“And this?” He bent his head and kissed the hollow of her throat.
Her pulse quickened. His moist, hot tongue burned along her vulnerable skin. She ached for him to continue, but all too soon he broke away.
He whispered, “Tell me truly. Does it displease you?” He waited for her answer with all the patience of Job.
Slowly, she shook her head, unable to lie.
His hands slipped beneath the wool cloak and found the bodice of her borrowed dress, a heavy silk woven with gaudy Dutch irises. He found the hooks at the back as if he were well versed in removing women’s clothing. He’d sworn that his wife had never worn the clothes in the trunk he’d brought, but the experienced manner in which he released each hook made her wonder if he had lied.
“No—please—you must stop—” She grabbed his forearms. Her fingers dug into his flesh.
“Does our lovemaking displease you?”
His question was pointed, but yet much too simple to answer. She struggled with it, but it was like trying to wrench a rope off a whale.
“No.…” she moaned. She shuddered, more from vulnerability than the cold. “But the answer is ‘yes,’ as well.”
He stepped behind her, resting his hands upon her shoulders. Slowly he bent his head to her nape. His lips trailed down her sensitive skin. She shivered while he warmed her ear with his quickened breath. “Which is it? Yes or no? It cannot be both.”
“It does not displease me.” Her voice came out low and husky. Afraid.
He turned her around. Slowly his hand lifted her jaw. “Then let me please you as a man pleases a woman.”
She did nothing, and again inaction became her affliction. He released a low, animal groan and bent to kiss her. All she had to do was tilt her head away and she knew he would have stopped. Instead, to her shock and dismay, she rose to meet him. His lips crushed against her all-too-eager ones and the conquest was complete.
The last time she had made love to him in a daze of sensation, but this time she felt everything with razor keenness. His scent rubbed against her mouth until it became more a taste than a smell. The soft purple wool of her cloak scratched at her back as he lay her down in a bed of straw. Her silk gown rustled like falling autumn leaves as he unhooked her; the pale pink undergarments fell away like rose petals.
She told herself she wanted to stop. Good sense lectured her that she was weak and wanton. But it didn’t make her quit. Lord Niall Trevallyan wove a spell around her that was as tight as any warlock’s, and soon she found him atop her, naked, warm, hard; kissing her with all the matching fervor in her own wicked soul. His mouth covered her nipples, her belly, the dark mound of her womanliness. Nothing shamed him; and therefore, nothing shamed her.
He laid her back by twisting his hands worshipfully in her hair, reveling in her raven-black tresses. He licked her skin as if it were warm cream and he a starving man. He wanted her. Desperately. She could see it in the tautness of his expression. In the fire in his eyes.
Without a protest, she let him part her thighs.
“When you think of me, think of this moment.” He stared down at her, his emotions roiling in his darkened aqua gaze. Slowly he took her hand. He laid a burning kiss deep into her palm, then ran it across the ruddy alabaster of his Celtic fair complexion. “Think of the man you hold in your small hands, Ravenna. And I beg you, have mercy on him.”
He entered her with one greedy push. She tossed her head back in the straw, sensation rendering her incapable of comprehending his words. In pagan rhythm, he made his magic. The stars above the fallen thatch roof began to dance and shoot across the sky. Pressure built within her loins with every rock of his body.
Only once did she dare look at him and acknowledge her surrender. It was a fatal mistake. The need in his soul gripped her as tightly as her legs gripped him. She couldn’t look away, until he forced the stars above to shower down upon her. With sweet damnation, he gave her release.
The stars took some time to return to normal. But finally, when at last Ravenna’s breath came slow and satisfied, she looked overhead and saw the heavens as she knew them; the stars placidly twinkling like crystals from a shattered vase.
Without a word, Niall rose and gathered his trousers and shirt. She hated the cold that rushed over her. If his warmth was sin, she wanted sin, not the cold hell of his abandonment.
Wrapped in her cloak, she watched him pull on his boots, his expression unreadable.
