14. Keira
Chapter 14
Keira
A ldrin doesn’t hesitate as I drag him into the cottage. Part of the roof has caved in. Moonbeams illuminate the rubble strewn across the floor and dust motes dance in the air as we disturb it. But the building has four walls and enough privacy for me.
I slam the door behind us, then throw my arms around Aldrin’s neck and crash my mouth against his in a brutal kiss. The scent of him fills my nostrils, earthy and floral, tinged with the tang of blood. His lips are so sweet, warm, full and soft. They feel like home as they brush against mine, parting them so he can dart his tongue inside to caress my own.
His powerful hands grip my hips, gliding across my ass, squeezing then lifting me up onto him. I wrap my legs around him as he slams my back against the door. The whole thing rattles behind me, but stands strong. Aldrin’s hard chest presses against the softness of mine and my fingers run down the muscles of his back.
He kisses me like he is a man dying, suffocating, and I am the only thing that can give him air. He sucks on my lower lip, then drags it between his teeth.
A low groan escapes me.
I run my hands through his thick hair, fingers catching in the snags of it as he kisses his way down the tender flesh of my neck, from behind my ear to my shoulder, over my collarbone and into my ample cleavage. I shiver at the delicious sensation.
My heart swells to the point of pain. I want to worship every part of him. To show him that he is the center of my universe. That I live and bleed for him alone.
When his lips meet the tops of my breasts, I let go of my death grip on him and unbutton my shirt with shaky fingers. Aldrin groans as my breasts spill out, nipples already peaked from the coolness of the night.
He cups them in his hands as I hold onto his rippling shoulders, then he leans down and flicks his tongue across each nipple in turn. I close my eyes and throw back my head as his tongue traces circles around them. Jolts of pleasure crash through me, making my heart race and breath catch.
My eyes snap open, and I desperately try to pull off his tunic to expose that perfect chest. We do an awkward dance, shimmying my weight until the fabric is tugged free and both our shirts are on the ground. I am rewarded with the sight of his sculpted pectorals and abdomen. I only get a glimpse of those defined ridges, gleaming with a sheen of sweat, before Aldrin’s lips crash onto mine again.
He moves his weight so his chest presses me harder into the door, then he adjusts his hips, aligning the hardened bulge of his cock with my core, with my legs spread out around him.
He rocks his hips against me, grinding his erection over my core again and again. The friction shoots pleasure through me, building and building, driving me to the point of insanity, until I am panting and calling out his name and cannot remember my own. I hook my legs around his hips to gain leverage and ride his length, hating the maddening layers of fabric between us.
“Gods, Keira.” His groan is feral. “You are going to undo me, right here, like this.”
“I want more of you, Aldrin,” I pant back.
He stops moving, and for a moment I want to scream at him, but he slips a hand beneath the beltline of my pants. Those thick fingers slip over my swollen clit, down the slick center of me and deep inside. Pleasure explodes within me with as they curl against my inner walls.
I come alive for him, writhing and pushing back against him, and still, I want more. His thumb draws lazy circles over my clitoris, bringing me higher with each rotation.
“You are so wet for me,” he rumbles in my ear.
He withdraws his fingers, then swings me away from the door and onto my back on the sturdy table in the center of the room. My heart might explode as he stands before me, unlacing his britches. He leans over me, his arms on either side of my shoulders as he stares down into my face, but he has stopped undressing.
I writhe beneath him, my nipples rubbing against the hard planes of his chest, the tantalizing sensation setting me afire, but he doesn’t move. I try to pull him free of his pants, but he takes each of my wrists and pins them on the table over my head.
“Aldrin,” I beg.
A deep sadness fills his eyes as they gaze down at me, spread out before him and ready to enjoy.
“We need to stop, Keira.” His lips curl downward. “I can’t do this.”
I freeze. It’s like a bucket of icy water has been dumped on my head. “What do you mean?”
He is so close I can feel his warm breath on my face. Our bodies are still tangled together as he holds me down.
“I don’t want a single night of passion. Not because you are full of adrenaline from the fear and thrill of battle. If we do this tonight, and then go back to the way things have been, it will destroy me.” He pulls away, releasing my arms. “I want all of you. Your heart. Your future. Your trust. I can’t give myself to you without those things.”
I sit up, gripping him so he can’t leave. My heart does somersaults at the vulnerability on his face. “I brought you here because I forgive you, Aldrin. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
His eyebrows raise and his lips part in shock.
“You deserve my trust, and I want to fix all the things that were broken between us. I will give everything to you. My heart, my future and my trust.” I lean forward and brush a soft kiss against his lips. “Because I am desperately in love with you.”
Aldrin presses his body into mine and kisses me hard, bruising my lips and scratching my skin with his stubble. I wrap my arms around his neck and hold him tight to me.
