Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(45)
Then she fell into Lachlan.
She plunged through his thoughts, feelings, dreams, and memories, a torrent of impressions that passed her like a blur. She had expected to hit the usual resistance when she looked into his eyes, and instead she’d hurled herself face-first through an open door.
As if from a distance she heard him speak her name. That sound helped her focus and eased the headlong fall. His midnight-blue eyes filled her vision as she tried to slow her streak through his mind. She dug her fingers into his scalp. Bit by bit the landscape of his thoughts slowed.
She struggled to make sense of it all.
She struggled to take in the wonder of it all.
Lachlan’s mindscape was a world without edges, a vast unfurling panorama of memories and dreams and ideas that stretched to an unseen horizon. For a brief moment she swept through a memory of a sun-drenched room where a younger version of Lachlan bent over a parchment, quill in hand, tracing a line of ink against a sharp plane of wood to meet with other lines. Her nose filled with the musty scent of books and goatskin bindings. Then, as if she were no more than a leaf in the wind, she propelled away from that memory into a landscape of a bright, endless city. She chased his attention from stone arches and flying buttresses, to the ribbing of vaulted domes, to the lines of cracks above colonnades. She flew through memories of workmen with wheelbarrows, chipping slate or weighing stones. She tried to absorb all the images of ropes and buckets and men turning wheeled gears to shift materials to the highest reaches of shaking scaffolding, all under a rain of dust.
Then that rain of dust formed into numbers and symbols that reminded her of the odd lettering on some of Da’s books. Those numbers and letters and symbols swirled to form calculations that just as quickly exploded and reformed. A hail of other imagery fell, of bricks and forges, of planed wood and stone, of stirred mortar and iron spikes, of levers and shims. Constructs of his imagination shimmered by her like lightning. She saw enormous stones transported across a bed of rolling tree trunks, water works and sluices, wooden pathways through bogs, ditches and canals for draining and making new land.
If she’d tumbled into Tír na nóg, the silvery Otherworld found under the burial mounds of Ireland, she would have been less flummoxed by the land of the ancient gods with its promise of magical horses, green plains, and endless youth than she was by all of the fantasy machines rampant in Lachlan’s mind. Never had she brushed into a mind so free yet so bound to the earth, the stones, the trees, and the incredible configurations that he could craft of them.
An ache pounded beneath her eyes and queasiness seized her, like what happened when she stood too close to the dolmen stones on the height of Inishmaan. She forced her eyes closed, the better to detach herself. Though she’d plunged deep inside the man, she suspected that there were places she’d not yet glimpsed, enough hidden rooms for her to explore for a lifetime. As she’d known from the first time he’d opened his eyes on the strand of Inishmaan, he was different from other men. Today, she understood exactly how different, how wonderful, how complicated.
She let her hands slip off his scalp. She heard him suck in a breath, as if he’d felt something as she’d pulled away. When she finally could master speech again, she would ask him if he’d felt as immersed as she had. Right now, it took all her concentration to settle herself into her own body. She paid mind to the weight of him atop her. She felt the intimacy of him still pressed snug against her loins, where warmth and wetness remained. A fresh tingling awoke in her, the start of new desire.
She dared to blink her eyes open once again. His head hung between his shoulders above her. She stretched up to plant a kiss upon his chest, but he was already rising off his elbows. His member slipped out of her, leaving a hollow ache behind. The cold air chilled the moisture between her thighs as he rolled onto his back. She found herself bereft, blinking up at an oculus of gray sky, rimmed by treetops.
The word oculus echoed in her head, and two things struck her at once.
First, that an oculus was a round opening in a building, like a window, or an eyelike design. It was not a word she knew. Somehow, Lachlan had put it in her head.
Second, they had just made love on a lush patch of grass within a perfect circle of oak trees. Her mother called such places fairy rings, powerful cathedrals of the Sídh, a place fitting for the sacred.
So lass,” Lachlan said, interrupting her thoughts with a voice that sounded strange. “Now you’ve truly had your way with me.”
She turned her head against the soft grass, watching the way his throat moved. The expression of his profile confused her. His eyes were restlessly seeking something in the high boughs of the trees. His hands lay flat on his abdomen as if he were a man gut-slain, holding fast to his spilling innards.
Confusion seeped through her. He must know that he’d pleased her beyond measure. Surely he could feel how her body thrummed with satisfaction, and not just from the lovemaking.
But of course, she thought. It was the other thing that had unnerved him.
She rolled on her side and pressed her body against his, breast to knee, the best way she could think of to express how much he’d pleased her. “Did you feel it,” she asked, “when our minds became one?”
A jolt shot through him, and instantly she realized her mistake. Her father and brother had always barked in anger when they suspected she was reading their thoughts. How much worse it must be for Lachlan, new to the experience, to be told so boldly that she’d been rooting around in all things private.