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“What is it?” came her wild whisper.
“Let it be,” he coaxed, holding her hips into the rocking rhythm.
“Oh, please, oh please, don’t stop.”
“Never. I will never stop,” came his ragged reply.
She tipped toward some inevitable precipice. Hesitating at the edge, he surged into her again and touched some mad, spiraling pleasure point deep inside her. A wave of shuddering wetness crashed through her body, flaming white heat and long, undulating quivers. She leapt off the cliff and flew, throbbing and shuddering and now alive.
Finian felt her release ripple along him and his hands flexed around her hips as he plunged into her one last time, exploding into his own quaking, rocking fulfillment. He held her shuddering in his arms—copper hair, parted lips, and burning spirit—and felt his heart shift.
The moment lasted forever. She mewed his name in helpless repetition, each whimpering cry accented by a shudder of warm flesh along his quivering length. He held himself deep inside her, spent, satisfied, and shocked.
Chapter 30
“Shocked?”
Pentony, seated at the table, nodded.
Rardove groaned. His eyes were red rimmed, and the small beard he usually kept so carefully trimmed was rough edged and uneven. “That’s what he says?” he asked Pentony, who was reading from the scrolled missive which had just arrived, pressed with red wax in the image of a sword-wielding, helmed horseman that marked King Edward’s seal. “Shocked?”
“And displeased,” Pentony added.
“Displeased.”
Pentony nodded without looking over again. No need to witness the deterioration with every sense. Hearing it was quite enough for now.
Rardove cursed and reached for the jug of wine and poured. Just what was required: more drink.
All the nights since Senna left had been filled with sleeplessness, fury, and flagons of wine, evidenced by the roars that exploded from Rardove’s bedchamber and sent maidservants scurrying. This morning had not brought much different, except that his rage seemed muted by a monstrous hangover. Even now, by candlelight, his eyeballs were obviously swollen and red rimmed, his nose mottled with little red spots, his cheeks ruddy red. He was a study in crimson.
Mayhap he would kill himself with drink. Today.
Pentony turned back to the royal missive in his hands. “The king is on the Welsh border, waiting for a good wind. When he gets it, he’ll sail for Ireland and march here. He’s sending Wogan the justiciar, governor of Ireland, on ahead to speak with you. When the weather cooperates, he will come himself.”
Rardove swept up a mug of wine and drank the dregs, then simply dropped the cup. It clattered to the ground. “Good,” he snapped. “The royal hound will learn how difficult it truly is, guarding his marches against the accursed Irish.”
“He will also learn you made the Wishmé dyes without telling him.”
Rardove scowled, but it was bravado, and Pentony knew it. Rardove had cause to fear. The king of England, Edward Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots, had an uncanny way of finding out who was inciting rebellion in his lands. It was the reason there was so little rebellion in his lands. Aside from the spy Red, that is, who must be mad to court the fury of this royal will. Edward was a terrifying enemy. Acquisitive, determined, brutal.
And he seemed to have found out that Rardove was trying to make the legendary dyes behind his back.
No, shocked and disappointed were probably pale versions of what Edward Longshanks was feeling. Enraged. Murderous. These were more the thing.
Especially when he learned Rardove knew the legend of the dyes to be legend no longer, but fact. Rardove had samples to prove it, made by the only dye witch who’d been able to produce the coveted dyes in the last five hundred years: Elisabeth de Valery.
Senna, her daughter, was Rardove’s last chance to make them again.
A long shot, by all accounts, Senna was like a single arrow winged over the ramparts from a hundred yards away, but there you had it. She was whelped from a long, ancient line of dyers, and while she claimed she had not been trained, that might not matter: legend said it was a talent carried in the blood.
The mother had it, for certes. She’d rediscovered the ancient recipe, written it all down, then run away.
That, at least, ran in the blood, Pentony thought. Mother and daughter, both had the wits to flee as soon as they were able. Unlike Senna, though, Elisabeth had taken the secret of the dyes with her.
Also unlike the daughter, Elisabeth had been married, to a wool merchant. Gerald de Valery, a man she apparently loved to great depths—deeper than Rardove. Love triangles were never good things.
But then, Pentony suspected Elisabeth had never been triangulated whatsoever. All her love had been for de Valery. Why she’d come for the dyes still baffled him.
