Chapter Twenty-Three
A hundred times during the course of that evening did Finlay question himself. Wondering over and over if he’d mistaken what had passed between him and Katrin in her chamber earlier. Whether it had been wishful thinking on his part.
Many lifetimes’ worth of wishful thinking.
Or, if he had not mistaken the invitation to spend the night with her, whether mayhap she had since reconsidered. Thought better of it.
Perhaps she’d reexamined the wisdom of leaving with her father’s men and decided she need not act in haste. That they had all the time in the world to come together, if she so wished.
He did not know. He repaired to his chamber late, wondering, wondering, and played upon his harp, listening all the while for footsteps in the corridor. For the sound of her chamber door opening and closing.
At last he did hear her come up the passageway to her door. She went in, and naught more happened. Had she indeed changed her plans, changed her mind? Had O’Hanlon convinced her? Or did she even now continue working at packing up her belongings?
He played on, his fingers moving across the strings even though his thoughts remained stuttered and frozen. Not until the latch on his door lifted did he cease.
There she stood, still in the wrinkled and soiled gown she’d worn this day long and with her hair half tumbled down. Gazing with a world of emotions in her eyes.
“I should be angry wi’ ye,” she said.
“Should ye?”
“Aye. Ye went behind my back and talked wi’ Reagan. Bade him dissuade me fro’ going wi’ my da.”
Finlay’s heart sank violently. He could not deny it. They would not be together after all.
“But I find—” She shook her head, her gaze holding his. “I find I canna be angry, at least no’ angry enough. No’ when there is so little time to spare.”
He set Brada aside and got to his feet, his heart—so he very much feared—in his eyes. He held his breath to hear what more she might say.
She glanced around the chamber before speaking in a whisper. “No’ here. Come wi’ me to mine.”
He slipped behind her, moving surely even though he could not feel his feet on the floor. At the door of her chamber, she caught his hand in hers, the touch warm and so much more than just the contact of skin on skin. She towed him inside and shut the door carefully behind him.
Her gaze met his, wide and pale blue, clear in the soft light of the candles.
“Here is your chance, Finlay, to tell me nay. Do ye still want to be wi’ me?”
Still. Always. Eternally. He had no words, so he stepped up and pulled her into his arms.
He wanted to kiss her, every separate part of her, he did. Instead he tipped her chin up gently and sought to determine what lay in her eyes.
His voice sounded choked when he returned her words. “Do ye still want to be wi’ me?”
“Aye. Och, aye, Finlay. We are fast running out o’ chances. If no’ this night, tomorrow, or the next, then mayhap never at all in this world.”
She still planned on going, leaving here. Leaving him. His heart sank again and then bounded. O’Hanlon had not been able to persuade her. “Katrin.” Alanna. “I would ha’ ye be certain this is wha’ ye want. That I am wha’ ye want.”
“My heart wants,” she told him gravely. “And somewhat even more fundamental to my being than my heart. My spirit, mayhap.” She smiled tremulously. “Parts o’ me I never knew existed seem to want ye.”
“Well, then.” It was not remembering. Not quite. Or mayhap it was as close as he would get, in this life.
“Ye will no’ tell me nay?”
“I will no’.” He had never been able to deny her.
“Then let us ha’ what time we may together—here, now, on this turn o’ the wheel, as my ancestors might ha’ said. To begin, let me see ye. My imagination has been running riot. Is that too bold a request?”
“Naught ye can say or do this night is too bold.” He shed his clothing for her as he had—how many times in the past?
Remembered how she had looked at him then.
With desire, with longing, with lazy possessiveness.
He wondered what she would see now and if she would be disappointed.
He was what he was and who he was, but as a man he wanted very badly for her to desire what she saw.
“No warrior,” he told her when he stood bared. “As ye see.”
Thoughts moved in her eyes. She examined him from the length of his limbs to the tattoos he bore, and must have found nothing lacking, for she came forward into his arms and kissed him, unleashing a tumult of sensation.
Fully clothed still, she clung to him, parted his lips with her tongue, and tasted him. Moaned deep in her throat.
“Ye be as perfect, Finlay, as I imagined ye. I find naught wanting.”
He laughed unsteadily. “No’ fair for ye to stand clothed while I—”
“Stand unclothed? Aye, ye are upstanding, so I see.” She breathed it into his mouth. “So I feel.”
Aye, so he was.
She backed off from him but a half step. Removed her garments with deliberation, all the while letting her gaze caress him.
She was bonny, as ever she had been. Long, long legs and flared hips. Breasts high and proud, rosy-tipped to his gaze. Strong, aye, and graceful. Everything she had ever been and would ever be. All, to him.
“Come,” he bade her. “To the bed.”
“No’ yet.”
She dropped to her knees, reached up, and ran her hands through the swirl of hair on his chest before sweeping them downward, ever downward. Across his stomach, which flexed to her touch. Up and down his thighs before she wrapped her fingers around him.
“I just ha’ to know how ye taste. It has been a thing much on my mind. Since the boat, when we kissed.”
Had it? By holy, sweet heaven—
He stood trembling violently while she leaned into him.
Parted her lips, took him in, and indulged herself, for indulge herself she did.
He buried his hands in her half-tumbled hair—for she’d neglected to take the bulk of it down—and gave himself up to her, as ever.
To sensation, and the sheer rightness of it.
Fate, he decided, was a strange and wonderful thing. That they should be together here this way, as so often they had been in the past. That it should be so wondrously new, and yet so much the same.
She slid up his body, skin against skin, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Now, ye may come to the bed.”
*
Finlay tasted just the way she knew he would, like every desire she’d ever had, all her dreams rolled into one.
