Page 45 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)

I Loved You Then

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Ciaran rose from the chair and closed the small distance between them in two steps, dropping to his knees in front of her.

She set aside her half-empty cup and faced him as he wedged himself between her thighs.

The action, his presence, her opening her thighs to accommodate him, which drew her shift high up on her legs, was terrifically intimate, and her pulse pounded.

He took her hands in his callused, warm grasp and held her gaze.

“I ken it’s time to stop fighting against it,” he said solemnly, his voice low. “I dinna care how ye came to be here. If ye’ll have me, I’ll have ye without apologies.” In his eyes was the fierce, plain gravity of a man who knew exactly what he wanted.

His gesture and words made something loosen inside Claire; she felt a laugh and a sob both tug at her throat.

Some wild thought of, Finally! coursed through her head.

He leaned into her and kissed her, slow and deliberate, as if sealing a promise.

This was their first kiss where she had no doubt about how it would end—this was not a one-off, this was the one, the true beginning.

Claire wrapped her arms around his neck, wanting never to let go. There was fire in his kiss, and she felt the possessiveness of it, and reveled in it. He swept his tongue inside her mouth, and she moaned softly, tasting wine and heat.

He rose only when their breath came quick and their hands had just begun to learn the geography of one another, pulling her to her feet.

His palm slid along her jaw, his thumb stroking along her lip, while Claire’s fingers brushed across the velvet hardness of his shoulders and arms. Eventually, he tugged at the breacan she wore, slowly pulling it free.

“Ye’ll nae wear this plaid again,” he said in a husky tone, “nae after tonight. Ye’ll wear my colors, the Kerr colors.”

The shift beneath was thin, clinging to the shape of her.

“May I?” he asked, though the question was more ceremony than requirement—she was ready to do anything with him, give him everything, all of her.

And yet she nodded slowly, not swift with eagerness, as if already lost in the trance of his touch.

Ciaran’s fingers trembled for a heartbeat as they found the tie at her neck and loosened it, slowly, his eyes never leaving her face.

He eased the cloth carefully, as if it were something fragile and holy.

The shift slid up over her shoulders, whispering against skin, and in the next moment she stood there in the soft firelight wearing only her black panties, a lone, modern scrap of black lace, incongruously fine against the rough world around them.

The sight of it made Ciaran stop abruptly, his mouth parted without wonder. Likely, he had never seen anything like it. For a moment his eyes simply drank her in, slow and unabashed, committing the sight of her, the shape of her, to memory.

Claire felt not an ounce of shyness, but a thrill at the hunger in his gaze.

He reached out almost timidly, as if permission were still required, and his finger found the lace at her hip.

He did not pry or press; he traced the scalloped edge with a fingertip, light enough to be a question.

“Aye,” he murmured, a rough, pleased sound.

“I’ll want to ken more o’ this.” His thumb rested there for the briefest of seconds, feeling warmth beneath the fabric, then he drew his hand away as if remembering better manners.

“But nae right now,” he added, another magnificent grin coming.

She answered him with a small, bright laugh, the sound scattering the last of the evening’s solemnity.

“You can study it at your leisure,” she teased, stepping closer until their breaths met.

His grin softened then, became something tender and a little amazed, and he covered her mouth, this kiss needier, harder, his fingers biting wonderfully into the flesh at her waist, pulling her against him.

Her breasts were crushed against the solid wall of his chest.

Hands moved over warm naked flesh, each touch was measured at first, learning, then braver as the assurance and hunger between them grew. Claire’s mouth opened beneath his, answering, offering, until they both forgot the room and the weak fire, and witches, time, and fate.

When they moved toward the bed, it was with slow progress, still kissing and touching, two people who knew one another only in glimpses and wishes, now demanding a better acquaintance.

The tenderness in his touch was underlined by need.

He drugged her with his kiss while his hands skated possessively over her body.

She responded in kind, finding all the scars along his chest and shoulders, tracks of his life, tracing them with her fingers as if memorizing the map of a country she would defend.

Boldly, she found the laces of his breeches and pulled the knot free, and he paused, looking down to watch her fingers work, before lifting his gaze to hers, his green eyes awash with desire.

