Insolent: The Moray Druids #1 (Highland Historical) (6 page)

Resolved, she placed a kiss on his neck, nibbled at his ear, and smoothed the wet hair down his back. She didn’t care how long it took to fill his empty heart; she’d show him the meaning of life.

Even if it took a lifetime.

***

It was always such a concentrated effort for Bael to beat the beast back into remission. He knew Berserkers who returned to themselves the moment blood was washed away from their vision. Others could sometimes control it in the heat of battle.

Not him, though. Once his Berserker beast took over, the damnable creature wrung every last moment of violent freedom before Bael could wrestle him back into his cage of rib and flesh.

Reason and consciousness turned the Berserker’s growl of pleasure at the tiny nip on his earlobe to Bael’s growl of fury. He awoke, for lack of a better word,
inside
the tight flesh of a woman.

His woman.

“Nie!”
Chest burning with betrayal, he jerked out of and away from her. The water resisted his movement as he threw her as far from him as he could, ignoring her shocked little squeak.

Turning from her, he hid the shudder that resounded through his bones. Little aftershocks of a release so intense his body still sang with bliss. Bael tried not to think of how warm it had been inside of her. How soft and wet and inviting.

A furious sound exploded from his chest, and he stormed through the water toward the shore trying to wipe the intoxicating taste of her from his mouth.

“Stop. Wait!”

He ignored her breathy, desperate orders, closing his heart.

The mud grabbed his foot. No, not mud, too chilly for that.

Ice.
It crawled up his calves, imprisoning them to the bottom of the loch. With a surge of strength, Bael broke through one of the ice bindings, gaining a step. But the other one thickened with alarming speed, and held him to the ground as the free foot again became entrenched within a block of solid water. Bael struggled as it crawled up his thighs, and encased his hips, blessedly leaving his manhood unfrozen.

The loch carried his mate to him, without her making one move to swim.

“Release me, witch!” he snarled, doing his level best not to look at the pink blotches of skin where his beard had abraded her cheek. Her neck. Even her lips were swollen. Bael slammed his eyes shut, willing the twitching heat in his cock to abate.

A hand caressed his cheek. He couldn’t be more startled if she’d decapitated him with his own axe.

He still refused to look at her, this time because he couldn’t reveal whatever strange and vulnerable emotion she’d just dredged from the black depths of his heart with her touch.

“I’m not finished with you, Berserker,” she murmured in a voice husky with pleasure and sex.

Her words, obviously meant to seduce, encased his heart with ice. She may not be finished with him now, but she would be. Eventually. He’d serve his purpose to her and she’d toss him aside like so much unwanted rubbish.

They always did.

In that moment Bael hated her. Hated the sweetness of her sex still lingering like a tempting nectar on his tongue. Hated the memory of pleasure too intense to be real sweeping through him and his beast, simultaneously, as he spilled himself inside of her. Hated the way his skin seemed to ache for the tenderness of her embrace.

Hated the Gods for binding their Berserker creations to a mate. The promise of heaven twice denied was the worst form of torturous hell.

“Let. Me.
Go
,” he ordered in a low voice, opening his eyes, but refusing to look at her.

She pulled her hand away from his face. The water froze even stronger around his muscles, and a shudder borne of cold rippled through him.

“And if I do, what then? You’ll abandon me, your mate, here in the middle of nowhere and toddle off to get yourself killed?”

“Probably,” he clipped, knowing he lied to them both.

“You would leave me here alone and pursued by my enemies?” She sounded aghast.

Never.
“Yes,” he gritted. “It’s not as though you’re helpless.” He gestured to his imprisoned lower half.

“Let me warn you, sir, that if anyone is going to abandon anyone here,
I
will be leaving
you
.” The water around him stirred with indignant ripples. “You’ll not thaw until spring, which will give you plenty of time to come to your senses.”

His senses were the problem. They honed in on the fresh scent of her warm skin, the lilting brogue of her voice, spinning him about and tempting him to abandon all reason instead of her.

He met her swirling blue eyes with the hardest, coldest stare he could muster. “Do what you will,” he challenged. Better that she leave him here to freeze to death than make him care anymore than he already did.

