Stealing Midnight. Tracy MacNishЧитать онлайн книгу.
to his face.
His lips were curled as if in a half smile, his eyes questioning.
“Surely you’ve seen all God gave me, Olwyn. Why the modest blushes?”
“I played nursemaid, not slut,” she snapped. And recalling the touches she’d stolen, felt ashamed.
“I’m not diminishing your care. I live, and I’m grateful for your tending.”
Olwyn ducked her head from the disconcerting sight of all that male flesh. He was right—she’d seen his skin. And stroked it. But when he’d been unconscious, she’d not found him so overwhelming. Now, however, she couldn’t help but envision every last inch of that body, and the memories made her cheeks burn. “Cover yourself.”
“Gladly. Where are my garments?” Lóchrann touched his chest once again, to the cut that her father had made. “And I wore a pendant, also.”
Olwyn rummaged in the back of the wagon and withdrew the long, tattered nightshirt, stockings, and cloak she’d stolen from her father. She handed them to Lóchrann without meeting his eyes.
“These are not mine,” he said.
“You were nude when I found you,” she told him, knowing this would prompt more questions from him, but not knowing how else to explain his lack of possessions. “I saw no pendant.”
Lóchrann let out a little laugh, but he didn’t sound happy. He held the garments up for inspection, clearly noting that they were made for a man shorter and plumper than himself.
Olwyn stole a glimpse at his face, saw the frustration evident in his expression. He seemed to struggle for a moment to gain his composure, before biting out, “Where, pray tell, did you happen to find me, Olwyn?”
Olwyn opened her mouth to answer, but words failed her. The truth was horrifying. He’d been pulled from a crypt and dumped on her doorstep. Her father was a ghoul and Lóchrann’s corpse had been lain out in their dungeon, ready for dissection.
He didn’t seem to remember waking in the dungeon.
She could lie to him, and maybe when they parted ways he would remember her as the woman who saved his life, and not the scion of a fiend who’d perched at his side, prepared to sketch his liver.
Lóchrann’s mouth flattened. Those dark blue eyes bored into hers, transfixing her. The hand that gripped her father’s garments tightened into a fist. “Olwyn. Some truth, please.”
He was so handsome. The truth was so ugly.
If she told him, he would be repulsed by her. Just like all the men in her village.
“You were brought to our keep, stripped and presumed dead,” she whispered. Lies were for cowards.
“Your keep,” he repeated, stressing the latter word with what sounded like disbelief. “Who brought me there?”
Olwyn closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “The resurrection men.”
Aidan fought back a wave of dizziness that swept through his brain, and his legs were so weak they trembled with the effort of standing.
Resurrection men. Yes, he knew who they were and what they did. They were gravediggers who pulled bodies from crypts and graves so they could sell the corpses.
His gaze traveled around the landscape. The rolling hills were stark and lifeless, the trees black and naked against the steely silver-white sky. Above them a hawk glided on a cushion of air, and in the distance he heard its screaming call, a hunter’s warning to its prey.
Aidan brought his attention back to the strange woman before him. In the full light of day he saw her beauty, her strangeness. Her eyes were as gray as the sky behind her, like hammered metal. The garments she wore clung to her form in fey, draping swirls and belled sleeves, their smoky shade of plum contrasting her fair skin and black hair. That white streak drew his eye, and seeing his train of vision, she touched it self-consciously.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Somewhere in England,” she replied. He watched as Olwyn’s lips trembled. She glanced at the wagon, and then back to him. “Cheltenham, Gloucester, perhaps. I am not certain. But for now, you really ought to go lie down. ’Tis too cold for you to be outside.”
“You are traveling?”
“I am.”
“Where do you go?”
“South,” she replied, as if that were answer enough.
Aidan didn’t have much strength left. Soon he would need to go lie down again. And yes, the warmth of the fire beckoned.
Looking at Olwyn, however, he found himself rooted there, caught up in the sensation of being in another time. It felt like he and she were removed from civilization as he’d known it, reduced to stone huts and fire pits carved from the earth.
And Aidan realized he rather liked it, the notion of being in this woman’s care, pulled from the grave into a different time and a new life.
For years he’d felt buried, suffocated. His life never felt quite like his own, and the map of his future had been kept from him. Yet Aidan had always felt honor-bound, a slave to it, never free to be his own man, make his own way, and live his own life.
He toyed with the notion of not asking more questions, but just going off with this odd, witchy woman into an unmapped future. He envisioned what that could be like, simple, sensual, stripped to basics.
Everything about Olwyn was mysterious and different, from her clothing to her hair, the way she spoke with such forthright self-possession, and the way she smelled of a hauntingly unfamiliar smoky perfume. Looking at her lips, he realized he wanted to touch them, kiss them. He wanted to ease that pointed chin down and plumb her mouth with his tongue.
Aidan reveled for a moment in the fantasy of burning his past and becoming someone different. No one would know who he was, his titles or his heritage. No one would look at him with that all too familiar glitter of curiosity: which twin is the heir? Which twin will be duke? Questions to which even he did not know the answers.
He could just be Lóchrann.
Olwyn and Lóchrann, two names as ancient as the soil they stood upon, as the humble building behind them, and as the standing stones he saw in the distance.
He imagined what that future could hold: a journey, discovery, primitive attraction. And if Olwyn found herself enamored with him and he her, Aidan would not fight it. He would follow his impulses. He would handfast with her, a ritual nearly lost in an age of published banns and licenses to wed.
Such strange thoughts ran through his mind, driven by a single curiosity: what did her body look like beneath that unusual gown?
Aidan pulled back from his own thoughts in disgust, mentally scolding himself. Where was his loyalty to Padraig, his parents, and his betrothed? Why had he so easily forgotten Mira’s gentle sweetness and sunny smiles, spellbound as he was by this raven-haired enchantress?
It seemed impossible. Aidan did not think himself the sort of man whose romantic attentions were easily diverted. He was loyal. Steadfast.
And yet…
“Are you some sort of witch, Olwyn?”
She hesitated only the barest second.
“People stopped burning witches a hundred years ago,” she answered, her tone brittle. “Surely you don’t believe in such nonsense.”
“That’s not an answer, is it?”
She raised one of her slashing brows. It formed a peak above her eye. “The streak of white in my hair is a birthmark. My mother had it, and her mother before her. ’Tis a family trait, not a mark of Satan.”
He suddenly felt foolish, addled by sickness and disorientation. He was behaving as indecorous as his surroundings,