She was prepared for Mads to shout, to be angry. She didn't even know what the penalty was for taking a child from its father among his people. She wondered dully if he would abandon her, or if he would leave in disgust. When he spoke, she was ready to hear anything except what he actually said.
“Tara, I'm so sorry,” Mads murmured.
He dropped to his knees by her side, and he took her frigid hands in his. He was so warm, he always had been, and she wanted nothing more than to collapse into him. There had been too much time, though, and too much blood, and all she knew was that she didn't know him at all.
“He's... he's a beautiful boy,” she found herself saying woodenly. “He came out perfectly, Mads. So strong, and so... so loud. He has eyes just like yours...”
Mads made a pained sound deep in his throat, and then the decision was taken away from her. He swept her up in his arms, and it was such a relief that she simply fell into him. It was what she had been yearning for the past year, and now that he was so close, she couldn't resist his scent, his touch, and his strength.
“We'll get him back, Tara, I promise.” Mads whispered the words into her hair, and Tara could only nod tightly. She heard the truth in his voice, the honesty, but then she had thought she could tell when he was lying before.
After a long moment, she drew back, and blinked at the two other men who were watching them closely.
Mads followed her gaze and nodded. “Tara, let me introduce you to my brothers. The idiot with the smile on his face is Kalle, and the quiet one who always glares is Nils. Nils, Kalle, this is Tara.”
“The famous Tara,” Kalle murmured, and she was struck all over again by how much he looked like Mads.
“I need to pack,” she said. “If we're going to find the Aerie, I'll need to have more than my flannel pajamas on me, like I did last time.”
She went into her room, where she started to pack an old backpack full of things that she might need. Her hand hesitated over the book of unbinding, which she had kept at the very back of her sock drawer. It was a rather ridiculous place for something so precious, but no one had found it yet. She stuffed it deep into her pack, but before she could go out to join the wolves in her kitchen, she noticed a fluttering piece of paper tacked to the back of her door.
When she pulled it down, she saw directions, and coordinates that could be put into a GPS. They were all written in Lukas' tidy hand, and at the very bottom, she saw that he had written Forgive me.
Perhaps, she thought grimly. Perhaps I will when this is long over.
Tying her thick hair back into a ponytail, she went out to give this information to Mads.
***
Against their protests, Mads had sent his brothers home. They were furious about it, stating that Mads needed them, and that of course this was a trap. Tara had anticipated long debates, but all Mads had done was snarl at them both, and when Kalle looked like he wanted to contest the ruling, Mads stepped up to him to stare him down.
There was a long moment where Tara was afraid that they would come to blows, but then Kalle stepped back, breaking the contact easily and gracefully.
“We worry about you, big brother,” he said. “And if you're not back in a decent time, I swear that I'll send the whole war party after you.”
Mads smiled wryly. “Do that,” he said, “but I'll be back before you know I'm gone.”
Tara watched in fascination as Mads' brothers turned back into wolves. They were enormous, but when they barked happily and sat up for treats, anyone who didn't know what they were looking at would have passed them off for dogs.
Mads loaded them into the back of the truck, the same one that he had driven what felt like so long ago. They drove in silence for hours, until they came to the edge of a national forest, and both brothers vaulted out of the truck bed and were lost to the trees.
“They'll make better time going home like this,” he explained, and she raised an eyebrow.
“I guess it has nothing to do with the fact that they were both giving you so much trouble back at the house?”
Mads shrugged, smiling a little, and they got on the road again. It would be a long trip, and there was so much between them that they didn't know what to say.
It wasn't until hours later that Tara broke the silence, and when she did so, it was to ask a question that had been preying upon her for the better part of a year.
“Why did you do it?” she asked softly. “Why did you lie to me?”
Mads glanced at her, and though he looked back at the road very quickly, she could see the momentary grief and loss that came across his face.
“There were a lot of reasons,” he admitted. “Some of them I only understood later, some of them were simply because I was selfish and short-sighted.”
He sighed.“I looked at you, and in a heartbeat, I saw that you weren't a killer. That made you different from everyone else I had ever known, from myself, from my brothers. You lived a life untouched by this kind of violence, and I couldn't imagine you helping me. You would never condone me trying to find a weapon that was designed to end lives.”
“Why not wake up the Fenrisulfir?” she asked. “You told me about him. You told me that he would bring this all under his control.”
Mads laughed harshly. “The Fenrisulfir was a man who lived a long time ago, like King Arthur. He's more a story than anything real, and it's a fairytale that we tell cubs that he will return someday.”
“A fairytale like werewolves and angels?” she asked archly, and he grinned wryly at her point.
“So you didn't trust me, and then you got what you wanted. Were you going to leave me on that field in Scotland?”
Mads' hands tightened on the wheel. “Never,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I went off to fight, and then I came straight to try to find you. I wanted to... to explain, to thank you for the good that you had done, even if you didn't see it. I wanted to do anything to win you back, because Tara, for me, it was never just about the sword. It hadn't been about the sword since I met you.”
