Thirty-six

Afterward, sated and stretched out on a modest inn bed that felt like the peak of luxury just then, Cathal fought off the urge to fall asleep. It wasn’t easy. He’d rolled onto his back and pulled Sophia against him, and the steady rhythm of her breathing could easily have lulled him into slumber, had circumstances been different.

They weren’t.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Oh.” Her voice was as drowsy as his at first, but sharpened to awareness quickly. She opened her eyes and sat up slightly. “I have his name,” Sophia said with a small smile: triumph, tempered by wariness. She wasn’t overconfident, his lady; she knew to call no man lucky until he died, or however the Norsemen had it. “That’s the sum of the work before his men began to suspect me, but that much made itself obvious, yes?”

“Slightly.” Gently, and with no small amount of reluctance, Cathal left her embrace and stood up, then crossed the room to the nightstand with its basin of water and the cloths lying nearby. “What’s the long version?”

She told him while they cleaned themselves, blushing when it came her turn but not looking away from him the entire time. When she reached her escape, she spread her hands. “…and so you found me, fortune being with us both.”

“Just enough of it,” Cathal said, and shook his head. He’d seen how close her pursuit had been, but had not known how narrow her original escape—nor how certain her doom would have been had he not overheard the soldiers and acted. In that moment, he wished he knew less—or less of war, less of Valerius himself.

Sophia shrugged, and the movement of her naked breasts was a small distraction from Cathal’s more troubling thoughts. “Fortune’s not in such great supply, you know. If we had just enough, it’s more than most people ever get.” She smiled and reached out, the tips of her fingers touching his cheek. “To have had the flight out here, and this night? I would change my luck for no one’s.”

Cathal caught her hand in his. “Marry me.”

The words came without thought, and yet, once he said them, he felt he’d been considering them for days, even weeks—like the time in a battle when years of practice let the body know what was right before the mind could even frame the question.

The smile left Sophia’s face, and she stared at him accusingly. “Don’t. That’s a cruel sort of jest, and you know I’d never demand—”

“No.” His hand tightened around hers. “I speak in earnest.”

“You can’t possibly,” she said, staring at him with even more surprise and much more doubt than she’d had when he’d stood before her naked and rampant. “It’s…generous of you, truly, to offer, but you know you couldn’t. You’re… Well, for one thing, you’re the son of a lord.”

“Aye,” Cathal said, seeing the swing and the means of blocking it. “The younger son, and the youngest of four children. Agnes wed to my father’s advantage, and Douglas doubtless will. Moiread still might. It’s been many lifetimes since any of them thought to direct my life in that manner. For all they knew, I could have brought home a Saracen bride when I came back.”

Mentioning the Holy Land brought Sophia’s next objection to the fore. “We don’t share a faith, nor a people, nor yet a homeland. And I would go home, if I succeed and survive. I…” She sighed. “Everyone’s been most kind, truly, most welcoming, but I’ve no wish to stay here. It’s not my home.”

“No,” he said, and forced himself to patience. If he spoke too quickly, let impulse dictate his words, Sophia would think him insincere or at least foolish. “But it’s not truly mine either. I stayed away for longer than you’ve been alive, and I’d never meant to come back for good. If I miss the place after I leave this time, in faith, I travel with a great deal of ease.” He smiled. “You could too, for that matter.”

“True.”

She sounded intrigued. She sounded uncertain. Her face was all thoughtfulness and grave concentration, and Cathal wasn’t sure whether he was more tempted to disrupt her thoughts or to have her turn such attention on him. He held himself back to putting his arm around her shoulders.

“As for faith,” he went on, and shrugged, “mayhap I should care, but I don’t. More than half the Church holds me damned already, or would if it knew what I am. I’ll not promise to convert—I’d rather not have the, ah, physical ceremony, for one—but I’d not ask it of you.”

