CHAPTER TWENTY #2
“If it is my fate to die, how can you possibly alter that?” he asked, pointing out the obvious.
Laoghaire’s terror instantly vanished, replaced with a look of fierce determination. The transformation was so complete that it made him think an ancient Valkyrie had materialized before his very eyes.
“I will give my life to protect ye and to ensure that no harm comes to ye.” Laoghaire took several steps, quickly bridging the distance between them.
Placing a hand upon his forearm, she squeezed tightly and said, “Coira believes that a man’s fate is sealed within the taibhse, but I believe that life is a balance between fate and free will.
This is why I came rather than send word with a messenger, because I feared that ye would disregard the dire significance of my vision. ”
Even though he was still garbed in a quilted aketon, Galen could feel the pressure of Laoghaire’s grip against the tightened muscles of his arm, her hand like a brand that somehow managed to sear through the padded layers of fabric.
It only served to reiterate what he’d known for some time now—his Highland bride had the passion and heart of a woman, but she also possessed the spirit of a warrior.
Confronted with Laoghaire’s steadfast conviction, his earlier rage began to ebb.
In its stead, Galen felt a sense of profound wonder.
While he refused to countenance the validity of Laoghaire’s taibhse, the fact that she would risk her very life to prevent the dire vision from transpiring humbled him beyond measure.
Aside from Hector, his brother, Galen could think of no one who’d ever gone to such lengths to protect him.
Rendered mute—uncertain what to do or say—he gazed at his lady wife with great longing.
Her burnished copper tresses had been woven into a single, thick plait that fell over her shoulder and hugged the outer curve of her breast. To his mind, the silky strands gleamed more brightly than the red-hot coals in the brazier, and he had to resist the urge to reach over and unbraid her hair.
Gently pulling his forearm from Laoghaire’s grasp, Galen stepped over to the chest and reached for the goblet of sweet wine.
Laoghaire followed in his wake and stood silently at his side.
After he’d taken several sips, she took the goblet from his hand and, looking him directly in the eye, she drank from the very same spot.
“So, you do not wish to see me die,” he said at last, finally breaking the silence that had arisen between them.
Laoghaire smiled shyly as she set the wine goblet on the chest. “I am yer wife. ’Tis my sacred duty to protect my husband.”
“Sweet Jesu,” he muttered, her earnestness causing his heart to swell with a strange, nameless emotion, one that he’d never before experienced. And one which wasn’t altogether welcome. Such tender emotions made him acutely uncomfortable. As though he were teetering over a dangerous precipice.
“I want to fulfill my duty as yer wife and give ye sons,” Laoghaire continued. Taking hold of his right hand, she placed it over her left breast, enabling him to feel the strong, steady beat of her heart. “But I also wanted to give ye aid, comfort, and my protection.”
“And what of your body, lady wife? Do you wish to give that to me, as well?”
“My body already belongs to you,” Laoghaire replied, Galen’s unexpected question causing the breath to catch in her throat.
“My heart is made glad.”
“Not only yer heart,” she teased. To prove the point, she reached under Galen’s aketon and molded her fingers around his arousal, able to feel the heat of him through his linen braies.
Closing his eyes, Galen grunted his pleasure. “Sweet Jesu, but you are brazen,” he muttered in a husky voice.
“Would ye have me be otherwise?”
Galen pulled her toward him. “Nay, Laoghaire. You are exactly as I desire you to be. You have bewitched me, lady wife.”
With a soft whimper, she clutched hold of Galen’s upper arms and molded her body to his. Locked in a lovers’ embrace, they stood so close to one another that she could feel the pound of his heart against her chest.
Slipping his forefinger under her chin, Galen gently tipped her head up. “I have yet to properly welcome you,” he said, just before he bent his head and covered her mouth with his.
The instant that his lips touched hers, Laoghaire felt a rapturous quickening of all her senses.
When, a moment later, Galen’s hand slid down her back and lightly squeezed her buttock, she pressed her woman’s mound against the hardened bulge between his hips and wantonly rubbed herself against him in a slow, grinding motion.
All the while, lips and tongues continued to entwine, their sighs mingling, their breaths merging.
Suddenly seized with a desperate desire to feel Galen’s bare flesh, the flame fanned by a passion eager to take flight, she tugged impatiently at the laces of his aketon.
There is only one way to satisfy this craving of the body. This yearning of the heart.
When the kiss finally ended, Galen stared at her, long and hard, his chest rising and falling with each indrawn breath.
In that silent interlude, his eyes grew dark and heavy-lidded.
Without uttering a word, Laoghaire sank to her knees before him.
Shoving the hem of Galen’s aketon to his waist, she began to tremble with excitement.
