He didn’t, though. Instead he stood, gently pulling her to her feet with him.
When he would have stepped back, Meaghan held on to him and rose to tiptoes, leaning into his body and brushing her lips against his in a caress as fleeting as it was riveting. Áedán froze, unprepared for the heat that licked his nerves and burned with his blood. A beast within him lifted its head and growled with satisfaction at the hot thoughts that filled his head. Perhaps this woman did have use.
But he didn’t understand what motivated her to touch him, kiss him. When they’d met before, she’d been combative, berating him with little care for what he might do in retaliation. She’d had a wicked tongue that she’d used to lash out at her enemies. He’d expected that behavior from her now, but instead her mouth moved over his again in a silken heat.
What game did she play?
He wanted to ask, but his brain had locked down, refusing any distraction from the sensuous slide of her skin against his. The hand on his cheek trailed to the base of his skull, and she pulled his head down, teasing his lips with her tongue—which was velvety soft, not wicked, not cruel—until he gave in and opened for her, pulling her body against the hard planes of his in the same single act of surrender. Her taste hit his senses like a whisper of hallowed memories, evoking the sultry languor of summer nights, the fragrant spice of misted fields, the perfume of female, aroused under a pale moon . . .
Her soft curves molded perfectly against him, vanquishing any thought but keeping her there, yielding, responding, filling some hollow he hadn’t known existed. She made a sound in her throat that set him on fire, made his hands hungry, his lips needy, his body parched.
It was his total capitulation that pierced the fog of want and made him hesitate.
This was not right.
She
was not right.
The Meaghan he’d known so briefly had been fire and hellion. She hadn’t yielded to anyone, for anyone.
She opened her eyes slowly, confused as she tried to pull him back into her embrace. Her gaze was unfocused, her pupils so huge they’d swallowed all but a thin strip of blue at the edge. None of that fierce spirit he’d come to grudgingly respect glowed within them.
Entranced
, he thought.
Bespelled
.
She fought his efforts to set her away from him, her movements sluggish, not quick and able. This woman had brought him to his knees with two quick blows within minutes of meeting him but now she seemed barely capable of standing.
“Meaghan,” he said sharply, holding her at arm’s length as she struggled to reach him. “
Meaghan!”
He gave her a hard shake and then withdrew, needing space from her heat, from her soft scent, from her closeness. His body disagreed with his decision and urged him to take her—no matter what the terms. Have her, use her. She was only human, after all.
He scowled at his own surprising reluctance, but before he could decide what he meant to do about her, she stumbled over an uneven stone and lost her balance. He lurched toward her, trying to halt her momentum, but his reach was not long enough and his reactions too slow. Her shriek joined the echoes of his inner turmoil as she plunged into the icy tide pool.
She burst back to the surface and stared at him in shock. Her eyes were blue again, wide and snapping with anger.
“What the feck is wrong with you?” she shouted in a shaking voice. “You fecking pushed me!”
That was the Meaghan he knew.
“I did not push you, fool. You fell all on your own.” He quickly moved to the side and reached out to her. “Here. Take my hand,” he ordered.
She flashed him a furious glare and swam to the side, ignoring his outstretched hand. “I don’t need your fecking help,” she said, the damp and cold framing her words in a vaporous cloud that hovered at her lips.
The injustice of the moment hit his fury and perplexity like oil-soaked kindling. To think, he’d taken
her
feelings into consideration instead of simply taking what he wanted and leaving her to deal with her own circumstances.
“I didn’t push you in and you know it,” he said, still reaching for her, still confounded by the fact that he hadn’t already stormed from the cavern.
Her eyes held defiance and fear. Her body shook with the cold. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You’ll freeze to death if you don’t get out.”
“I-I k-know.”
Meaghan, back to her familiar stubborn and irritable self, tried to haul her body from the pool, but the freezing temperature had already made her muscles stiff and her reactions slow. She hefted herself halfway and then slipped again.
Ignoring her feeble protest, Áedán gripped Meaghan by her arms and heaved her out of the freezing waters. Cursing beneath his breath, he looked at the pathetic and bedraggled female and again he felt that alien tug of compassion swiping the feet out from under him.
She didn’t want his help. He should leave her and call it a good riddance.
He hunkered down beside her, shrugging out of his coat and wrapping it around her as he began to rub her icy hands with his.
“How did you get here?” he asked as he worked.
“Wh-wh-whe,” she answered.
“Where? We are on the Isle of Fennore.”
At the panicked look in her eyes, he shook his head. “No, not Inis Brandubh.” Not the place where they’d met, where nightmares had been the only reality available. “I believe we have arrived in the year of nineteen hundred and fifty-six. I got here five days ago.”
