Temptress Unbound (3 page)

He grunted, and dismounted to scoop it up. After he remounted, we were on our way. We'd gone no more than a quarter mile when a shudder racked Terix. He risked a sideways glance at me. “
Two
at once, Nimia? Really?”

“It wasn't my idea.”

“I'll never get that image out of my head. But you know what's even worse than seeing it?”

I shrugged, and waited.

“Feeling it as you did.” His face filled with the last emotion I would have ever expected: pity. “And knowing it wasn't enough.”

3

“M
aerlin, please tell me this is a joke,” I said. “We are
not
going to ride out a storm up there.”

“It's completely safe.”

“And completely terrifying!”

“You'll forget where you are, soon enough.”

“Because I will have fainted.”

Maerlin had, with his typically untypical way of thinking, built what he believed to be the best possible place for us to join together and call the storm: a woven rope nest high in an ancient oak tree that projected out from the steep western slope of the hill, below and out of sight of the forge. Mistletoe formed a cloud in its otherwise nude branches, creating a bower of sorts for the spiderweb of rope that would be our bed. A mass of furs lay in our nest's sagging center. Bone sauntered up to the oak and lifted his leg.

“You'll be blown out of it,” Terix said. He was standing beside me, gaping with equal horror at my future.

“My body is suddenly feeling a deep, abiding love for the solid earth under my feet,” I muttered.

“There are straps attaching the furs to the net,” Maerlin said. “We'll bob around and swing some, but as long as the ropes hold we'll be fine.”

“ ‘As long as'?” I squeaked. “Is there some question?”

“Nothing in life is certain,” Maerlin said, going to the base of the tree and testing the footing of the ladder leaning against its trunk. “We could be struck by lightning up there. I do worry a bit about that.”

A whine sang in my throat.

“What was wrong with building a hut, firmly on the ground?” Terix asked.

“I want to watch the storm; I want to be
part
of it.” He spun back around to face me, with a look of surprised comprehension. “Don't you? Nimia, this is going to be like nothing we've ever experienced.”

“It was going to be that anyway.”

Terix put his hand on my shoulder, anchoring me in place. “You don't have to go up there.”

But I did have to. At the top of the hill, Brenn and half a dozen others were tending the fires and double-checking the heavy, reinforced sails that would direct the captured wind into the furnace. The metals and mineral powders had been measured and mixed. Everyone both at the forge and at the villa knew that the great druid Maerlin, assisted by the foreign sorceress Nimia, would today be calling up ancient magic to draw the winds. Everyone was waiting. Everyone was expecting this to happen. I couldn't hold everything off because I didn't want to climb a tree.

And I
had
promised.

If I'd been smarter I would have stipulated that we do this inside four solid walls, but who thinks such things need to be said?

The only bright spot was that Maerlin had forbidden anyone from watching the spell-casting; he'd warned that the ancient magic would sense their eyes if they disobeyed, and eat their souls. So at least no one would know what Maerlin and I were up to up there.

“Nimia,” Maerlin said, coming to me and taking my hands. “Trust me.”

And then, inside my head, his voice:
I'm here with you.

I nodded. What else could I do?

Maerlin grinned and pulled me toward the tree, out from under Terix's hand on my shoulder. I looked back at Terix and shrugged with my eyebrows.

Terix's face twisted in concentration.

I blinked at him, confused.

He tapped his skull.

Oh.

I sought the essence of him inside me, already half-lost in the jumble of my inner world. Found it. Followed it back to him and heard his repeated thought:
Call for me if you need me. Call for me if you need me. Call for me if you—

“I will,” I said, not knowing if I could, and turned to follow Maerlin to the ladder.

As soon as Terix and Bone were gone, Maerlin started stripping off his clothes and shoving them in a leather bag.

“Eager, aren't you?” I said, hands on my hips.

“It's impossible to do up there,” he said, pointing with his chin at the nest as he hopped on one foot, pulling off a boot. “Better strip down yourself.”

