Blood In Fire (Celtic Elementals Book 2) (9 page)

But Mac…

There was a man of a different caliber altogether. The god of the sea, master of horses and mist, Lugh’s own foster father. The only one of Danu’s offspring that knew more of magic than Bav did herself. Mac could change the weather with a sigh, bring down lightning with a curse, drown whole lands at will. He had ensconced himself to his isle eons ago, removing himself from the conspiracies and intrigues of court. Mac was the king of keeping himself to himself.

He had interfered once before in her schemes. Only once, but…

Bav had no wish to see him do so again.

She had been sure he hadn’t known about the spell, absolutely positive. Mac couldn’t be bothered to fuss about events in Eire itself, let alone anything further afield. He would likely have forgotten the child eons ago. There was no way he could have known…
no way.

Was it possible she had been wrong all this time?

Bav spun from the pool, her long fingers clenched in the wild spill of her vibrant red curls.

No, she
couldn’t
have misjudged this badly. Something else was afoot here, she turned back to the pool, her lips thinning.
Aine.
That little bitch couldn’t have…wouldn’t have
dared
….

Surely not. The dark-haired vixen was spunky, she’d give Aine that, but Aine was also clever. Much too clever to cross the Morrighan, with all the fallout that would entail.

Unless her current liaison with the king had made the moon goddess bold beyond all sense. But to what
end
—what possible use could it be to
Aine
to let Mac know the child lived again? Aine liked Aidan well enough, it was true, as did most of the Tuatha de Nanaan. But to risk her own skin for him—

No.

As sunbeams struck the fading tile beneath her feet, Bav siphoned the water back in its pouch with a fretful wave of her hand. Her last thought before she dematerialized into the rising of the sun in a flash of green light was that she would find out who was messing with her plans…and they would pay.

Dearly.

Bav was not the only one contemplating payment at that moment. Abhartach sat in the twisted chair in his castle and thought about blood due.

Long past due.

When he had accepted Bav’s terms so long ago, he had thought himself well served. His prize had been great, after all. Aidan. The pride of the O’Neills, indeed, of all Ulster. Given to him on a platter. A proper heir for his ‘family’ at last.

That his prize had been an unwilling one, he well knew—and had enjoyed the knowing. Savored it. Abhartach had looked forward to the breaking of his proud new pet, but there had been just one small difficulty. Aidan would not break. Except the once, that one brief, delicious week. It had been so sweet—

Then the cursed man found a way out of his trap.

And the one thing that would have ensured the bowing of that stiff neck again had been snatched away. Far out of Aidan’s reach, aye. But also out of Abhartach’s.

Forever.

The fae’s gnarled hands curled into the stone table, the thick nails gouging impossible grooves in the dull, grey granite. That piece of trickery still rankled, but there was naught to be gained looking at what might have been. There was only what could be done
now
.

For whatever reason, his heir had come home and Abhartach fully intended that Aidan would never, ever leave Ireland again.

No doubt, Aidan thought himself clever for escaping and that was good. Very good indeed. He knew well his heir’s strength of spirit. Abhartach had studied him for years after all. Watched him grow, waiting for the fruit to ripen like a juicy plum. Poised to catch it when at the perfect point of ripeness it fell right into his waiting hand.

Aidan was cocky to a fault, and deservedly so. His talents as a warrior and a leader had only drawn Abhartach’s attentions in tighter.

He'd had his eyes on the youth for far longer than that, though. Not to mention his fangs. Abhartach smiled at his private joke. Niall of the Nine Hostages and all his descendants had owed a blood debt to him for centuries. Aidan had only paid the final and sweetest price on what his ancestor had owed.

It was true Aidan could be cautious when need be, as befitted a man who had been a great warrior. Too cautious and tricky by half. He would have been expecting attack from the second his feet had touched Irish soil. Giving it to him would release some of that coiled tension, and conversely erode his caution, however infinitesimally. Abhartach had also been hoping to expose a weak spot and he believed he had succeeded.

The Fitzpatricks, of course, had always been out of bounds, at least for a direct onslaught. Ronan, particularly.

Abhartach had always known that, though it galled him. It would have been so easy to trap Aidan that way, particularly with one of the children. But you did not attack the beloved of the king of the Tuatha de Naanan and expect to get away with it. Look what had happened to that idiot Fomorian bastard, Aillen.

