Redeemed (Heroes of the Highlands) - By Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,30
for the Fae. Perhaps he would help you as you’re a Druid and all.”
Daroch looked at her then. The earnest kindness in her steady gaze shamed him, which stirred his temper. She was supposed to be angry with him, dammit. She was supposed to be here to scream and rant at him as was a woman’s way when she had been so wrongly scorned.
“Because yer father’s gods and legends are all ignorant superstitions with no basis in reality,” he challenged her.
“Oh?” she lifted one eyebrow, but also quirked the corner of her lips. “Enlighten me.”
He planned to. As soon as he could form a memory or thought that didn’t pertain to her generous mouth.
“Ah.” His eyes dropped lower, to the breasts lifted higher by her arms crossed beneath them. If he studied them very hard, he could make out the darker shade of her small pink nipples. “Um.”
“The lights?” she reminded, her voice warm with amusement.
He wrenched his gaze toward the sky, seeking salvation there. “These lights are actually produced by incredibly powerful winds emitted by a flare from the sun.”
“Well that makes sense,” she agreed. “Bal is the God of the sun.”
“No, no” he gestured impatiently. “The sun has nothing to do with a deity. The Sun is merely a star, a very close star burning so hot and so big that we are pulled toward it in our planetary orbit.”
She gave him a silent, skeptical look.
He threw up his hands, running into his biggest annoyance of the modern century. “How is it possible that we Druids, and Anaxagoras and Copernicus were discovering this more than a thousand years ago and it’s still not—” He cut of his own digression with a tight sound, rubbing at his temples. “Regardless, let me explain the lights.” He drew in a deep, slow breath. “The Earth’s core is made of molten alloy. As our planet spins around the Sun, it creates magnetic fields that emanate outward and protects us from this dangerous solar wind. When the highly charged winds flare at their mightiest, they can sometimes make their way through this magnetic field and they encounter our oxygen and nitrogen and other atmospheric elements. Thus, that interaction manifests itself in the far northern and far southern points of our world, as those are key magnetic points of opposition.”
He glanced back at her, to gauge her comprehension.
She was looking at him as though he’d lost his mind. “That seems… unlikely.” She wrinkled her nose.
He grunted. “More unlikely than deities and magic?”
“You forget,” she chided gently. “I’m a creature of magic. And so are you.”
Too exasperated to sit anymore, he stood in one fluid move. “Trust me, I havena forgotten,” he insisted. “But I doona believe that magic is mystical. Just a greater understanding of what we doona yet know. No magic is absolute and no magical creature indestructible. The laws of the Universe tend to balance such things.”
She shrugged. “If you say so.”
“Argh!” He threw his hands up and stormed away from her, angling south across the moor. She was so damned adorable. So sweet and wounded and… “What are ye doing here anyway, besides being an insufferable Harpy?”
“Not Harpy,” she corrected, keeping perfect pace with him. “Banshee. And I’m here to apologize for last night.”
He snapped his head to look at her. “What the bloody hell do ye have to be sorry for?”
“What I said—what we did— upset you.” She offered him a conciliatory smile. “And I regret it, because everything before that was…” She delicately cleared her throat and looked away from him, her cheeks tinged with that becoming heat.
“Aye, that it was,” he agreed gently. Because the lass was absolutely correct, whatever it had been defied words. The most erotic experience of his life. And he’d not even been an active part of it. How was it possible? And he’d acted like a fool. He’d tainted the experience with his own weakness. “It is I who was wrong,” he admitted. “Which is rare.” The addendum eased the peculiarity of the admission.
Her melodious laugh was a delicate explosion of delight. It rippled across the sky as remarkable as the northern lights. All the moisture in Daroch’s mouth dried and bloomed in his palms, which he rubbed on his trews.
“It did help, you know.” They skirted a marsh pond and still angled south, the only sounds other than their voices were Daroch’s heavy boots on the soft earth. “It was… I felt… Anyway, I understand more now about lovemaking versus violence. Pleasure