“That…will change….if you stop.”
He grinned then, a masculine satisfaction welling up inside him at the desperation thinning her voice. He thrust inside her, hard, relishing the hum that vibrated her chest. Again and again, he rocked against her, bare skin hitting bare skin with every thrust. Their rhythm shifted, each one reacting to the other until they moved together in tandem. The shining edge of pleasure loomed before him, sharp and filled with wicked promise. He grunted, bowed his body over hers to reach one hand beneath her.
The weight of her breast against his palm heated his blood several degrees, threatened to boil him alive. He gritted his teeth, holding back, forcing himself not to cast himself over the edge, not yet. He took her nipple between his finger and thumb rolled it back and forth, appreciating the velvet, puckered skin. Pinched her.
Marian screamed, her arms flexing, throwing her body up. He followed her, bending her back in a dance of sleek, pale lines. He dropped his face to her neck again, licked the shell of her ear, nipped at her lobe. She thrashed against him and he let go, followed her into that abyss of pleasure that sucked every speck of energy from his body, spun him into darkness, and left him lying on the ground with Marian cradled against him, boneless and utterly satisfied.
“Marian?” he whispered, when he’d got enough breath to talk.
“Mmm?”
“Are you always going to run? From me or after me? I mean, when—”
“Yes.”
Robin smiled and hugged her as tightly as he could. “Good.”
Epilogue
“They will pay. All of them will pay.”
Mac shoved at a spindly, brittle tree branch that barred his way, snarling when it refused to yield. The forest had turned against him, just like his people. Every twig stabbed at him, every trunk loomed in his path, thick leaves blocking the moonlight, leaving him fumbling around in the dark. The bruises that marred his body made every step more difficult than it should have been, every physical pain a reminder of a grasping hand pulling him from his horse, a tug at the rope binding him—#p#分页标题#e#
He shouted, a raw, ragged sound, and gripped the wood at the base of the offending limb, tearing it back and forth with all the strength he had left in his body until a satisfying crack broke the still night air. The broken limb hung in his grip and he threw it violently to the side before continuing his march back to his home.
“I had him.” He looked down at his hands. He’d removed the claws and the blood before going into the village, but if he looked at them now, he could still see the curved iron, feel the tackiness of the sidhe’s blood. “I had him weak and bleeding, ready to suffer for his crimes.” Another branch reached out to slap him, striking him across the face with a fistful of leaves and leaving tiny scratches in its wake. Mac screamed and snatched a handful of the offending greenery from its branch, stopped walking to shred them into tiny pieces, wishing he could do the same to Robin Hood and every man and woman who had helped him escape this night.
“Grab him!”
“Get him off the horse!”
“Hold him!”
The voices echoed in his head, accompanying the memory of the mob rushing out of the forest to surround his horse, bows and arrows trained on him, torches flaring to life in a circle of flames. Hands on his arms and legs, pulling him down, binding him with rope as he bellowed his rage into their anonymous, hooded faces.
“I will figure out who they were,” he rasped, “and I will find them all. I will make them pay.”
His people. The people he served, protected, fought to save from the fickle whims of the fey. They had turned on him, surrounded him on the road after he left Robin behind. He had left to prove the sidhe wrong, prove that his people saw him for the protector he was and not the madman Robin claimed him to be.
It had been Robin’s doing. He knew it. He had poisoned the people against him, paid for their loyalty with stolen gold. The fury inside him climbed higher, threatening to spill out his mouth in an unholy howl. He pivoted, changed direction to go to the pit instead of straight to his cabin.
He will not be there. He is gone. Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe the wolves were not worthless tonight, maybe they held him here, kept away those who would have—
The pit yawned before him like the mouth of a great beast, and Mac didn’t need to look inside to know it was empty. The iron grate that should have covered it lay at an angle, slanting into the pit to form a perfect staircase. The wolves were nowhere to be seen.
Mac approached the pit one shaking footstep at a time, needing to look inside even though he knew there was no possibility that his prisoner was still there. The sight of the pit’s floor, bare of any living thing, sliced through him like a fire-heated blade.