Just outside the tent, she could hear raucous laughter and the fainter sound of someone strumming a gittern. And though she knew there were at least a score of people in the encampment, at that moment they seemed a world away.
While she busied herself with untying various knots, Galen made quick work of removing his aketon and undertunic.
After she slid the chausses down his legs—carelessly flinging them aside in her haste to disrobe him—Laoghaire plied her fingers to the ties that fastened Galen’s braies.
Once she was finished with that, she very slowly pulled the linen undergarment between his legs, using the fabric to gently caress his cods.
Galen groaned softly, jutting his hips in her direction.
Taking firm hold of his erect member, Laoghaire angled it toward her mouth and warmed the stiffened rod with her breath. She then moved her hand up and down the veined length of it, glorying in its unique feel—thick, silken, hot.
“When I first saw yer manly appendage, I thought it strange to behold. And yet, for all its strangeness, it fits perfectly.”
Galen thread his fingers through her hair. “Mayhap that is because we are made for one another.”
“’Tis a lovely thought,” she murmured . . . just before she lathed his manhood with several slow, torturous strokes of the tongue.
“Do you enjoy tormenting me, lady wife?”
Galen’s voice was now so hoarse, the tone so low, that Laoghaire had to strain her ears to hear him.
’Tis obvious he has great need of me. That he did filled her with womanly satisfaction.
Having teased and tormented him enough, she took him inside her mouth, pursing her lips around him. Galen hissed through his teeth, his entire body going rigid as his fingers clasped her head more tightly. Emboldened by his response, she used her lips, tongue, and hand to caress him.
When she sensed that he was near to climax, Laoghaire was surprised that Galen suddenly pulled away from her.
“I am close to the edge,” he said on a harsh breath. “But my pleasure will be more keenly felt if you share it with me.” He wrapped a hand around her elbow, pulling Laoghaire to her feet.
No sooner was she upright than Galen began to remove her clothing, tossing aside boots, tunic and chausses, and finally her linen undergarments.
When at last she stood naked before him, he cupped both of her breasts in his hands.
As he strummed his thumbs over each distended nipple, the little nubbins of hardened flesh were so sensitive that the pleasure bordered on pain.
And yet it was an exquisite sort of pain, one that caused a trickle of moisture to seep down her leg.
Without warning, Galen suddenly slipped one arm behind Laoghaire’s knees and the other around her shoulders. Swinging her off her feet, he carried her over to the pallet and laid her upon it. His eyes glimmering with a blatant desire, he stood beside the cot and peered down at her.
Neither of them spoke, the only sound to be heard in the tent the collapse of several coals in the brazier. It felt as though time had somehow become suspended, holding them in a passionate moment of exquisite anticipation.
He is my heart’s desire. A marvel among men. And he is mine.
“Have ye finished welcoming me?” she asked with a knowing smile.
“I have not yet begun.” Lowering himself to the pallet, Galen situated himself between her legs.
After shifting to better accommodate him, Laoghaire breathed in his scent, a wild, manly smell that she found utterly intoxicating. Feeling his erection twitch against her inner thigh, she finessed a hand between their two bodies and guided him toward her.
With a deep-throated growl, Galen penetrated her, surging so powerfully, filling her so completely, that he became a part of her; as though they had fused together, one to the other.
Galen then pulled back, almost to the point of complete withdrawal.
Laoghaire gasped, able to feel the broad tip and swollen flange of his rod as it momentarily corked the opening to her woman’s place.
Lifting her head, she peered downward, to where they were joined as one, and watched as Galen once more drove into her.
Murmuring incoherently, she dug her fingers into his back, certain that she was on the verge of bursting into flame. Determined to take Galen with her into the fire, she tightened her inner muscles around him, adding friction to the rhythmic pull and push.
As though he were seized by a savage fervor, Galen relentlessly, repeatedly, thrust into her.
If he doesn’t stop, I will shatter into a thousand pieces.
Sweet Jesu! I pray he never stops, she thought on the next breath.
Just then, his expression taut, Galen arced upward, his body shaking as he reached his climax.
And still he continued to plunge and pull, plunge and pull, until, finally, blissfully, she exploded from within, the pleasure so keenly felt that she had to press her open mouth against Galen’s shoulder to keep from crying aloud.
For as long as she could, Laoghaire clung to that burst of pleasure, reveling in the pulsating tremors which eventually faded into radiant warmth.
In passion’s aftermath she continued to hold onto Galen, her body depleted of its animating energy, her thoughts little more than broken fragments.
It was as if, in that interval of exquisite pleasure, she’d come face to face with eternity, able to feel, see, experience something that was normally beyond her ken.
Like a quick, indrawn breath, hot and sharp, it lasted only for a moment.
But, oh, what a glorious moment it was.