Chapter Thirty-Six
Quarrie would never have believed that lying in a filthy, ruined hut in the pouring rain could feel so comfortable or so right. Yet it did. The comfort reached deep and stemmed from something other than his physical location.
It came from the woman in his arms.
He’d known even before she shed her clothing and they lay down here together, she was perfection. Perfect for him. The taste of her. The feel.
The feel.
By feel he did not mean only the slide of her skin beneath his hands or even the heat of her mouth, but her spirit entwining with his. Enfolding him. Welcoming him like one long lost and returning home.
And when he entered her—naught else had existed.
Sanity returned to him slowly and very much against his will. They did lie in a filthy hut, he and this woman who should be his enemy.
Who belonged with him as did no one else.
They did have a world of difficulty and conflict before them.
He closed his eyes. Mayhap he could keep that world at bay a few moments longer.
“What does it mean,” he breathed at her, “that word ye spoke to me?”
“Word?”
“ást.” He repeated it carefully.
Her breath caught in her chest. “Love. ást min means my love.”
An endearment spoken in the heat of the moment, mayhap.
In keeping with the honesty that held them, as fundamental as the sense of belonging, he asked, “Am I yer love?”
“It seems so.” She stirred a little beneath him. “Does it not?”
“Aye.” He kissed her because he could do nothing else, and fell into her again. The one place he wanted to remain.
Struggling for words after the kiss ended, with a lingering tug of lips on lips, he said, “Ye do no’ feel like a stranger.”
“Nei.” She touched his cheek, and the tenderness of the gesture near undid him again. “Can you explain this?”
“I do no’ ken. But, Hulda, since we met I ha’ been having a wealth o’ dreams. Dreams in which I am with particular women. Women I adore. Only they are no’ other women. Somehow, they are all ye.”
It should have made no sense to her. Indeed, she blinked up at him with those pale, luminous eyes.
“I too had this sensation when we were making love. With my eyes closed, I could not be certain who you were. Only, you were you. And you belonged to me.”
“A curious sort o’ thing,” he breathed. “And a powerful one.”
“Very powerful.”
His thoughts raced. “The ancients—my ancestors—believed we live not one life but many. They said we come into the world through the cauldron o’ rebirth. I ne’er gave much thought to it before—”
“One would not.” She blinked at him again. “Unless caught in such a situation as ours.”
“But ’tis madness.”
“As mad as us meeting out o’ a world of strangers and feeling”—she brushed her fingers across his cheek—“this?”
“I do no’ ken. I canna say.” In a way, it terrified him, that memories from a past he could not recall might come rushing at him. Overtake him in this way.
Yet there was the familiarity of it. The staggering rightness.
“My people,” she whispered, “we hope for a valiant life that we may enter Valhalla when we die, and remain ever young. Me—I can imagine hoping for no more than this.”
“Hulda.” He kissed her, and the rest of it, the questions and the wondering, ebbed away to the back of his mind.
She drew his hand to her breast. “I want you here, ja? And I want you inside me.”
And Quarrie, a man who attended always to his duty, surrendered the world and everything else in it.
*
It rained. A fury of the gods it was, perhaps sent by the great Thor himself to help conceal this haven in which Hulda and Quarrie lay. It rained while they ran their hands and their mouths over each other. While she memorized this body of his that, ja, housed a spirit all too wonderfully familiar.
It rained while he came inside her, and she lost count of how many times. While their cloaks dried because they lay so long. While he became so much a part of her, she could not conceive of parting from him.
Yet she must. That thought lingered at the back of her mind, that this time out of time must end. That she would have to surrender him from her arms and return to the world.
This that she felt for him, though—it was boundless, bottomless. Just like her desire.
What would her men say when she returned after so long away? Would they wonder what she had done alone with the Scotsman? Would they be able to tell?
“Quarrie.” She spoke his name just because she liked the feel of it on her tongue. “How long till morning?”
“Who can tell?” The light he’d brought had long since guttered out.
“We need to go back.”
“Aye.” He ran his lips across her cheek to her mouth, and fires that should be well quenched flared again.
“Once more, mayhap, first?” she suggested.
He laughed. Ach, by all the holy gods, she loved it when he laughed. Above all the other things she loved about him.
Ja, he was her ást. Her love.
“Lass, ye ha’ wrung me dry.”
“I do not think so.”
It proved she was right. Sometime later, when she came to herself once more, she realized morning light filtered through the broken roof and allowed her to see him. He lay with his eyes closed, brown lashes making two fans.
“By the gods,” she groaned. “We are late.”
“Ye ha’ fair killed me. I am too weak to rise.”
“Fool.” She kissed him fiercely, which opened his eyes. He smiled at her, and she near lost herself in him again.
Yet when they got to their feet and began to dress, it was she who felt weak and light in the head.
They held on to one another like two children.
“It has stopped raining,” he observed.
“Has it?” Was there still a world out there?
“Wha’ will ye tell your men?”
“That we waited out the rain, I suppose. That you have given us leave to use these hunting grounds. Do you give us permission to hunt here, Chief Murtray?”
“Aye so, but I would keep well north o’ the settlement if I were ye. Armed men meeting other armed men out in the wild canna be safe.”
She thought about that. “Any excuse to loose an arrow, eh?”
“That is what I am thinking.”
They ducked out of the half-ruined building, a haven it now seemed to Hulda, into the gray morning light. The entire world had changed, though it had not. She had changed, as had the very color of all she saw.
She turned to him. “Do I look like a woman who has taken off all her clothing and put it on again?”
He smiled. “A bit, aye.”
Ach, but she loved it when he smiled that way, with his head thrown back and the light in his eyes.
“Come,” he told her.
They went hand in hand like two lovers till they left the trees and the sea came into view. A glorious sight it was, the sky still lowering but with early light showing through in ladders, combers raking the shore far below.
“We maun part here,” he said with regret.
Nei. Her heart cried it. But she was a grown woman, a leader of men. She had learned, had she not, better than to whine and moan at the unbearable?
She had to go back to her camp and he to his settlement. Even now, eyes might be watching. She should not, could not touch him.
“When will I see you again, Quarrie MacMurtray?”
“I do not know.”
Not an answer she could accept.
“I must see you.”
“Aye, so.”
“I must lie with you again.”
He did not look at her now but gazed away toward the sea, giving her his profile, which was very fine. Strong nose with a slight hook to the bridge. The beard curling along his jaw looked red. She loved everything about this man.
Loved.
“Aye,” he said so softly that she barely caught the word. “But we maun be careful, lass.”
Ja, they must. Difficult to tell her heart so, for it already missed him.
He looked at her then, his eyes sparkling with green in the morning light. “We will find a way.”
She wanted him to promise. But she had wrung promises enough from him, had she not? And nei, she was not a child.
She turned northward even as he must head south.
“ást min,” she branded him in parting.