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“Aye.” The word was hard male pleasure.
Waves began moving through her, thudding deep pulses. Atop them rode another sensation, bright and trembly, skimming the deeper shudder, like flames flickering on oil. Silver thread atop an earthquake.
She became nothing but sound and passion, rocking hips and gasps of pleasure, crying out his name as the spiral of fiery pleasure built, until it crashed inside her in a wave, so that she felt as if her body came apart in hard, shuddering explosions of white-hot pleasure.
While she was still reverberating, he pulled out. She whimpered in dazed protest, but he flipped her onto her back as if she was a sheaf of parchment and pushed her legs apart. Her body was damp with passion-sweat, her hair tangled and spread across her body as he slid back inside her with a single push.
“Keep saying my name, love,” he said, his voice ragged
and hoarse for all his insouciance.
Love.
Tremors of pleasure still moved through her as she curled her hands around the hard definition of his upper arms and hung on. He held himself up on his palms, his head bent, hair falling forward, his gaze fierce, intent, their gazes locked, and she did indeed keep whispering his name, her eyes filling with tears as he moved in her. Then his body stiffened and his face contorted, a beautiful, hard, pained male shudder, and he spilled inside her with swift, savage thrusts.
She wrapped her knees around his hips and clung to him until he stopped thrusting, until the shudders of pleasure slowed. He finally lowered himself to his elbows, then brought his head down too, until his forehead rested on hers. They breathed together, their sweat and breath mingling. Magdalena lifted her hands—they were heavy, languid—and trailed her fingers along his jaw, tipped her face up to covered his in hot, little kisses, no aim, no precision. His body radiated heat into hers.
Finally, he tipped his head up an inch. He shifted onto one elbow and wiped the sweeps of tangled, sweaty hair away from her face to peer in at her.
“Well,” he mused, his voice rough. “I think that went well.”
She laughed. She was still laughing when he rolled them over, keeping himself inside her, so she was on top, straddling him, her knees pressing into the soft, crackling hay.
His eyes found hers in the firelit darkness, then, looking over her whole body as he did, he pushed the rest of the hair back from her face, brushed it slowly over her shoulders and down her belly, until it pooled on his chest and flat stomach. Then, strand by strand where necessary, he carefully, devotedly, silently combed it with his fingers, taking out all the knots.
Her heart felt so full it hurt. Such a complicated man. Such a dangerous—nay, perilous—man, capable of great ruthlessness, but also gentle and insightful and funny and kind. What forces had shaped him to be who he was? What mission could have sent him out into the world as he was now, cold, alone, outlawed and hunted, so far from the home he loved so well?
How had this intelligent, charming, powerful man come to this?
“Tadhg,” she whispered, “will you not tell me what happened?”
Chapter Thirty
TADHG GAVE A LOW LAUGH and ran the back of his knuckle across her lip, then looked away, over her shoulder, unable to look into the complicated reservoir of her eyes.
Maggie was the closest thing to his dreams, the ones he’d stopped dreaming a decade and more ago, and look what he’d done to her. Abducted her, took her from home and safety, flung her out into the cold, dangerous world. At the least, she deserved the truth. It was the only thing of value he possessed anymore: the awful truth.
“Do you want me to start at the beginning, Maggie? For that will take us back to Ireland, and thence the shores of England, and caves and outlaws and broken bonds, and we would still be here talking when Easter came for us.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I want to know all those things. But for now…start with your dagger.”
He smiled faintly, his fingers still in her hair. “Well then, I suppose I’d have to start with the ruby.”
She laughed softly. “Only you would, Tadhg.”
“Now this ruby, Maggie, ’tis a huge, beautiful thing, deep-red. Magnificent. Quite distinctive.”
“Much like the one in the hilt of your dagger.”
His gaze slid to hers. “Beautiful and smart. I’m a rare lucky man.”
She did not smile.
“How do you know ‘tis a ruby?”
“I saw its red gleam when you took it at my shop.” She gave a little shrug. “A red gleam, in a dagger…A gem of course. But what matters the gem, or the dagger?”
“Because war is good business,” he said in a quiet, toneless voice, and looked back up at the ceiling. “But an expensive one. And for all its power, an army is a terribly vulnerable thing. Too much rain, moldy bread, a supply train that stretches out too far…anything can upend it, wipe out months of planning, bankrupt a campaign. Or a kingdom. It would be far easier if a king did not have to fight at all. If the nobles serving his enemy simply renounced their fealty, and laid down their arms.”
