Chapter Nineteen #2
breath soughed into a low moan that reverberated to her core.
“Yes.”
“My sweet rose.” Talon
wrapped his hands in her hair and pulled her head down toward his,
meeting her halfway, his mouth taking hers in a fevered
kiss.
Delirious from his kiss, his hands on
her breasts, his cock between her legs, Lara leaned back, breaking
their kiss. Talon rose and suckled first one of her peaked nipples
and then the other as she slowly rubbed herself against the ridge
of his pinioned cock. He groaned and she froze. “Did I hurt
you?”
“Hurt me?” He laughed,
short and gruff. “No.” Still his jaw clenched as he laid his head
back down on the pillow.
“Are you sure?”
Eyes the brooding gray of a summer
storm held hers. “Don’t go nursemaid on me now, witch.” His voice
was low and rough. “I fear I’ll go mad if I’m not inside you
soon.”
Lara pressed her palm to his chest. “I
think your nursemaid can remedy that, Captain.”
She lifted her hips, licking her lips
and grinning as his cock followed. Just touching her aching flesh
to the blunt, soft tip of his erection, she slowly lowered herself
over him, thrilling at the feel of him as she took his throbbing
cock deep inside of her one hot, hard inch at a time. She began to
move in slow, rhythmic circles, gently at first, then faster and
harder as he pressed his thumbs to her nubbin of flesh where every
nerve in her body seemed to coalesce. She rocked back and forth,
and he moved with her, grabbing her hips and pushing himself deeper
and deeper into her body, into her very soul. Their fever grew in
heat and need until it peaked and broke in a pitch of sensation,
causing Lara to cry out Talon’s name as she shuddered around him.
He clamped her hips tighter and went rigid as he cried out her name
in response, then he wrapped her in his arms and held her as she
lay on his chest, skin to skin, heart to beating heart.
***
Talon
Talon was indeed a man undone. A man
undone and remade each and every time Lara so much as smiled at
him. For here in the Hollow, she’d shown him a new smile, a smile
only for him: sweet and tender and lusty and knowing, a woman’s
smile full of the secrets she shared with him every time they made
love.
Though they were seldom from each
other’s sides, Talon found he couldn’t get enough of her. He
couldn’t look at her without wanting her, couldn’t want her without
touching her, kissing her, inhaling her, devouring her, and the
happiest of surprises for him—she couldn’t get enough of him
either. She matched him smile for smile, kiss for kiss, thrust for
thrust. Their wants had become their needs, and their needs in this
peaceful, magical hollow were each other.
Lara’s birthday was only two days
away, and their planned departure the day after, which cast an
ever-growing shadow over their dwindling days here. A shadow Talon
contemplated as he sat on the bench, watching Lara cross the yard
with her basket full of greens and her parade of hound and
horses.
“Good morning,
sleepyhead,” she said, greeting him with a smile that warmed him
even more than the late morning sun peeking out from behind the
clouds. She set the basket down and gave him a kiss he prolonged by
twining his fingers through her chin-length curls. When he let go,
she swayed on her feet, her gaze unfocused. Talon wagged his brows
and nodded toward the cabin door and the bed inside. “Later.” Lara
offered a promising grin. “I want to show you
something.”
“Tired of playing with me
already?” he groused.
“Aye. I’m on to bigger and
better things.”
“Well, I don’t know about
bigger.”
“Nor better,” she said,
laughing. Then she grew serious. “I want to take you to visit my
mother’s grave.”
Talon stood. “I was wondering if you
were ever going to take me there.”
Lara took a deep breath in and blew it
out. “My mother giving birth to me here, being buried here, was the
one thing Sophie made me swear to never tell anyone,
ever.”
“If you’d rather
not—”
“No. I want you to
know.”
She led him across the meadow, into
the woods, to a small, ferned glen where vining red roses heavy
with the last of the year’s blooms climbed over a bier of stacked
stones. Lara cut a blood-red bud from the vine and held it out to
Talon.
