They kissed. It might have been for hours; she could not tell. Better than breathing, it was. Something they had done a thousand times, yet never, never before. She could feel the hot weight of him nestled and pressing between her thighs.
She scarce knew herself, who she was, where she was. When she ceased kissing him, it was only to say, “Now. Please.”
Aye, surely this had happened before. Her demanding him this way. Begging to have him inside her. It was wild and desperate, the need to have him inside her. To hold him.
“Now, lass? But—”
“Only the first o’ times,” she said against his lips. “We ha’ all night.”
He plunged into her, and it was as if her entire world fell into place. As if all the pieces of who she was formed a pattern always meant to be. He began to move in a rhythm as ancient as his songs, too beautiful almost to bear.
Joined at the mouth and below, they rocked and rocked until she could not remember that anything but this existed. Him, a part of her. Her, part of him.
When he would have withdrawn, she locked her heels at his back and he came inside her, both of them climaxing in a storm too powerful to be denied.
“Lass,” he breathed into her ear. “Alanna.”
“Call me that again.”
“Alanna. Darling.”
She drew his face up from where it burrowed in her neck and gazed into his eyes. Green eyes, deep as eternity.
“List to me, Finlay. This time together we have for certain. Aught ye want o’ me. Understand? There is nothing I will withhold.”
“Nor I.”
When she left here, her beloved home, when she lefthim, she wanted to carry at least a part of him with her.
If only she could make time cease to pass upon this night.
They did their best. In truth, the hours they spent together did make time stand still, rendered it at once eternal and immediate. Long before dawn, Katrin knew it would not be enough. Forever with this man might not be enough. Had she given her heart to the harper?
Nay, not her heart so much as her soul. If it had ever been hers to give…
They lay quiet for a while. They spoke in intimate whispers of the pleasure they shared. They made love again with tender eagerness. Katrin slept, slept and dreamed.
It seemed she was back in one of Finlay’s tales, the first that he had told. Aye, and she had shared in the story as he told it, but now she found herself there in truth, her feet upon the green turf of Erin. She stood on a hillside, the sun moving through the sky to set, and a soft wind bringing the far scents of thyme and heather. Should she be able to sense so much of a dream?
She walked down the hillside into a settlement made of roundhouses with a larger structure at its center. Her heart lifted and sped as she went. He would be there. Her mother was away helping with a birthing, and he would be there alone.
Stolen time they might have together, before the wheel turned and perhaps parted them.
She entered a tiny roundhouse, one that looked no different from the others, though she knew it for home. The scent of it, the fire burning low in thecenter of the floor. The sleeping benches beyond.
He was there, back from his practicing at arms, and turned to regard her when she went in. Tall he was, with broad shoulders and a graceful, limber frame. Not the harper. And yet, and yet…
Helpless against what she felt for him, she went forward. They linked hands. His eyes, bright hazel, met hers and asked a question.
“Come,” she whispered.
Was there aught more to be wanted or had in the world than the feel of his arms around her? Ah, but how had she ended up in Finlay’s tale? Was this real, or imagining? Filled with him, filled with his love, she lay curled in his arms on the sleeping bench, and wondered. She could feel the stars moving overhead, way up above the roof of the roundhouse, and even those stars slowed in their courses to afford them this time. It was not enough. By heaven, it would never be enough.
Katrin awoke in her own chamber, in Finlay’s arms, knowing one night would not be enough. Perhaps not many nights, or many lifetimes.
She lay listening to him breathe, a sound she seemed to know deep within, like the coming and going of waves on the shore. Their night must have passed. Light filtered in through the window and she could hear that activity began outside the walls, and down in the house. A pit of dread opened in her stomach. She did not want morning to come.
Finlay lay sprawled beside her, his lips still at her cheek. She wondered, with the coming of the day, what would happen between them, even as she stroked her fingers through his red hair. What could happen between them? In a mere matter of days, she must go, and he stay.
