around his handsome head and draw him up. Had Antimache not overruled her, Coure
might well be on the LRC at that very moment, though Penthe had not counted on the
interference of the Triune Goddess in the matter.
“But you should have,” she chastised herself. “You should have known She’d not
give him up easily.”
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Realizing she might well be stuck on this backward world for the remainder of her
days, Penthe cursed fluently and sat up, slapping her wrists atop her drawn-up knees
and glaring across the bucolic creek. Her vow to bring Coure back for punishment
might never be fulfilled, but she would take pleasure in hunting him, causing him as
much irritation and grief as she could.
“I want him hurt,” Kennocha had said on her deathbed. “I want him completely
destroyed.”
Penthe had read the bitter memories boiling inside her great-great-grandmother’s
head as the old woman lay there wheezing for breath. She had seen the handsome
young priest as the flames had swept upward to devour him. She had witnessed the
unbelievable rescue that had plucked Bevyn Coure from his just reward and had
commiserated with Great-Great-Grandmere Kennocha that justice had not been served
that day. Truth be told though, she couldn’t have cared less about the alleged injustices
Coure had supposedly perpetrated against her kinswoman. She wondered at
Kennocha’s state of mind as the old woman continued to rail so vehemently against the
priest.
“Pain of the highest order,” Kennocha had decreed. “Give him pain he will feel
throughout eternity!”
Such things came when a woman allowed herself to become obsessed with a male,
Penthe scoffed, knowing that would never happen to her. She herself had no use for
what she considered the weaker sex. Men were born to be used until they were used up
and then discarded for a newer, better model. They were not meant to be kept and
cosseted as the priest had been at Rathlin. Nothing good ever came from sheltering the
dirty little beasts from life’s travails. To her way of thinking, Great-Great-Grandmere
Kennocha had gotten what was due her but family obligations were more important
than personal feelings, and she would do what was needed to avenge her great-greatgrandmere.
Not to mention, Penthe thought as she got to her feet, she had her own personal
bone to pick now with Bevyn Coure. Because of him, she was trapped, whether
permanently or temporarily, on Terra and he would be made to pay for his part in the
problem. Dusting off the seat of her jumpsuit, she bent over to retrieve her Dóigra,
thinking of the one that had been taken from Asteria Kleite, the Amazeen who had
accompanied Penthe to Terra to retrieve Coure.
Asteria and Penthe had been more than partners. They had been lovers for over
eight years and Penthe intensely mourned her loss. The rabid rogue who had brought
Asteria down had savagely bitten her, tearing Asteria apart. The balgair had died for his
sins but Penthe had been so devastated at Asteria’s death, she had not thought to
retrieve Asteria’s weapon and had been careless in not making sure Roy English could
not rise from his rabid state to kill more women. When she had gone back to the shack
where Asteria had met her end, dreading to see once again the atrocities English had
committed, Penthe had found it burned to the ground, the Dóigra destroyed along with
the deplorable contents of the shack. A scan of the area had brought Coure’s scent. She
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knew he had finished what she should have seen ended and that irritated her beyond
acceptance.
It was just one more thing for which Coure would be made to answer when Penthe
had him in her clutches.
* * * * *
Leaving Lawler behind, Bevyn drummed his heels against Préachán’s flanks,
urging the steed into an easy gallop. He rode with his right hand on the reins, his left
braced on his thigh, his uneasy thoughts drifting back to the Blackwind. He knew he’d
have to go after the Amazeen, take her down, but for now there was nothing he wanted
more than to find his woman and hold her, lose himself in her sweet scent.
The memory of what he had found in the shack had come back to haunt him and
was sitting heavily on his soul. He knew it always would for such things were an
abomination—once seen, never forgotten. He suspected the Triune Goddess had
clouded his mind for a few hours of brief relief but now the sights were sitting in his
mind’s eye like a canker. That too would be Her doing.
“Lord Kheelan?” he asked, reaching out to the High Lord.
“We are here,” the Shadowlord replied.
“Were there any survivors of the crash?”
There was a long pause. “No, Lord Bevyn. Unfortunately not.”
“How many men died?”
“Fifteen.”
Bevyn closed his eyes. He wanted to ask how many had been married, how many
had fathered children, but a part of him didn’t want the burden of the knowledge
weighing down on his shoulders.
There were no more words from the Citadel. He knew the Shadowlords would be
discussing him still again and another tick would go on the healer’s chart—one more
thing about which to counsel Coure when he came to the bastion.
He reached up to take off his hat, armed the sweat from his brow and then pulled
the hat back on low over his forehead to shield his eyes from the sinking sun. Once
more his head was throbbing with pain. He needed the cool strength of his woman.
