Then he kissed her. He tilted his head down and touched his lips to hers gently, softly, completely. She opened to him, and he slipped his tongue inside, searching for hers. When she touched hers to his, he suckled on the tip of it and wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. He walked her across the chambers, taking a step forward for every step she took back, until they reached the wall. Lifting her once more, he placed her on his bed and followed her down until he covered her with his body.
This time was different. This time they needed something other than hard and deep and fast. This time, their souls searched for something in the joining of their bodies. Connor lifted up and began to kiss every inch of her, gliding down over her breasts and stomach and hips and mons and thighs. He touched her and brought her to release, but neither made a sound.
It was quiet. It was gentle. It was about giving and not simply taking.
And when his body pushed hers over the edge and she fell, she took him with her. Moira opened her body to him, and he emptied himself into her and accepted what she could give him. She offered kindness, and he took it, praying that there would be space in her new heart for forgiveness before it was too late for him.
“I wanted to die.”
Her voice was almost a whisper in his ear as they lay together in his bed. The storm raged outside with a growing violence, but it no longer held power over him. Nor did the rampant need for her, for her gentle touch had soothed his body and soul.
“When?”
“When Diarmid’s men…” Her voice dropped off, but he needed no more words to explain. Then he felt her shake her head. “I accepted that I would die when I tried to kill you,” she explained. “I wanted to die after…”
“By the time I brought you back here, something had changed,” he said. He’d felt some difference in her, and even Dara remarked on it in her messages to him.
Moira turned to face him now. “I still only wanted to live long enough to kill you.”
Connor laughed then. Only Moira would have the boldness or lack of fear to say such a thing. Every other woman bowed and scraped or begged to be in his bed or to share in his wealth and position, but not her. He thought on her words and realized when her change of heart happened.
“On the battlements,” he said. “When Breac held you over the side.” He met her gaze then. “When faced with it, you knew you wanted to live.”
She lay silent for a few minutes, and he thought her asleep, when she spoke again.
“How did Breac come to be in your service? And Agnes?”
“You have won them over, Moira. They regularly reprimand me for various or imagined slights to you. Agnes suggested that I take you outside,” he paused and shook his head, “well-intended, though the result was not what I’d planned for us.” He thought about his true hope for the morning at the inlet and shook his head.
“About Breac and Agnes?” she reminded him. Her curiosity was a good sign to him. She was beginning to care about things…and people.
“About five years or so ago, I met Breac in the village. They’d just arrived from An t-Oban Latharnach across the firth, and some of the villagers were harassing him for having brought such an old woman with him. Breac took down the two largest of them, and the rest gave him a wider berth. I offered him employment.”
“Why? ’Twould seem to most that a man who fights simply over a woman is hot tempered and unreliable,” she said.
“Ah, but you saw neither the look in his eyes when she comforted him over his bruises, nor hers when he called the villagers out for their words. It nearly broke my heart at seeing such a love.”
It sounded so love struck when he said it, but having never seen such a thing, he’d been intrigued by it. A man and woman who loved so strongly it shone from their eyes. Maybe he simply sensed that he needed them to tether him to a real world while he lived in his made-up one. His world was filled with power and visions, but nothing and no one there could be trusted.
“And Dara and Pol?” she asked.
“Something similar.” He’d saved them from exile when they had incurred Diarmid’s anger over a small incident that did not deserve such treatment. Connor had never realized that he’d surrounded himself, when he could, with people who understood the importance of love. Ironic, when he considered that he’d never found it for himself. Again, there was another few minutes of silence, and he listened to her breathing grow slower and deeper.
“Do you have sons?” she asked.
“Why do you ask that?” He shifted so he could see her face in the light of the lone candle left burning in the room.
“When a man beds women in the numbers that you do, Seer, bairns usually would follow.” Aye, indeed bairns would follow, he thought, if he was a normal man.
“I have no sons, nor daughters either, to my knowledge,” he said. “Mayhap another part of the Sith’s contrariness for those humans they touch with their power? Give them the drive and the opportunities to create bairns but not the ability? This is less like a gift and more like a curse with the passing of every day.” He reached out and caressed her cheek. “And you? No bairns of your own?”
“That I would leave behind while searching for you?” she asked. “Fate has been kind not to grant me bairns, for I will not live to see them grow.” He winced at her words. Such hopelessness, but it was a hopelessness he was beginning to understand himself when now facing his own demise.
“I suspect that your wish to see me dead for my sins is not long in coming, Moira.” He’d not confided his fears to anyone, and yet he handed the worst one to his enemy.
She sat up then, surprised by his words, and turned to face him.
“Do you plan to throw yourself off the walls then?”
He frowned at her words. “Do you wish to be free of me that much?”
“No. For your death simply brings mine sooner, Seer.”
“You called me Connor on the wall,” he said, reminding her of her slip.
