She guided him inside her, the dark wrapping close around them, the damp air warm in their lungs, dripping down their cheeks, silvering their hair. He held her, feeling her close around him, sheathed tight inside her. He made no move. And then slowly . . . very slowly he withdrew and plunged deep again. Each stroke a torture. Each thrust dragging him closer to the edge. He locked his gaze with hers, dilated pupils and parted lips, clawing fingernails and wet skin. Her pleasure aroused him further until lightning licked along every raw nerve.
This was the end between them. He tried to console himself. She was not the first woman he had walked away from without a backward glance. Yet his heart ached as he pictured the future that might have been theirs, the family they might have had, the life they might have lived. And for the first time, David felt an irresistible urge to fight tooth and claw against his fate rather than resign himself to the inevitable. Because, for the first time, he had someone worth fighting for.
Callista wrapped her legs around David’s waist, lifted her hips to take him deeper. Head thrown back, she groaned as the water sluiced over them and between them, as she felt her blood pouring volcanic through her body. She’d heard the act of love called the tiny death, but there was nothing of death in this giving and receiving of pleasure. Death was a cold and frigid place, a vast empty landscape, a gray forever where no sun burned or stars shone. This was light and heat and life and blazing, heart-stopping emotion. This was the promise of bliss shadowed by the fear of despair.
This was what she had told herself she would not and could not do.
Love.
She arched against the sweet friction of their joining as he kissed her in a sweeping, heated, toe-curling, stomach-knotting kiss. Felt the cresting wave of her bliss pull her under, and cried her climax into his mouth. His sending struck hard as a warrior’s vow in her dizzy head.
The groan of door hinges broke the spell, the splash of lantern light over the bricks tore them apart, and the soft shush of robes over the stone had David bracing for attack.
“Down here, Ard-siur.” A grizzled priestess with a mole on her chin wobbled down the stairs. Two more followed, the last gripping the wrist of Sister Clara, who shot Callista a look of frightened apology.
The outraged group drew to a halt at the bottom of the steps, Aunt Deirdre close to boiling over as she took in the scene. “How dare you!” She fairly trembled with rage. “I offer you comfort and you repay me with lechery. I offer you aid and you pay me back with whore’s gold. Mr. St. Leger, you’re to return to your rooms. Tomorrow you’ll be turned over to the Amhas-draoi. You can be their distraction. I hope they offer you the hospitality that one of your kind deserves.”
Beneath the water, David squeezed Callista’s hand. Touched her leg. “You can’t keep him against his wishes, Aunt,” she argued. “He only came with me because I asked it of him. He’s only here because he worried about my safety.”
“Perhaps it’s best this way,” David murmured, and she knew he recalled his dangerous dream. That the fear of what he might do to her still gripped him. She would not believe. She could not believe that so soon after such joy there would follow such pain.
Ard-siur dismissed Callista with a scowl. “You will leave Dunsgathaic at first light. I’m sorry you traveled so far with nothing to show for your journey.”
David’s hand froze, his breath caught in his throat.
Callista had been wrong. It could happen. She closed her eyes and refused the horrible, violent images assailing her.
“Don’t be sorry, Aunt Deirdre,” she answered, defying her aunt as much as the voices raking her skull with whispers of death. “I’ve gained far more from these past few weeks with David than I could have found closeted away here with you in a hundred lifetimes. Love.”
20
The sun broke above the ocean’s horizon, throwing diamonds across the water, while far to the north, clouds hung low across the distant hills and wide, brown moors of the Cuillin. Callista cast a final glance over her shoulder as Dunsgathaic disappeared from view, and tried not to imagine the worst that her dreams last night had shown her.
She sat back against the lumpy seat, hoping to empty her mind of the whirl of useless, plaguing thoughts. Hard to do in a coach that smelled of mildew and rattled like rocks in a pail, but sleep had been scarce in the long dark hours and her eyelids soon grew heavy as the coach crawled over the bumpy track toward the ferry crossing.
From there . . . who knew?
She’d no destination in mind, no schedule to which she must adhere. There was no one to tell her what to do or how to do it. Her future was finally her own. And she’d never felt lonelier.
Should she return to Gray de Coursy at Addershiels? He might not welcome her when he heard about David’s capture by the Amhas-draoi, but she’d a notion to read more of those stories she’d found in his library, to discover the lost history of the Imnada among those dusty stacks.
She smiled. One Fey-blood at a time, David had once said.
The coach hit a rut, knocking her to the floor. As she clambered back onto the seat, she saw that they had turned off the road and onto a narrow track winding up into the rocky hills rather than down toward the nestled village and the ferry crossing. A slithering tendril of fear curled up from her stomach and snatched her breath.
The landscape grew wilder as long-haired cattle wandered the wide, barren uplands and the sea shone like glass away to the south. Off to her right, a thatched crofter’s cottage stood alone in a narrow valley.
The track ducked beneath a rusted iron gate into a courtyard, drawing up in front of a tall stone house of turrets and towers with moss growing thick up the walls. Seabirds wheeled and dove from the cliffs into the pounding surf and the ever-present wind carried a salty spray.
The coach drew up on the gravel. The door opened. Callista’s fear blossomed like an icy fist around her heart.
Victor Corey held out a hand, his twisted smile never reaching his hard glittering eyes. “And here’s my blushing bride, just in time for our wedding.”
David stood, hands braced on either side of the window, body thrumming with rage and an almost consuming panic.
“. . . back from my ma’s house . . . go every morning . . . she’s not well and there’s the cows to look after . . .” The young priestess gabbled her story in a frightened and breathless half whisper. “I tried telling Ard- siur, but she wouldn’t listen . . . said it wasn’t our concern . . .”
“You were right to come to us,” Lady Duncallan said before looking to her husband. “Could you speak to them, James?”
“I could, but I doubt it would help. It took all my persuasive abilities just to keep David from being tossed in a cell to rot while they bicker over what to do with him.”
“So we do nothing while Callista’s in trouble?”
“Not nothing.” Duncallan spoke a low string of indistinguishable words, the air shimmering gold and orange and green as he summoned the power of his kind, shaping it, manipulating it, training it to his hand.
The hair on David’s neck rose at the confluence of such potent Fey-blood magic, and he turned, stomach churning, just as a wraithlike figure flickered into being in front of him. Tall, broad-shouldered, steel-gray eyes, and a jaw set like stone.
“You did this?” He touched his ringer, half expecting his hand to pass through the tangle of mage energy like drawing aside a curtain. Instead, he touched warm flesh, hard muscle. “It’s like looking in a mirror.”
“The illusion won’t last long nor is it strong enough to fool the Amhas-draoi for more than a few minutes,”