“Oh,” said Sophia, her mouth round and her eyes wide. “I… Well…” She shook her head, not in denial but with an attempt to bring herself back into reason, and her hair rippled over Cathal’s arm. “It would be a scandal, still…but then I was never entirely respectable, and my family might not mind very much, so long as any children…but then there wouldn’t be children, would there?”

“It’s harder with us,” he said. “There’s a rite to breed with humans, and a risk to the woman.”

“So I heard. That was one of the factors in…” She gestured to the bed around them. “Not that my family would know that, of course, but I’m old for childbearing, so they might think it unlikely, and they too have other children to carry on the name. My mother, I think, would be only glad to see me return safely, and I don’t believe my father would disown me, though I don’t know that he would be very happy either.”

He waited, knowing that she spoke only half to him. Patience was difficult, particularly with her skin warm and smooth beneath his hand and her full lips only a few inches away. Repletion was beginning to fade into renewed desire. Yet he kept himself still, giving her time.

“But you wouldn’t age,” she said, “or you’d age slowly. I wouldn’t know how to explain that without giving your nature away, although I suppose I could claim it was an accident of alchemy.”

“That could be. Or I could just be well preserved.”

“Very well preserved, thirty years on. Although, after thirty years…” Sophia looked down at the bedclothes and sighed. “After thirty years, my parents will have gone to their reward, Rachel and my brothers will have their own concerns, and we could go elsewhere. At that…after thirty years, I’ll be an old woman. You may wish to leave then and only let people believe you’d died.”

“No,” he said again, leaning forward and gripping her hand tighter. “For one…if you bear a child, you’ll age more slowly, live longer.”

That brought her head up again, and sent the now-familiar look of fascination into her eyes. “Truly? How? Why? How long?”

“There are theories,” he said with a laugh, “but I confess I never had reason to study them until now. You’d not have the years we do, but as I’ve more than a century’s head start on you, we’d likely see gray hairs together.”

“Ohh,” she said, drawing out the word, and smiled. “I’d have much more time for reading than I expected, then, even with motherhood. And…if I didn’t have children, even with the rite?”

“Then I’d stay all the same.” He’d not considered watching Sophia age and die, and the prospect dismayed him, but the idea of abandoning her was worse. Morals were only part of it. He found he loathed the idea of no longer having her in his life, whatever form she might inhabit. “I’ll stay until you ask me to leave.”

She stared at him, firelight in her eyes and shadows wavering across her naked body. “That,” she said and smiled at him, so gently that the room felt colder, “is kind, but it may be in the end as much a burden as a gift. I’d not want you lingering out of obligation…and minds do change, whatever you think now.”

“You could say that much of any man.” Cathal pulled back. He couldn’t quite bring himself to stop touching her, but he left his hand only on her near shoulder and studied her face. Had he ever learned much about judging human emotion, it might have served him well. “If what you mean to say is that you don’t wish to marry me, you should say that. I’ll not take it badly.”

Had she taken more time to reply, had her eyes not suddenly lost their darkness and flashed boldly at him, Cathal might still have doubted her answer. They were alone, he was a large man even in human form, and men had spoken falsely for passion before. To his great relief, though, there was nothing in her face or in her sudden motion toward him that seemed the least bit false. “No! Or, yes. I do…and so I have to object, to think of all the obstacles that I can.” She smiled again, wryly, and ran her fingertips up his arm, over his shoulder, and down toward his chest. “If the wish of my heart is so great, then it almost has to blind me, doesn’t it? Unless I’m careful, I’ll miss a vital detail somewhere.”

“I can’t think how to argue with that,” he said. Another time, he might have, a time when her small calloused fingers weren’t sliding through the hair of his chest, their touch changing the direction of his thoughts as though it were the final ingredient in one of her potions. Cathal felt his cock stirring, thickening, and considered how little effort it would take to lean forward and bear Sophia back onto the bed.