“A moment of weakness. Why do you think your death is at hand?” Of all the things he could say, that was not the one she expected. “Or do you think that Steinar’s assassins will complete their task?” He was out of the bed within moments, standing and staring at her as though she was mad. She shook her head at his lack of knowledge.
“How have you managed to stay alive this long, Seer?” Moira slid to the side of the bed and pulled her shift on. “You have not seen the patterns surrounding your visions. You have not seen the patterns surrounding the attacks on you.”
His expression showed he agreed with her. From what she’d seen of his life this last month when close enough to see it clearly, his only concern was surviving the pain and lust the visions brought on…and the blindness. They were crucial things to worry on, and she was certain that Steinar counted on those distractions to hide his attempts even better.
The Seer walked around the screen and came back a few minutes later with two cups, wine by the smell of it. He handed one to her and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Tell me of the patterns you see, Moira.” His voice was calm and his gaze intent on her.
“Ask yourself this question: who will benefit the most from your death? Not Diarmid, for he sells your services to those willing to pay and keeping you alive keeps him strong and held in high esteem by those who pledge to him. Not those who receive the gift, for they have come to you with a need and you fill it. So, that leaves Steinar, who is so filled with hatred at growing to manhood in Diarmid’s shadow, yet is not strong enough to unseat him.”
He stared at her in silence so long she thought he was asleep on his feet. Then he shook his head in denial. “You see this?” He laughed a bitter one. “And yet they call me the Seer.”
“But I have been seeking to learn everything about you since almost the beginning,” she said, drawing her legs up under her. “And I learned to listen.”
“And not talk,” he finished her words.
“I have stayed alive by watching and li
stening and being ready to act when the moment comes.”
A mischievous glint crept into his dark green eyes then. “So why was I not dead those months ago when I discovered you at my door?”
She shrugged. “I was not ready.” The narrowing of his gaze spoke of his disbelief in her words. “I came hoping to get a look at your chambers before the next vision and never expected to find you here alone. My dagger,” she paused as he touched his chest where a small puckered scar marked the spot, “was still in my sack.”
He drank from his cup and watched her over the rim. “And the next time? Why did you not strike the killing blow?” His face went blank as he asked. “You had me at your mercy then. Why did you not finish your quest?”
It had plagued him for months: She’d forced him to the floor and disabled him with the first strike and her kicks. She had stabbed him once, but not a fatal blow. Then she had hesitated.
“Killing you was not as easy as I thought it would be when I planned it,” she admitted. “I was ready, but I hesitated in that lost moment. Then you opened your eyes…” She could not control the shudder at the memory of what she had seen in his eyes when the visions burned through them.
“Did you scream? I think I remember hearing a scream,” he asked.
“Aye.”
She trembled again. No one should ever see the power that flowed out of him when he was controlled by the visions. She shook her head to rid herself of the terrible things she had seen deep in his eyes. She’d wanted to make certain he recognized the identity of the one who inflicted the death blow, to make his last thoughts of the vengeance she sought, and instead she’d found herself being pulled down into the depths of hell.
“Can you feel the fires burning there?” She had her own questions that she’d not dared to ask, until now.
“Yes.” He turned away then and walked to the hearth. “It burns without destroying. The pain is like holding your hand over an open flame, but it just goes on and on.” He began to reach his hand out toward the banked fire and stopped. “But that is not all of it.”
Moira followed him across the chamber. “The other? The lust that fills your blood? It causes pain?” she asked. Lust unfulfilled was like skin that itched without relief. It was not comfortable, but it could not kill you. But what she’d witnessed and heard him suffer was more than that.
He faced her then, his expression grim as he explained the visions to her.
“Once the moon passes through its darkest phase, the lust begins, flowing and pulsing in my blood, something that cannot be denied or ignored. I have tried to, but the pain increases until I feel as though my head is in a vice, ever tightening, without relief. I feel as though my skin and cock are burning from the inside out, and I cannot think about anything but finding a woman and fucking until the lust is satisfied.”
“Does it help? Do you need to tup a certain number of times or different women to gain relief?” Though she’d heard some tales about his sexual prowess, stories of this part of it had never been told.
Connor looked at her as though she’d spoken in a strange tongue and then shook his head. “At first…” he began.
“Has it not always been so?” she asked. “From the beginning?”
“Nay, at the beginning I could have women when I wanted them. If I did or did not, it mattered not to the power that controls me. The visions grew stronger, and my appeal to women grew.”
She laughed then; it surprised both of them. “Those touched by the Sith share in their extraordinary beauty,” she said. “Everyone knows that.” His body and face were blessed by the Sith: the light coloring of his hair, the strange coloring of his eyes, and the glow of his skin all bespoke the magic and vitality of the otherworldly beings.
“Well, women came to me or I called them as I learned the way, but my bed was never empty.”
That much, she’d heard…over and over as the tale of his male beauty and virility and body spread throughout the Highlands and isles. A man who could make a woman weep in pleasure, he was called. No woman could refuse, nor would she want to, for to be taken to his bed and loved by him was too much pleasure to bear. Stories spun from a figment of truth into the thing of legends, but she knew the truth from the fancy.
