But she knew. Her heart could not doubt. She threaded her fingers through his and held on tight. Just like this should they be, flesh to flesh and life to life.
“You will go home to Erin,” she said. “Eventually ye will, with the agreement ye seek or otherwise. Ye will forget me.”
He shook his head. “Never. Ye have a rare beauty, Bradana.”
Men rarely told her she was beautiful. Aye, they might compliment her hair, eye her breasts, speculate over the length of her legs. They said only that she wasformidable. Too strong. Her stepbrothers’ friends were cretins.
“I will no’ forget ye either, Adair. But we are like two o’ these pebbles cast up on the shore. They might lie beside one another for a time. The next great wave that comes tumbles them and moves them far apart. We have many great waves coming.”
“But here, in this moment, we have peace.” He cradled her hand against him, and a kind of serenity reached out from him to embrace her. He turned his gaze back out to sea and she became lost. Lost in how beautiful he was, and the sweet strength of his spirit.
Examining her own feelings, though, she found she did not want serenity. She wanted him to take her in his arms. Kiss her. She wanted the fire and madness she instinctively knew would rise between them. She wanted the violence of loving him and gifting him her soul in a rush of passion.
Yet she sat with him because he asked it, and she breathed him in there in the peace of the dying afternoon, absorbing his feel and his presence.
Storing it up for whatever the future might bring.
Not till nightfall did they part, retracing their steps back up the shore, where they paused and faced each other.
“Will ye no’ come in and tak’ somewhat to eat?” she beseeched, loath to part with him.
He made a face. “Nay.”
“Ye must be hungry.”
“Flynn and Nolan shared with me earlier. Anyway, I still do not think I would be welcome at your stepfather’s fireside.”
“Mayhap not.”
“Sleep well, Mistress Bradana.”
He leaned toward her. For one blinding, glorious moment, she thought he meant to kiss her. But he only gave a nod and drew his fingers from hers. Abruptly, the last of the light faded from the day. She could no longer feel his heartbeat.
“And you.”
She watched him walk away from her toward his quarters, her devastation all out of proportion. Would she not see him come morning?
“Come, Wen,” she told her hound, who seemed as disappointed at parting from Adair as she.
Chapter Eleven
Voices interrupted Bradana’ssleep, partly muffled and accompanied by a burst of laughter. She opened her eyes to the close dark of her sleeping chamber. Morning had not yet arrived, yet someone—quite clearly not the guard—bumped along outside the dun.
She’d been sleeping quite well up to this point, better than she’d expected. She thought she might lie long thinking about all that had passed between her and Adair, might flail and struggle over the impossibility of what she felt for him. But she’d dropped off instead to the memory of him holding her hand, and dreamed of the two of them lying together so in a far-distant place, fingers twined, hearts yearning.
Now she thought she recognized her stepbrothers’ voices.
Accursed fools, she thought. They must have sat up late drinking and bragging with their friends, as they tended to do, and be on their way back to their beds. Kendrick would not be pleased if he found out.
She rose at the bidding of her annoyance, went out into the corridor and to the nearest door. Wen followed her, his great head cocked and a growl sounding low in his throat.
The night air struck cool against her body, clad only in a thin sleeping gown. She could see the settlement mostly asleep, and the forms of two men, little more than shadows, moving past her.
She was about to step back and return to bed when Wen ran out, the growl increasing to a rumble.
“Wen? Come back.”
Rarely did the hound disobey her, but he did so now, heading off around the side of the dun and down the slope toward the shore.