They came together without haste and without pretense—no frantic fumbling, only the inevitable fervor of two people who had finally decided to lean into desire rather than question it or run from it.

Breath and murmurs filled the chamber, a name whispered, a laugh over bumping limbs, a plea swallowed into a kiss.

At times it was fierce and almost hungry, at times so gentle it felt like she’d glimpsed heaven.

The weight of the world lifted in those hours.

The past, the future, the witch’s puzzling words, the dead woman and the dead marriage, the centuries that separated her from home—none of it could reach them beneath the bedclothes.

There was only this huge, perfect moment, the present, the press of his hands, the warmth of his skin, the surprising softness when he held her cheeks and told her again, low and throaty, how much he wanted her.

Hypnotized by his touch, she tingled under his knowing hands.

Eventually, her black panties met the fate of her shift and his breeches, dropped to the floor.

And then he was inside her, wickedly hard and thick.

It was the most astonishing, most delicious sensation, like nothing she’d ever known.

Together they found a tempo, their bodies in exquisite harmony until they shattered with a splintering climax, pleasure pure and explosive.

Claire gasped in sweet agony while Ciaran grunted and collapsed against her.

When the fever of it broke, they lay tangled beneath the blankets, limbs draped around one another. Claire listened to the sound of him breathing, felt the slow rise and fall of his chest under her palm, and knew right then, with perfect clarity, that this was where she was supposed to be.

He spoke then, voice a rough murmur in the half-dark. “I dinna ken we’d ever get here, Claire. I dinna ken what curses or gifts come with ye. But I ken this: I’d rather have had this, now with ye, than have spent my days wondering what might’ve been.”

She turned her face up to him, hair splayed across the pillow and his arm, a smile tilting her mouth. “Oh, God, yes.”

He chuckled, the sound husky with satisfaction. “Godless fool that I am,” he muttered, then, as if struck by the want to be less grim, added, “Ye’ll tell me about that scrap of material now? About what kind of sorcerer invented a garment so brazen in its desire to beguile and befuddle a man?”

Claire laughed softly, the sound bright in the hush. “Hm, I don’t know. Maybe I want to keep some mystery about me, not give up all my secrets.”

Ciaran laughed as well now, his smirk seeming to question the sense of that. “I say enough mystery surrounds ye, lass, and we might want to be done with that.”

“Maybe,” was all she offered, but she did not explain modern underwear to him. Instead, she tangled her fingers in his hair and kissed him, softly now, the sort of kiss that lingers in memory.

When at last they drifted toward sleep, it was not an anxious sleep but one of ease and surrender. The room was quiet and the morning uncertain, but at that moment the future felt less like a trap waiting and more like a place they might, together, confront.

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Three weeks later

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An unseasonably warm day came to them in the middle of November, the sun hanging low and golden, soft enough to warm the back of her neck but kind in its touch.

Ciaran and Claire walked south from the cliffs under Caeravorn, the keep shrinking behind them until it was only a dark shape on the ridge.

The air smelled of salt and kelp and the faint smoke of hearth fires blown out to the beach from the scattered crofts.

The path down was rutted and narrow and Ciaran took her hand at the steeper bits without ceremony and she gave her fingers willingly, the small, simple ease of it making her smile.

The beach here was not like the fine, pale beaches she’d known back home in the States.

The sand by the firth was darker, warm gray with a million bits of mica that caught the sunlight and made the surface look quietly starlit.

In places it ran coarse and almost pebbled, rubbed smooth by tides and the ruthless grind of waves.

Where the water licked at it, the sand lay like damp velvet underfoot, packing cold and solid around her bare toes.

The wrack line was a storybook of the sea, with long, glossy fibers of blown kelp, tangled like ropes, broken shells bleached ivory and in one spot, the bleached ribs of a small lobster or crab shell.

Chunks of driftwood, pale as bone, were speckled with seaweed and barnacles.

She was used to the gulls, swaying and squawking above, a sight and sound that belonged to the coast, but was pleased to finally meet the beach of Caeravorn.