Passion? Pleasure? Desire? Surely there was plenty of those in his bed, but love, she knew, did not enter into this matter at all. Thinking on it distracted her from her purpose now. She needed to know why he thought he would die soon. From his words, he did not think Steinar’s plot would bring it about. Nay, he was convinced that the gift would end it.
“The pain? It has been there since the beginning then?”
She wanted to understand what made him the Seer and all that meant. Some part of her looked for a reason to explain his responsibility in the events caused by his gift.
He turned and rubbed his face. He did that when he was tired, spreading his large hands out to cover his face and then sliding them back through his hair. Then he stared at her as though searching for something on her face or in her eyes. The Seer walked closer until she could feel his breath on her face and the heat of his skin. Was talking over then, in favor of tupping?
He took her by the arms and pulled her to him, still staring at her as though trying to decide whether to tell her something or take her to his bed another time. The lightning and thunder crashed outside, shaking the walls of the keep, and he yet held her so.
“No one knows what has been happening to me. Diarmid suspects something but cannot catch me in a lie or prove it. Ranald sees part, but I pay him well for his silence in this. You know the most, having seen it twice,” he revealed in a voice so low she struggled to hear his words.
“Not even Breac or Agnes know it all. But I need to tell someone, and I think it must be you,” he whispered in a voice filled with need and desperation.
“What is it, Seer? What does no one know?”
“I believe that my final vision will be on Samhain, the end of seven years of visions, and that I will not survive the price the visions demand.”
Chapter Sixteen
Connor released her and moved away. Though not the burning edge of desire, a restlessness filled his mind, and he tried to calm himself from it. He had so many things to tell her and explain and discuss that he did not know where to begin. He only knew that he could trust her.
Moira had saved him twice now: once on the beach when she warned him—nay knocked him aside from the boulder’s path—and then again tonight on the wall when he’d lost his desire to live and was tempted to put an end to it all. She’d caught him just in time before the despair and pain overwhelmed him.
Though if what he suspected to be coming, a quick fall or the strike by a bolt of lightning might be the easier way.
Nay, there were things he must accomplish before he let the gift burn him out. Planning to be done and reparations to be made for his sins, both those intentional and the ones not of his choice. Most of those involved the woman standing before him—one who had started out his enemy, but whom he believed was now much more than that.
Connor lifted her and carried her to the bed, climbing onto it and placing her across his lap. Her body brought warmth to his; the thoughts of his impending death chilled his flesh. The thought of dying unforgiven chilled his very soul.
“How do you know this?” she whispered to him. Even if she denied it, there was concern in her voice, not just the curiosity he’d recognized before.
“For almost the last year, the visions have become a curse. The first six years, I had no pain, no burning, no uncontrollable urges, and especially no blindness after the visions. Then the month after Samhain was observed, the other things came in tandem with the visions.”
He shifted her to sit next to him and pulled the blankets over their legs. The storm’s coldness permeated even the stone walls now.
“At first, they were mild, and I even wondered if I’d experienced them at all. I mean, ’tis not unusual for a man in his prime, one unmarried an
d not having access to the constancy of a wife in his bed, to want more sex one time or another.”
Her left eyebrow arched, and he smiled. She was becoming playful and had smiled at least twice tonight and then this. Did she notice it as he did? The urge to touch his mouth there grew.
“Then the blindness began, and as each vision grew in strength and clarity, my own vision suffered. At first, it felt as though I was looking out at night—the shadows covered my sight. Then month after month, the damage has been worse—the blindness lasted twice as long this time as it had the time before. If it increases like that this month and then again next, I will spend every hour of every day blind.”
“Blind is not dead,” she said. “Even if you lose your sight, you may still have the visions. Do not despair yet,” she advised.
“But what if the visions disappear with my sight? What if the gift burns out when my eyes do and I am left with neither?”
That was his biggest fear now: to become a blind, worthless man in Diarmid’s keep was a death sentence. Anyone who held no value to him was discarded, exiled, even killed, and no one would stand in his defense.
“Again,” his practical Moira said, “blind is not dead.”
“You lived here. Think of anyone here in Diarmid’s keep, from sheepherder to the highest in his command, and tell me of one who is impaired. One who is less than able to carry out his duties. Blindness is a death sentence.”
Connor leaned his back against the headboard and closed his eyes. There was something more, but he was not certain he could explain it to her. More a feeling, an effect of the visions, that foretold him of death after the final vision. Would she believe him foolish for being convinced by only a feeling, rather than facts he could see or hear?
“Moira, my heart stops when the visions cease. And I believe that when the final vision ceases, there will be no power within me to start it anew.”
She could not help herself; she reached out and touched his chest and laid her hand over his heart. It beat strong under her palm, and she felt it for a few moments before meeting his gaze again.
A Storm of Passion Page 17