She crossed defensive arms beneath the water pushing glossy cleavage together for his eyes to feast upon. “Bring him back,” she ordered.

Bael knew she was referring to his Berserker. “Why, so he’ll do your bidding?”

“Nay,” she mulishly denied. “Well—yes, but it’s very important bidding. And
he
doesn’t seem to mind.”

“
I
mind!” Bael roared, swiping for her and falling short as the water carried her out of his reach. “This body is
mine
. How dare you beguile my beast with your magick and take me against my will.”

The ice climbed his torso, threatening to squeeze the air from him.

“How dare
you
accuse me of using my magick to seduce you? I did
no
such thing!” she sputtered indignantly. “You ripped the dress from my body, you kissed me, and
you
threw my legs over your shoulders and had your way with me. I had
nothing
to do with that.”

“Horseshit. That wasn’t me, and you know it. I wasn’t in a place to deny you. You used my beast to bring you here.”

“I said
please
!” she spat. “And you—
he—
seemed more than happy to oblige. And don’t for one moment think that you can make me feel like I took advantage of you. Do you really mean to convince me that you
or
your Berserker beast, possibly one of the most lethal creatures in existence, is vulnerable to the likes of me?”

That was exactly what he meant, but hated the way her words made it sound. “Isn’t everyone vulnerable to magick?” he volleyed back.

In a fit of incense, she splashed him, and the cold lake water felt like a thousand tiny needles of feminine ire against his skin heated by lust and anger.

“You
dare
insinuate that I used my magic to force you against your will? I am a Druid of Moray. I stand for all that is good and light in this world. I would
never
—”

“Never. What?” he interrupted, motioning to his prison of ice.

Her lovely eyes widened as she flushed a tempting color of pink. “That’s different… I…You… Ugh!” Throwing her hands up with a noise of sheer frustration, she turned from him and threw out her fingers, whispering a few words that brought her torn, soaked dress to her from where it had been floating in a sodden heap on the still water.

As she stalked toward the shore, Bael couldn’t stop himself from savoring every inch of pale skin revealed by the retreating loch surface.  Her long, mahogany hair, glistening with water. The drastic indent of her waist. The dramatic flair of her hips. The lush globes of her round ass swaying over soft, sloping thighs and tempting, dimpled knees.

He clenched his fists below the water, realizing that all the ice in the world couldn’t cool the inferno of lust she evoked within him.

She used some kind of witchcraft to draw all the moisture from the fabric of her dress with irate movements. Bael had the impression that anger didn’t come often or easily to her.

What would it be like to be a creature of serenity, as still and tranquil as the glassy pond in which he stood? Ponderously, he brought a palm to the surface of the water, letting it flow through his fingers and ripple over his skin.

No tangible element existed as soft and malleable as water. It sustained life, made that which was heavy more buoyant, and cleaned away rot and blood. Bael’s eyes flicked back to the witch—er—druid as she yanked her dry, worn garment over her head and clutched at the ripped bodice, grumbling to herself.

And yet
, he thought with a wry smirk, who could withstand the force of a flood? The sheer strength of a tidal wave? The raw power of a sea gale? He pictured the mountains and canyons of his homeland, carved by colossal glaciers. Of the fjords that shaped the landscape over untold millennia. Water did all that, sometimes with the patience of the ages, and sometimes with the immediacy of devastation.

If he was a mountain of a man, Morgana de Moray was the river that could carve through his defenses, shape the very essence of his being, and flow through the heart he’d carved of stone, chipping away at his soul drop by relentless drop.

That made her unspeakably dangerous.

Struggling and fighting against his frigid bonds, Bael strained this way and that, flexing his muscle and surging against ice as unyielding as rock.

A crack in the ice encasing one of his legs caused a flicker of victory that was quickly extinguished as he realized Morgana was standing over him,
on top of the water
, her dress lifted away from the moisture revealing her shapely ankles at nearly eye-level.

She didn’t give him time to ponder why the view of that ankle was more arousing than a thousand naked women. Instead, she held out her palm, and regarded him with the most serious expression he could imagine on a sweet face like hers.