“Sophie planted the roses
on my eighth birthday. We stopped here on our way home the summer
we traveled north to the Neustria Sea.”
Talon reached for the rose and
stopped, his hand hanging mid-air as Lara stood smiling at him with
the same openness and light a young girl had once bestowed upon
him. He took the rose and held it to his nose, breathing in the
spicy sweet scent of it, of Lara.
“That summer you traveled
north with Sophie,” he said. “Did you go to a riding tournament in
a town by the sea?”
Lara tilted her head and looked at
Talon as if she’d never really seen him before. A slow dawning of
recognition lit her hazel eyes and she smiled, as bright and warm
as the sun shining down on him.
“There was a rider on a
fire red stallion, the youngest there.” Her voice shook. “He rode
under the name—”
“Vagus. The
Wanderer.”
Lara stood wide-eyed and
speechless.
“There was a young girl
there,” he continued, “with freckles across her nose and cheeks and
her red hair in side braids. She watched every match he rode in,
her smile his reward whenever he looked her way, though she
wouldn’t come close enough to speak with him.”
Lara blinked and licked her lips. “She
was so shy of him. He was as a god to her, racing the very wind
itself and flying through the heavens on his fiery steed.” She
smiled as if to herself. “He won every match that day, and the
right to choose the Queen of the Field.” She met and held Talon’s
gaze. “He chose her, an eight-year-old girl, above all the other
women vying for his crown of flowers.”
“And in turn, she plucked
a single red rose from the crown—” Talon twirled the rose bud in
his fingers. “—and offered it back to him with a smile so pure and
sweet, he’s carried it in his heart ever since.”
Lara smiled up at him beneath lowered
lashes. “The crown lies in a chest at the foot of her bed to this
day.”
“The rose lays dried and
wrapped in my chest next to the carving of a beautiful, thorny,
woodland witch I met in a river the first day of summer. The same
troublesome wildcat who ransacked my chest her first night of
captivity in my chamber.”
Lara’s smile turned cheeky. “As any
prisoner with a lick of sense would’ve.”
Talon took her hand in his and raised
it to his lips. “You were never just any prisoner. In truth, I’ve
been prisoner to your smile these fourteen years past.” He lowered
their hands but kept hold of hers. “Where did you go that day after
the tournament? I looked everywhere for you.”
“After you crowned me,
Sophie said it was time to leave. That we had seen what we had come
to see.”
“What was it you had
seen?”
Lara shook her head. “I never knew,
and Sophie never said. But that was her way about many things.” Her
eyes welled. “I wish she was here so we could ask her.” A single
tear ran down her cheek. “I wish she was still here.”
Talon pulled her to him and held her
close. “Know what I think?” he whispered in her ear. She rolled her
forehead against his chest. “I think Sophie the Sixth cursed me
then and there with your smile. Cursed me to search far and wide
until I found it, found you, again.”
Lara lifted her gaze to Talon’s. “The
night Patience gave birth to Wilric, Sophie asked me if I loved
you. I told her I didn’t want to, that I’d tried so hard not to.”
She smiled, sad and wistful. “I told her I’d loved you once, that
night at the river. That I was scared to let myself love you again,
only to lose you.” Her smile brightened and her eyes shone green as
emeralds. “I’m not afraid anymore, Talon.”
Talon swallowed, hard. He cupped her
chin, unsure if he wanted her to say the exact words or not. Afraid
of what it would mean if she did. Of how she’d expect him to
answer. He’d wanted her from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her
standing him off in the river with nothing more than two knives and
a dog. Which was, he’d only now discovered, actually the second
time he’d laid eyes on her. He’d held the memory of her as a young
girl, smiling at him as if he were a god, close all these years.
He’d recognized something in her even then and felt more for her
now than he’d felt for any woman ever. But he was a king’s soldier,
destined to leave her before the first snows fell.
“Lara…” He tried to tell
her with his eyes what he couldn’t with his words.
She lifted her chin and bestowed a
smile on him that clove his heart in two. “No promises, I
know.”