The Irish Warrior
“That was close,” she whispered.
Finian held out his hand to help her rise. “Quite.”
He stood beneath, pushing her up over the side of the ditch. She finally curled her body over the lip. “Next time, all I ask is that I be on top.”
Finian, with one thigh thrown over the top, his arms flexed to support his weight, froze. An enormous grin spread over his features as he hauled himself up.
“As ye wish it, angel.”
Their hunched figures were but small, dark spots on the darker landscape as they crawled away from the castle. Finian led her to the edge of the road and they sped away into the night, disappearing into the vast Irish wildside.
Chapter 12
They halted briefly an hour later beside a wide, rushing stream, a tributary of a larger, more riotous river flowing some fifty steps away, behind a long, narrow copse of trees.
Finian knelt at the water’s edge and adjusted his tunic. His arms burned from the effort of lifting them overhead. By chance, his eye caught Senna. She was staring, her lips slightly parted.
“Ye might want to turn away, lass,” he suggested quietly.
She spun so quickly her braid lifted in the air, then thumped against her back. The curls poking out at the bottom bounced in small, ruddy ringlets at the dip of her spine. He looked at them a moment, then turned back to the river.
“I’ll need but a trice.”
“Take all the time you need. And I’ve seen men before,” she added sharply.
“Umm.”
He tore off his léine, the traditional knee-length tunic, and tossed it over the boulder beside him, then waded into the frigid stream. Kneeling, he gave his body a rough but thorough scrub with the small, sand-like pebbles that covered the riverbed, washing away the stink of the prisons. His skin rippled prickly-hot at the freezing temperatures, and he dunked his head under the water. Coming up again, he shook himself like a dog, spraying water droplets. With the palm of his hand, he flipped his hair off his forehead and turned.
A tunic and pair of leggings came sailing over and landed on his face. He dragged them off. Senna’s back was still conspicuously toward the river, as if she were aiming it at him. But her head was turned in his direction slightly, so that her chin sat on her shoulder.
“You’ll want something clean and English-looking to put on,” she mumbled.
“My thanks.”
“And in any event, I didn’t have one of”—her hand waved vaguely in the direction of his hips—“those.”
Even from this distance, even through the moonlight, he could see her cheeks flush pink. And he did not have to see anything at all to know this was due the fact she was not fully turned away. She’d been watching him.
He pulled the tunic over his head. Once his leggings were on and laced, she turned. Her gaze didn’t quite meet his.
“Are we quite ready?” she asked in an imperious voice.
“I am ever ready, Senna. Why don’t you take off yer skirts?”
Her jaw dropped. Everything about her shone in the moonlight. Her bright, wide eyes, her lower lip, now wet as her tongue slipped along its fullness. That long, chestnut brown braid, which trapped the wild, rampant curls.
“M—my gown?”
He stepped closer. “Ye have leggings on under? And a short tunic? Aye. Then, off with it.”
Her cheeks flushed so brightly he could see it through the moonlight, but she was already pulling it over her head, huffing something incomprehensible while under its folds. He took it and threw it away, next to his léine, halfway behind a large rock on the streambed. It looked as if the clothes had been hidden, but poorly.
Quickly he took a head-to-toe appraisal of her—it was impossible not to, with leggings that skimmed her thighs so snugly—then he turned away and shouldered his pack again. But in the time it took to make the visual sweep of her body, he heard a small, quick breath slip out from between her parted lips.
“Let’s go, then,” he said.
She spun on her heel, took her very pink cheeks, and stalked away down the path they’d been following for the past hour.