She absorbed this in silence, still shaking from head to toes. “Oth-oth—”
“No, I haven’t seen any of the others.” He searched her face, looking for hints of what had happened since those last, terrifying moments when they were together. “What happened to you, Meaghan? Where have you been since—”
The sound of a rock scuttling into the cavern behind him drew his attention and silenced the rest of his question. He stood and faced the passageway just as Colleen Ballagh—Mickey’s young wife—stepped from the shadows into the cavern, a satchel in one hand, her baby in another.
She wore a shapeless brown dress with a black shawl over her shoulders and serviceable shoes on her feet. Her hair and clothing dripped wetly from the storm outside, which unleashed its fury in time with his own storming rage. She paused as she crossed the threshold to let her eyes adjust to the dark.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, too shocked by the sight of her to temper his tone or words.
With a baby in her arms at that?
Colleen ignored him as she peered through the gloom, anxiously hefting the baby up on her hip, making a soothing noise in her throat. Then her eyes fixed on Meaghan, and she let out a gasp.
“Jesus in heaven,” she exclaimed, staring at the shivering woman. “Were you in the water? But why? It’s nigh on winter, girl. You’ll freeze to death!”
As if the two of them couldn’t have discerned that without her help, Áedán thought. Not even a brash woman like Meaghan would have chosen to dip into the icy tide pool fully clothed.
“She slipped,” Áedán said. “We need to get her warm.”
Colleen didn’t even glance his way. Instead she gaped at Meaghan as if she’d never seen a wet female before. Granted, Meaghan was a sight. The jeans she wore clung to her legs, and the T-shirt had become a second skin, outlining something lacy over her breasts, communicating just how cold she really was, reminding him how hot she’d felt just moments before in his arms. That traitorous feeling inside him protested at the sight of her body wracked with cold, but he steeled himself against his own baffling reactions.
Bending—for Colleen’s benefit he told himself—he took Meaghan’s hands between his again and continued to rub. Meaghan’s breath plumed in front of her. Outside their shelter, thunder boomed ominously and all three of them startled. Colleen tucked the infant closer to her body, adjusting the blanket over his head to keep him warm.
What could have possessed her to come to this cavern in such a storm?
“What are you doing here, Mrs. Ballagh?” he asked again.
“Sure and didn’t she tell me I’d find you here and to bring clothes, but I didn’t know why, did I now?” Colleen said, still staring at Meaghan.
And with a trickle of unease, Áedán realized that she had yet to answer him. Was it deliberate? Was she angry about something? Colleen had never been anything but kind and thoughtful to Áedán since her husband had brought him to their door and commanded that she feed him.
“Who told you she’d be here?” Áedán asked. When Colleen still didn’t respond to his question, he glanced at Meaghan, glad to see that spark still glinting in her eyes and the vacant look gone. “What is she talking about?”
Teeth chattering, Meaghan shook her head.
“It’s the truth,” Colleen went on, as if Meaghan had denied her claim. “She telled me that I’m to go to the cavern this afternoon. ‘Bring clothes,’ she says. ‘They might be needed.’ She said I would find a girl and she might be as naked as Eve in the garden. Instead I find one near turned to ice, but I’ve no doubt it was you she meant.”
“Who?” Áedán barked again. “Who told you?”
He stood and stalked to Colleen’s side, feeling once again that dread coil tight and fear tripping over his skin. But with each step, a new kind of horror overtook him. Colleen’s gaze never flickered from Meaghan. Even the baby in her arms gazed right through him as he stopped in front of them both.
“I don’t suppose I even need to ask if your name would be Meaghan, do I?” Colleen went on, shaking her head even as she confirmed her suspicions. “What other young miss would be down here in the cold, shivering like an ice maiden?”
“Mrs. Ballagh,” Áedán said, reaching out to take her arms in his hands and shake her. He watched a shiver go through her body at his touch, but she didn’t look his way, didn’t acknowledge that he was there. Instead she moved forward toward Meaghan with an air of purpose.
“I don’t know how you got here, missy, or who you might be, but I’m here to help you. Let’s get you out of those wet clothes and into the dry ones I brought.”
And Áedán realized that his instinctive dread of this place had been well founded. He’d let his own vanity guide him, tell him that he was above such petty things as
fear.
He’d let this woman lure him into a trap.
After five days of taking meals across the table from Colleen, of working with her husband from dawn to dusk, of doing whatever menial task would help her, suddenly she couldn’t see him . . . Why? What had happened? What had changed?
Slowly, horrified, he turned his eyes to Meaghan.
Only one thing.
From the minute he’d understood that he’d returned to the real world, he’d scorned his return to humanity, his loss of power. But now he realized there was something worse than being human.
Colleen hadn’t answered him because she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see him. He’d been wrong to think he was once again a man. Now he was less than even that. It wasn’t this cavern that had caused his foreboding.
It was the woman.
Meaghan.
Whatever was happening now, he knew, somehow Meaghan was responsible.