“I’ve come to strike a bargain with you, Berserker,” she said with mysterious stoicism. “Take me home to Dun Moray, and I vow on the Goddess that if you still want to die in battle, my brother, Malcolm will gladly put you in the ground.”

Morgana could think of nothing more exhilarating than traveling in the arms of a sprinting Berserker. It truly did resemble flying. By the time the sun disappeared, they’d reached Hadrian’s Wall.

“I’d thought we’d traveled forty miles or so at most,” Morgana marveled. “You had to have taken me at least a hundred and forty since Yorkshire in one night.”

“At least,” he mumbled, as they ventured into the wilderness beyond the wall.

Now, hours later, stars pricked the sky with pinpoints of light. Clouds gathered in the distance to the west, rolling with an approaching thunderstorm, and the moon glowed as a waning orb in the east.

“At this speed, you could have me to Loch Fyne by tomorrow night,” she calculated, enjoying the moist, chilly air contrasting with the warmth of his chest against her body.

“I will have to stop and rest, eventually.”

“Of course,” she said quickly, feeling a little foolish that she hadn’t really considered the mythical Berserker to be a beast of finite stamina. “How long can one such as you run?”

Her curiosity seemed to irritate him. “I told you I’d get you home as fast as I can. I’ll only stop long enough to eat and regain my strength.”

They’d had speared fish before leaving the side of the loch where they’d made love. Morgana looked up at the hard jaw of the man who carried her through the night. He’d been inside her only hours ago, caressing her skin as though it was the most precious thing he’d ever put his hands on. She wanted that back. Godss help her, now was not the time for such concerns, not with so much hanging in the balance, but all she seemed to be able to think about was the possessive worship in the Berserker’s eyes. And the steely disdain in the eyes of the man now carrying her toward home.

“I wasn’t questioning your word,” she clarified gently, though she had to speak with a little more force to counteract the rush of the air around them. “I’m merely curious. Exactly how fast and far can Berserkers run? I can’t say I’ve met one before.”

Her words seemed to mollify him enough to answer her question. “Most Berserkers move with supernatural speed, but usually in short bursts for battle or pursuit. We all have a specific strength that sets us apart from the others. Mine is speed and endurance.”

“Luckily for me.” Morgana beamed up at him with her most charming smile.

He didn’t answer.

Sighing, Morgana burrowed a little deeper into the warmth of his chest. She thought she felt a tightening of his hold around her legs and ribs, but wondered if she only imagined it. He was too surly a man to be the cuddling kind.

“For what it’s worth, I wanted to thank you for taking me home,” she offered, hoping to warm the ever-present chill of his company.

“I didn’t have much of a choice,” he mumbled.

“I suppose not,” she conceded. “But it’s important that you know I appreciate it, all the same.”

He didn’t look down at her, keeping his eyes affixed on some distant point in the darkness that only he could see, but she had the sense that she’d surprised him. No. Astonished him was more like it.

What a curious creature he was, to say nothing of the gentle, deadly beast that lived inside him. He was her lover. Her mate. And yet Morgana realized she knew nothing about him.

“What is your name, warrior?”

“Bael. Bael Bloodborn.”

“Bloodborn,” she echoed. “A…Berserker family name?”

He shook his head, leaping over a fallen tree and jarring her a bit with the landing. “Nie,” he answered. “I am the Bastard of Sigard Fjordson and his Persian slave. At the temple of Freya, we bastards have to earn our names through our deeds.”

“Bloodborn,” she whispered again, the name holding a more sinister meaning now. “I like the name Bael. It’s strong and bold. It suits you.”

“It’d be my name whether it suited me or not,” he said gruffly, but a small prick of awareness skittered along the fine hairs of her skin, telling her she’d alternately pleased and discomfited him.

“I think I like the name Bloodborn better than Fjordson,” she continued, enjoying the bit of warmth flowing between them. “It’s more, um, evocative, surely. And, er, I’m certain well-deserved. Also, there’s something to be said about being the first of your name, isn’t there? For example, you can forge your own legacy, that is, if you wanted to live long enough to do such a thing.” Morgana furrowed her brow, she’d taken a conversational turn there she hadn’t meant to.