The only other weakness of Aidan’s was the one long since lost to time, more’s the pity. If he possessed
that
leverage again, Aidan would come to him on his knees…
begging.

Abhartach sighed.

Still…his bad, bad boy had not been alone when they had found him, had he? No, indeed. When the human Declan had told him of Aidan’s companion, he had suspected a dalliance, nothing more. His heir was a bit of a rouge in that respect.

However, in that room, Aidan had kept the woman behind him every second, he made pains to keep from exposing her to any more danger than necessary for even the breadth of a single heartbeat. But he had exposed
himself
quite nicely.

On top of all this wonderful news, there was the whole
ghrian siúlóir
issue. Could the myth be true? He wouldn't have believed it, but the slave swore he was telling the truth. He would test that soon and if it were true….

Anticipation had him throwing his head back.
To feel the sun upon his skin once more…!

Ah well, all in due time.

Abhartach smiled at the painting of his heir as he saluted him with a goblet brimming with the blood of the unfortunate Rathkeale bed and breakfast owner. Pieces of her body were scattered down the table in glistening hunks, along with bright streaks of blood and entrails that still steamed in the cold air of the dining hall. The hunting party had deserved
some
small treat for their efforts tonight. They had done well.

Abhartach drank deep as satisfaction filled him with a warmth greater than the fresh blood.

His foster son had a lovely weak spot alright…though he didn’t appear to realize it yet.

That, of course, just made it all the sweeter.

It wasn’t possible. Heather lay belly-down on the outside edge of Lacey and Ronan’s bed, her arm hanging off the mattress. Her fingers trailed lightly on the fur rug laid below her on the hardwood floor. Soft fur, thick and soothing against her fingers. She wondered idly what kind of animal it might have come from as her brain continued to whirl.

Back and forth, thoughts going round and round. If she closed her eyes she could see them; dark blue worries about Lacey and what she’d gotten herself into, magenta streaks of more worries over what Heather had gotten her
own
self into,  emerald coils of distress about what they were going to tell Kate, then the bright, startling flashes of silver and cobalt.

That was all Aidan, of course.

Vampire.
Psychic
fucking vampire
.

Lacey had explained that not only did Aidan have the preternatural strength and speed that always seemed to associated with vampires, he was also special in other ways. He'd been born with a low-level psychic gift as a human, one that he'd only ever thought of as a strong sense of empathy. When he'd been changed, that gift had changed as well, becoming more of a curse. He could feel intense emotions from the very air around him and actually touching someone had the power to cause him physical pain or mental anguish, depending on the state of the person's mind at the time.

He had removed his gloves more than a few times when they had been together in Istanbul. Heather wondered what he had felt from her during those unguarded moments and closed her eyes.

Her fingers tightened in the strange fur at her fingertips. Some of the guys Heather had been involved with in the past had been bad news, sure. The producer back in Minnesota with the wife she had found about too late. The Italian journalist, whom she hadn’t known was a journalist until
way
too late.

Heather gave a delicate shudder and curled her lip. But this…

Well, it was fucking crazy, that is what it was.

Somehow she really wasn’t as freaked out as she should be, though. Oh, sure she
was
freaked
.
There was no way not to be, at least a little. But she had accepted that freaky or not, Lacey wouldn't lie to her.

Lacey, whose gentle, familiar snores were echoing off the wall behind her, had had expected a bit more hysteria. Lacey knew Heather was not remotely a ‘take things at face value’ kind of woman. No doubt Lace had expected a hundred million probing questions. After all, Lacey had seen her interview dozens of people on their old show,
5 Minutes of Fame
. Her technique, along with Lacey’s producing skills, had propelled them to the heights of daytime TV. If only in the Twin Cities. And public TV, at that.

Heather smiled. They had both moved on to better things from there, hadn’t they?

And now definitely
weirder
things.

Lacey was going to marry a goddamn werewolf. Well, not that Ronan was technically a werewolf anymore, from what Heather understood—not that she understood half of it—and not that they were technically getting ‘married’ either. Handfasting. God, it was some kind of
pagan
ritual.

Heather thought that was the piece that freaked her out the most in all this mess.