When he pulls a few inches away, his amber eyes glow. “You love me, do you? I guess you’re not half bad yourself.” A cocky grin fills his face, and I slap a hand on his chest. He leans forward and whispers in my ear, “You already know I am so in love with you, I would cross realms and fight wars for you.”
A thrill ripples through me, making my stomach dip and heart flutter. My fingers dig into his shoulders. “Show me how much you love me.”
He puts his hand on my chest and firmly pushes me back onto the table, pinning my shoulders to its surface. His heated gaze roams down the naked curves of my body, his fingers following it until they meet the belt of my riding pants. He drags my hips to the table’s edge and undresses me completely in a swift motion.
Aldrin admires the sight of me as he drags his pants down his hips and his erect cock springs out. I lick my lips, desperate to taste it, to feel the length of it in my mouth, and for it to be buried within me.
I can’t seem to catch my breath as he adjusts my legs on either side of his hips. He uses two fingers to spread my entrance wide and grips his cock to line it up with me.
Fire jolts through my entire body at those simple touches. At the anticipation of him finally entering me and filling me up. There is a smirk on his face as he pumps his hips slightly to rub the head of his cock up and down my slit, awakening my every nerve. I move my hips to capture it within me, but he holds me down with a hand on my hips.
“Beg for it,” Aldrin commands, rubbing it up to my clitoris again, then back down to my entrance.
“Please, Aldrin.” My voice is guttural. “I want you in me. I want it so hard I’ll see stars.”
He lines himself up with my core, thrusting just the head inside me, and I let out a strangled moan as sensation burns through me. I try to push against him, to drive it home, but Aldrin raises an eyebrow. The bastard is going to make me work for it.
“Please. Give me more.”
He drives another inch in?—
And we both freeze as shouts reach us from across a great distance.
“Keira! Keira!” My father’s voice echoes through the cottage. He hasn’t found us, but he is looking. “Set up a search party immediately!” he barks. “I want them both found.”
I turn pleading eyes up to Aldrin. “How fast can you be?”
He withdraws from me instead, the drag of it bittersweet. “I will not be caught here, like this, by your father.”
There is such longing in his eyes as they dance over my naked body, spread out for him and willing. They catch on my breasts, then my core.
He shakes his head, then bends down to grab my pants and tosses them to me. “Get up, Keira. I just got your father to stop wanting me dead.”
My hands shake from all that unsatiated lust as I dress. It doesn’t help that the ripple of Aldrin’s back muscles keeps drawing me in as he tugs on his pants.
I leave first, while he watches over me from the shadows of the cottage as I stalk back to the camp. He will steal back the long way around. It pains me that we must sneak around in the shadows, but what we have between us is too dangerous to the war effort to be revealed.
I head straight for my father, who has multiple guards gathered around him at the edge of camp. He barks orders for them to search for me in the forest and meadow, and lights dozens of fire orbs with a flick of his wrist to illuminate their way.
“You can stop all this drama, Father,” I snap. “I’m right here.”
He whirls around, grabbing me by the shoulders and forcing me back a few steps out of the soldiers’ hearing. “Where did you go? Were you with him ?” he hisses.
“I felt sick and needed air that didn’t reek of blood. I wanted to be alone.” Shame fills me as the lie rolls off my tongue.
He gives me a long, hard look. “We were just ambushed by an angry mob that hid in the scrub, and you walked off in it alone? That doesn’t sound like you.”
I don’t have a good answer to that, so I become the juvenile daughter he is treating me like, and turn on my heel and walk away. His glare burns into my back.
I wake the next morning to the chorus of my father’s snoring with a black fury in my heart. I rip the covers back from my pallet and get dressed, banging the lid of mychest as I pull clothing out and throw my boots across the ground in frustration.
It is time I grew up. I need to stop playing the victim and become the hero in my story. To take charge, instead of hiding behind my father and grandmother, then grumbling at their methods.
“Keira. Is the sun even up yet?” my father grumbles, a hand on his forehead.
I stomp over to the tent flaps and duck my head out, noting the silvery glow upon the horizon. “Yes,” I snap. “We should leave Lord Tomas’ lands before any more of his people decide to assassinate Aldrin and Silvan.”
“Or the slimy bastard sets his personal guard on us.” My father drags himself out of bed, pulling boiled leather armor over his tunic and pants. I glance at Caitlin, and he gives me a hard look. “Leave her to sleep until the last moments. She gets bad sickness and vomits often. Your sister is too stubborn to admit it, but I have followed her a few times when she suddenly disappears.”
“She struggles to show any weakness,” I agree.
He lets out a huff of air as he tightens his buckles. “It is a hard line to toe, not taking away her agency and authority, but also protecting her and the unborn baby.”
My father gives me a long, searching look, eyebrows creasing. He wants to know about the fae parent of his first grandchild. He will have to get past his prejudices enough to ask, if he wants any answers. But I cannot tell him, and neither can Caitlin. We are still bound to our oaths to the temple and cannot speak of our pilgrimage.
