“Ást.” He repeated it carefully.
Her breath caught in her chest. “Love.Ást minmeansmy love.”
An endearment spoken in the heat of the moment, mayhap.
In keeping with the honesty that held them, as fundamental as the sense of belonging, he asked, “Am I yer love?”
“It seems so.” She stirred a little beneath him. “Does it not?”
“Aye.” He kissed her because he could do nothing else, and fell into her again. The one place he wanted to remain.
Struggling for words after the kiss ended, with a lingering tug of lips on lips, he said, “Ye do no’ feel like a stranger.”
“Nei.” She touched his cheek, and the tenderness of the gesture near undid him again. “Can you explain this?”
“I do no’ ken. But, Hulda, since we met I ha’ been having a wealth o’ dreams. Dreams in which I am with particular women. Women I adore. Only they are no’otherwomen. Somehow, they are allye.”
It should have made no sense to her. Indeed, she blinked up at him with those pale, luminous eyes.
“I too had this sensation when we were making love. With my eyes closed, I could not be certain who you were. Only, you wereyou. And you belonged to me.”
“A curious sort o’ thing,” he breathed. “And a powerful one.”
“Very powerful.”
His thoughts raced. “The ancients—my ancestors—believed we live not one life but many. They said we come into the world through the cauldron o’ rebirth. I ne’er gave much thought to it before—”
“One would not.” She blinked at him again. “Unless caught in such a situation as ours.”
“But ’tis madness.”
“As mad as us meeting out o’ a world of strangers and feeling”—she brushed her fingers across his cheek—“this?”
“I do no’ ken. I canna say.” In a way, it terrified him, that memories from a past he could not recall might come rushing at him. Overtake him in this way.
Yet there was the familiarity of it. The staggering rightness.
“My people,” she whispered, “we hope for a valiant life that we may enter Valhalla when we die, and remain ever young. Me—I can imagine hoping for no more thanthis.”
“Hulda.” He kissed her, and the rest of it, the questions and the wondering, ebbed away to the back of his mind.
She drew his hand to her breast. “I want you here, ja? And I want you inside me.”
And Quarrie, a man who attended always to his duty, surrendered the world and everything else in it.
*
It rained. Afury of the gods it was, perhaps sent by the great Thor himself to help conceal this haven in which Hulda and Quarrie lay. It rained while they ran their hands and their mouths over each other. While she memorized this body of his that, ja, housed a spirit all too wonderfully familiar.
It rained while he came inside her, and she lost count of how many times. While their cloaks dried because they lay so long. While he became so much a part of her, she could not conceive of parting from him.
Yet she must. That thought lingered at the back of her mind, that this time out of time must end. That she would have to surrender him from her arms and return to the world.
This that she felt for him, though—it was boundless, bottomless. Just like her desire.
What would her men say when she returned after so long away? Would they wonder what she had done alone with the Scotsman? Would they be able to tell?
“Quarrie.” She spoke his name just because she liked the feel of it on her tongue. “How long till morning?”