Lacey had found her ‘someone’. That wasn’t supposed to happen yet. Lacey, sure, Lacey would get married someday, that was a given, somewhere far in the future.

A future that Heather had always pictured
herself
alone in—with a string of lovers trailing behind her like ribbons on a kite, sure—but no children. No husband. No in-laws, for fuck’s sake. She loved her own parents fiercely and saw them about twice a year. She loved Lacey better than anyone on earth and this was the first time they’d been face to face in what…? Nearly five months.

Well,
shit.

People who didn't know her from anything other than magazines, interviews and such, assumed she was warm and sweet. She wasn’t, not really. Heather just knew how to charm and draw people out. And she used that. Not mercenarily. At least not entirely. She didn’t want to talk about herself—she
never
ever wanted to talk about herself—so she’d learned how to make other people talk.

And talk and talk.

She liked listening to them because it kept her out of her own head for awhile. Kept her away from the drop offs. It was comforting, restfu
l
and damn useful.

In her whole life, she'd never
really
felt connected to any but those three; her parents and Lacey. And sometimes even with them…things got tenuous.

Heather sighed and turned her head. Lacey lay face up on a fat pillow. Her red-gold hair, that gorgeous color Heather had been insanely jealous of more than once, fluffed around her pixie face, the jewel bright eyes were closed. Her sweet, pink bud of a mouth was open slightly as she breathed, and snored.

Heather smiled and felt her heart lighten. Lacey refused to believe she snored, and honestly, it wasn’t ‘really’ snoring. Not the godawful bellowing that men were known for doing, anyway. Lacey's version was a light and rhythmic thrumming that was rather cute. Lacey wouldn’t want to hear ‘cute’ either. Lacey loathed that word, and Heather couldn’t blame her.

It hadn't been easy for Lacey to be her friend. Heather wasn’t stupid or self-absorbed enough to think looks were everything, but looks
were
what the vast majority of people focused on. By some genetic lottery, her looks were the sort most people went gaga over. Lacey was smart and insanely organized, even though it may not always seem like it, not to mention beautiful in her own right. But next to Heather, she had always been the ‘cute’ one.

Most women got damn tired of that shit, damn fast.

Thank god for her, Lacey wasn’t most people. Heather didn’t know what hell she would do without her Lacey and she didn’t want to know. Tears pricked her eyes and she flopped over, her back to Lacey’s, her stinging eyes focused on the glow of the fire. Why the fuck had Lacey had to come to Ireland anyway? And fallen in fucking love?

And how the hell had Heather managed to meet Aidan and hook up with him?

A goddamn vampire.

Jesus! She had sensed he was dangerous. Well, more than sensed it, she’d
seen
it. Heather swallowed. It had been the second night she was with him. After both of them had passed out in her hotel bed and not moved again until well after sundown.

When she had woken up, it had been to Aidan between her legs, his mouth on her. Bringing her so high so fast...Heather only had to close her eyes to feel the dizziness she had felt then and the feel of his hard, muscled shoulders under her thighs...

She came arching against his tongue before she was really awake. Then he used his fingers to make her come again. Then his fingers and tongue together. Over and over until it seemed like she’d been in that room, in that bed forever. Being plunged into one orgasm after another, wave after wave of pleasure tumbling her in delicious riptide she couldn’t break free of.

Heather couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t move except to buckle and shake and scream under his hands.

Aidan was unstoppable. She was absolutely limp before he moved over her. That lithe, powerful body hovering above her trembling one. The mere touch of his breath against her skin made her whimper.

She was too weak to even lift her hands until he slid inside of her in one quick, hard thrust that slammed the headboard against the wall.

The sound of the brass frame against paneling sang through the room like the clang of a bell while the force of Aidan’s invasion ripped through Heather’s hypersensitive body. Her back bowed off the bed and her mouth opened to scream again, but she couldn’t make a sound. She could only feel.

Him. Deep inside of her. Thick and demanding and hot. Her hands slapped against his chest, found the smooth, bunched hardness of his shoulders and held on as he rode her until she came again. Her inner muscles clamped down on him so viciously she had the satisfaction of seeing his beautiful eyes roll back in his head before his cry joined her silent one.