“Bastards don’t leave legacies.”

“I don’t know about that,” she gently argued. “There’s a rather dangerous one bearing down on England as we speak.” She, of course, referred to William the Bastard, of Normandy.

He grunted, and Morgana decided to take that as a concession of her point. She was studying his jaw again, the way it connected to the sinew of his neck, tightening beneath her weight, but not straining.

A Persian mother? She could see it now. The dominance of his sharp nose in his otherwise aquiline features. The dangerous angle of his jaw where his Northman blood would want it to be square. The fullness of his lips. The blue cast when the moonlight glinted off his ebony hair. He wasn’t dark enough to be exotic, but neither was he cast from the same grey skies and long winters of the people of the north and west. His ancestors were kissed by the sun, and the burnished bronze of his skin likely retained that kiss year-round.

She’d certainly like to find out.

“Where are your mother and father now?” she queried, trying to imagine them waiting at home for him to return from raiding the Saxons.

“Dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”  It sounded insufficient, even to her.

“Don’t be,” he droned tonelessly. “I’m not.”

That saddened her. She’d loved her parents dearly. Their loss was a constant ache, most especially since they were taken from her too soon by Macbeth.

More indirectly, by the Wyrd sisters.

“What about siblings?” she asked.

“What about them?”

“Do you
have
any?” He was being obtuse on purpose. Likely because he wanted her to be quiet. Well, it had never worked with Malcolm, she wasn’t about to let it work now.

“I am alone in this world,
witch
, is that what you wish to know?”

“Druid,” she corrected, automatically. “But I, too, have a name. It’s Morgana, and you can address me as such.” She gentled her voice, trying to be conciliatory. “I wasn’t trying to ask you painful questions. I was just trying to get better acquainted with you.”

“Well, don’t,” he barked. “There is nothing to acquaint yourself with. I kill people. That is who I am, that is what I do. Sometimes for money. Sometimes for survival. I go to war. I go to sleep. That is my life. I spill so much blood I bathe in it. I see it when I close my eyes. I took my first life the moment I came into this world, and I haven’t stopped since.”

“Your mother?” Morgana ventured.

The tightening of his jaw could have been a nod. It was too dark to be sure. Morgana was silent a moment, her heart bleeding over the emptiness emanating from him. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t rage. It was… nothing. A fathomless, bleak, and yawning chasm devoid of all but a century of blood and loneliness.

Was it possible for someone to be
full
of emptiness?

“Bael, I—”

“Don’t.” With a burst of speed, he made it impossible for them to talk as he barreled into the Lowlands of Scotland at an incomprehensible pace.

They didn’t stop until they’d chased down a sea storm. Lightning boiled the clouds building over a distant peak, smelling of brine and heather and something like singed darkness.

“I see a loch with a thick tree line.” He spoke for what seemed like the first time in ages. “We should rest there until we know what those clouds are going to do.”

Morgana wondered which loch he referred to, but she couldn’t see a blasted thing with the clouds covering the moon. Though, something told her dawn would be upon them any moment. She could feel it in the mists, in the condensation of water on the blades of long grass. It smelled like home.

Like the Highlands.

He set her on her feet and she gripped his powerful arms in order to steady herself while she gained her bearings.

“Stay here, I’m going to hunt,” Bael ordered.

“Don’t leave,” she pressed fretfully, worried that she’d angered him enough that he might not come back.

“I can’t run like that another day without food,” he said. “I’ll start a fire.” He left her, rustling around in the darkness for a time and then returning to where she stood, blindly following his movements with her hearing.

“What do you have to start a fire with?” she asked, wishing she wasn’t so ineffectual with nothing on her person but a torn dress and a pair of ill-fitting boots.

“You’re not the only one with magic, Princess.”
Princess?
Well, it was a good deal better than
witch
. She decided it was progress.

A pyramid of logs flared and leapt with light, throwing deep shadows against the Berserker’s dark eyes and painting the chiseled planes of his figure in stark relief.

Bemused, Morgana wandered toward the warmth of the flames blinking her surprise. “I had no idea you had fire magic,” she exclaimed, quite breathless. “What else can you do?”

