“Raghnall.” He frowned, shocked that the enemy had been his brother in another life. “He’d had no use for your kind before that.” He shook his head. “Not until you healed him, and he felt you from the inside out.”
“Then he was as drawn to me as I was to you.” Riona took a few more sips and flinched. “Unfortunately, because I had healed him, we remained connected. Enough so that he always seemed to know where I would turn up.”
“And ‘twas only a few short years later that he realized the great beauty you were becoming.” Declán could see her face in that life. Features nearly as exquisite as those in this one. “Something I noticed just as readily.”
He still remembered how much he had come to adore her as their friendship grew. Then the intense love he felt for her when it became even more.
Something that crossed the line into forbidden.
“Yet I never acted on it,” he said. “And I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to. How I longed to make you mine in all ways possible.”
“I felt the same.” She gazed into his eyes and touched his cheek. “It was torture. Every single second. And we experienced it the first time we slept together in this life.”
“Because we came so close in the last.” He remembered kissing her too many times to count. Being so close to sinking into her sweet flesh. “Yet somehow we fought it. Somehow we held back.”
“We did,” she agreed. “Because of him. Fear of Raghnall telling my druid sisters.”
“Ta.”Now that Riona had let him into her dream and showed what happened, memories of his brother in a former life kept flooding back. How cruel he’d been even then. He thought nothing of killing animals for pleasure rather than necessity. Nothing of murdering humans if it got him what he wanted.
The only kindness he ever showed was to the little druidess who healed him. Yet it wasn’t love but obsession, and that became clearer as the years passed. As his obsession turned to dark lust. Petulant need despite her treating the two brothers equally.
“He knew, though,” she said softly. “He had to have seen the way I looked at you. Had to have known I hated his cruelty. His ruthlessness with animals.” She caressed Declán’s jaw. Saw into his heart with the way she looked at him. “But that was never you.” She shook her head. “You were so different than him. So kind, where he was the opposite. And it all began with that blue cloak....”
When he looked at her curiously, she went on.
“I had thought it was a dream when I was little and chased you into the New Hampshire woods, but I don’t think it was. Not entirely, anyway,” she said. “They found me curled up beneath that rock ledge in the morning with nothing but a blue cloak wrapped around my sodden nightgown.” She seemed incredulous. “Somehow, you led me back to the moment we met in another life, Declán. And when you did, it reconnected us. Sparked my druidess magic. In turn, the nightgown I wore became not just a dress over the years but the same shade as your cloak.”
“’Tis something else, is it not?” he marveled, sensing she was right.
“It is,” she said. “I think after that, I was able to find my way to you here in eleventh-century Ireland. What I’m not sure about yet is why the tree followed me or what that archway’s about. Why my blade was tucked behind the stump beneath it.”
“Which I suspect is somehow connected to how it all ended for the three of us in our last life,” he said. “How Raghnall became your husband when ‘twas forbidden to love, let alone lay with an Unnamed One. Because he would have had to truly love you to become an unknown king,ta?”
“You would think,” she replied. “But the Raghnall I knew in that life was incapable of genuine love.” She shook her head. “Absolutely incapable.”
Declán agreed based on what he remembered of his sibling in their last life. He recalled no kindness in him unless he was around Riona. No compassion for much of anything. It was hard to believe they were brothers. He was more than grateful they hadn’t been reborn as such.
“I wonder about one more thing,” Riona went on, her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t realize it in my dream, but I’m certain now. The cave I ended up in when I followed you through the woodland back home, the one that led me to the younger King’s Heart, to you and Raghnall, was the same one I dreamt of before traveling back in time. The same one connecting your land and Raghnall’s.” She gave him a pointed look. “It was undoubtedly King’s Echo.”
“You think it connects the three of us somehow, then?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“Then we will do away with it once all is said and done,” he promised. “You should know that I’ve already blocked the main route through it, so we are far less vulnerable to him now.”
She nodded, but he could tell it weighed on her mind.
“Let us get some rest,” he urged. “We’ll worry about it on the morn.”
“Rest sounds good.” She eyed him in that dewy way he was quickly becoming familiar with. “Although I’ll admit I could use a tad more warming up first.”
He knew it wasn’t just that. She wanted to see only him again. Drive Raghnall from her mind once and for all. While he wondered if such a thing were truly possible in light of what they had remembered, his cock was willing to give it a shot.
Something made obvious since the moment he sat her on his bare lap.
When he went to stand to carry her back to bed, she shook her head and straddled him right where they were. He released a ragged groan when she sank onto him ever-so-slowly.
When she kissed him like she had the very first time in ancient Ireland.
