She held it up, healed and whole, and offered it to Brian.
Foolish boy.
He took it.
C
onn should have liked the
island. It was a wild and untamed place, an antidote to the choking confines of the city. No ax had fallen here for hundreds of years. There was only the wind and the tide to rough hew these acres.
It was beautiful. And he hated it.
He hated the winding path from the beach that disappeared into the trees, because a woman at the mercy of unscrupulous men, a woman like Beth, could disappear in such a place with no one the wiser. He climbed, hemmed in by the muffling foliage, wondering if Beth had known he would come for her or if she had preceded him hours before in hopeless terror. On this subject, the forest was mute.
They reached the clearing and a high-pitched scream broke out, coming from the dimly lit house. He
passed
then, not caring if Miach or Elada followed, and arrived in the room whence the sound came.
Relief washed over him when he saw Beth standing unharmed in front of the hearth.
Then sick fear replaced it. Her eyes were bright, her lips moist and parted, her hair wild down her back. She was the picture of Druid abandon, and she was draining Miach’s son.
Miach and Elada arrived a second after Conn and stopped dead. “If you’re Finn’s get,” Miach said quietly to the room at large, “leave now.” Nothing was more terrifying than a sorcerer in a state of purposeful quiescence, because it was, so often, the calm before the storm.
The Fianna, wisely, bolted. Conn felt the charge in the air as Miach gathered power into himself, readying to strike. He would unleash the magical equivalent of a bucket of cold water over two fighting dogs. The problem with that, of course, was that the dogs might tear each other’s throats out as they separated. He placed his hand on the sorcerer’s arm. “Let me try first. Safer for your son, and safer for Beth, if she lets him go.”
“Druids don’t let go,” Miach rasped back.
“No.
Druids
don’t. But
Beth
might.”
Conn approached the hearth. Beth’s grip on Brian’s hand was tight, the tendons in hers stark, the knuckles white. This was how they defeated his people, of course. They’d learned not only how to draw power out of the trees and soil, they’d learned how to draw it out of the Fae so that each and every one of the
Aes Sídhe
found his own magic turned against him.
Her cheeks had roses in them. She was flush with life. And Brian, clearly, was fading. His skin was pale and his lips blue.
“Don’t let her touch you,” warned Miach.
“She won’t hurt me,” said Conn, although he knew nothing of the kind. He only hoped.
“Beth,” he said gently. “Let him go.”
She turned to him, wild-eyed and unseeing. A tempest behind her dark irises, raging to get out. The Druid in her. She wasn’t ready for this. Not yet.
“Beth,” he tried again. “It’s all right. You can release him now.”
Her right hand hung at her side. He wove his fingers through hers and braced himself. “If you must have life, then have mine.”
He felt her draw on him, an instinctive reaction, an involuntary sip. Then she dropped the boy’s hand as though stung and turned to him.
C
onn.
Warmth, affection, desire, love.
All the emotions the Fae prince had prodded in her mind.
Hunger
was all her Druid mind knew when it saw him, and greed. The Druid inside her wanted to devour him, and be free.
And he was going to let her. He offered no defenses.
And his trust gave Beth the strength to stop.
M
iach saw the whirling stars
in Beth’s eyes recede and knew the danger was past. She took a tentative step into Conn’s arms, and the Betrayer, fool that he was, folded her into his embrace. Miach supposed it was like nuzzling a viper. Exciting, if you fancied that sort of thing. He didn’t.
Brian slid down the wall to crouch against the hearth, white and drained. “Elada,” Miach said. “Make arrangements for my son to be comfortable here. He’ll be staying a while.
“No,” Brian croaked.
“You have defied me, and shamed me,” Miach said. “My son, as close to me in blood as any creature living. There is no place for you at my table. And there is no place for rogue half-breeds in my city. You stay here, until I say you may return.”
“
Father
.”
“Don’t try to play me, Brian. I’m not some simpering Southie wench. I’m only ‘father’ to you when you want something, and I’m the ‘old man’ when you don’t get it. Here you stay.”