Harshly, he announced, “The evening grows cold. We’ll stay here for the night and walk to Cinaeth Castle in the morning. I’ll build a fire.”
She nodded, not even bothering to fumble with her dress that lay next to her. It was only her second experience, and yet she already wondered how a man and a woman could be in the throes of wild intimacy one minute, only to grope through the perdition of awkwardness the next.
Unable to think of a way to cast aside the sudden chill between them, she mutely watched him work, confounded by her own tangled emotions.
Soon he had built a small blaze at one end of the barn. The smoke trailed up thirty feet to the roofline, sucked into the open sky where the thatch had fallen through.
In the firelight, she watched him. The flames licked up between them, casting his features into evil relief. His slanted eyebrows, his piercing gaze made her think of druids, Celtic warriors, and kings long dead. Men of myth. Men who weren’t supposed to be found in this modern age, especially building fires in barns, and wearing black leather boots and trousers of bottle-green corduroy.
“If I had a pot I could at least make us some nettle soup for our dinner. We’ve enough of those,” she commented, desperately hoping that he would talk.
He looked up at her. Ruefully, she lowered her gaze to the nettles caught in her cloak’s hemline.
“Nettle soup? Is that something witches eat?” The expression in his eyes lightened. He quirked his mouth in a way that made her want to smile.
“Nay, we only eat bairi’n breac,” she said, mischief dancing in her eyes as she referred to the bread eaten on Hallowe’en, “…and little children, of course.”
“Of course.” He nodded his head as if they were merely two old acquaintances conversing over tea.
“We find noblemen quite indigestible.”
“A pity.” He watched her through heavy-lidded eyes. “I always fancied being eaten by a witch.”
An odd excitement trilled in her belly. His naughtiness never failed to disconcert her.
“Come, sit by the fire with me.” He held out his hand.
Slowly she rose, wrapping the cloak around her nudity. Her hair was in knots; her legs wobbly and unsure. It was a relief to feel his hands on her hips, sliding her between his legs near to the fire.
They stared into the flames, a restless silence between them.
Finally, he lifted the hair at her nape and kissed the soft jet curls at her hairline. “You smell … mmmm … how to describe it. Mystic. Like crushed orchids.”
“What is an orchid?”
“’Tis a flower. From the darkest jungle. They’re very fragile. I’ve come across their fragrance many a time in the queen’s botanical gardens at Windsor.”
“You mean—the actual queen?” Her heart sped at the thought. She couldn’t imagine being in the presence of the queen. The pomp and circumstance was just too awe-inspiring.
“I’ve been to Windsor many a time. Albert likes a good hunt as much as any man.”
She shut her eyes, hating the jolt of despair that shot through her. He consorted with the queen and her royal prince, while she scratched out her miserable fairy tales and dreamed of one day clerking in Dublin. The gulf between herself and Trevallyan was too large to bridge. They were worlds apart, and his talk of Windsor had brought the reality right to her doorstep.
“Why so quiet?” he whispered, nibbling on her ear.
“Am I?” she asked distantly.
“Yes.” There was a playfulness in his tone. “Does my talk of the queen a
nnoy your rebel Irish nature?”
“No…” She stiffened.
He ceased kissing her.
“What is it?” he whispered against her neck.
Her mouth grew dry as she forced out the words. “You—you say you want my love…”
“Yes?”
“… and yet, you’ve never spoken about your love.”
His hands tightened on her shoulders. There was a long, painful silence. “Once, long ago when I was just a lad, I thought I gave my love to Helen, my wife.”
“Did you?” The words were so low as to be inaudible.
“She cuckolded me. She led me down a fool’s path.” His voice was harsh and yet dispassionate, as if he were speaking of wounds now healed. “I now realize what I felt was never love. It was rebellion, a need to ease my loneliness.”
“And—how—do you feel about me?” She braced herself for the answer.
“I never wanted her like I want you.”
“And the others?” she gasped, thinking of his chorus of fiancées.
