Chapter 31
The feel of her hand in his after a month nearly brought him to his knees in front of them all.
He had touched her before. He had carried her up the stairs with her blood on his hands, bound her wound, and held her face to kiss her in a nursery he had no business kissing her in.
But he had never once, in all their strange, brief history, simply held her hand the way a man held his wife’s hand—warm fingers laced through warm fingers, for no reason but that he wanted to and was at last allowed.
He pulled her gently into the slow turn of the dance, and she responded, stiff at first, then relaxing, as the firelight cast a golden glow over her face, and her eyes never left his.
He did not pull her closer. He did not need to.
The careful handsbreadth he kept between them was its own torment, every spot they did not touch lit up like a brand, and he could feel her breath grow short and knew his had gone the same way, and around them, the glen danced and never guessed their Laird was quietly losing the last of his reason.
“Ye swore ye’d tell me,” she said against his shoulder. “At the dancin’. Ye swore it on whatever I liked.”
“Aye.”
“So tell me.”
He did not answer her at once.
The fiddle went round, and the fire threw their shadows across the trampled grass, and he turned her under his hand and thought about the shape of the words and found that he could not get his mouth around a single one of them.
Ten years. He had carried it for ten years and never once said it aloud, not to Maisie, not to Alastair, not to a priest. And it seemed to him now that a thing kept that long in the dark grew a hide on it, and he had no notion at all what it would look like when it finally came out into the light, nor what she would do when she saw it.
Say it then, ye great coward. She’s asked ye plainly, and she’s stood there in front of three hundred people and told them she’s nothing left to burn, and ye cannae find yer own tongue.
“There’s a thing I swore,” he murmured into her hair. “Over me sister’s broken body. Ten years back.” He felt her go very still against him. “I’ve never said it out loud to a livin’ soul, Olivia, and I find I cannae say it here, with a fiddle goin’ and half the glen watchin’ us.”
“Ragnall—”
“I’ll say it. I’ve given ye me word, and I’ll keep it.” His hand tightened on her waist. “But nae here.”
Then the tune wound down.
She did not refuse him. He had not expected her to. She had been demanding this of him since the fiddle started, and she was not a woman who let a man off the hook once she had him on it.
But he saw the flicker all the same, the small wariness that crossed her face and was gone, and he understood it, because it was the same thing that was coiling within him.
It was not the answer she was afraid of. It was the dark, and the distance from the fire, and the pair of them alone in it with a month of wanting between them and nothing left to hold it back but her rule, and her rule was already lying in pieces somewhere at the ford, and they both knew it.
She set it down anyway, deliberately, the way she set down everything she had decided to stop carrying.
“Aye,” she said. “Walk with me, then.”
She walked with him beyond the edge of the firelight, past the last booths, down along the dark singing river to where the alders formed a black roof against the stars. The music grew faint and distant behind them until they seemed like the only souls left breathing in the glen.
He stopped, turned, and looked at her in the starlight, and the fine speech he had meant to make flew clean out of his head.
“I cannae do this anymore,” he said. “Ye wanted an answer? There ye have it. I cannae do it, Olivia. For a month I’ve tried.
I drove ye away to keep ye safe, and I’ve been half a man every day since.
I told meself it was duty, and I told meself it was fear, and I told meself a hundred fine things, and every one of them was a lie.
The truth is, I cannae stop wantin’ ye. I’ve never wanted to stop. ”
His chest was heaving. “So tell me to stop now. Tell me, and I will walk ye back to that fire and never speak of it again, and keep me word till I die of it. But daenae look at me the way ye are doin’ now and say nothin’, lassie, for I am only a man, and I’ve come to the end of what a man can bear. ”
“Ragnall… I missed ye,” Olivia said.
It came out of her cracked and furious, as if the words were dragged up against her will, which he thought perhaps they were.
“A month in me faither’s castle, in me own bed, and I couldnae sleep for missin’ a man I swore black and blue that I hated.
The bairn. The daft dog. Kate. Yer grandmaither.
I missed all of it. But mostly ye.” Her eyes were wet and blazing in the starlight.
“So, nay, I willnae tell ye to stop. I am tired of tellin’ both of us to stop. ”
He kissed her then, and it was nothing like the careful kiss in the kirk and nothing like the furious kiss in the nursery. It was a month of pent-up desire poured into the one act, and she gave it back to him every bit as hungry, her hands fisting in his plaid.
When he finally tore his mouth from hers, it was only to put it where he had been dreaming of putting it far longer than he would ever confess.
He kissed the line of her jaw and the wild pulse in her throat. He drew the plaid from his shoulders and spread it out on the soft grass and laid her down on it in the starlight, and then he knelt over her, and this time, he let himself touch her.
“That whole night,” he murmured against her collarbone, working the laces of her bodice loose with hands unsteady as a green lad’s, “I lay next to ye and talked ye through it and never laid one finger on ye, and it almost undid me, and the single thought in me head the whole while was this: how I’d do it for ye meself, if ye ever let me near. ”
He bared her to the cool night air and the wet heat of his mouth, closing his lips over one hard nipple while his hand rose to cup the other, and felt her arch off the plaid and gasp his name into the dark.
He drew on her slowly, rolling the stiff bud with the flat of his tongue, finding the exact pressure that made her breath stutter, and when her hands fisted hard in his hair, he gave her the gentle edge of his teeth and swallowed down the broken sound she made.