Aldrin has no such restrictions.
“I am coming to see that I was wrong about Aldrin. I shouldn’t have listened to my mother in our questioning of him.” His words shock me into stillness, and all I can do is gape at him. “He fought last night not for his own protection, but for yours. I saw the gaps he left in his defenses so he could shield you. The way he was more concerned about the soldiers who had their eye on you instead of him.”
He rolls his head when I don’t respond.
“I am no monster, Keira, just a man out of his depths.”
I take a step closer to him. “Why did you do it? You tortured him. Why show such cruelty when it is nothing like you?”
My father sits heavily on the edge of his cot and pats the spot beside him for me to join him. “Sit, Keira. I want to tell you a story.”
My eyes narrow. I remain standing, hands on my hips.
He presses his fingers to one temple and closes his eyes for a long moment. “The fae hurt my mother. Then my wife. And now…now I thought they had hurt my daughter. Hunted her, while she still bore the ring of bruises around her throat put there by the man I sent her off to.”
His eyes snap open, and his gaze is glassy.
“It broke something within me, Keira, when I learned Finan struck you. It brought out a feral, murderous beast I haven’t been able to tame. I blame myself. It is a father’s duty to make sure his daughter is safe, and I sent you to him .”
I take a shaky step toward my father, the blood draining from my head until the world spins around me. “What do you mean, the fae hurt my mother?”
He shakes his head, as though to dispel demons. “It happened before we married, while she still lived on her father’s estate. He was a noble minor lord of the North who owed allegiance to my father. A warband of fae stole into our realm through a portal and slaughtered her entire house, dragging some of the women back to their realm. All were killed or taken, except your mother, who hid and witnessed everything. I don’t know if they were high fae or nymphs, but it doesn’t matter.”
I rush to my father’s side. “Did you go after them? Did you bring them back?”
“What do you think?” His fists clench and unclench. “I would do anything for your mother. Even back then, before we married. She was devastated and has never truly recovered.”
“Is that why she cannot handle the sight of blood or loud noises? Why even hearing the guards spar is enough to unsettle her?”
My heart cracks as he nods. My traumatized mother, who always tries so hard to be warm and caring but is too damaged to be anything other than emotionally distant.
It explains why her expression is always tight, like she wears a mask that doesn’t fit her. Why the battles she fights are those of court intrigue and discretion. She never speaks of her family, and I always assumed she grew up in an abusive household.
My father runs the heels of his hands over his eyes. “The fae have touched three generations of our family, and you are the only one who hasn’t been hurt by them. Maybe someday you’ll forgive me for overreacting, especially when yet another fae tried to claim one of my women.”
I stand and sit on the bed beside him. “It is Aldrin you should ask for forgiveness. He is not going away, Father, and he deserves to hear your reasons.” Before he can answer, another thought comes to mind. “If fae hurt my mother, why was she more forgiving than you when Aldrin was in our prisons?”
He sighs. “Because beneath all the rigid control, she is a bleeding heart. There were fae who helped us get her family back. And those who stole them in the first place? Her uncle had hired them to do the job, wiping clean his brother’s line so he could take up his title and lands. And yes, I executed the bastard.”
A silence drags out between us, filled with the distant clanging of guards packing up the camp and barking orders at each other. The activity increases as more soldiers wake and pack the tents.
When Caitlin rouses, she takes one look at my father and me, poring over maps of the North and bickering in hushed tones, then runs out of the tent to vomit. I tuck a water canteen into her hands when she returns and offer her a bowl of cooling porridge.
“We need to appeal to Lord Bradford next.” Caitlin sits heavily at the foldout table, pointing to his seat of Rosehallow City. “If he supports Finan, our retreat to Appleshield will be cut off, along with our line of supplies.”
“It is already decided, Caitlin. Lord Adalwolf has more soldiers and is closer. We appeal to him first.” My father stares her down.
“We will do neither.” I place my hands on the map and lean forward over it. Caitlin and my father turn to me with matching scowls on their faces. “We petition the Countess Lynna first. She has portals in her lands and a healthy respect for the fae. Lynna will be won over simply by the promise of trade with the fae lands. It helps that every woman in her line has taken the pilgrimage, including herself. We gain more powerful support for Aldrin, and we stop getting attacked by closed-minded fools who think they have a right to kill him. Lord Bradford is next. He has always been a merchant at heart. He has the wealth to back our war and the greed to be lured in by a fae alliance.”
My father gives me an approving look. “We will change course. The Countess Lynna first.” He strides from the tent, immediately barking orders at the guards outside.
Caitlin places a hand on my arm. “Find your voice in this war, Keira. Challenge us more often. No one has studied the geopolitics and maps of this kingdom like you have over the last decade.”
Shivers run down my spine. I will fight for my future and my freedom.