by Kris Kennedy
She loved his rough words, how he demanded things that were so erotic, so dangerous, so perfectly matched to what she wished to give.
She rocked her hips, just a little, by herself. He leaned back, his hands now almost motionless, and let her set the pace. And the depth. And the rhythm.
At first she moved slowly, leaning over him, hands on his shoulders, her hair swaying beside them. Each measured movement forced him in a little deeper. Her knees slid out, and she began to move faster, their breaths pushed by the rhythm of her rocking.
His hands curled tighter around her hips, and he began moving her too, slowly increasing their tempo, harder, faster.
Bands of pleasure tightened around her: her breasts, her legs, the slippery swollen flesh Aodh was taking possession of. It was splendid torment. She leaned lower, her breasts before his face, and as he suckled them, his hips came up in a long, hard thrust. A shivery pulse of heretofore unknown pleasure snapped up her back like a whip.
She flung her head and cried out, then dropped her head back down, heavy with passion, and locked her gaze on his.
“Oh, Aodh.” It was a hot exhale of pleasure.
“Aye, bahn sidhe. We’ll do that one again.” And he did, lifted his hips just as he had done before, gripped her hip just as he had done before, and the long, hot cord of pleasure came for her again, lashing her with wicked force.
Her body bucked. Following the sensations, she let her hands fall off his shoulders and sat up straight.
He lay back on the bed and watched her, his gaze raking down her body.
She felt unleashed. To be so bared before him, to move for him so, to have him approve of it all, approve of her, she felt as if she’d been cast in liquid gold. Hot, glowing. Each lift of his hips forced the thick thrust of him in deeper, made her spread a little wider to take him. There was no retreat from this possession. She wanted no retreat. She wanted only to follow the whipcord slashes of pleasure that were slowly deepening to gold-hot undulations down her back and up her legs, and deep, deep inside her.
Aodh kept his hand on her hip, kept moving her, ensured she was dragged under the sea of pleasure. The pulses expanded, until she could do nothing but rock on him like some wanton, her shoulders back, her face up to the ceiling, her hair trailing down her spine, brushing over his thighs, like some mad, magnificent dream.
He pushed up on his elbows, his hips pistoning. “Aye, rise up, arch your back.” His words were like gunpowder, exploding her. “This is what I want from you, Katy. I am not afraid of you.”
She had a sudden, blinding flash of insight, as heated as what his body was doing to hers. She well knew the danger of woman was passion, and knew men’s desire for it, and their disdain. Their condescension to it.
But maybe…maybe they were afraid of it.
All this time, afraid… Afraid that she would do something. Be something. Something stronger than they.
The certainty of it stunned her. It was as if a flame had suddenly been lit in a dark room, and she was right up in front of it, staring into its blinding white-hot light.
Men did not disdain her.
They were scared of her.
Aodh was not.
The shocking, earth-shifting nature of the insight drove her over the edge, exploded her body. Wrecked and racked by deep undulations of pleasure, she keened in long, low moans, then collapsed atop him, her body shuddering, and he took her mouth, swallowed her cries of pleasure.
He took her then, carelessly lifted her up, and flung her back on the bed, pushed her legs apart with his knee and took her again.
She welcomed him, her body already broken by pleasure, a temple of their desire. He forced her to come again, weakly, almost whimpering. He drove her mad, took her over and over and over, until he roared his own completion, and collapsed atop her, barely held up on his elbows as he breathed onto her neck.
Aodh held himself over her until he could not anymore, then rolled away, pulling her with him, but also pulling out of her. She gave a little whimper of distress, but there was nothing either could do about it now; they were too spent.
For long minutes, they lay there and breathed, while the fire cast shadows across the ceiling and walls.
Aodh felt a deep, hot hum inside him, as if he’d been filled with…music? As if a steel bar had been rung, and the reverberations were moving through him.
Katy’s slender hand trailed across his chest. He watched the idle movements a moment, then said sleepily, “We’ll sign today.”
