“It is too good,” she whispered.
“I know,” he rasped, and sucked her bottom lip into his mouth.
Tremors of pleasure grew and grew like a wave through her body until, with a crash, it fell. Smashing, rolling towers of shuddering pleasure tumbled through her.
Tadhg locked his mouth on hers as she quaked in rhythmic pulses, but still he did not stop, instead drove her onward more, until she cried from the tortured pleasure of it, surging into her again and again until, with a hoarse curse, he cupped the back of her head and held her mouth to his as he reached his completion, spilling himself inside her in hot pulses.
It seemed as though they clung to one another for hours afterward, sweaty and rampaged and stunned, incapable of doing more than breathing hard and resting their mouths against each other’s in a long, endless kiss.
Finally, though, he shifted. She felt it as if in a dream, him sliding out of her, wiping himself clean, then her, then taking her back on his lap, her skirts properly down around her ankles now, wordless through it all.
Then he held her, for how long she did not know. It could wait, everything could wait. The world, the worry, the problems, the unanswerable questions, everything could wait. She felt limpid, crystalline, transparent and lit up, as if she was a glass vessel filled with sparks, alive for the first time in too many years to count.
So all the rest could wait, for soon he would be gone, this criminal, and her world would return to the ashen reality where no one called her anything but Mistress Thread, proper merchant who paid all
her bills and extortions on time.
Church bells finally drove her from his arms.
If Tadhg had any chance at all, it was now. Now or never. And, shameful as it was, she did not think she could go on if it was a ‘never.’ If he was captured, her heart might break. If he was captured, he would be tortured, and—
She pushed off his lap shakily. “You must go. Now, before the gates open. Here.” She started to turn to get the coin he’d given her at the quay. “Take this, for Gustave.”
“Again with Gustave,” he muttered, getting to his feet.
“Go, now.”
He reached for his sword belt. “Not without you.”
Chapter Twelve
MAGDALENA LAUGHED. “Not without—? Are you asking me to come with you?”
“Aye, come with me,” he said, as casually as if he’d suggested they play a game of chess. As if, somewhere on him, invisible right now, he didn’t hold contraband that powerful forces were hunting for some dark purpose.
As if he weren’t shepherding it to some even darker purpose.
Come with me.
Her heart thrilled, became buoyant.
She dragged it back down. Come with him, indeed.
She frowned. “No.”
“Why not?”
She laughed again, with affection this time. His outrageousness was quite…outrageous. “Why not? I thank you, sir, but I choose not to be on the run with an outlaw.”
“I’m not an outlaw in France.” He paused. “Yet.”
“Indeed. Well, I have quite a nice life here—”
He was standing, covered in blades and mystery, his dark head bent as he buckled his sword on. At this, though, he looked up, dark hair spilling forward beside his face. “Do you?”
She flushed.
Pressing his point, he stepped forward, touched the curve of her hips. “Come with me,” he said, his voice a low coax.