Beyond the Highland Mist

Page 85

“Just touch me.” She wrinkled her brow. “Don’t ask me so many questions about it!”
He rumbled with soft laughter and promise of infinite passion. “Oh, I’ll touch you, lass.”
“Too deep. You’re in too far.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’ve given it thought, fool. We must end this. Queen Aoibheal is on to us. Even your time by her side has not allayed her suspicions. I, for one, do not wish to suffer the consequences of her wrath. The woman is simply going to have to return to her time.”
King Finnbheara waved his hand.
And the Hawk collapsed onto the bed. Stunned, he looked around the empty room.
Adrienne fell to the floor of her modern kitchen with a thud.
“Did you see what I saw?” King Finnbheara gasped.
Adam was stunned. “She was nude. He was panting. She was—oh shit!”
The King nodded emphatically as they both gestured. “She stays.”
It was one of the golden rules. Some things could never be interrupted.
“You really are from the future, aren’t you?” Hawk whispered hoarsely, when Adrienne reappeared scant moments later, a few feet away from him on the bed. While Adrienne had been drinking in his study, Lydia had told him of the disappearance in the garden. The Hawk had tried to convince himself that Lydia was mistaken, but his guards had confirmed that they’d watched his wife disappear and reappear several times in quick succession.
So, she could still return to her own time, even without the chess piece. The black queen is not what she seems. The seer had spoken true.
Adrienne nodded, still dazed by her abrupt transfer through time. “And I can’t control it! I don’t know when it’s going to happen again!” Her fingers flexed convulsively on the woolen coverlet as if a tight grip might prevent her from being taken again.
“By the saints,” he breathed slowly. “The future. Another time. A time which hasn’t happened yet.”
They stared at each other, dumbstruck, for a prolonged moment. His raven eyes were deep with shadows, the beautiful golden flecks extinguished completely.
Suddenly Adrienne realized all too clearly that she never wanted to go back to the twentieth century. She didn’t want to be without him for the rest of her life! Desperation curled cold fingers around her heart.
It was already too late. How she loved him! The abruptness with which she had been reminded that she had no control over how much longer she could stay; the knowledge that she might be shuttled back, never to return; the fact that she had no idea how, or if, she could come again by herself terrified her.
To be consigned, no, condemned, back to that cold and empty twentieth-century world, knowing that the man she would love for eternity had died almost five hundred years before she’d even been born, oh dear God, anything but that.
Awestruck by her realizations, she gazed at him, her lips parted, openly vulnerable.
Hawk sensed the change in her; some kind of wordless admission had just occurred in that part of Adrienne he’d been trying to reach for so long. She was gazing at him with the same unfettered expression he’d seen that night on the cliffs of Dalkeith when she’d wished on a star.
It was all Hawk needed to see. He was on her in an instant. His awareness that she could be ripped from him at any moment made time infinitely precious. The present was all they had, and there were no guarantees for tomorrow.
He claimed her body, raining down upon her a storm of unleashed passion. He kissed and tasted, desperate with fear that any instant her lips might be torn from his. Adrienne kissed him back with complete abandon. Heat flared between them as it should have, as it would have from the very beginning had she permitted herself to dare to believe such passion, such love was possible.
Falling back on the bed, she melted beneath him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his hungry head closer.
“Love me … oh, love me,” she whispered.
“Always,” he promised into her wide-open eyes. He cupped her breasts and lavished them with kisses, savoring how wildly she responded to him. This time was different. She was really seeing him, Sidheach, not some other man she’d had before, and hope exploded in his heart. Was she coming to crave him as he did her? Could it be his wife was developing a hunger for him that matched his own appetite?
“Oh, please …” Her head arched back against the pillows. “Please …” she breathed.
“Do you want me, Adrienne?”
“Yes. With every ounce of my body …” and soul she was going to add, but he claimed her mouth with deep, hot kisses.