Chapter Fourteen #3
lush lips and sensuous mouth to her firm, full breasts, slim waist,
and curvy hips, to her long, lean, shapely legs. Yet it wasn’t just
her physical beauty that drew him to her, for she was as
intelligent as she was beautiful, as rash as she was intelligent,
as kindhearted as she was stubborn, and full of
surprises.
The way she’d made love to
him—fiercely, passionately, holding nothing back—hadn’t surprised
him in the least. It was who she was, how she lived her life. What
did surprise him was that she’d turned to him in the river, that
she’d let him kiss her, let him make love to her,
with her. What surprised
him even more was the thought of what they’d done
as making love. He’d
wanted many women in his life, and he’d had most of those he’d
wanted. He’d lain with those women, had enjoyed carnal pleasures
with those women, many of them women of rank in one royal court or
another, and all of them experienced sexually. But he’d never
considered it making love until… Lara.
She nestled her nose into
his thigh, and Talon tucked the blanket around her legs, his cock
tightening as he remembered the length of them wrapped around his
hips. She slid her hand up his thigh, and Talon sat there in sweet
agony, torn between wanting to let her sleep and aching to stir her
and move her once more. He told himself it didn’t even matter that
Ranulf had her first. That whelp wouldn’t know how to make love to
a woman. Hell, he wouldn’t know how to make love to anybody or
anything other than himself. What mattered to Talon was Lara had
come to him tonight of her own free will, had made love to
him.
She’d turned to him to feel the living
warmth of another being after watching so many others succumb to
death, as he’d turned to her. He was a battle-hardened soldier, and
the bloody aftermath of the ambush had unsettled him. It was only
one of many such horrific scenes that would live forever in his
memory. He still remembered his first battle as if it were
yesterday, and today’s slaughter would haunt Lara for the rest of
her days. It was why he’d forbidden her to march with them, to keep
her from witnessing the horrors of war, or worse, to be killed
herself. Yet she’d been determined to come and had fooled him and
forty other men until she’d given herself away in a fit of anger.
His fierce wildcat.
She twitched, and Talon tucked the
blanket tighter around her as it slid from her thighs. Dampness
crept under his touch, and he drew away. A small stain on the
blanket left a dark stain on his fingertips, and it carried the
scent of copper.
Virgin’s blood?
That explained her little yelp when
he’d first entered her, but not why she’d lied about Ranulf or
being a virgin. Talon racked his brain trying to remember exactly
what she’d said to him that day, and realized she hadn’t actually
told him that Ranulf, or any other man, had been her lover. He’d
assumed it, and she’d let him, never challenging his assumption
until the night Hamm had cracked Ranulf across the head with the
pitcher. “He had no right,” she’d said as Hamm. “No right to be
saying such things about her.”
Bloody hell.
Talon sat there cradling Lara, trying
to make sense of it, to comprehend what she’d given him this
night.
“Nooo.” Lara cried out,
her whole body jerking. “Oh God please. No.”
Startled, he held her tight as she
thrashed from side to side. Her eyes flew open full of pure, primal
terror.
“Lara, what is it?” He
fought to keep his voice level. To keep from squeezing her too
tight. More than a little worried after her dream last night and
the massacre today. “What did you see? Tell me.”
Her eyes focused on his, and every
single thing he’d felt making love to her was reflected back in
their depths. Then tears pooled her eyes.
“I can’t.” She shook her
head, sniffing back her tears, then pushed away and sat so they
weren’t touching.
What Talon wanted to do was pull her
back, to hold her and kiss away her nightmare. To make love to her
until nothing else mattered. What he did was take a deep breath and
follow Sophie’s advice. Lara had come to him this night of dreams,
flesh, and coursing passion, and it had been more than worth the
wait. He could wait until she came to him again.
“Come on.” He stood and
held a hand down to her. “We’d better get back to camp.”
***
Lara
Lara sat forward in the saddle,
refusing to lean back into the comfort of Talon’s chest as she
relived her dream over and over again. Talon had fallen. In her
dream, he’d slumped over the Black’s neck and slid off his saddle,
boneless as a sack of grain onto an open field, where he lay in a
pool of blood, his eyes dulled and unseeing. After lying with him,
having him so deep inside her that she could still feel him there,
he had died.
Her body still flushed hot every time
she remembered the feel of his hands, the taste of his mouth, his
skin, the hard heat of him pulsing inside her, and her mind reeled
every time she realized anew what she’d done. What they’d done.
Oddly enough, she felt no shame, no regret, no sense of wrong.
Rather, she was in awe of how right it had felt, how he’d known her
body better than she, how she’d responded to his. To him. For the
first time, she truly understood how it could be between a man and
a woman, and what she would lose when he left. She could only pray
he left her of his own volition, not as he had in her
dream.
She knew he’d died a little today,
that it’d cost him to look on the dead faces of so many of his
fellow soldiers, that it was this cold, dread ache they’d both
felt, the emptiness they’d both needed to fill that had caused them
to turn to each other for comfort, to warm their souls with the
living heat of the other. She knew this as she knew she couldn’t
lie with him again, couldn’t make love with him again, and survive
losing him completely.
Just as she knew she could never tell
him of her dream, of seeing him fall lifeless into a pool of his
blood. She’d told him her dream of the slaughter at Roncesvalles
Pass, and it had come to fruition. All her dreams did, one way or
another.
When they returned to camp, Phillipe
was waiting outside their tent. “King Charles wants to meet with
you, Captain. Yesterday.”
Talon dismounted, and Lara ignored the
hand he held out to help her down from the Black. “Stay here until
I get back,” he told her, then called for Tree and Dardinel to
stand guard as she entered the tent.
Unable to sleep, Lara paced the
confines of the small tent, going over and over everything that had
happened that day, until at last she heard Talon speaking with the
men outside. She plopped down on her bedroll and feigned sleep as
he entered the tent, peeking up at him from beneath lowered lashes
as he stripped down to his breechcloth, flushing warm at the sight
of his well-muscled torso and the trail of dark fur that led down
to his breechcloth, and the memory of what lay not so hidden in the
manly bulge beneath it.
“Sleep well, my lady
wildcat.”
He fell asleep in ten breaths. Lara
knew because she counted them, envious of his ability to sleep
anywhere, anytime, and to wake up alert and at the ready no matter
how long or short a time he’d slept. She didn’t sleep the rest of
the night. Not with the chance of dreaming again. She lay stiff and
cold despite the warm summer air, fighting the near constant urge
to curl up against Talon’s big warm body, and was up before dawn
broke. She snuck out the back of the tent and was sharing her
day-old flat bread with the roan when Talon found her.
“You shouldn’t be
wandering around the camp alone.” He came to her side. “Tree and
Dardinel are beside themselves looking for you.”
Lara shrugged and wouldn’t meet his
eyes. She couldn’t.
He cupped her chin and raised it until
her gaze finally met his. “Lara, what happened between us last
night—”
“Can never happen
again—”