“I desired a wife and children. You must understand. You were just a child, Ravenna. With every year, with every woman I knew I could not lie to, I saw my dreams slip through my hands.”
“And so … you love me?”
His struggle was almost palpable. She could feel it in the grip of his hands, in the wooden manner in which he held himself. “I don’t know,” he finally confessed. “I see now I know nothing about it. I’ve never felt it before.” He cupped her chin and turned her head so that she would be forced to look at him. She did, with eyes glittering with tears. “I only know that I want you. Desperately. So desperately that my need for you eclipses everything else in my life. I want you so much it frightens me. I fear it may destroy me, and I cannot stop it.”
Possession. It ran through his veins like blood. She would not destroy him. He would destroy himself.
“I’ve told you before,” her voice was a choked whisper, “I don’t want to be owned. I’m already too indebted to you.” She looked away, hopelessness dulling the sparkle in her eyes. “I should have run from you back at the castle. Now I’ll owe you for finding my father.”
“You owe me for nothing. I’ve given you these things, free and clear. When Grania told me about your need for silverware at that infernal school of yours, did I send it with a bill? I did not.”
She looked at him, grim-faced, reminded how he’d even provided the silverware and had her initial engraved on each piece. His manipulations had been deep; they knew no boundaries at all.
“I’ll pay you for the silver promptly when we return to Lir,” she told him.
He ran his hand down his face, then rubbed his lightly bearded jaw in frustration. “I don’t want the money. Don’t you see? I only want to make you happy. Whatever you want, I’ll get for you. You want those silly tales of yours published—well, I’ve a friend in Dublin who publishes books. He’ll publish them for you. I will do all that, to make you happy.”
She recoiled as if he’d burned her. He didn’t understand anything that she wanted. “You can’t do that. I shall publish on my own, or give up the endeavor. I won’t humiliate myself by using your powers to see my words in print.”
“Why are you so pigheaded? You won’t get them published any other way.”
“I’ll do it by my talent, or I won’t do it at all.”
He heaved a sigh and studied her as if she were some sort of alien creature. “Fine. Do it the hard way. Accept your failure. I don’t care. As long as you stay away from Malachi and his ilk, and behave like a lady, then you may do as you please.”
“‘Behave like a lady.’ And how may I do that when you’ve seen to it twice that I’m no lady at all?” She couldn’t cloak the venom in her tongue. The truth was too raw.
His anger frightened her. He shook her until her teeth rattled. “Don’t you ever say such words to me again. What’s between us is good and fine. Don’t ever imply otherwise.”
She almost wept her impassioned rebuttal. “Grania told me about pleasures of the flesh when I asked about my mother. She never put constraints upon me. She made me believe the union between a man and woman was beautiful and creative, and because I was not Catholic, and raised outside of society, I believed her.” She wiped the tears spilling down her cheeks. “But then a man sent me to an English school. There they drilled into me exactly the kind of woman my mother had been. You say I’m to be a lady. Well, the headmistress of Weymouth-Hampstead would have another word for me—”
“Bother that! They were not responsible for molding you. I saw to that. Your upbringing was, and is, mine to control, and I tell you, the headmistress of that bloody English gaol I sent you to was wrong in this regard. The world is made of many rules. You play by all of them and you are miserable.”
“You play by none of them … and you die alone.” She stared at him. She watched the anger pass across his features.
“I flaunted the geis and found nothing but misfortune. Now I’m willing to embrace it, but it’s not working. Both paths seemed doomed. So which do I take? Which do I take?” He spoke the question like a monk’s chant.
“You follow your heart.”
“Yes.”
She looked up at him and for one brief second, she saw a want on his face that she had seen in no man. The emotion was loneliness and despair combined, further tortured by an acute intelligence that couldn’t be comforted by delusions. The emotion was raw, and so vivid that she felt it pass through her very soul like a wind off the Irish Sea.
But quickly, artfully, he shuttered it away behind the terrible facade of the brooding Lord Niall Trevallyan, and it vanished like a wraith, leaving her to wonder if it was not something she had imagined.
