He wanted her again. He did not have to tell her that. She could feel it in the heat of him pressed against her and the flames leaping up through her own flesh. Something in her responded to something in him, and likely always would.
It did not matter, for now—this moment—presented her with her best chance. While he reached for her lips with his lips. While he thought only of stoking those fires and mating with her again. Flying, flying on the strength of the light.
She could not let herself fail. Much as she wanted to wind her arms around his neck, to give herself to him again, she reached over the side of the bed instead.
Her fingers tangled in soft wool. The fabric of her gown. They could not find the opening. The pocket where lay the knife.
Rory lifted his lips from hers and half propped himself on one forearm, gazing into her face. The green eyes between those spiked lashes had gone soft with mist. In that instant, she caught no hint of darkness.
“Saerla.”
Her entire body desired him. Without her permission, her lips parted. Her legs spread wide, offering him admittance. Her fingers, on their deadly mission, froze.
He kissed her. His lips asked a question even as his tongue slipped inside and his body slid into position between her thighs, ready to enter her. Every part of her wanted him inside her, even as her fingers returned to life, dug through the fabric, and located the hilt of the knife.
He lay upon her, poised to enter her, his mouth fixed to hers. As vulnerable as this man would ever be.
Saerla drew the knife from the fabric and brought the point of it up, up over the side of the bed and directly to the pulse that beat at the side of Rory MacLeod’s neck.
Chapter Thirty-One
It took amoment, the span of perhaps twenty heartbeats, for Rory to register the prick of cold at the side of his neck. He thought only of kissing Saerla. Of the sweetness of her mouth and the heat of her below. He wanted to be inside her so intensely, nothing else existed. He wanted only to fly with her, fly and fly on the wings of light.
She was of the earth, of the ground and the rock that made up this glen he loved, and yet she was not. She was of the air. The light.
She could make him believe in magic.
He had only to slide into her again, her sheath made for him where he had always, always needed to be.
Then she went still beneath him. Utterly still.
He stilled also and stopped breathing, because at that instant her breath supplied his own. Through the fog of rapture came a sharp point of pain.
“Do no’ move.”
She spoke into his mouth, so close were they to one another. She had no need to tell him. He could not move, seized by disbelief.
Her eyes stared hard into his. Wide, blue, no longer filled with mist, they looked sharp enough to glitter. The eyes of a warrior. On the battlefield.
“I am sorry,” she whispered. “I am sorry.”
The sensation of a blade entering his flesh cut through all the others and brought him to life. His reactions had always been quick, and now served to save his life. He jerked away with a grunt. Felt the hot blood start at the side of his neck.
Saerla skittered away from him, slid off the bed with the knife still clutched in her hand. He blinked at her in dawning horror and clapped a hand to his neck. It came away wet with blood. She had attacked him.
Nicked him only.
Another moment, a tiny bit more pressure, she would have ended his life.
That truth crashed upon him even as he continued to stare at her standing there naked at the side of the bed. The place where they’d just made love. Where another splash of blood among the tangled sheets proved she’d been untouched before he took her.
His.His.
She’d tried to kill him. Och, God! Och, God, och—
“Gi’ me the knife.” His voice did not sound like his own. A stranger inhabited his body. Another stranger looked at him from Saerla’s eyes.
She shook her head. That glorious red-gold hair of hers tumbled across her shoulders. Covered her breasts.
