He couldn’t stop. The taste of her was like water, cool and clean, after a lifetime of thirst. Empty pockets he hadn’t known he carried inside him filled, bulged, overflowed. His blood was a rage of heat, his body weak with wanting. He gathered the back of the shirt in his bunched fingers, prepared to rip.
Then they dropped the pendant they held between them to reach for each other. And he snapped back as if from a blow.
“This is not what I want.” He took her shoulders, intending to shake her, but only held her. She looked dazed. Faerie-struck. “This is not what I’ll accept.”
“Would you let me go?” Her voice was low, but it didn’t quaver. When he did, and stepped back, she let out a short, quiet breath. There was no point in being a coward, she told herself.
“I have a couple of choices here,” she began. “One is I hit my head when I fell and I have a concussion. The other is that I just fell in love with you. I think I prefer the concussion theory, and I imagine you do, too.”
“You didn’t hit your head.” He jammed his hands in his pockets and strode away from her. The room was suddenly too small. “And people don’t fall in love in an instant, over one kiss.”
“Sensible ones don’t. I’m not sensible. Ask anyone.” But if there was ever a time to try to be, it was now.
“I think I should get dressed, take a walk, clear my head or whatever.”
“Another’s storm’s brewing.”
Allena tugged her clothes off the screen. “You’re telling me,” she muttered and marched into the bedroom.
4
CONAL wasn’t in the cottage when she came out again, but Hugh sat by the fire as if waiting for her. He got up as she came through and pranced to the door, turning his big head so that his eyes met hers.
“Want a walk? Me, too.”
It was a pity about the gardens, Allena thought as she paused between them. She’d have enjoyed getting down into them, yanking out those choking weeds, pinching off deadheads. An hour’s pleasant work, she thought, maybe two, and instead of looking wild and neglected, those tumbling blossoms would just look wild. Which is what was needed here.
Not her job, she told herself, not her home, not her place. She cast an eye at the little outbuilding. He was probably in there doing…whatever the hell he did. And doing it, she imagined, angrily.
Why was there so much anger in him?
Not her problem, she thought, not her business, not her man.
Though for a moment, when their hands and mouths were joined, he had seemed to be.
I don’t want this. I don’t want you.
He’d made himself very clear. And she was tired of finding herself plopped down where she wasn’t wanted.
The wind raced in off the sea, driving thick, black-edged clouds toward the island. As she began to walk, she could see the pale and hopeful blue being gradually, inevitably consumed.
Conal was right. A storm was coming.
Walking along the shoreline couldn’t do any harm. She wouldn’t climb the hills, though she longed to. She would just stick to the long curve of surf and sand and enjoy the jittery thrill of watching the fierce waves crash.
Hugh seemed content to walk at her side. Almost, she thought, like a guard.
Eight kilometers to the nearest village, she remembered. That wasn’t so very far. She could wait for the weather to clear, then walk it if Conal wouldn’t drive her. There’d been a truck parked between the cottage and the outbuilding, a sleek and modern thing, anachronistic but surely serviceable.
Why had he kissed her like that?
No, that wasn’t right. It hadn’t been his doing. It had simply happened, to both of them. For both of them. There’d been a roar in her head, in her blood, that she’d never experienced before. More than passion, she thought now, more than lust. It was a kind of desperate recognition.
There you are. Finally. At last.
That, of course, was ridiculous, but she had no other way to explain what had spurted to life inside her. And what had spread from that first hot gush felt like love.
You couldn’t love what you didn’t know. You couldn’t love where there was no understanding, no foundation, no history. Her head told her all these sensible, rational things. And her heart laughed at them.
It didn’t matter. She could be conflicted, puzzled, annoyed, even willing to accept. But it didn’t matter when he didn’t want her or what had flamed to life between them.
She stopped, let the wind beat its frantic wings over her, let the spray from the waves fly on her. Overhead a gull, white as the moon, let out its triumphant scream and streamed off in the current of electric air.
Oh, she envied that freedom, for the heart of flight was inside her. To simply fly away, wherever the wind took her. And to know that when she landed, it would be her place, her time, her triumph.