Daughters of legianne, p.25
Daughters of Legianne, page 25
“We don’t have forever.” Her voice was barely audible as she struggled to keep herself together. “I don’t want to spend the time we do have watching you give away every last piece of yourself.”
Still holding her hand, he laced their fingers together, then pulled her into his arms. The moment he wrapped them tightly around her, she broke, the first sob ripping free, followed by the rest held back by the dam she’d tried to hold.
After several minutes, she quieted in his arms. Still feeling the small shudders from the quiet sobs, he tightened his hold on her. Finally able to pull himself out of his own emotions that had threatened to swallow him, he said, “I draw the line at being tucked into bed every night.”
She pulled back to look at him, her eyes wide. She blinked slowly, then burst into laughter.
“What? I’m serious.” He scoffed. “I would take some milk and cookies next to the bed every night, though.”
“Oh, my Goddess,” she wheezed, squeezing her eyes shut.
Hearing her laughter was a balm for the ache within him. His heart started to return to its steady, slow beat. His lungs loosened so that he could breathe again.
“Any other requests?”
“Sponge baths wouldn’t be too bad,” he offered, sending her into another fit of laughter. He waited until she calmed, wiping the tears from her eyes. “On a more serious note, it’s not going to be easy. I’m pretty sure I’ve proven on more than one occasion how stubborn I am.”
She lifted a brow.
“For you, I’ll do anything.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead first, then the tip of her nose, followed by brushing his lips over hers.
“Thank you.” She curled against him.
“So…” He tipped his head toward the bathroom door. “How about that sponge bath? You do me, I do you?”
“Why do I feel like that was a double entendre?”
“Mm.” He gave her a mischievous grin. “Maybe you should come find out.”
She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment, the weariness she wore on her face earlier when everyone was there, now gone, her eyes bright again.
Slowly, she unfolded herself from his lap, then scooted off the edge of the bed. Pausing at the bathroom door, she pulled off her shirt and slid her cotton shorts down her legs. When she stood, she looked over her shoulder. “Are you coming?”
His voice was deep and rough, full of love and desire, when he answered, “Oh, I’m coming all right.”
Chapter 57
“Is she going to be okay?” Lily asked, causing Matthew to lift his attention from his book. Just like falling from a cliff, his efforts at pretending she wasn’t within arms reach of him so that he could focus on his book, tumbled over the edge.
Lily tipped her head toward the end of the table, her strawberry blond hair slipping over her shoulders, beckoning his hands. When she turned back to him, her pupils flared and cheeks reddened, and suddenly, his breath caught in his chest.
He ripped his eyes from hers and glanced toward where Róisín was bent over an ancient tome with torn pages, chewing on her thumbnail, eyebrows set in a scowl. They had been in the Molennius Archives all morning, reading through the extensive Coven history books.
He wasn’t sure just how he could honestly answer the question. Despite Róisín’s charge forward attitude she had carried when this task fell into her hands that no, she was not okay right now. It was still questionable if she would be okay at the end with all she’d learned about her family.
“She’s been through so much,” Lily whispered. “She’s… amazing.”
Matthew blinked slowly.
“I’m serious. Even when we were all younger, I’ve always thought that.” Lily’s eyes glossed with her shining admiration for Róisín.
Amused, Matthew would’ve wondered if Lily would attempt to muscle Caid out of the picture with Róisín. But he wasn’t the only one that had felt that faint tug of a bond trying to snap into place the last time he and Lily had been in the Alleyette Library.
“Are you?” He wiggled his eyebrows at her, then inclined his head toward Róisín, making his implication clear.
“What? Oh!” Her cheeks darkened more. “I mean, I’ve thought about other women in that way, sure,” she admitted. “Beyond that, though, I… no.” She turned serious, spinning quickly to face him. “Are you—” She cleared her throat and moved her chair closer. “Are you going to, um, ask me on a date?” she whispered.
Matthew coughed in surprise, then thumped a hand hard against his chest, hoping his voice didn’t croak when he answered. “Do you want to go on a date?”
Her eyes flit to where Nanette and Shasta stood, hands clasped, mouths moving to the words that lay on the page before them. They’d tested new spelled wards all morning. “When we were at the manor, in the library, and we… did you… feel anything?”
He tried to remember how to breathe, nearly failing, another cough scratching at his throat. Count, he needed to count, distract his brain so his body would remember what it needed to do to live.
“In the room. A.” She paused as though she were trying to choose her words carefully. “Tugging of sorts.”
“Tugging?” He managed hoarsely.
“Maybe it was nothing.” She shrugged. “I’ve been super paranoid about the council finding out what we’re doing despite my grandmother, Lucius, and Shasta’s protections. I’ve heard and felt things for weeks now.”
Her shoulders came up, her spine straightening, her mouth dropping open as the realization hit her.
He grinned, barely managing to hold back his chuckle of delight. “Surprise?”
“You? It’s you? I thought—” She glanced back at Róisín. “Wait, you two aren’t?”
“Nope.” His grin grew wider. “Pretty sure it’s her and the human.”
“But…” She brought her hands to her face, placing them on her cheeks. “I need to step outside. It’s boiling in here all of a sudden.”