“This is the extent of it.” he motioned to the stack of wood. “We can create and extinguish a moderate flame, but rarely can a Berserker wield fire.”

“What about water?” she asked, motioning to the loch, still a swath of darkness beyond the bank.

He shrugged. “I know a Berserker or two who can summon mists, or work curses. But our magicks are more for survival and combat than anything.”

“Fascinating!” Morgana exclaimed, lowering herself by the fire and resisting the temptation to take her hands from where they held her bodice together to hold out to the enticing warmth. “Tell me everything.”

He looked at her askance, which she was pretty certain he’d been avoiding since their little interlude by the other loch, both mile and hours past. His eyes skittered away from her, then back.

“My cousin, Kenna, can wield fire, but not ignite it,” she mused. “How incredibly useful a Berserker would be to her.”

She’d said the wrong thing. Again. She caught the distinct chill in his eyes before he turned away from her. “I’m going to get food,” he informed her.

“But, I can call fish from the loch,” she protested.

He was gone.

Berating herself, Morgana padded to the water’s edge and crouched down, meaning to pull some fish with her magic, just in the unlikely event that Bael’s hunt was unsuccessful. The glint of the firelight danced off the still loch, and the past called to Morgana like a wayward siren.

It seemed like an invasion of privacy, somehow, but as she cupped her hand in the water and held it up to the light, she knew that what she would see in this pool would give her the key to unlocking the Berserker’s heart. 

***

A woman with hair the color of a spring poppy wove a tapestry in a longhouse adorned with scroll work and animal furs. She hummed to herself a lovely tune while motes of dust and wool glinted in the late-afternoon sun. Her tranquility never faltered even as a giant warrior, his tattoos glowing from skin the color of burnished copper, ducked inside and stalked to her, hauling her to stand and pressing her against him.

“Accept me, woman,” he crooned against the hollow of her neck, pausing to press a playful kiss on her rosebud mouth. “Or must I spend another night persuading the words from your lips on sighs and screams?”

“Bael,” the woman laughed, glancing surreptitiously around the longhouse, as though checking if they were alone. “What are you doing here in the middle of a training day?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Bael’s shoulder flexed with a movement of his hand, and the woman’s bodice was untied. “I am seducing my mate.”

She pushed at him, ineffectually. “Won’t they miss you at the temple?”

Bael paused in his passionate exploration of her clavicle to pull back and look at her. “What do they have left to teach me at the temple? I’m their fastest warrior. One of their deadliest. They would rather I focus on claiming my mate. It makes me less of a liability.”

“About that.” She reached up and pulled her bodice together fingers stuttering as she worked to retie it. “I don’t think we should be together during the day like this, someone might see.”

Bael’s dark eyes lit with suspicion, and beneath that, fear. “My Berserker accepted you as his mate last night,” he said more seriously. “Once you accept me, you’ll live in my house, sleep in my bed, bear my children. Who cares if anyone sees us? Let them stare.”

She turned back to her weave, strumming lines of wool. “Our children,” she murmured. “Won’t they be dark, like you?”

Bael crossed thick arms over his chest. “Does that matter?”

“Of course it matters. Do you want your children to be laughed at? Do you want them to be outcasts—Persians— like you are?”

“I’m a bastard, not an outcast, Heida. And I’m only half Persian.”

She didn’t look at him as she said the words that distinguished the light in his eyes. “Do you think someone… like you should be having children? Should even be mated at all?”

Bael seized her arm, forcing her to meet his dead gaze. “I am mated. To you. Or don’t you remember begging me to pledge my life to yours last night as I fucked you into oblivion?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Heida’s fingers blithely worked on her weaving, and she lost herself to the project, effectively shutting Bael out. “And truly, you should have known that a daughter of Jarl Thorsen would never be allowed to mate with a Bastard. Berserker or no Berserker.”

Bael’s eyes widened with panic and rage. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he grit out. “I’m bound to you. For the rest of your life. There can be no others for me. Only you, until you die, or I do. Do you understand what that means?”

“I understand that you can prolong my life exponentially,” Heida postulated.

“It means that if you do not accept me—”