A gust of winter wind wormed its way inside my cloak and sent its cold hands groping across my skin. “I'll take my chances.”

He shook his head. “You can't climb in those skirts, and your cloak will act like a sail and pull you off the tree.”

He was right, of course. I gritted my teeth and started to peel off my warm, soft clothing. As soon as my cloak was gone, the cold set in in earnest and I yanked the remainder off, shoved them at Maerlin, and scrambled up the ladder. The sooner I got up there, the sooner I'd be in those furs.

I felt him on the ladder beneath me, and as I reached the top I could feel the warmth of his body behind my legs. “Grab on to that rope there,” he said, and guided me through the hand- and footholds he'd put in place to get high into the tree, and then out along one of its branches. For a moment I made the mistake of raising my head and looking out to the west, and felt my heart drop through my stomach and out into the open air. From the ground, the nest had not looked so very high; what I hadn't realized was how much the tree leaned out over open air, and how the hill fell away beneath it, sloping steeply downward, down, down, to the valley far below. The nest that had seemed only twenty or thirty feet in the air now felt an endless mile above the ground.

A shudder of cold racked me, and I realized my hands were going numb. In a flare of panic, I feared I'd lose all control of my body in the cold and tumble down through the branches to that distant valley floor. A gust of wind buffeted me, turning my body to ice.

“Nimia, you have to let go of
that
hold to get the next.”

I whimpered.

He wrapped an arm around my waist and hoisted me. I yelped and scrambled for my handhold, but he forced me away from it to the next one. “Just two more steps and you can get in the furs.”

I tilted my gaze to the nest, which no longer looked like a flimsy bit of whimsy high in a tree, but the most stable, secure, warm, and inviting bed I'd ever seen. I flew through the last few holds and tumbled into the depths of the nest, the ropes creaking and sagging beneath my weight. I burrowed into the furs and pulled them up and nearly over my head, my teeth chattering.

Maerlin was standing on the nearest branch, only one hand holding him secure, apparently not caring that he was stark naked and that the raw temperature had shrunk his cock to a frightened mouse peering from a thicket of dark red hair. The winter wind tossed his hair in a mad halo, tendrils whipping across his face, the yellow-green of the mistletoe behind him, and the gnarled black branches all around creating an otherworldly setting that made him look more like a mythical god than a human man. For a swaying moment, I wondered if any of this was real.

Then the bastard grinned at me. “I knew you'd climb faster if you were freezing.”

“You shouldn't anger a woman who's soon going to have her hands on your balls,” I said as shivers skimmed over my flesh. I couldn't see his balls due to the cold and the hair there, but it didn't look as if he'd been tattooed there. Spirals adorned his slender hips and spread over his broad shoulders as well as his neck and his other joints, stark black against his pale white skin. There was no fat on his body, nothing to hide the long, smooth, sculpted muscles that spoke more of grace than of power, though I knew he had both.

He jumped down into the nest, making me shriek as I was flung upward, then rolled down toward his weight. “Told you it was safe,” he said, kneeling amid the furs.

“What if it rains?” I asked, my face near his carved-stone belly, and for no reason I reached out to lay my fingertip against his navel. His belly flinched at the unexpected contact.

“Then it rains,” he said, looking at me strangely. I had the satisfaction of knowing I could unnerve him, if only a little. “We should be dry enough.” He showed me how he'd pierced holes for laces around the edges of the biggest, roughest furs, furs from a bear. They would form an outer cocoon, a bag of sorts, inside of which we would nestle with the softer furs.

“You thought about this carefully.” I imagined him lying awake at night, mentally designing this odd bed for us. There was a ruthless practicality to it that should have taken away any sexiness, and yet . . . the very practicality of it was arousing. He'd built this nest to have sex with me in a particular way, at a particular time. It might not show
desire,
but it spoke of his intention, and his determination to fulfill it. I was perverse enough to feel a tingle in my loins at the thought of him planning it in such fine detail.

