last week of the summer session he’d brought a bottle of wine…” I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering the warm, alcoholic haze that had surrounded us that night.

  “Did he hurt ye, love?” Robert demanded, his fingers tightening on my hips.

  “No. Not then. Then was nice.” Robert slid his arms around my waist, but I didn’t move. Now that the floodgates were open, everything was coming out.

  “The next morning, I got up early and picked up his favorite coffee and some bagels.” I glanced up at Robert’s reflection, and saw that perplexed look on his face. “A bagel is like bread. You can spread cheese or jam on it.”

  He nodded. “Bread. Go on.”

  “I wanted to surprise him with breakfast. When I got to the floor with the offices, his door was open a bit, and I heard him talking to another TA. Jared was saying how he never felt stressed by all the work the professors piled on him, because he had a bunch of dumb students do all his work for him. He said he only picked girls, so when he got bored he could… he could…”