“Sign what.” She leaned up to kiss his neck.
“The betrothal papers.”
“Oh,” she whispered dreamily as she ran her fingertips over his face, then snuggled into his chest. “I told you, I cannot marry you.”
Christ on the cross.
The smoke-blackened rafters were beginning to glow as dawn light came in. “Why not?” he asked, very calmly.
“Because I cannot. It would be treason.” She shifted on the bed, curled closer to him. “I hold Rardove for Elizabeth, Aodh. She is my queen.” Her hand slid over his chest, lazily tracing the swirls of ink. “Of course you can see that.”
More calmness. “You said you were mine.”
Her tracing finger stilled, then she pushed up on an elbow. Her face was soft in the aftermath of passion, her mouth swollen from his kisses. He reached up and brushed the hair back from her face.
“You said you were mine, Katy. When I was in you, as deep as a man can be, you looked in my eyes and said you were mine.”
She peered at him. “You are not the sole possessor of me, Aodh.”
He forced himself to breathe slowly. “What does that mean?”
“I too possess me.”
She was the most infuriating woman alive. “And so you do. But you said you were mine. I thought that meant…”
She straightened a little more. “I am not responsible for your thoughts. I am, indeed yours in…in that way.” Her face flushed a delicate color. “That does not mean I am not also my own. And I am not marrying you.”
She did this to him every time, tore him in half. He wanted more from her than she would give.
“Go to sleep, lass,” he said quietly.
She hesitated, watching him a moment, then lay back down. He pulled her into his side, his arm firm behind her. She sighed and kissed his neck and snuggled in. Soon, her breathing was soft and steady. She was asleep.
He slid out of the bed, threw on his clothes and boots, and left the room.
He locked the door behind him.
*
WHEN SHE AWOKE, Aodh was gone.
She lifted her hand and pushed the hair out of her face, then stretched languidly, her body warm and aching and…wonderful. Belowstairs, she could hear the sounds of the castle stirring. Today, she would join it.
Mayhap it was this, maybe some other conduit to clarity, but in the dawn, after knowing Aodh as deeply as she had, in every way, she knew now exactly what she needed to do: send a message to the queen.
But not the message she’d been intending to send. Not one alerting the queen to a rebel presence, nor a message informing her how best to launch an attack.
A message to inform the Queen of England why Aodh Mac Con was precisely what their marchlands needed.
She would throw herself on the queen’s mercy if need be. Surely Elizabeth would understand, could be made to see reason. She always had before, every time Katarina had written on matters of Ireland.
She plied her fingers through her hair, combing it, feeling each muscle stretch itself in a new way. On one particularly languid stretch, through a gap in the canopy that hung on all sides of the great bed, she caught sight of the oak door, and saw it was shut tight.
A small note of discomfort rang.
But why? So a door was shut. Drafts ran rampant. So why was her heart suddenly beating faster?
Pushing back the covers, she got up and padded to the door. She turned the knob.
It wouldn’t turn. It w
as locked.
She was locked in.
Aodh had locked her in.
Fury burst from her like a dam crashing under the pressure of too much force. She hammered on the door, beat on it like an impotent, caged beast, her hands fisted, her feet kicking, shouting as loud as she could, “Aodh, you bastard!”
Her shouts bounced around the stone walls of the room. She battered senselessly and uselessly at the door until, finally exhausted, admitting defeat, she leaned against it, breathing heavily. It had been growing for three hundred years or more before it had been turned into a door; banging at it with her fists, or her shoulders or her feet, or even a battering ram, was not going to accomplish anything.
She had to get out, though. And for that, she had to be clever, for being stubborn had got her nothing at all.
Just as Aodh had predicted.
*
DOWN IN THE BAILEY, Ré was escorting a local Irish prince from the stables to the hall, when shrieks broke out and could be heard wafting down from the open window of the tower room.