“I think about everything carefully,” he said, and showed me how to get into the cocoon. Turning away to double-check the straps, he added under his breath, “Too carefully, perhaps.”

It wasn't the first hint he'd given me that he wasn't as calculating, as devoid of emotion, as he often appeared. There were moments when I knew he wanted to be other than he was . . . as did most of us, I supposed. I didn't know if any of us could ever make those changes come true.

He crawled into the bag beside me, a gust of frigid air coming with him, his elbow landing in my stomach as we turned and shifted and struggled to make ourselves comfortable while the woven ropes beneath us tilted and dipped and seemed bent on jumbling us together. Then at last he settled, sitting half-up with ropes and furs supporting his back, his skin like ice as he drew me onto his lap, my back against his chest. We were embedded in the furs, but our heads were free, and with his arms securely around me I could at last look out through the sloping sides of our woven cage without flinching, and take in the vast sweep of the valley beneath and the roiling, darkening clouds overhead.

“This must be how eagles feel,” I breathed. “You were right, it's like nothing I've ever experienced.”

His arm tightened around my waist. “Then for once, something I planned turned out right.”

I didn't need psychic contact to know how much that meant to him. Too often, his gifts of wonder turned into episodes of horror for the recipients. “Do we have to call the storm? I don't want to close my eyes.”

A vibration in his chest told me he was silently laughing. He spoke near my ear, his breath the only warm thing about either of us. “Then don't. We'll enjoy it like this, until we want to do otherwise.”

“Everyone's waiting for the wind.”

“You can't rush magic.”

I decided to believe him, and nestled even closer, seeking crumbs of body heat. The usual languid desire was there, flowing back and forth between us, not yet strong enough to overcome the chill and the view.

In a faint way, being here with Maerlin reminded me of when I'd belonged to Sygarius. Maerlin was older than me, powerful, far more sexually experienced, and there were times I was frightened of him. His insistence that I trust him was seductive in a way I wasn't sure I liked, reminding me of times when I'd had no choice but to let a man make decisions about my life. There was a silent offer of security in that giving up of my own will, a feeling of comfort, as if I were handing myself into the care of someone wiser who would make all the best choices for me. It was tempting to lay myself before him as I had been forced to do before Sygarius and declare myself his for the molding, in the belief that he would guide me and teach me, and sculpt me into the woman I wanted to become.

That was the danger of the seduction: for the man's all-knowing, all-caring power was an illusion. No man would ever look out for my wants and needs as well as I would. No man would make decisions that put my well-being above his own. No man could know the woman I was meant to become; only I could discover that. Only I could guide myself along the right path to my future, following the urgings of my own heart.

Maybe for this one strange day, though, I could trust Maerlin and give myself over to him. Hanging here in the branches, the mistletoe of the druids above us and the whole world below, I felt as if we had stepped together out of the known world. There was magic in being here, magic that Maerlin had created, and I wanted to release myself into it. To hold back out of caution would be to rob myself of an experience that could surely never come again.

I trusted him. Goddesses help me, I did. His repeating it so often had made it so.

Our bodies slowly warmed and I drowsed, listening to the wind in the branches and feeling the gentle rise and fall of Maer­lin's chest. Feeling relaxed and secure in our aerie, the arousal caused by our contact felt more like a sleepy pleasure creeping over me than a call that must be answered. Even when that timid mouse in its red-thatched home was swallowed by a thick snake, I felt no need to do more than shift my thigh so it had room to swell. The lust stole across me so peacefully, with so little threat, that for a short while I wanted to let it reach its own end without my moving a muscle. I felt as if my body could reach its release on its own as it rose gently on a tide of desire, untouched by either me or Maerlin. The lust sank into my loins, bringing the familiar heavy ache of need and a sense that my sex was stealing all thought and purpose from me.