He swallowed hard. “I knew that there was an angel unaccounted for. I fought three. I killed three, but I saw four in the sky. What do you think I felt when I followed your trail, and it just... ended in the middle of nowhere?”
“What did you do?” she asked, her mouth dry.
His laugh was a hopeless sound.
“I searched. I searched all night and into the next day. I howled for you, I screamed your name. Around every stone and down every gully I thought I would find your broken body, where an angel dropped you. That's one way they kill, did you know that? They lift you into the air and just....drop you.”
She shivered, because she could see him doing it. She could all too easily imagine him baying for her in the darkness of the Scottish country side, and then finding nothing.
“Why did you go to him?” Mads asked. “Why an angel, why that?”
“Because the Three in One sent him to me,” she said softly. “When... when you lied to me, when you lied to my face about what I was to you and what you needed me to do, I was sick right to my heart, Mads. I couldn't take it. I ran, and I knew that you would just come after me and convince me that it was all fine. You could do that, and I needed to find my own strength. I needed to think about what you had done and to find out if I could forgive you on my own. I couldn't wait for you to tell me what to think.”
“And now that you've had the time that you need to think about it?”
She shook her head. “It's not fair, Mads, not like this. You can't come out of nowhere and demand an answer from me.”
“What about my son?” There was a tautness to his voice now, a throbbing of rage and grief and something else that she couldn't name.
“I didn't know that I was pregnant until I left. Then how could I risk him? You might have taken him away from me. You might have done anything.”
“I would have respected your wishes,” Mads said, a hint of that bright temper burning through. “My pe
ople believe that children belong with their mothers, and it is their mothers who choose where they wish to live and with whom.”
“I didn't know that, and what was I to do? Did you want me to bring myself and my child into a war that you were intent on fighting?”
Mads was still after that, and Tara stared out of the window. There was so much in the air between them, and she thought that if she looked at him too long, she might simply fall back into his arms. She couldn't afford to do that, not when her child was lost, perhaps frightened, perhaps hurt.
They stopped for the night at a hotel in the middle of nowhere. The sign said that they were in Indiana, but to her, the Midwest simply flowed from one flat field to another. She didn't flinch when Mads signed them in as man and wife, but the single bed gave her a pause.
“They didn't have anything else,” Mads said stiffly. “I'll take the floor.”
Silently, she made her way to the bathroom to bathe, and when she was clean, she looked at herself in the mirror. She looked delicate, even frail. She looked foreign to herself, and for a long moment, Tara wasn't sure that she recognized herself at all.
“What do you want?” she whispered to her own reflection, and the answer was there. It was simple, and she realized that in some ways, nothing was simpler. She took off the towel and hung it up, and then, stark naked as the day she was born, she walked back into the hotel room.
Mads looked up when she came out, and his eyes widened. He climbed to his feet, watching her warily, but she could see the immediate flame of desire in his eyes and the sudden tenseness of his body.
“What are you playing at, Tara?” he asked roughly. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”
“What I want,” she said raggedly. “What we both want. It's been so long, Mads. I've missed you. I want you.”
Mads closed the space between them in a few long strides, and though she expected to be crushed to him in a passionate embrace, he held her gently, as if certain she would break.
“Tara, I thought you were dead,” he whispered. “I grieved for so long.”
She bit her tongue on an apology, but he didn't need one. He tilted her face up with his finger on her chin, and the kiss he gave her was deep and restrained. His tongue pressed between her lips, and she opened to him willingly. She could feel his hard cock between them, and when she pressed herself closer to him, he groaned.
“Don't tempt me if you don't mean it,” he whispered. “I couldn't stand that.”
“I'm not teasing you,” she said, looking deeply into his eyes. “I want you. I don't know much, but I know that.”
With aching tenderness, he scooped her up and deposited her in the middle of the enormous bed. She had slept in a scavenged twin bed for so long that this felt like an unspeakable luxury, and as she watched through heavy-lidded eyes, Mads stripped down to his skin. She flinched to see that there were more scars there, and where there had been five triangular tattoos over his hear when they first met, now there were seven.
“More lost friends,” she said as he came to rest next to her.
He dropped his gaze when she brushed her fingers across them and nodded.
“Niall and Hild,” he answered. “Lost in battle.”
She considered and then leaned down to kiss each mark, one for each companion he had lost.
He shivered under her touch, and though his hands came up to clasp her shoulders, he did not pull her away. Inquisitive, she lapped her tongue over his skin, tasting the salt of his flesh and reveling in the way his muscles responded so completely to her.
She nuzzled first one small flat nipple and then the other, and when he made a pleased sound, she pressed her thigh against his cock, feeling its weight and its heat.
“You want me,” she murmured.
“Never doubt it.”
She kissed and lapped at his neck. The taste of him was so familiar on her tongue that she purred, and she stroked his flanks gently, running the tips of her fingers up and down.
“You've always called me beautiful, but I don't know if I've ever said the same to you,” she mused. “You are, you know. Perfect, scars and all, and I have missed you.”