Startled, the Irish clansman looked around. “What in God’s holy name…”
Ré hurried him along a little faster. “Singing,” Ré assured him. “English song. We heard a lot of it over in England, as you can imagine. Sounds a bit like caterwauling, doesn’t it?
“Sounds like a bahn sidhe,” the Irishman said with a shiver. “In full regalia.”
“You’ve no idea.”
Aodh appeared at the castle door, and they quickened their pace.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
UP IN THE TOWER, Katarina copied out two messages. That was the minimum, in case one was captured, the messenger drowned in a river, or some other all too common misfortune.
Hand shaking, she stuffed them under the pelt beside the fire, then went to the door and rapped softly.
The guard outside her room—there’d been one ever since the sword incident—opened the door. It was Bran. She brightened, but his face was sober. She issued her invitation for Aodh to come visit her that night.
“And send up whisky,” she added offhandedly. “There are barrels of very good stuff in the cellar, in the farthest chamber, on the northern side. Mind your head; the lintel is low.”
Bran seemed clearly torn between a desire to do as she bid, and great, abiding suspicion. “Whisky?” he repeated.
She nodded.
“Barrels of them?”
“Dozens. Pull from the barrel nearest the back. It is an oak barrel with the image of a clamshell burned into it.”
“A clamshell,” he repeated, stretching it out, the words filled with confusion and growing suspicion. Understandable. After all, she was locked in the tower. There had been sword-fighting. “Do you drink whisky, my lady?” he asked hesitantly.
“Upon occasion.”
He blinked. “I did not know.”
“Now you do.”
“Yes, my lady.”
She blew out an impatient breath. “Or have Aodh bring his own if he prefers, to ensure I can’t put a dropper of henbane in it. It is all the same to me. Honestly,” she said, turning back to the tower, “if I’d wanted to kill him, I have had a thousand chances thus far.”
*
“AND I AM TO BRING…whisky?”
Aodh repeated the message slowly, in case something had been misunderstood.
He’s spent the day in council with too many lords to count, and it was certainly possible that he was simply suspicious of everything. But something about this seemed…very suspicious.
Bran nodded. “That is what Lady Katarina said, sir. You’re to bring it yourself, to make sure she does not poison it.”
He sat back. “She said that?”
“Aye, sir.”
“That she’s thinking of poisoning me?”
Bran looked horrified. “No, sir! She suggested it to allay any concerns, you see, so you would know she hadn’t.”
“And were there concerns?”
Bran shuffled uncomfortably. “I might have asked a few questions about her request. Caused her to think I was suspicious.”
“And were you?”
“Well…it is unusual, sir. I mean…whisky. In barrels. In the cellar.”
“Why did we not know of them?”
Bran looked shamefaced. “I saw the barrels, sir. I thought they were wine.”
Aodh nodded thoughtfully. “But they are whisky.”
Bran started to smile.
Oak barrels of whisky, in the cellars of Rardove.
His men would bow down at her feet.
“But,” his squire went on, “she said not to worry, that she could have slayed you a dozen times already before now.”
Aodh’s head came up swiftly.
“If ’twas truly her goal. I suppose that means it is not her goal?” Bran framed it as a hopeful possibility.
Aodh turned and looked though the open window at the sunset, reddish gold and stretched to the edge of the world. “Do not fear, Bran, her danger is not of that sort, even if we do have to keep her locked in a tower to prevent her from ruining the plans of a lifetime.”
“Yes, sir.”
Aodh got to his feet. “Send for the whisky. Take it from the barrel with the clamshell mark.”
He picked up two glasses and went upstairs.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE ROOM WAS lit with candles, and a fire burned bright. She’d pulled the windows shut and shuttered them, so the room was warm, rolling in shadow and flickering, amber firelight.
“I thought I was a bastard,” Aodh said as he stepped into the room. “As did everyone within three miles of the castle.”
She cleared her throat delicately. “I may have overstated the matter.” Then she peered pointedly over his shoulder at Bran.
