Chapter 21 #2
He was matter-of-fact. “Oh aye. All I’d caught was snippets of conversations that led me to the assumption tha’ it was my job tae make the hole—that’s why it was so tight, and that was why there was blood on a virgin’s wedding night.”
My lips felt the smirk at his youthful naivete. “When did you discover that’s not exactly how it works?”
He laughed then at his own ignorance as he worked my sweater up and off. “Actually, it was in basics.”
“Sorry? Basic training? RAF? Not, like, say, high school health class?”
“I thought they were full of shit in secondary. It’s hard tae learn things when ye think you know it all.”
“Mm-hm. I see, and I remember you were a bit of a Lothario in those days. You probably thought, ‘Thank god all these women have already slept with guys who did the hard work of making a hole.’”
“Oh aye, glad the work was already done. I didn’t like the idea of causing pain in casual hookups.
I was trying to get to this moment”—he paused to kiss me and smiled—“without having tae do the work to get here.” He kissed the tops of my breasts, plumped out the top of my bra.
“To be clear, that ‘here’ I was aiming for was where my fair maiden found me, saved me, and for all the reasons in the world that she shouldn’t, she did pick me to love.
Then picked me again tae wed and to bed for the rest of her life.
” He let his body relax down onto mine, and I wrapped my legs around him.
“That’s right.” My thumb traced the contour of his cheekbone as his pewter-blue gaze went hazy with contentment. “I was zapped into action to cross the Atlantic and found you, an arrogant Scottish chief I thought I might murder before I’d kiss, much less get naked with.”
His grin was back. “Aye, but then I trapped ye in my hunting cottage tae keep you safe and realized that you were the woman I’d dreamed of.
It was the curse talking to me. I knew then in my heart of hearts that you were sent to break it because I’d never felt love like tha’ before.
I’d only met you, a wild American who set my belly on fire, and suddenly I couldn’t think of a future without you.
It was like you’d always been at my side.
I’d never felt that way before. I was intoxicated. ”
My hands wove up into his hair and gripped.
I agreed, “Intoxicated.” And pressed my lips to his.
I inhaled the ocean spray smell and exertion of his run down the hill off his skin.
The memory of us in the loch came back to me.
His arms were tight around me then and now the warmth of his weight was on my front.
Rowan’s hand smoothed over my stomach before he found my jean’s buttons and yanked; each one popped out of its hold, yawning open my fly.
His fingertips scoured over my hip and pressed my waistband down as I made quick work of his undershirt.
I breathed in along the skin of his shoulder as I scratched my nails up his back.
We’d made love plenty over the past year, but there was something unique in that moment.
The sound of the ocean lapping on shore beyond the cave wove around me until I was consumed with its rocking lullaby feel.
I undid Rowan’s fly as I kicked off my shoes and he his, and I pushed his jeans off with mine.
My knees spread as Rowan moved to notch into me, his cock in his fist, when I remembered my line.
“Oh right. Mm! My what a large cock you have, sir. Or is it my chief?”
Rowan paused, and for a moment he didn’t have the mental capacity to remember what he’d fantasized about. He was purely in the moment, and it took him a few heartbeats before he recalled what I was talking about.
A grin broke across his face. “It had been chief, but when ye say sir, it feels exotic, very American. I’ll be sir, tae-day.”
“It’s a magnificent erection. Sir, I’ve never seen one so large.”
Rowan laughed and settled down on me, his forehead resting against my temple. “This is not going as I imagined.”
“Maybe if you lay on your back, you can poke up to make that special third hole— Mmm…” Rowan pressed into me, and my train of thought was lost as he filled me, stretching sumptuously into our connection.
I pulled his hips in until his pelvis bumped mine, and he settled there.
He relaxed out before pressing back in again.
There it was again, the ocean waves, the heady mix of exertion and desire.
A small flame seemed to break across my skin just as I felt I was the only one feeling it, Rowan groaned in pleasure.
“I’m back in the loch making love tae you.”
His slow and deliberate hip presses created a slip and slither until they gradually crescendoed into earnest thrusts, making me moan and bite his shoulder. I’d forgotten how good it felt to be possessed by him. And this time possess him.
My skin took on a golden sheen that coated us and heightened our touch and immersed us within the memory of Rowan, his hands on my hips, my arms wrapped around his neck and straddling him in the icy waters he rammed his thick erection up inside me like a man possessed.
Dampness from our own sweat or the loch water of our memory slickened our skin.
His lips found mine, and our tongues tasted as we shared one breath and one body.
Electricity of our lovemaking built. I arched my pelvis up, taking Rowan deeper.
He followed suit and pushed himself farther in, stretching and tapping into that elusive erogenous zone deep inside.
My body shuddered. The stones we lay upon seemed to quake along with us, as if they were possessed with our erotic energies as well.
“Cole…” Rowan murmured in longing. “You have me, all of me, for the rest of time, mind, body and soul.”
His words were a spell and a promise. The ground shook as a groan escaped over my vocal cords. My head fell back as the power of our lovemaking shot through my body in a powerful orgasm.
At my groan and pinch of my insides, Rowan lost it and wild with his own release thrust erratically before he cried out with me.
I could feel Rowan’s chest rising and falling with each of his breaths, and his heartbeat thumped in the vein at his neck. Rowan gave a small push in, making me giggle. Our skin glowed softly in the dimly lit cave.
“Are we glowing?”
I lifted my arm off his back and took in the soft golden light.
“I think we are. I might have finished that loch memory.”
Rowan kissed the tip of my nose.
“I noticed. I think I like it, this new skill ye have.”
We smiled like fools as we locked gazes and swam in our connection.
I wet my lips that had gone dry with our kissing. “That was fun.”