Heather lay there after, slick with sweat, unable do more than breath, each pulse of him inside her like an exquisite, electrical shock. This man made her do things, feel things that she hadn’t even dreamed were possible. She liked to think she knew what good sex was, but Aidan O’Neill increasingly made what she once thought of as 'good' seem rather pathetic.

The night before he had reveled in holding her on the edge for hours, not letting her go over but bringing her again and again to within a hair’s breadth of orgasm over and over. She had screamed until her throat was raw, then begged in a whisper. She had done everything he wanted and more.

Just as he had said she would.

Her release then had been crushing, but this…

Heather jumped like a scalded cat when she felt his finger run down her arm. His chuckle made her shiver, goose bumps breaking out in a thousand different places, all of them sore.

“Ready for more?”

She gasped. “You can’t be serious.”

He moved experimentally and Heather’s breath hissed out in a near scream.

“You’ll kill us both!”

“Hmmm, death by orgasm, no' a bad way to go, love. But I think we are in need of a break.” He cocked his head, watching her face as he slowly pulled out of her. Heather’s fingers dug into the sheets at the sensation, trying to hold on as it felt like she could simply fall off the edge of the worl
d,
and keep falling until she floated away into nothing.

She focused on Aidan’s eyes and the falling feeling gradually settled into something warm and heavy deep inside her. Centering her.

Heather took a breath and was proud when she got the words out without her voice shaking…much.

“What kind of a break did you have in mind?”

His mind had showers first in line, separate ones, blessedly. If the man had tried touching her again so soon, Heather felt like her mind would shatter.

She also knew with a bone deep certainty she wouldn’t have been able to resist him had he tried.

Thankfully, Aidan didn’t put her theory to the test. They dressed. Aidan making a call that had a bag delivered to her door within fifteen minutes, from which he pulled a rich, blue Henley he shrugged into negligently. Until he caught her look.

“What?”

“It’s just…” Heather waved a hand at the rest of his clothes helplessly, feeling silly. He had been so unrelenting clad in black the night before, and it had suited him, down to the ground.

He laughed, catching her unarticulated question easily.

“Oh, I like the dark well enough, but once in a while a change is in order.” The easy words seemed to have a hidden meaning, but she couldn’t decipher it. Looking at him was too damn distracting.

If Aidan was tantalizing in black, the deep blue made him devastating. His crystal eyes caught the color, blazing in his angular face, set against those dark gold curls that were still damp and coiled tightly from his shower.

“What?” He said again, more exasperatedly this time. Heather just shook her head and slipped into her own clothes.

This one, she thought, didn’t need any compliments. He’d eat them—and her—right up if she even tried.

It was Istanbul, so Heather choose her clothes with care, not sure where Aidan intended to take her and not wanting to ask. He was all about uncharted territory and she didn’t want to spoil the spell. She finally settled on a silky green dress that fell from her shoulders like a waterfall, clinging to all the good parts, but holding on to demure….if only barely.

Heather twisted her mass of inky hair up off her shoulders and pinned it into a loose chignon, letting silky tendrils escape here and there. She slipped on a pair of sandals and a long, shimmering pair of silver earrings. Aidan didn’t comment on her appearance either, but there was an appreciative gleam in his eyes that pleased her more than words could have.

The night was dazzling, a deep and gauzy purple sparkling with faint stars, that stretched over the golden city. Before long, she realized they were heading for the old market. The perpetual haze that crept along the river during the day was fading in the cool night air and the branches of the linden trees swayed. The leaves seemed to whisper to each other as she and Aidan passed under them.

It should have been romantic, but the Grand Bazaar at night was a little creepy. The ancient stone arched ahead of them and there didn’t seem to be a soul in sight. Heather could catch the faint smells that would have been overwhelming here a few hours ago; spices, perfume, the heavy scent of ripe fruit and the fading musk of hundreds of bodies ripe with the sun’s heat. The slap of her sandals against the stone echoed against the old walls that had seen so much.

Then another sound slipped under that, soft and stealthy behind them.

The muscles of Aidan's arm didn’t so much tense under her hand as hum, like a lightly plucked sitar string. He turned, his fingers casually flicking hers from him. Instinctively, Heather took a step away, giving him room as she saw what had closed in behind them.