“Aye. Truly.”
“You have too many clothes on,” Chloe complained breathlessly a few moments later.
He offered her his dirk to cut them off, but she took one look at those snug leather trews and decided there was no way she was letting a sharp blade get near what she knew was inside them.
So she borrowed another of his delicious tactics and undressed him mostly with her mouth.
Chloe was deliriously content. Curled with her backside to Dageus’s front, his strong arms wrapped around her, she was blissfully sated.
He loved her. He’d not only told her, he’d shown her with his body. It was there in the way he stroked her cheek or brushed her curls from her eyes. It was there in his long, slow kisses. It was there in the way he held her in the aftermath.
With that resolved, she was impatient to lay all her concerns to rest. With such love between them, she knew they could face anything together.
She squirmed in his embrace, slipping around in his arms to face him. He smiled at her, one of those lazy, melting smiles he gave so rarely, and kissed her.
Sighing with pleasure, and before he could distract her again, she drew her head back, breaking the kiss. “Dageus, I’m ready to know about the curse now. Tell me what it is, and tell me what you’re looking for.”
He kissed her again, lazily, sucking her lower lip.
“Please,” she persisted. “I need to know.”
He smiled faintly, then sighed. “I ken it. I’ve wanted to tell you, but it seemed you needed a bit more time.”
“I did. So many things happened so quickly, that I felt like I needed to catch my breath or something. But I’m ready now,” she assured him.
He stared at her a long moment, his eyes narrowed. “Lass,” he said softly, “if you tried to leave me, I fear I wouldn’t let you. I fear I would do whatever I had to do, no matter how ruthless, to keep you.”
“I consider myself warned,” she said pertly. “Trust me, I’m not going anywhere. Now tell me.”
He held her gaze a bit longer, silently assessing her. Then, capturing her hands in his, he twined their fingers together and began.
“So let me get this straight,” a wide-eyed Chloe clarified some time later, “you used the stones to go back in time and—oh! That’s what that quote in the Midhe Codex meant about the man who takes the bridge that cheats death! The bridge is the Ban Drochaid, ‘the white bridge,’ because you can take it backward in time and undo a person’s death. That quote was about you.”
“Aye, lass.”
“So you saved Drustan’s life, but because you broke a sacred oath that you’d sworn to the Tuatha Dé, you ended up setting an ancient evil free?”
He nodded warily.
“Well, where is this ancient evil?” she asked, bewildered. “Are you chasing it through the centuries or something?”
He made a sound of dry, dark amusement. “Something like that,” he muttered.
“Well?” she prodded.
“Rather, ’tis chasing me,” he said, nearly inaudibly.
“I don’t understand,” Chloe pressed, blinking.
“Why doona you just leave it for now, Chloe? You know enough to help us search. If, while reading, you find aught about the Tuatha Dé or the Draghar, bring it to my or Silvan’s attention.”
“Where is this ancient evil, Dageus?” she repeated evenly.
When he tried to turn his face away, she cupped it in her hands and refused to let him look away.
“Tell me. You promised to tell me it all. Now tell me where the damned thing is and, more important, how do we destroy it?”
Dark gaze boring into hers, he wet his lips and said softly, “ ’Tis inside me.”
• 23 •
Chloe delicately turned a thick vellum page of the tome on her lap, though she was not really reading it, too lost in thought.
’Tis inside me, he’d said, and so many things finally made sense to her. Bits and pieces slid neatly into place, giving her her first real glimpse of the whole man.
He’d told her everything that night, several days ago, as they lay in bed, faces close, fingers laced. About Drustan and Gwen (no wonder Gwen had been trying to brace her!), and about how Drustan had been enchanted and put in the tower. He told her how he’d immersed himself working on Drustan’s future home (and now she knew why he’d sounded so proud of the castle), and about the fire in which Drustan had died. He told her about the night he’d warred with himself, then gone into the stones and broken his oath. He told her that he’d not truly believed in the old legends till the ancient evil had descended upon him in the in-between, and it had been too late.