Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(46)

“I felt a lot of things,” he said, still blinking straight up at the sky. “After watching you come, my mind wasn’t my own for a long time.”

A tingling heat swept up her cheeks.

“If it happens only then,” he added, “I’d be glad of it. You were all I was thinking of, in that moment.”

She’d seen a lot more than his desire for her, and she sensed that realization was the root of his wary, uneasy behavior. She supposed she could play the part of an innocent and pretend that his blind lust was all she’d perceived, but her heart balked at the deception. She hadn’t left her home and followed Lachlan into the world only to pretend—as she did with every other outsider—that she didn’t have a gift.

“It’s true,” she began, “that I felt a communion with you while we were…in the middle of things.” Why were there no good, loving words to describe what they just did, that breathless merging of their bodies? “But after, when we were both…finished, I could read you as if there had never been a wall between us.”

“Even now?”

She sent tentacles of thought toward him with care, not wanting to tumble head over foot again. “You’re blocked to me now.” He let out such a long, deep breath that she wondered how long he’d been holding it. “It’s a pity, Lachlan, because even a glimpse into your mind revealed so much good.”

He stilled to stone. Undaunted, she ran her hand over his forearm, up past his wrist, to cover his hand with her own. He didn’t raise it from his abdomen or make any attempt to grasp it. She twisted her palm so that her fingers lay between his.

“Listen to me,” she whispered against his shoulder. “Back on Inishmaan, when I thought about what might be hiding behind the black haze of your mind, I could only guess that you would be like other men, to some degree.”

“So I’m to be judged against such a measure.”

“There’s no judgement in it. I’ve been seeing into men’s thoughts since my thirteenth summer. I know the lusts that drive them, the overriding sense that their members are a grand thing of great wonder to be worshipped—”

“Are they not?”

“Perhaps some are.” She smiled at his unsteady stab at humor. “The irony is that most women yearn for a big heart more than a big…cock.”

He remained as motionless as the church statues she’d seen as a child in the cathedral in Galway.

“It is the way men and women are made,” she continued. “I accept that. And since you’re the heir to a chieftaincy, I could only expect from what I’ve seen in the other noblemen that you would have lofty aspirations, bloodlust, even a craving for a crown of antlers upon your head. But Lachlan—” she squeezed his hand “—what I saw defied everything I expected.”

His fingers twitched under her grip. Against her lips she felt the slightest softening in his body, a statue shifting into life.

“It was but a glimpse,” she hedged, “but I saw you as a boy in your uncle’s house in Rome. Your hair was long and coming out of the rawhide tie at your neck. You sat upon two books to reach the desk. Around you were parchments held open with broken pieces of veined marble, and you were drawing lines on a slate. You were sketching an arch of some sort—”

“A bridge,” he interrupted. “My uncle had tasked me to measure the forces, to craft the size of each arch.”

“Yes.” She squeezed his hand again, and this time his palm lifted from his abdomen. “I saw that. It was a lovely memory, but an unusual one to rise to the front of your thoughts in that moment after we finished…loving.”

His brows drew together. “That time in Rome,” he said. “That was the moment I knew—”

He swallowed his words. She wished she could slip into his mind and see the battle raging inside. But even as the thought passed through her mind, she had a sudden insight into what he meant to say.

“It was the moment you knew what you most desired,” she said, a flush rising within her at the implications. “It was the moment you found true happiness.”

He turned his head toward her. She met his midnight-blue eyes and the soft expression within them. Suddenly, she didn’t mind that she couldn’t see his thoughts, for there was something wondrous in this thrumming sense of intimacy that had nothing to do with the certainty that could come with her gift.

“You felt something, didn’t you?” she whispered. “When my mind sank into yours?”

“Yes.”

A spiral of excitement rose up in her. She’d never had anyone to talk to about her gift. Even her brother, to whom she was closest, shut right up when she asked him too many questions.

She said, “Tell me what it felt like.”

“Lass,” he said on a hitching breath, “it’s not as easy as that.”

“Please, Lachlan. I need to know.”

He rolled to his side to face her. He ran a hand over the curve of her hip, up and down, sending shivers of sensation across her skin.

He said, “I need you to tell me something first.”

“Anything.”

“I want you to describe what it felt like when I put myself inside you.”

She flushed. “Lachlan—”