“Yer query, Senna. Nay, this isn’t the way to Dublin.”
She stopped so short he walked up the back of her heels. “What?” she whisper-shouted, trying to turn around on the sinuous path. “You promised to take me to Dublin.”
“I ne’er promised such a thing, lass.”
She glared over her shoulder. His chest was barely inches from hers, and she contemplated elbowing him over the side of the ridge. “You did!”
“I did not. Becalm yerself,” he added quietly.
She glared. She was practically crackling with fury. She was also being quiet. Angrily quiet. Vehemently quiet.
“I will be calm when you—”
His hand snaked out and closed over her mouth, silencing her.
“Riders.” His gruff voice was a notch above silence.
And like that, Senna’s orientation shifted. No longer was she aware of her leaden, weary limbs, nor her desperate situation, nor the fear that had been marking its way up the back of her neck like the tip of a knife. She wasn’t even terribly aware of the riders on the highway, some forty feet below. She was aware, only, of him.
His fingers gently held over her lips. The touch of his wide wrist against the side of her neck. His thighs just behind hers, pressing heat onto the back of her legs.
She drew a steadying breath and inhaled the scent of him, the river and the wild, stones and pine.
“Fimiam?” she puffed against his hand.
“Can ye not hush for a single second?” he whispered back, but his words were made of breath, his jaw an outline of heat beside her ear. Her back and buttocks were warm from him. She could hear the men on the road far below, muffled voices and shuffling hooves.
Riders? What of it? What did this man taste like?
She trembled, from fear, surely, but more, from the power of this new, reckless desire. The root of her mother’s evil. Reined in for years, bound by books and ledgers, now being released? While she was on the run from a madman? The onrushing strength of it shocked her.
He must have felt her trembling. The hand covering her mouth slid to her cheek, and his thumb stroked gently by her jaw. His other hand skimmed up her back and rested warmly between her shoulder blades. She shivered, not whatsoever from fear.
“Nothing to fear, lass,” he murmured. “’Tis but a messenger and his man. They are not seeking us. All we have to do is let them pass.”
All I have to do is taste you.
Senna jerked at the thought. No, not a thought, an urge, rising out of something so deep inside her it pulsed with each heartbeat.
He put his mouth by her ear. “Easy, now, Senna.” His thumb stroked her jaw as if he were gentling a wild thing. His sculpted body was hot behind hers. “Be easy.”
“Stop touching me,” she pleaded in a whisper.
His thumb stopped moving. “What?”
“Kiss me.”
The rest of him went completely still.
Oh, please, Lord, deliver me from this. But it was too late. His body was too hot. She was too far beyond the Pale.
“What did ye say?” he asked in a low, masculine rumble.
Her heart started a strange thudding. Their voices were so quiet that the breeze blowing over them nearly drowned them out. Both were held paralyzed by the riders on the highway below. No one was going anywhere. In fact, it might all be over in a matter of minutes. And all she wanted was his touch.
If I am going to die, she suddenly decided, it will not be absent the touch of this Irishman.
She touched his hand and slid it across the mere inch back to her lips. Shutting her eyes, she trailed the tip of her tongue over his warm flesh.