He moved to the other nipple and gave it the same patient ruin, until both were tight and glistening in the starlight, and she was writhing under him with her spine bowed up off the ground.
“Let me, Olivia.” His voice had gone to gravel against her skin. “Let me show ye what I couldnae that night. For a month I’ve thought about nothin’ else.”
And she, who had sworn a month of oaths that she never would, slid her fingers deeper into his loose black hair and held him to her and breathed, “Aye.”
He took his time with her. He had a month of dreaming to make good, and he meant to make it good, meant to leave her with no breath to call this gratitude or duty or anything but exactly what it was.
He kissed his way down her body, over the soft weight of her breasts and the faint flutter of her pulse beneath her ribs and the flat of her belly, pausing to graze his teeth lightly over the swell of her hip until she writhed and swore.
He dragged her skirts up over her knees and her thighs as he went, baring her to the gloaming inch by pale inch, and the sight of her laid open in the crushed grass nearly undid him where he kneeled.
He learned her by the catch of her breath and the restless lift of her hips, every separate place that wrecked her. The crease where her thigh met her hip. Her soft inner thigh, where the skin quivered and warmed under his open mouth.
He spread her legs wider with his broad hands and felt her tremble beneath them, half pure want and half the old fear of being looked at so, and he pressed his mouth to the tremor and kissed it slowly out of her until her knees fell open of their own accord.
“Easy, lassie.” The words ghosted warm over her. “I have ye. I willnae stop until ye are undone, and then I will start again. Look at me while I do it. I want yer eyes on me.”
She lifted her head, her hair a wild red tangle in the grass, her eyes dark and dazed, and he held her stare as he settled his shoulders between her thighs and licked into her at last, one long, slow stroke of his tongue through the slick heat of her, entrance to peak.
Her head fell back. A cry tore out of her into the night, raw and astonished, and her hand flew to her mouth to muffle it.
“Nay,” he said, catching her wrist and drawing it back down to his hair. “Let me hear it. There’s nay one on this earth but me to hear ye now.”
Then he stopped his thinking altogether and gave himself over to it. He worked her open with his mouth, slow and thorough and shameless, learning the rhythm that made her hips chase him and the angle that made her thighs clamp tight around his ears.
He circled her tight, aching bud with the tip of his tongue until she sobbed his name, then soothed her with the flat of his tongue and drew back to lazily lap at her wetness until she cursed him as a black-hearted devil and ground herself against his mouth.
He could have kept doing this until dawn broke over the hills. He told her so, the words rough against her skin, and felt her shudder at them.
He slid one thick finger inside her, feeling her tighten around him, slick and eager.
When she pressed down greedily to take more, he curled his fingers deep, stroking a spot inside her that made her whole body shudder, and a string of broken Gaelic slipped past her lips—something she would have blushed to hear in daylight.
His tongue kept its merciless work on her swollen bud all the while, and he felt her begin to wind tight as a bowstring beneath him, her belly fluttering, her heels digging into his back, her breath sawing high and desperate.
“That’s it,” he hummed against her aching flesh. “I can feel ye, lassie. Ye are close. Let go. Come apart on me tongue and me hand. Let me feel it.”
She came undone for him as she had that first night, only now it was his mouth and his hands that pushed her to it.
There were no rules between them anymore, and no careful silence kept in the dark.
Now, when she broke, it was his name she shouted up at the indifferent stars, again and again.
Her back arched off the plaid, her thighs trembling hard around his head, and her fingers clenched so tightly in his hair that it hurt.
He worked her through every last wave of it, relentless, drawing it out long past where she thought she could bear it, until she was sobbing, boneless, and weakly tugging at his hair to beg him to stop.
Only then did he soften, his mouth becoming gentle and worshipful, drinking down the last small shudders, pressing one final slow kiss to the inside of her thigh before he lifted his head.
She lay wrung-out and gasping beneath him, her bodice gaping and her skirts ruched at her waist and her wild hair full of crushed grass, the bonniest wreck of a thing he had ever laid eyes on.
He crawled back up her body, pressing his mouth to her belly, her breasts, the wild flutter at her throat, before he braced himself on his forearms above her and looked down at her undone face in the starlight.
And Ragnall, with his wife loose-limbed and gasping beneath him and her taste still on his lips and his want a hard, insistent, deliberately unspent ache against his laces, was closer to a happy man than he had been in the whole grim run of his life.
Then, he pulled her close against his chest in the warm tangle of the plaid, both of them exhausted and breathing heavily, and pressed his lips to her damp temple, holding her.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
“I missed ye,” he said into her hair, giving it back to her, the only confession he was allowed to make. “Every hour of every day. The bed was a tomb without ye in it.”
“Daenae let me go back to Blythe, then,” she whispered.
He froze. A whole future depended on those four small words, which he wanted so badly that he was afraid to touch it.
And that was the moment the night tore open.
It came from upriver, from the festival ground, faint at first and then horribly clear. The bright clash of steel against steel. A man’s scream. And then the rising baying roar of two clans falling on one another in the dark.
Ragnall instantly stood with his half-dressed wife in his arms. His joy vanished as the first scream echoed. He quickly lifted her, and they ran together along the river toward the fire, overwhelmed by the very sound he had dedicated a month’s effort and his wounded heart to preventing.
War.