Miach hardened his heart and turned his back on his son. “Where is the woman called Helene?” he asked Liam and Nial.
They looked at each other and paled.
Then Nial said, “Brian locked her in one of the attics.” After a pause. “A small one.”
“She’s afraid of tight spaces,” Liam said.
“Wait in the boat,” Miach said.
He took the stairs two at a time and started to panic when they ended beneath the dormers with no sight of an attic. The rooms up here were already claustrophobically small to begin with. He couldn’t imagine what an attic would be like.
Then he saw the door at the end of the room. Low, perhaps two feet high, and narrow, it must lead out into one of the eaves. And it was padlocked.
He touched the lock. Brass, thankfully. The tumblers fell into place at his touch, and the lock sprang free.
He pulled the door open and was assailed by a gust of cold air, smelling of damp and rot. The crawl space was dark, filthy, and only two feet deep. Helene was huddled against the wall, her face pressed to the plaster, her knees tight against her chest, her booted feet only inches from the door.
She looked at him, and he knew she was seeing Brian. “It’s all right, Helene. No one is going to hurt you.”
A moment of doubt assailed him. His mark, the scribble on her inner thigh, would have protected her against a half-breed or even a lesser Fae, but the Prince Consort had been here. The bastard played on another level entirely.
She remained huddled against the wall.
“Did anyone hurt you?” he asked.
If they had, he would take the memory away.
She shook her head.
“You’re safe now.”
Still no move. Then it occurred to him that she’d been menaced for hours by men who looked—to one degree or another—like him. And now he was looming in the only exit from the space where she’d been confined.
He drew back from the opening, took his jacket off, and held it out to her. “Let’s get you home.”
She hesitated, then unfolded herself and slid her legs—long, tanned, glorious legs—from the dank hole. She used the low door to steady herself and stood up, the relief plain on her face. “You’ll feel better when you get outside,” he promised.
But she stood there unmoving, outside the door to her tiny prison. “He lay on the other side of the door,” she said. It took him a moment to catch up. She was talking about Brian. “He locked me in, and then he lay down out here and told me what he was doing to himself, and what he was going to do to me.”
His son was not true Fae, but there was rot in Brian, cruelty, as vicious as anything found in a full-blood. And at present he had no idea what to do about it.
He took a step toward her. “If the memory troubles you, I will remove it.”
“Don’t touch me!”
Or not.
“And stay out of my head.”
So she could feel his tentative exploration. Of course she could. She was intelligent, and she’d been exposed to Fae compulsion more than once today.
“I apologize,” he said. They weren’t words he used often. He
ran
South Boston, for fuck’s sake. His word was law on the peninsula, and it was scripture to his family. “I was only trying to help, to remove some of the trauma. It was for your own good.”
“And this?” She turned her leg to expose the mark on her inner thigh. “Was this for my own good? Or yours?”
He was Fae, so the sight of his scribble on her sensitive inner thigh gratified him. But he had lived among men a long time, was a father and a grandfather many times over, and his motivations filled him with shame. So he was honest. “No. That was entirely selfish. I wanted to be able to find you once Conn’s Druid was out of danger.” He left for what unspoken. “You’re very lovely,” he said.
And then, because she was still looking at him like something found at the bottom of a pond, he added, “It preserved you from Brian.” And then he realized that the unspoken part of that sentiment was,
for me
.
Helene slugged him. Hauled back and hit him square in the jaw with a solid right hook. As good as anything he’d taught his legion of tomboy daughters and granddaughters to dish out—hoping they’d make good use of the skill if ever men treated them as he had just treated Helene.
She walked, half-bent beneath the low ceiling, out of the room, and he heard her silly fur boots thumping down the stairs.
Elada appeared around the corner. “How did that go?”
“As well as could be expected. See that she gets down to the boat.”
Elada raised an eyebrow. “That one,” he said, “mark or no mark, won’t let you touch her any time soon.”
“True. But lucky for her, I’m a patient man.”