Mads groaned as if something was being drawn out of him, and he palmed her belly, stroking the soft and tender skin there.
“There are marks here now,” he said softly. “And you're softer. It only makes you more beautiful to me, and more sorrowful that I could not be here.”
She quieted him with her mouth over his, and they passed long minutes like that, simply kissing and relearning each other. When Tara would have leaned up to kiss him more thoroughly, he pressed her to the bed.
“Let me,” he said thickly. “It's been too long.”
With no more warning than that, he started to kiss her, starting with the curve of her forehead, down her cheeks and stopping to press sweetly passionate kisses to her mouth. When she would have kept him there, he moved on to her neck and her collarbones, and then he pressed his mouth to her aching breasts, bigger now, with nipples that were lovely and dark.
He pulled on first one and then the other, lapping at the tip with care, and when she threatened to arch off of the bed, he only laughed and told her to be patient. He trailed kisses down her ribs and over her belly, pausing to bite her hip bones with the tenderest care.
It occurred to her that he was relearning her, finding what was different and what had changed over the course of the year they had been apart. There was such longing in his touch that tears came to her eyes, and she cradled his head in her hands, tangling her fingers in his hair.
There was something tender about the way he kissed her hips and her legs, and though his hands ghosted over the hair of her legs, he only planted the softest kiss there before moving on. She squirmed when his mouth ended up on the ticklish part behind her knees, but she sighed when he laved his tongue over the bump of her heel and the curve of her foot.
Slowly he worked his way back up, and somewhere in that timeless while, she could feel herself grow wet and wanting. It had been so long, and she felt like a different person now. Some trace of her unease must have shown on her face, because he reached up to stroke her face.
“It doesn't matter,” he started to say. “We can stop if you want, we don't need to...”
Hearing his concern tore at her heart, and she shook her head against the tears that stung her eyes. “No, no, it is only that I want you so much...”
His smile was sweet and gentle, and he leaned up to place another kiss on her lips. “I want you like I want food and fire,” he whispered. “This is coming home.”
He settled beside her, and though she could feel his cock against her hip, there was no haste in his motions at all.
Instead, he swept his hand between her legs, stroking gently until they parted for him, and then he traced his fingertips long her damp slit. He circled her clit slowly, making her hips roll with desire, and then he pressed a finger inside.
She flinched, and he halted, a look of concern on his face.
“No, it's just... it's been a while. Go slow?”
“As slow as you like,” he promised
With gentle rocking motions and an infinite patience, he eased a finger inside her. Even that felt like a stretch, and Tara concentrated on looking into Mads' eyes as he opened her.
“There,” he whispered. “That's what you want, isn't it?”
“Yes, oh yes...”
He held his hand still while he kissed her, and then he was edging a second finger in. It went easier than the first hand, and the third went more easily still. He was thrusting his fingers into her slowly and steadily, and before she knew it, she was frantic for more.
“Please?” she asked plaintively. “Please now?”
“You're tight, it might hurt you...”
Tara shook her head violently. “I don't care. I don't. All that matters to me right now is being with you. Please, Mads?”
He searched her face, and then he nodded.
&nb
sp; Instead of coming over her as she expected, he lay down beside her and lifted her up instead. With that quick savage strength that had protected her so well, he set her straddled on top of him, and pressed flat between their bodies was his cock.
“Put it in,” he whispered. “I want to know you want it.”
Biting her lip, Tara reached down and stroked her hand around his cock a few times. It was achingly hard, and there was already a trickle of dampness from the tip. It was broader than she remembered, and she knew that he would stretch her.
Just the tip was enough to make her gasp, and she rocked for a moment, easing herself down further.
“Don't make it hurt you,” Mads said. “I couldn't take that.”
She couldn't tell him that the slight ache and sting only intensified the pleasure. She loved how large he was, how she could barely take him, and the slow slide onto him made her faint with the sensations it brought.
Finally, she pressed herself down on top of him with one quick thrust, making both of them cry out. This feeling of completion, of unity was what she had been missing for the past year, and she wanted to weep with how perfect it was.
Mads' hands came up around her hips, holding her steady, and his body rolled underneath her.
“Yes?” he asked through gritted teeth, and she nodded wildly.
That was all the permission he needed to lift her nearly entirely off of him and to bring her down again. The long slow stroke pushed the pleasure inside her up to a fever pitch, and she writhed in his grasp, wanting more and needing more as well.
He lifted her slowly a few more times, until the sting of his entrance was nothing more than memory, and she was slippery with need. She was desperate for him, starved for more, and she struggled against the hands that were keeping her from taking him fully.
“Please, please now, Mads, I can't wait any more...”
She was ready to beg, but now she could tell that he was as desperate for it as he was. He tightened his grip on her hips and brought her down hard on top of him, making her feel every inch of his length, and then he did it again. He pulled her to him with sharp, almost violent motions, and when she was wailing with need, he stilled for a moment.
Hunting Hearts II (Trilogy Bundle) (Werewolf Romance - Paranormal Romance) Page 2