Page 2 of To Wed a Highlander (A Highland Magic Collection #3)

Chapter 2

S axons took the bridge and flooded the east bank. Instead of spreading and breaking upon the Viking shield wall like a wave, they pierced through like an arrow. The screams of rage and pain rose above the gentle song of the trees. The gurgles of throats filling with blood drowned out the gurgle of the river.

Morgana couldn’t bear to look. Instead, she followed the slow progress of the giant as the current carried him downstream from the bridge toward her. In moments, he would pass her and his body would be gone forever.

Not today , she decided. I need you.

Ignoring the roiling in her stomach, she inched both her feet into the freezing river and reached out with her magick. Bring him to me, she told the current. Bring me the warrior.

The river obeyed. The Viking’s body slid along the bank, magickally avoiding rocks and the water’s other gruesome occupants, until the current deposited his impressive weight in the mud at her feet. Most of his thick frame remained submerged, the water not strong or fast enough to propel him with any force.

His features, all but an obstinate jaw and lips too full to be concealed by his few days growth of beard, were hidden from her by his fearsome bone and iron helm. The water leached blood away from hair the color of volcanic stone.

Gods but he was massive.

She needed to touch him in order to know where to send her magick. How could she possibly do it with her wrists bound behind her? Healing magick was intimate, internal. Generally she had to lay her hands on a wound, on a body, to diagnose and provide a cure.

She cursed her bonds once again, futilely testing their strength, and winced as the leather bit into her skin.

Damn. That left her only one choice. Trying not to think of what polluted the river, Morgana dropped to her knees beside his alarmingly still frame, grateful that the water had lifted much of the blood from his skin.

Willing her heart to slow, she pressed her ear to a chest the texture of firm Highland stone and almost as deep as it was wide. No breath lifted his ribs. No pulse moved the blood through his veins.

But life still flowed within him.

So did magick.

Alarmed, Morgana fought to remain calm as she closed her eyes and used her ear and cheek to connect with what blood was left in his body. Where are your wounds? She knew he’d been stabbed three times, but she needed to assess what damage had been done on the inside, and she doubted her ability to roll him over even if she had the use of her hands. He was simply too heavy.

His blood connected to hers as no other patient had before. A clear and instant knowledge of the damage seared her mind. The wound in his thigh was mostly meat and vein. But blood leaked from both of his lungs, and would prove fatal any moment.

This mythical savage needed breath. He needed the punctures in his lungs healed. Since she couldn’t reach his back, she’d have to do it a different way.

Taking strength from the water flowing around her knees, Morgana chanted a spell of healing against his chest. Willing his wounds to mend like she never had hoped before.

Nothing changed. In fact, she could feel his life draining out of him with every moment that passed. A frantic panic welled within her.

“Stay with me, warrior,” she implored, moving to kneel at his shoulder. “Do not cross to the Otherworld just yet. I need you.” Taking the loamy air deep into her chest, she brought her lips close to his and breathed her healing spell against his mouth.

“ Earth is our body.

Fire, our soul.

Air, our breath.

Water, our blood.

Flesh knit to flesh.

Vein to vein.

The Goddess blesses you.

Be whole again .”

An impulse borne of pure feminine urge pushed her to make a hasty, desperate move, and she fused her mouth to his, breathing her magick into his lungs.

It should have taken but a moment, the space of a short and powerful breath.

But once her warm lips were pillowed by his cool mouth, Morgana was seized by a typhoon of such shocking sensation; she lost all sense of place. The green of the forest, the chill of the water, the sounds of rampant bloodshed all faded as something as subtle as a whisper and as deafening as the truth rushed around and through her. It reminded her of holy days, when planets aligned in their orbits, or when full moons coincided with a solstice or equinox. It was a foreign and potent magick. Masculine. Dominant. Binding.

Before her overwrought brain could process movement, she was shackled to a chest by bands of pure iron, and being devoured by a mouth that was cold no longer.

Pulled onto an enormous body bowing with the first breath of life, Morgana knew she should panic. That she should struggle. But she didn’t. It would have been fruitless. There was no escaping a hold this powerful.

The Viking ripped off his helm and sat up, dragging her into his lap and cradling her body into the cavern of his. Once again, Morgana found herself a captive. For something about this kiss was stronger than any length of rope or magick spell could ever be.

There was a hint of the divine in his savage lips. A glimpse of the eternal.

And just like that, she was bound.

The Viking ripped at the front of Morgana’s bodice; effectively breaking the spell and dumping her soundly back into reality.

“No!” she gasped, ripping her mouth away from his.

To her utter shock, he stilled, though his big hand nestled in the valley of her breasts, spreading unsettling warmth through her. She became equally frozen as she looked up into his face.

By the Goddess, she was cradled in the lap of a monster.

Morgana often felt when she looked out into the absolute black of a moonless night, a bereft sort of expectant danger. Like the darkness peered back at her, studied her weaknesses, and reached into the places of her soul where magick resided that should never see the light.

If one concentrated that darkness, that trepidation that lifted the hairs on the back of one’s neck and caused even the bravest of men to avoid the shadows, it still wouldn’t have aptly described the pure black emptiness of the Viking’s eyes. He seemed to study her in that way she imagined the nighttime did. Those fathomless pools of onyx roaming her face as though she were the peculiarity.

She remained locked with the beast in a moment of stunned visual discovery. Aside from his eyes, or lack thereof, the rest of his face was undoubtedly male. Or would be, if the Gods of war, those fiends of destruction, ever created a warrior’s features.

Nothing about those broad and brutal planes were ever meant to please the eye. His chin and jaw, set in sharp angles, thrust forward with unyielding menace. A forehead positioned in an eternal scowl shadowed those already impossibly dark, deep-set eyes. Scroll tattoos toyed with his hairline and disappeared into his abundant dark hair.

But his lips.

Morgana’s gaze latched on to them with a desperate fascination. Those lips were the Goddess’s compensation for his frightening demeanor. She’d never before seen lips like that on a man. The rest of him would have to be so alarmingly masculine in order to claim such a luscious mouth.

“What are you?” she breathed the question. For surely a creature such as he was not of this world.

He didn’t answer. Instead, his hand lifted from her chest to her cheek. With a tenderness that shocked Morgana, the Viking explored her own features with the thoroughness of a blind man. A soft ticking rumble, like that of a contented cat, began to emanate from somewhere within his massive chest. It echoed through her in the most unsettling way, the vibrations rocketing a strange awareness directly to between her legs.

Morgana submitted to this, wondering if his sight was, indeed impaired by the soulless voids of his eyes.

A slow recognition began to permeate her memory, one her brother, Malcolm, and her cousin, Kenna, had discussed in awe-struck whispers after pouring through tomes in Dun Moray’s library.

Morgana had never been much for the hours of scouring spells and memorizing the legends of her Druid people as her brother and cousin were. She learned from the forests, from the rivers, from the elders of Moray. She would rather read the faces of her people than a dusty old book.

But this story she remembered, because she found a brutal sort of romance within it. One of a Northman blessed by the war Goddess Freya with preternatural strength and stamina. When he saw blood, he unleashed a beast of battle with black eyes and sharpened teeth. An unstoppable beast who slaughtered indiscriminately, unable to decipher between man, woman, or child. What had Malcolm called them again?

Berserkers.

By the Gods . She was bound in the clutches of one of the most lethal creatures to ever walk the earth. And, according to Kenna, who paid particular attention to this part, the only possible way he would refrain from murdering her was if—

She gulped, her eyes peeling wide and her mouth dropping open.

If he’d claimed her as his mate.