B
eth and Conn were finally
alone. The others had left the kitchen. The Druid voice inside her had gone quiet. With her arms wrapped around his waist and her head pressed to his chest, all she could hear was his heartbeat. He was holding her close, one hand on the small of her back and the other across her shoulders. She felt cherished, warm, protected.
It was too soon for love, Beth knew that. And he’d made it clear that the Fae never made permanent alliances with their mortal lovers. So be it. Whatever it was they could have together, she wanted it.
He began stroking her back, his touch at first reassuring and light, then with a subtle pressure that reminded her of the
geis
tightening on her shoulder.
That’s when it occurred to her that while she could feel the
geis
, and certainly felt drawn to Conn, it was not an irresistible compulsion. Not a sure road to madness, as Miach had warned.
She gently disentangled herself from Conn’s arms. “I want you,” she said.
He laughed. “Here?
Now?
”
She rolled her eyes at him, then admitted, “Kind of. But not the way Miach said. I want to make love with you, but I won’t go mad if it doesn’t happen. I don’t understand it. I can still feel the
geis
, but it isn’t ruling me, like it was at Miach’s bar, or afterward, when we went home to my apartment. When I wanted you, even in the middle of a malaria attack.”
Conn glanced at the open door to the hall, put his fingers to his lips, and walked softly over to close it. Then he returned to Beth and spoke in low quiet tones. “Do not allow Miach to see this,” he said.
He unfastened the pewter clasp of her wooly vest. She felt a rush of sensation when his knuckles brushed her breast. Okay, maybe she wouldn’t die for want of him, but she responded to him as to no other man. The warmth of his fingers undoing the buttons on her blouse penetrated the cloth, heated the skin beneath. He bared her shoulder.
The quicksilver tattoo lay flat against her skin, but it was no longer the same symbol Miach had drawn. The tail of the knot, just above her breast, was gone. A new line rose from it, as though the pen had dipped and come back up and was now beginning a new character. Beth’s character.
“You are rewriting the
geis
,” he said. “The Druid inside you won’t tolerate being ruled by a Fae.”
“You sound as though that makes you sad.”
“I don’t want to rule you, Beth. But I do want to touch you.” He was doing so now. “And I want you to enjoy it.” She was. “And because your ex-husband shamed and degraded you and made you feel less than beautiful, I thought the
geis
might free you to feel.”
“I feel,” she gasped. His finger had dipped into the lacy cup of her bra and hooked her nipple. He pushed the other cup down and lowered his mouth to it. She felt. The
geis
, to be certain, increased the pleasure, amplified it. But she felt no compulsion. She threaded her hands through his hair—
“Your hair!” she said. It was short. Chopped off above his collar. She hadn’t noticed before, in her relief and confusion.
He lifted his head, his face strangely vulnerable. “Does it distress you?”
“It was beautiful, but I like this, too.” It emphasized the sharp planes of his face, his harsh cheekbones and chiseled jaw. “But what happened?”
“Miach. He thought my hair was too conspicuous.”
“It was definitely memorable,” she admitted, remembering the feel of it brushing her breasts in Clonmel.
“It will grow back,” he promised, fixing the cups of her bra and starting to button her blouse.
She felt disappointed and wondered for a moment if the
geis
was having an effect on her after all, because sex in a filthy kitchen under harsh lights with uncertain allies on the other side of the door wouldn’t normally appeal to her. But she knew it wasn’t the
geis
. It was Conn.
“Don’t you want to . . . ” She trailed off.
Fuck me
sounded crude.
“Yes.” He smiled wickedly. “Very much. But I want to take my time with you, Beth Carter.”
“Oh.” The thought made her so hot she could barely think.
“The
geis
does have an effect on you, you know. It may not rule you,” he said, popping open the button on her cords and slipping his fingers under the waistband of her panties and then down, down—
“Oh!” She leaned back against the table for support.
“But it heightens your arousal.” He stroked her, his fingers hot against her slick nub. He was doing something extraordinarily wicked with them, his index and middle digits. They worked in tandem, sliding back and forth until she was panting and her mouth was open and his descended to swallow the deep, involuntary groan she couldn’t contain as she climaxed.