His woman, he thought as Préachán dug its hooves into a hill and climbed
effortlessly. It felt good to know there was someone so special waiting for him, someone
who wanted him, who loved him. Her bright smile, her open arms were like a beacon
toward which he traveled.
Another smiling face flashed across his memory and he frowned.
“Kennocha,” he whispered fiercely.
Her false smile and clinging arms were a curse from which he had fled, only to find
himself caught in an unbreakable trap.
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The past rose up before him to blot out the last of the sun’s dying rays, casting him
into a bleak landscape he had never wanted to travel again…
“You will go to Rathlin,” Archdeacon Janus had decreed. “There you will assume
the position as junior prelate for that district.”
There had been much talk of Rathlin at the monastery and the talk had not been
good. Over the years, the keep there had gone through priests like a sharp blade
through hot butter. Those assigned had simply vanished, never to be heard from again.
Where they had gone was the stuff of wild speculation—much of it centered on the
mistress of Rathlin, the Countess Kennocha Tramont.
“They say she is a witch,” the brothers whispered among themselves.
“The count holds his lady-wife hostage at Rathlin,” Archdeacon Janus had
explained to Bevyn. “They say he captured her in battle and keeps her chained on the
third floor of the keep.”
“Is that not wrong, Your Grace?” Bevyn had asked.
“What a man does with his lawful wife is no concern o
f the Brotherhood,” the
archdeacon had replied. “Our only mission is to tend his mortal soul. If he is true to the
Teaching—and Count Culbert is—that is all that matters in this life. What do we care
what he does with his woman?”
Completely unaware of what a man and woman did within the confines of their
marriage, Bevyn had pushed aside any worries he might have pertaining to Count
Tramont’s lady-wife. It was the man and his knights whose souls would be the thrust of
Bevyn’s interest and attending.
But upon arriving at Rathlin Keep, Bevyn had found great turmoil and strife.
Tramont was at war with a neighboring duchy and the lord of the keep had been sorely
wounded in the fray, lying on his death bed with wounds too numerous to heal. His
body as white as the sheet upon which he lay, he had weakly grasped the front of
Bevyn’s robe and drawn the young man nose to nose with him.
“She set this ill-begotten war into motion,” the dying man whispered, his voice
hoarse, blood gurgling in his throat. “She is the cause of it.”
Culbert Tramont had taken one last wheezing breath and had lain still, his eyes
wide, mouth ajar, drawing flies to the mortal cuts and holes that peppered his corpse.
Every knight sworn to Rathlin had been slain in the battle, their squires as well.
Only the foot soldiers who had turned and fled the melee escaped the hacking deaths
that had turned the fields around Rathlin crimson.
With no captain of the guard left to countermand the order, the countess had
demanded she be set free from the imprisonment her husband had forced upon her.
The household staff had responded quickly, afraid of what the countess would do if she
were ignored.
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“She’s a witch!” the chief steward had told Bevyn in a shaky voice. “A daughter of
the Abyss!”
Upon meeting the woman who was now mistress of Rathlin, Bevyn had seen the
fires of hell gleaming in Kennocha Tramont’s gaze. He had felt a shiver travel down his
spine the moment her hand had touched his cheek, her pale pink tongue sweeping
across a thin upper lip as she assessed him.
Despite his vehement protests, she had put her hands to his arms, his shoulders, his
thighs, had ordered him stripped naked, staring avidly at his utter humiliation as he
was held steady for her perusal.
“Good legs,” she’d remarked, walking around him. “A goodly sized staff.”
“Milady!” he had gasped, his face flame-red.
“You’ll do,” she’d declared, and turned her back on him, going back to the chamber
in which her husband’s still body lay upon its death bier.
He would learn a few days later that she had taken a war ax and had chopped her
dead mate into a hundred pieces, venting her rage upon him until his bedchamber was
a sea of gore.
Held captive in the dungeon for over a week—as naked as the day on which he had
been born—Bevyn had finally been brought before the countess and once more she had
put her hands to him. This time it had been his staff she had wrapped her fingers
around.
“Give yourself freely to me and I will let you live,” she had told him. “Deny me and
you will meet your doom in the bonfire.”
Bevyn had reminded her he was a priest, a man of the cloth who had taken vows of
poverty and chastity, but she had merely laughed at him.
“If you want to live, Bevyn Coure, you will give yourself to me and service me as I
wish to be serviced. Unlike your fellow priests, you will be mine and not Cul’s.”
The whole of the tale would be told to Bevyn on the night before his torment began.
Those who had come before him had been nothing more than playthings to the lord of
the keep. Count Culbert had sodomized and tortured the men then murdered them to
keep the news of his atrocities from reaching the ears of the Brotherhood. The dead
were dropped into the moat to feed the denizens that slithered and snapped there, all
traces of their existence wiped away in the scaled bellies of the crocs.