The scraping of their chairs on the floor made Róisín lift her head, blinking at him.
“Is she okay?” Róisín asked as the door practically slammed shut.
“Uh, she will be?” He shrugged. “I don’t know why she’s embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?”
“I think I’m quite a catch.”
Róisín’s mouth dropped open, then quickly snapped shut, and her eyes grew wide in excitement. “I knew it. The other day at my house on the couch! Oh! And the power around you two was different today. Oh, oh,” she drew out the word. “She just figured it out, didn’t she?”
Matthew rose, gathering up the book he’d been looking through, then made his way closer so they weren’t shouting to one another.
Róisín studied him after he settled into the chair next to her. “What makes you think she’s embarrassed?”
“Her face got redder than a tomato, then she said it was hot in here.”
“That’s not necessarily embarrassment, Matthew. She could be…”
“Well, shit.” He looked at the door. “No. We need to talk about it all before anything moves forward. It also wouldn’t hurt for us to spend more time together outside of all”—he waved his hands over the table—“this shit. Get to know each other, really fall in love, not just lean on the bond and what feelings come with that. She deserves that.”
“Isn’t this a cozy little distraction?” She beamed at him, her face bright. “The heirs of their Covens being bound together.”
“Is that weird? Has that ever happened?”
She shrugged and reached for her hair tie on the table. “I mean, there must be a reason. I guess we won’t know until you two…” One hand held her hair in a ponytail, the other waving the elastic to the door, then at him. “You know.”
He tapped a finger on his chin. “What if she doesn’t want it? I mean, she is an heir, too.”
“You two could try to fight it,” she suggested. “If you’re bound, fate will just keep bringing you back to one another until you commit.”
“Kind of like us.” He gestured between them.
“You’re just a pain in the ass brother that won’t go away. That’s different.”
He hummed in agreement. “It’s fun. Ah, fuck.”
“What?” She closed her book with a thud. Shifting in her chair, he waited, watching, as she looked him over. He saw the very moment it hit her, what he had meant, in the way she winced ever so slightly. “Oh. That.”
“Did you tell Caid?”
“Caid knows everything.”
“Everything, everything, or just everything?”
“All of it, Matthew,” she said firmly.
He slumped in his chair, sighing. “I’m going to have to tell her.”
“You are,” she agreed. “It’s not that hard. Trust me.”
“Not that hard.” He barked a laugh.
“Hey, at least she already knows you’re a witch. I mean, Caid knew about you and me the day he rescued me from Madigan, and had thought you and I were together. That spilled out in one of my rare, I-can’t-shut-my-mouth moments. I had to tell my boyfriend that I’m also a super powerful witch, who also has a very rare magic. Ah, but wait, I also had to tell him I am probably going to die saving my people.”
Matthew quickly sobered. “You will not die.”
“We don’t know that,” she whispered.
“You will not die,” he repeated with such ferociousness and finality that it made her flinch. She wasn’t used to the more serious side of Matthew, and he knew it. He felt bad for snapping, but he needed her to see, to understand. “You’re going to kick the shit out of that pile of shit. Then you and the carpenter are going to get married. I’ll be there throwing rice at your face, I promise you that.”
She stared at him for a moment. In her eyes, he saw past the weight of all the realms on her shoulders. The terror that lay deeper. He grabbed her hands, gripping them. “You will not die, Ro. We’ll find a way. This isn’t over, for any of us. Okay?”
She nodded.
“I’m serious,” he pressed. “We’ll find a way.”
“I hope we do, because I don’t want to die.” Her voice cracked as she answered him. “I’m not ready.”
Chapter 58
Caid moved to step over a stack of recently delivered lumber at his current job site, tripping and stumbling into the rear quarter of his truck when he didn’t quite clear the wood pile.
“Ya good, man?” Wyatt called over, slinging his tool belt over his shoulder. “You’ve been wicked out of it all day.”
Caid waved him off, then stalked to his truck, dropping the tailgate to load his tools. Róisín had been gone for three days. The first day had been fine. By the morning of the second day, the inability to reach out to her set in.
Was she okay?
Had Madigan found her? The others?
The not knowing ate at his sanity. As the third day ended, he wasn’t sure he had any sanity left, or even remembered what it was.
David had come in the evenings. Caid felt awkward talking to the rabbit and was convinced that David’s frequent presence was just to check up on him for Róisín.
Did David have a way to reach her?
As Caid shoved the rest of his tools into the truck bed, he hoped he saw the rabbit again to ask.
He mumbled his goodbyes to Wyatt, climbed into the truck and closed the door with a slam. Róisín had asked him to stay at her house while she had been gone, insisting it would be safer for him. He heard the desperation in her plea when he had stubbornly tried to push away her concern.
Now, as he fought the urge to duck his head as he passed Lina on the road, there was a relief to know that he headed there instead of his place, which felt empty, almost desolate, in their time together.
His phone rang, pulling him from his spiraling thoughts. He hesitated to answer when he saw Lina’s number on his truck’s dash screen. He hadn’t talked to her since Róisín left on a ‘business trip’ for a few days. Since then, he’d avoided her calls and texts because he hadn’t trusted his own poker face.