He held still. She’d wanted to touch him; this time, he might have enough control to let her. He thought too that he should find words to answer her, even if he could think of no counter to her final argument. “You have time. You don’t have to answer tomorrow. But”—he slid his fingers down her spine, then back up, tracing around the edge of her ear and down the delicate line of her jaw—“when you think of a new problem, bring it to me, aye? Give me a chance to argue my case.”

“That seems only—” She caught her breath as Cathal leaned forward, kissing the base of her neck. His free hand conveniently settled on her thigh, soft and sleek and tense with desire. “—just.”

“Good,” said Cathal. He meant the conclusion. He also meant the taste of her sweat on his lips, the ragged sound of her breathing, the flick of her fingers over one of his nipples. “Good. Yes.”

And then she shifted, turned toward him a little more, and curved her fingers around his cock. Everything in the room blurred around the edges then, and he thought he invoked God in either Latin or Arabic, but he didn’t quite remember which. The ultimate destination of her curiosity hadn’t been a surprise, and the caress was certainly nothing he hadn’t felt before, but just then, from Sophia, the touch was a revelation.

However stunned he might have looked, he seemed to communicate good well enough, for she didn’t pull back or ask if she should stop. Instead, as Cathal should have guessed, she experimented: pressure and angle, location and speed, always careful, always intrigued. More than intrigued, he realized gradually, for her nipples were hard again, and her face was flushed, and she smelled of arousal. She was enjoying this, and the knowledge made him moan and thrust into her hand.

When she released him, just for a moment, and touched the moist tip of one finger to her mouth, he swore again.

Sophia spoke then, and her voice was throaty. It was a good thing she wasn’t touching him, or he would probably have been unable to hold himself back. “Can you…can we, er, couple again tonight? If it wouldn’t be… I don’t want to damage you, and I’ve read philosophers who say that men—”

“Not me,” said Cathal. He doubted the theory in general, but didn’t truly care, particularly not then. He thought of lewd stories about virgins, of songs and the occasional joke, and of the need hot and urgent between his legs. Reaching out, he pulled Sophia against him and rolled onto his back, kissing her until she was squirming against him and making little noises in her throat. Her breasts were hard to reach from this angle, he discovered, but fondling her lush backside, or slipping his hand down and cupping her sex, were more than compensatory joys.

In time, she sat up and back, giving Cathal a wonderful view, and, catching her breath, considered the situation. Short as she was, kissing her left only her thighs to rub against his member, and now it stood hard and flushed, thrusting blindly into the air. Sophia gave it a long look, then turned her gaze down the length of her body to her sex, and finally nodded, “I think…like this?” she asked, making the necessary adjustments in position.

“Aye,” he said, barely able to get the words out, fists clenched in the covers. “Slow as you like.”

It was slow at first—agonizingly, amazingly, wonderfully slow—and Cathal thought he stopped breathing at several points. She was very wet—confirming what he’d thought when she was touching him, and that realization nearly drove him to the breaking point—but tight, and there was a moment when she winced, and then another when he was fully inside her and she began to move.

“Wait,” he said and managed to sit up a little, enough that he could urge her forward and take one of her nipples in his mouth. With one hand, he found the spot just above their joining, as hard beneath his fingertips as he was inside her, and felt her internal shudder when he began to caress her there.

This time he couldn’t wait and tease her; this time he found her pace quickly, reading her moans and the motion of her hips, the way her sex relaxed around him even as her fingers tightened on his shoulders. When he brought her over the edge, she was crying out his name, with no attempt to bury her mouth in his shoulder. Her body arched like a bow, like the figurehead of a ship, breasts jutting forward and head back, her hair falling over them like a curtain.

The image branded itself on Cathal’s mind just before his eyes closed with his own climax, the sight and feel of Sophia’s too much for him to stand for even a few more breaths.

He thought, at the very end, that she said a word or two after his name. He even thought he knew what they were, but not certain, he kept, if not silence, at least incoherence. Best not to rely on anything said in passion, particularly when the passion was new, nor to trust his own hearing at such a moment.

He’d give her time. He wouldn’t press the issue.