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He told himself he was only sharing all this to keep her panic at bay.
Shifting against the log, he tugged the blanket up around her, covering her shoulders more.
“Then your sword is descended from a god?” she asked.
He nodded.
“And it has been passed, father to son, all this time?”
He nodded again.
She shifted further, facing him, her body less like ice, more like the sensual woman who’d bent her body for him in the tent. “That means you are descended from a god.”
He shrugged. “’Tis legend, lass.”
“Máel,” she said dreamily. “The god of outlaws. Perhaps rogues as well.”
He laughed. She turned fully to the side and rested her head on his shoulder, then tucked her hands under her chin and curled her body against his.
Jésu. She would be the death of him.
Chapter 24
They spoke no more. Cassia stared into the fire for what felt like hours, trying to ignore the feel of his hard body behind hers.
Sadly, though, she could not even ignore the memory of him kissing her. The feel of his hard hands sliding up her ribs and then down her legs.
What had he been going to do down there?
She wanted to know so much, her body began to throb. Her breath hitched. Then she felt him, behind her, his hardness growing, against her back.
How like a man, she thought unsteadily, to become aroused in his sleep.
He stretched his legs out, hands resting on his thighs. Otherwise, naught.
Her inhalations were patched around pockets of held breath, all her attention focused on the length and width of the powerful erection. How she wanted, ever so much, to move against him. To push back.
How like a woman.
She was terrified. Of herself.
His breathing kept on with the slow, regular rhythm of sleep, but his erection was fully blooded now, a thick, hot shaft against her back.
And in that heartbeat, the strangeness of her life stopped being a thing odd and alien, and became a thing of…opportunity.
If she did move against him, if she shifted her body ever so slightly to feel more of his magnificence, who would know?
No one but Cassia and her aching, never-touched body.
Oh, how she wanted to be touched. By Máel.
She was untried in anything but poverty and how to hold up appearances. She was a child when it came to passion. And if all went as planned, if her long-held dreams were realized, she would be wed to a man who would care nothing for her, who lighted no fires inside her, certes nothing like the hot, burning flame that lit whenever Máel simply looked at her.
She would gain her heart’s desire: safety…and never feel this way again.
Whatever magic moved through this warrior and into her, she would never experience its like again.
Her life would be spent playing at chaste, meaningless passion with troubadours on lutes. She would be bedded by a man she did not love, repeatedly, and she would never know the raw, real power of this man again.