He took a deep breath with his nose to my neck. “Aye it was. Tha gaol agam ort.”
“I love you too.”
He made a pained face. “Though, next time, I need padding under my knees. The rock is no’ fun. Not like the loch at all.”
“You hurt your knees?” I looked down past our joined bodies, his thick erection slowly fading out of me. He lifted a leg. That knee indeed looked roughed up.
“I am nothing if not dedicated to the fantasy.”
In our literal postcoital glow, I took in the cave once more. It was in a nice location. A deep little inlet for a boat, and the cave was a little like an ancient stone cottage set into the hillside. And a grand old place to avoid authorities if you were distilling whisky in the bad old eighties.
“When did you discover this cave?”
“The cove we’ve always known of. It’s a fine location for harvesting langoustines and mussels. Clabbydoos and the like. There are bogs and marshes not far from here that were good before climate-controlled architecture. Like butter—”
“Whisky?” I asked. Rowan grinned. He was on his back next to me, his hands resting under his head. The black of his armpit hair matched the hair at his navel that dove down.
“Aye, whisky. But it gets transported over the bog and to the road on the other side. No’ stored in the bog.”
“So your family knew of this cave forever. Because there’s one thing that I’ve been curious about with the Lady MacLaoch curse,” I said, using her formal name, just in case.
“What’s that?”
“How did she and Ormr develop a relationship?”
Rowan made an acquiescing noise out of the back of his throat. “Mm-m.”
“I mean, she wouldn’t decide to throw away everything that had been laid out for her in life for a Viking dude. I mean, he was an enemy. How’d he win her heart? Because we both know—”
“That she’d come to be his better half. She quieted the wildness of his soul.”
We’d seen it on the cairn knoll. The way her presence gave him pause in his quest for retribution, and eventually with her ghostly hands in his, he gave in to her love.
“Right. So, how’d it happen?”
Rowan pulled me in close, resting a leg over mine as the bridge of his nose rested on my temple. “Ye are the only one with the connection to the man who can answer that.”
“This cave… There’s something about it. What was it like when you came here when you were a kid? What was the condition of this cave?
“You think they met here?”
“I mean…besides it feeling consequential? It’s private and close to the castle.
I wish she’d kept some record of her life.
” I added, “Peabody says she was likely illiterate. Most people outside the clergy were. And ‘paper’ would have been expensive—papyrus or leather—so her writing a diary, or letters to Ormr, for that matter, would have been rare and probably completely unlikely.”
“What about that sheaf from Clive? Tha’ one you thought was runic, and you read it before Ormr fully showed up.”
“The one Clive and Deloris were having a bit of an argy-bargy—as you’d say—about.”
“Tha’ one.”
“It was from the book Ethel had and that I helped her digitize. I wonder if that book has the day he met Ora—”
“Shh…”
“Right.”
Rowan shivered. “I just got a wee tingle up my spine.”
“Sorry, when he met Lady MacLaoch. I wonder if it’s in there, him meeting Lady Mac,” I said.
“Or…” Rowan said.
“Or what?”
“Or…?” His brows rose up in pointed meaning.
“If you’re suggesting that I chat with Ormr…”
“I am.”
“Can’t.”
“Ye haven’t tried.”
“Not gonna.” I sat up and rummaged through our clothes for my pants.
“Don’t you want to know the part of their story that was beautiful and legend-making? We know the end, the brutality, and curse, but what about the soft and lusty beginnings?”
“He probably brutalized her, and in a fit of Stockholm syndrome, she acquiesced to feelings she had under his capture, and in a fit of fantasy, they married for a brief second on his dragon ship.”
Rowan scoffed so hard I could practically hear him say bullpucky.
“Ye know that’s not true.”
“Could be.” I got my bra on when he grabbed the back of my pants and made me sit again. Sitting on the edge of the flat stone, he pulled me in against his naked chest, wrapping me in a hug.
“Look, maybe ye start a journal of your own? Ask him questions there. Maybe he’ll answer.”
“What, like, ‘Hey, Grandpappy, how’d you and your lusty lady meet?’”
“Nae. ‘Why’d you possess me, ye bastard?’”
“I could try something like that.”
“And if he does answer, ask him about the coffers coffin.”
“I’m not sure I want to know where he got those coins…”
That evening, I sat in the front room overlooking the dusky evening of the tidal flats beyond the cliffs, notebook immediately in front of me.
Rowan, much calmer now after our “walk,” had taken seriously what I thought was a joke.
He’d met with Clive after we’d gotten back and Clive had given him a blank notebook with an indeterminate origination date to pass along to me.
Or, in Clive’s words: “Don’t tell Deloris I’ve given it to you to write in.
” Since the moment I had demonstrated skill at reading runes that day in his office, Clive had gotten keen about helping with my gift.
The pilfered old journal from the library was just one example of that.
The evening chill sent me breaking kindling for the fire in the small wood stove behind me.
Then, with a cup of tea (with a tipple of Glentree Gold) and a wool blanket tucked tight around my shoulders, I resettled at the antique writing desk.
I uncapped my fountain pen—also a Clive gift—and opened the notebook.
It was leather-bound. Each page was translucent like filo dough and had slight imperfections of visible pressed plant fiber.
I put my hand to the upper right-hand side of the page and took a deep breath, praying that my pen wouldn’t offend the creators of the notebook.
And that I wasn’t cursing myself once again.
I scrawled the date. Then, in an instinctual scientific urge, I wrote the location, weather, and time of day.
I had no idea what I was doing or if any of the questions I was about to ask would work, but I did know that, much like scientific research, if I didn’t try, I’d not earn a different level of understanding than I had now.
With a steadying breath, I set my intention—kissing the ring on my finger that was my link to the ancients—and with the crackle and snap of the fire behind me, I penned the first entry.