Aye, so she was frightened. At being left once more with no one to care for her, her young sister, and her ailing mother.
But her arms, clutching him so hard, argued there might be something else behind it.
Their relationship had changed since the long night she’d sat and held his hand beside the door. Since she’d decided to help him discover the truth.
“Here now,” he crooned to her, speaking the words soft into her mane of golden hair. “I will return.”
“That is no’ certain. A big battle, this will be.”
A series of them, no doubt.
“Much hard fighting. And ye are no’ yet fully recovered.”
“I am as recovered as I need be.”
“What if Chief Brihan joins his forces with Dacha?”
Aye, what if?
“Ye will be facing twice as many men. And I will not know—all that while, I will not know.”
Aye, an agony. If she cared.
He said the only thing he could. “I will come back.”
“How can ye say—”
“Liadan, I will come back. To ye.”
She raised her head at that and looked into his face. Her eyes swam in tears, luminous with her emotions and what lay in her heart. Fear. Hope. Unmistakable desire.
Ah, by all the gods! Despite his wild attraction to her, he’d dared hope for no more than forgiveness and perhaps friendship. Indeed, a tentative friendship had grown between them. Was there more?
“Do no’ fret for me, lass.”
“I canna help it. I—”
“I will return to ye.” He said it for the third time, a charm. “So I do promise.”
She did not say what an impossible promise it was to keep. That in the heat of battle—battle after battle—a man could not dodge every sword and every blow. That death would surround him. That he might well end sprawled on his back in the green turf, staring at a sky as blue as the one that now arched over them.
The promise was what she needed to hear, impossible or not.
Her lips parted with words she did not speak, and she trembled in his arms.
He kissed her, because he could do nothing else.
Ever since he’d moved into her house, since he’d seen her anew, the desire had simmered inside him. As he claimed her parted lips there alone in the grove, tasted of her for the firsttime, it roused into flame. What began as an attempt to comfort became a rush of pure want.
Strong and bright and victorious, with a life of its own.
A sob sounded in her throat as she wound her arms around his neck, fingers digging into his hair. He made a corresponding sound—inquiry and demand—and she opened for him, allowing him in. Tongue finding tongue. Reaching, reaching—heart finding heart.
He strained her to him, and she clung, she clung, trembling with need equal to his own. From two separate beings, they became one.
How long that kiss lasted, Ardahl would never know. He forgot to breathe. Forgot the tribe and the world around it. Forgot anything existed, save this.
“Ardahl. Ardahl.” They must have stopped kissing, because she spoke his name. In a broken way, she did. She wept, the tears running down her face. “I canna bear it if ye do no’ return to me.”
