All the things Katrin felt.
It must be some mysterious magic, for Finlay did know these things. He but rarely spoke of it. He asked her few personal questions, merely answered those she asked with brief yet boundless courtesy.
One afternoon they moved out to the grove of rowan trees that grew at some distance from the keep. A glorious afternoon it was, with a limitless sky of deep blue above and a light breeze that brought to them the scents of the hills. Too lovely, as Finlay had commented, to stay indoors.
Katrin could hear the sea from down at the shore. She could also, distantly, hear the Gallowglass at practice. A strangely divergent combination.
Something about it made her restless. Or perhaps it was Finlay’s calm that did. Like a small child seeking attention, she wanted a reaction from him. At last she put aside his harp—with great care, for she never treated it any other way—and got to her feet.
“Are we finished, mistress?” He had grown used to her moods, as she had to his. Not that he had moods, as such. The man merely flickered quietly.
“Nay,” she said. If he thought they had finished, he would leave. She was not ready to part with him. “I am merely feeling unsettled. Ye must play for me. Please.”
She knew no greater pleasure than listening to him. She wondered if kissing him would be a still greater pleasure.
“The point o’ us meeting is for ye to practice,” he told her. “Yemay hear me play anytime.” He slanted her a gleaming look. “Through the wall, of a night.”
Aye, he continued to do that for her, oft times. A kind of lullaby it was, and good of him.
She said, “I can ne’er get enough.”
Their eyes met and held. The breath hitched in Katrin’s throat.
He smiled. “Ye flatter me, mistress.”
“Call me Katrin, for God’s sake.”
“Katrin.”
“And nay of flattery. Ye maun ken ye be a magician with Brada in your hands. Is it too much for me to ask that ye might play for me?”
“Naught ye might ask would be too much.”
Then lie with me. Let us strip off our clothing here in the warm sun beneath the rowan branches and touch one another skin to skin, so I might memorize the feel o’ ye, and we might forever become one.
She did not say that. Instead she kept her wanton thoughts in her head and stretched out in the fragrant grass to watch him while he played.
His fingers wove enchantment upon the strings. What, she wondered, if he wrought a new song, only their own?
Breath caught, she listened. She admired.
Whereas she might be unable to do aught but watch when beads of sweat gathered upon Reagan’s brow as they worked together, and ran sliding down over the muscles of his broad chest, she now marked the many colors the sun found in the harper’s hair. Not just rich red but threads of gold also, and copper, and brown. The way the tiny hairs grew along his jaw. He did have a fine jaw, the harper. And the glint of hair at the open throat of his tunic.
How would he look naked? No warrior, the harper, but not a soft man either. She’d learned that much when he sat behind her and reached around to direct her fingers on Brada’s strings. He had tramped all over the Highlands, and other lands, in all weather.
She could almost see him stripped of his clothing. She could almost taste him.
Those fingers that moved so deftly over the strings, how would they feel upon her body?
She wanted to give herself to him as she never had to any man. She saw herself rising, going to him, taking the harp from his hands and kissing him so she’d know how he tasted. So he’d know how she felt.
She did not, merely lay there listening, her mind and body alive with desire.
He finished the song he was playing and let his fingers rest on his knee, asked softly, “Ye remember that tune?”
To be sure, she did, and he knew it, for had she not mentioned it to him before? It was the tune the old harper, Coll, had played while Darlei and Deathan made love for what they’d believed would be the last time, in the alcove behind the great hall. Desperate and unendingly devoted love.
“I do. Do ye, Finlay, believe in the wheel o’ destiny that ye describe in your tales? That we are caught upon it and return to this lifetime after time to mayhap find one another?”