The taste of pure man. He possessed a whipcord-strong body beneath the bard’s robes, not a spare bit of fat on him, but no lack of muscle either.
A body in its prime, honed by years spent traveling over hill and stream.
Not that Katrin would have cared, had he been far less beautiful. It was Finlay that she wanted. The fire of him and the gentleness. The patience and the wit. The man inside.
The fact that he pleased her so, that he was just as she best liked a man to be, with a trail of hair down his chest leading to what stood so proud for her, with long, graceful limbs, and freckled skin, just added to her heady pleasure.
At her bed, she threw aside the covers, tumbled down, and, with what might have been a breathless laugh, pulled him atop her.
They kissed. It might have been for hours; she could not tell. Better than breathing, it was. Something they had done a thousand times, yet never, never before. She could feel the hot weight of him nestled and pressing between her thighs.
She scarce knew herself, who she was, where she was. When she ceased kissing him, it was only to say, “Now. Please.”
Aye, surely this had happened before. Her demanding him this way. Begging to have him inside her. It was wild and desperate, the need to have him inside her. To hold him.
“Now, lass? But—”
“Only the first o’ times,” she said against his lips. “We ha’ all night.”
He plunged into her, and it was as if her entire world fell into place. As if all the pieces of who she was formed a pattern always meant to be. He began to move in a rhythm as ancient as his songs, too beautiful almost to bear.
Joined at the mouth and below, they rocked and rocked until she could not remember that anything but this existed. Him, a part of her. Her, part of him.
When he would have withdrawn, she locked her heels at his back and he came inside her, both of them climaxing in a storm too powerful to be denied.
“Lass,” he breathed into her ear. “Alanna.”
“Call me that again.”
“Alanna. Darling.”
She drew his face up from where it burrowed in her neck and gazed into his eyes. Green eyes, deep as eternity.
“List to me, Finlay. This time together we have for certain. Aught ye want o’ me. Understand? There is nothing I will withhold.”
“Nor I.”
When she left here, her beloved home, when she left him, she wanted to carry at least a part of him with her.
If only she could make time cease to pass upon this night.
They did their best. In truth, the hours they spent together did make time stand still, rendered it at once eternal and immediate. Long before dawn, Katrin knew it would not be enough. Forever with this man might not be enough. Had she given her heart to the harper?
Nay, not her heart so much as her soul. If it had ever been hers to give…
They lay quiet for a while. They spoke in intimate whispers of the pleasure they shared. They made love again with tender eagerness. Katrin slept, slept and dreamed.
It seemed she was back in one of Finlay’s tales, the first that he had told.
Aye, and she had shared in the story as he told it, but now she found herself there in truth, her feet upon the green turf of Erin.
She stood on a hillside, the sun moving through the sky to set, and a soft wind bringing the far scents of thyme and heather.
Should she be able to sense so much of a dream?
She walked down the hillside into a settlement made of roundhouses with a larger structure at its center. Her heart lifted and sped as she went. He would be there. Her mother was away helping with a birthing, and he would be there alone.
Stolen time they might have together, before the wheel turned and perhaps parted them.
She entered a tiny roundhouse, one that looked no different from the others, though she knew it for home. The scent of it, the fire burning low in the center of the floor. The sleeping benches beyond.
He was there, back from his practicing at arms, and turned to regard her when she went in. Tall he was, with broad shoulders and a graceful, limber frame. Not the harper. And yet, and yet…
Helpless against what she felt for him, she went forward. They linked hands. His eyes, bright hazel, met hers and asked a question.
“Come,” she whispered.
Was there aught more to be wanted or had in the world than the feel of his arms around her?
Ah, but how had she ended up in Finlay’s tale?
Was this real, or imagining? Filled with him, filled with his love, she lay curled in his arms on the sleeping bench, and wondered.
She could feel the stars moving overhead, way up above the roof of the roundhouse, and even those stars slowed in their courses to afford them this time.
It was not enough. By heaven, it would never be enough.
Katrin awoke in her own chamber, in Finlay’s arms, knowing one night would not be enough. Perhaps not many nights, or many lifetimes.
She lay listening to him breathe, a sound she seemed to know deep within, like the coming and going of waves on the shore.
Their night must have passed. Light filtered in through the window and she could hear that activity began outside the walls, and down in the house.
A pit of dread opened in her stomach. She did not want morning to come.
Finlay lay sprawled beside her, his lips still at her cheek. She wondered, with the coming of the day, what would happen between them, even as she stroked her fingers through his red hair. What could happen between them? In a mere matter of days, she must go, and he stay.
By the time she returned from this battle, if she returned, he would likely have moved on. She had no right to ask him to wait for her, while making the choice she did.
One with which he disagreed.
“I maun rise,” she murmured to him with heavy reluctance. “We have another hard day afore us.”
His eyes opened, magically green in the dim morning light. Many things, he might say. He could once more attempt to dissuade her from her plan, ask her to stay. His words carried much more weight with her now. Being the man he was, he did not ask. Nor did he speak of love.
Ah, and could what had been born between them go by so ordinary a name?
Instead, he requested, “Kiss me.”
She did, putting the whole of her soul into it. He accepted the gift and breathed in deep.
Should she tell him about the curious dream? Confess that in his arms she had slipped off to the place in the past he’d described to the company so well?
Instead she said, “Tonight.”
“Eh?” Curiosity—or was it wonder?—sparked in those incredible eyes, and moved in his face.
“We have—we have a few more days.” She stumbled over the words. “A few more nights. If I ask to ha’ ye again—?”
“Lass, och lass, has there ever been aught I’ve been able to deny ye?”