Aodh followed her gaze, tipped his head and sent Bran on his way.
She stepped away from the door and drifted into the room. He followed and set the cups on the table. A moment later, a knock came, and a small pitcher was brought in.
Katarina smiled at her servant, Agatha, who seemed bursting with happiness to see her. She bobbed a curtsey, then brought the whisky over. “It is excellent, my lady.” Agatha lowered her voice a bit. “I tasted it to be sure.”
Katarina smiled her thanks. Agatha set it on the table with a bow, nodded to Aodh, and backed out. The door shut.
Aodh watched Katarina pour the drink into his glasses. She handed him one and said companionably, “I saw a messenger with Cunningham’s livery arrive this morning.”
He blew out a sigh and sat back with the drink. “Aye. He’ll join us if the others do. Same old story.”
“They are not so bold as you,” was her encouraging reply. “It is a matter of vision.” And she took a dainty sip of the whisky.
He took a swallow too, then pushed to the edge of his chair and crooked a finger beneath her chin, pulled her closer until their noses almost touched.
“What are you up to, lass?”
“Nothing,” she whispered.
His gaze fell to the drink in her hand, then he curled his fingers around hers, made her lift the cup and drink it down.
She shuddered faintly as the heat moved down her throat, into her belly like fire. “Well,” she said softly, “shall I get us another?”
His lips brushed hers, his tongue sliding into her whisky-soaked mouth, then he pulled back. “Aye.”
Drugged not from the drink but from Aodh’s careless kiss, hot and muddleheaded, she poured them two more.
“Come sit on my lap,” he said, reaching for her.
She tumbled down onto his thighs, his arm curved around her back. She leaned close and said, “I’m glad you came up.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth. “I’ve no idea why. Although I see you’ve developed a strange and sudden affection for whisky.”
She shifted on his lap. “This is Rardove whisky. Do you like it?”
“It’s quite fine.”
“Indeed it is. It produced m
ore income than the wool last year,” she said proudly, then lifted her glass. “To Rardove whisky.” She drank and smiled at him.
He sniffed his cup with an excess of suspicion. “I thought you didn’t drink the stuff.”
“I do not. Usually. But that does not mean I am unable to.” Or that she couldn’t hold her own when asked to. Indeed, it was one of her hidden talents: she could drink anything, in great quantities, with almost no effect.
He hesitated, then sipped.
“Oh, don’t be scared of it, Aodh,” she teased.
“You think I’m scared of whisky?” He sounded indignant.
She shook her head. “No. I think you’re scared of me.”
It was difficult to be sure, but she thought his gaze looked ever so slightly unsteady. In any event, he lifted his glass. “To Rardove women. They’re a frightening bunch.”
She splashed more whisky into their cups. “What shall we toast to next?”
“Why are you trying to get me addled on the drink?” He broke gaze and took a slow visual sweep of the room, as if looking for clues.
Her heartbeat sped up. “Maybe I am not trying to get you addled. Maybe I am trying to get myself addled.”
He finished his perusal of the room. “To what end?”
She frowned. “Must I have an end?”
“You mustn’t…but you do.” But he seemed to be growing distracted. It was evident in his gaze, the way it kept drifting to her mouth. In the hard thrust of manhood pushing against her hip.
She smiled at him, then her focus drifted to the beautiful inkmarks visible above the collar of his tunic. “Aodh?”
He stretched out a leg, which shifted how she sat on him, and as she lolled on his lap, he said, “What?” very, very warily.
“Did it hurt? When they painted you.”
He hesitated. “Aye.”
“Are they Rardove dyes?”
“The legend dyes? That they are.”
“So it is not a legend.”
His eyes met hers. “Do you want to see them again, lass?”
“Oh, yes,” she breathed.
Aodh watched her a moment, certain she was up to some mischief, but it hardly mattered; she was sitting in his lap, breathing unevenly with desire. For the time being, at least, she was entirely his.