“You will meet the same fate, boy, unless you give her what she wants.”
“I am a man of the cloth,” he had protested. “I can not—”
“Make her yours,” the jailer had cut in. “Please her and you might live a day or so
longer.”
“I will not do that,” Bevyn had sworn.
“Then you’ll die a terrible death,” his jailer had declared.
For weeks on end he had been tortured, and at the end of each session had come the
question—“Will you give yourself to me now?”
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The answer had always been the same no matter how much had been inflicted
upon his body, how much blood he had shed. He would not forsake his vows to satisfy
the lust of a crazed woman, for it had become a test of wills—his and hers.
She had taken delight in pouring and rubbing salt into his wounds. She had
laughed at his screams of pain, his tears and his trembling body. She had enjoyed
watching him barely able to crawl from the rack to his pallet where he would lie
senseless until the next session began.
“And now, Bevyn?” she had whispered in her silky voice on the morning he had
been condemned to die. She caressed his genitals, stroking him suggestively. “Will you
forego the agony of the flames and take my body unto yours?”
“No, milady, I can not,” he had forced himself to say, and thought for just a
moment he saw respect in her insane gaze before she pronounced his death sentence.
useless life!”
Too weak to speak, in too much pain to do anything save draw shallow breaths in
and out of his lacerated chest, he had been taken to the courtyard to meet his fate. There
he had been lashed to the column and Kennocha had come out to watch him die.
“But I didn’t stay dead, did I, milady?” he asked aloud.
Ahead of him was Orson and the sweet arms to which he would ride for as long as
the goddess allowed him, and then in a sudden bright burst of awareness—reining in
Préachán because that awareness hit him squarely between the eyes like a ton of brick—
he realized that at last he had something, someone, to live for.
“Sweet, merciful Alel,” he whispered as tears gathered in his eyes.
He sat there trembling as that realization took hold of him, wrapping him in
warmth he had never known, soothing him with a peacefulness he did not know could
exist. He swallowed the lump in his throat.
“Lea.”
Her name on his lips was the sweetest sound, the most glorious feeling. He ached to
see her, to hold her, to hear her gentle voice.
“My Lea,” he said, and a smile broke across his handsome face.
Putting heels to his mount, he raced down the hill and into town, striving not to
whoop like a wild man as he drew his horse to a skidding stop and vaulted from the
saddle, running up the little fieldstone walkway to Cornelia’s front porch, taking the
four steps two at a time and snatching open the door.
“Lea?” he called out, and when he saw her at the top of the stairs, he grinned like an
idiot.
&nbs
p; “You’re home,” she said, hurrying down the steps.
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Her Reaper’s Arms
“I am home!” he said. He opened his arms and she threw herself in them, laughing
gaily as he swung her around, set her down for a moment then picked her up in his
arms.
“What are you doing?” she asked as he headed for the door.
“We’re going to Mable’s where a man can show his woman he loves her,” he said
determinedly.
“All her rooms are taken,” she said.
He paused at the door, swiveling her back and forth in his arms, his forehead
puckered with agitation. “Where, Lea? Where?” he demanded.
“Oh for the love of Peterson! Take the girl upstairs, son,” he heard Cornelia say
from the parlor. “Just this once, mind you. You ain’t gonna make a habit of it.”
Practically taking the stairs two at a time, Bevyn didn’t question their landlady’s
reprieve. He took his lady straight to his room, bumping the door open with his hip. He
carried her to the bed, plopped her down, rushed back to shut the door and with a
wave of his hand, eliminated the clothing Lea was trying desperately to remove as she
sat up on his mattress.
“That is a wonderful talent, milord,” she said with a gasp.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet, wench,” he told her, flying onto the bed and landing
atop her.
“You goofy oaf!” she complained with an oomph of air escaping her laughing
mouth.
His mouth slanted down on hers and his tongue thrust wickedly between her lips.
His arms went under and around her, and he wedged his lower body between her legs,
holding her so tightly she could barely breathe.
Lea loved the weight of her Reaper lying atop her. Her hands were clutching his
hard biceps and that too was a glorious feeling that made her feel safe, protected and
loved. His tongue was thrusting in and around hers, and those sweet, firm lips of his
were making warm heat flow between her thighs.
“I love you,” he whispered against her mouth. “With all my heart I love you!”
Bevyn’s cock was stiff, the tip moist. It was wedged between them along her belly
as he held her. When she slid her hand from his arm to run it between them and grasp
that hard shaft, he drew in a quick, shuddering breath.
“Show me how much, milord,” she said, her fingers wrapped around him.