The longer Róisín was gone, the harder he fought to keep his emotions down. There would only be one person who could see through the mask he wore, and that person was Lina.
“It’s about damned time.” Lina’s loud, exasperated voice filled the truck’s interior when the call connected. “Are we fighting? Did I say something snide again and piss you off?”
“I’ve been busy working, which, shouldn’t you have almost no free time between the impending arrival of the twins and running this town?”
“STOP saying it’s twins,” she groaned. “The more times you say it, the more it’ll come true.”
“Twins, twins, twinsitty-twins.”
“You’re an asshole,” she muttered.
“Just fulfilling my duties as a brother. Is there a reason you’ve been harassing me, Leen?”
“Maybe I’m just fulfilling my role as a sister.”
“Touché.”
“Anyway... Do you know when Ro will be back? Thomas’s sister has been chomping at the bit to plan my shower and I’ve told her she can’t do it without Ro. I called her this morning but got the ‘out of service area’ message.”
“You’d have a better idea than I. Thomas does business trips, how long is he usually gone for?”
“At least two or three days at a time, but always different,” she answered casually.
“And there’s your answer. She’ll be home when she’s home.” He was grateful to be pulling into the drive as he made that statement, because the words hit him right in his guts with a hard punch.
Lina’s heavy sigh burst through the speakers, causing the sound to crackle around him. “Okay. I’ll tell Ashley I’m working on my registrations, and then when I’m done, we’ll plan. Should be plenty of time for Ro to get back so we can all come together and plan.”
Swallowing suddenly seemed impossible. Shaking his head, clearing his worries away, to cheer her up he said, “I can help plan if Ashley’s that gung-ho.”
“Oh, hell no. Love you, but hell to the n-o-p-e.”
“Can’t say I didn’t offer.”
“Mm, thanks for that much. You’re an asshole, but you’re my favorite asshole.”
“I do my best,” he replied, scanning the tree line for a dot of white.
“Answer next time I call you but, I need to get going. The town lawyer wants to meet about my proposal to get Stewart Munson out of town.”
That snapped Caid back to the moment. “Do me a favor, be careful with Munson, okay?”
There was a long pause, as though she wanted to ask him questions. “I will. I promise,” she replied, instead.
“Love you, knucklehead.”
“Love you too, asshole.”
He waited until static from the disconnected call filled his speakers before he shut his truck off, then went inside. After grabbing a beer from the fridge, he settled himself into a chair on the patio, waiting for the rabbit to come.
Chapter 59
Róisín came to Caid in the night. The feeling within her chest at the sight of him in her bed hit her like a wall, leaving her wishing that she could be selfish with her time, her magic, with him. Quietly, she curled against his chest, taking in his warmth, his smell, the feel of him.
A different urgency had chased her home from Molennius this time. The edges had closed in, nipping at her heels.
They were out of time. Madigan was coming for her.
Instead of telling the others first, she went to Caid. She went to be with him, to love him for just a moment longer; to say goodbye.
Caid brought his arm around her tightly, pulling her against him, then rolling so that she was over him and he could bring his other arm around her.
Wordlessly, she brought her mouth to his. When he opened to welcome and taste her in return, she prayed to the Goddess he couldn’t feel her sorrow, her desperation, as she sunk deeper into their kiss, frenzied to consume as much of him as she could.
His mouth froze on hers the second one of her tears splashed against his cheek. “Hey,” his voice was soft, and he cradled her face in his hands, thumbs stroking away her tears.
“I’m okay, I’ve just missed you.” She struggled with the lie.
He kept his thumbs stroking her cheeks. The moonlight streaming in through her windows illuminated his face, and his features shifted as if working out whether he wanted to press her, or let it go. Using his hands, he brought her back to him, sealing their mouths together. This time, his desperation mirrored her own. Like he knew.
When she rocked her hips against him, he rolled her onto her back and rose over her. He skimmed a hand over her chest, stopping to take one of her nipples between his thumb and forefinger. She moaned into his mouth, and he swallowed it down, cupping her breast, moving his hand down along her stomach to her hip. His fingers pressed against her skin as his palm cupped her hip, drawing her closer to him.
The feel of his length against her had her arching against him, breaking their kiss as she pressed harder against him.
“I need you,” she breathed out. “I need you, now.”
With his mouth on her neck, nipping, and kissing down to her shoulder and back, he shifted them both so that they aligned. When he stroked the head of his cock along her entrance, she reached for him, fingers digging into his hips.
“Jesus Christ,” he murmured against her skin, pushing in deeper.
He fisted her hair, tugging, tipping her head back to give him access to her neck. He sucked the skin there, causing her to cry out his name when a white, hot heat slammed into her core. She rocked against his thrusts, then, needing to feel him deeper, she wrapped her legs around his waist.
As the edge came closer, something came together, tightening. Something unfamiliar. A wall coming down inside of her. Something rising in the space left behind.
The sensation grew inside of her. It was light, airy, like a balloon floating in the air. A thin thread stretching from the balloon, to her, tethering them together.