Yet it had been real. For if it hadn’t been real, then she would be able to erase the bittersweet ache it had left in her heart.
“I won’t let you go, Ravenna,” he said softly.
She hardened her heart, forcing herself to fight when all she wanted was to surrender. “You can’t keep me if I don’t love you.”
He held her against his chest, his eyes alive with the reflection of the flames of the fire.
“Watch me,” he whispered ominously. “Just watch me.”
Chapter 22
DAWN WAS still a gray ghost on the horizon when Ravenna woke within Niall’s embrace. The straw was warm where they lay beneath her cloak; it was difficult to think of leaving, but she wanted to be gone. She knew she must leave him while she still had the strength of will to do it. Now, just paces from Cinaeth Castle and the truth about her father, she knew she must break free and do this by herself or suffer the consequences of Trevallyan’s all-consuming manipulations.
She looked down at Trevallyan. He slept well. She hated to even think of the reasons why. The soreness between her thighs spoke eloquently of the activity the night before. Furious with him, she had meant to sleep alone, wrapped in the false security of the purple wool and velvet cloak, but then he had lain down next to her. She tried to remain stiff and unapproachable, but he ignored her mood, and pulled her within his arms. He held her so close, she swore she could feel the strong beat of his heart, and, not wanting to, she had nevertheless turned to him.
He kissed her. His hand familiarly cupped her breast. She had hated herself then, as she did now, because instead of pushing him away, she had kissed him. He took her hard and swiftly, as if binding her soul to his, and she had let him, only because her plans for today had solidified. She was going to leave him, even though she thought she might be in love with him after all.
Pulling on her dress, contorting herself to reach the hooks at the back, she stepped away from the pile of straw that had been their bed. The sky overhead through the thatch was graying to the color of doves. It would be light soon. She had to find the road, and there were miles perhaps to walk to Cinaeth Castle. He would follow her there, she knew it, but at least she would have an hour or two alone with those who might have known her father. Sh
e would fight for that much. It wouldn’t do to linger.
Silently, she swept the cloak over her cold shoulders. She looked at Niall one last time and wondered about when they would meet again. She knew it would be in anger, but she still hoped not. He had given her no choice. It was either begin to break away, or fall in love with him and entwine herself. He would force more and more dependence on him until she would be obligated forever. And he was too powerful and vindictive a man to become indebted to. She would be nothing but a slave to him, an Irish peasant to do his bidding because he had shown charity to her. Because he had lusted after her. She was not his possession. She was no man’s possession. She would no longer accept his good works, including the one he attempted now in leading her to her father’s ancestral home.
She tore her gaze from his sleeping, half-nude form that was partially hidden in the mounds of straw. The urge to kiss him farewell was strong, but she swallowed it like bile. If she kissed him, he might awaken. He might kiss her back, and then she’d fall again beneath his warlock’s spell and take the wanton pleasures he offered.
Without another look back, she tiptoed from the barn and ran into the thick elms.
Cinaeth Castle was a breathtaking sight to a girl who had been born in an Irish hovel. Ravenna climbed the small rise in the road, squinting in the early afternoon sun. She didn’t need to look hard. In the distant forests, it spired up from the treetops like a sentinel guarding the hills. Delicate, and relatively modern in comparison to the dark, brooding, millennium-old Trevallyan home, the sandstone castle was a princess’s dream. It was the color of wheat, the turrets patinated to a fine copper-green. Ravenna felt she had stepped right into one of her faerie tales. It was all she could do to keep herself from running along the white-pebbled drive and throwing herself at the gilded front doors.
As she passed through the iron and gold gates mounted with English neoclassical gryphons, she wished fervently that she could make herself more presentable. Her hairpins had been lost in the straw, and her hair, though tied with a silk ribbon, hung loose down her back, mercifully covered by the wool cloak. There were nettles still woven in her hemline, and her silk dress, yesterday fresh and pretty, was now a rumpled, embarrassing rag.
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