He took her in more slowly then, his fingertips tenderly tracing his eyes' path.

“Your ribs.” he murmured, cradling her torso gently in her hands. “They're better?”

She nodded wordlessly, unable to speak. She was still a little stiff, but that didn't matter now. Nothing mattered but them. This moment.

She brought her hands to his cheeks, and carefully pushed the hair from his face. The ir eyes locked. His brown and warm on her. His features, so sharp and strong, softened, only for her.

“I love you, MacColla,” she whispered. “I'm here because of you. Only you.”

“I'll love you all my days,” he replied huskily. His voice was fierce, and his grasp on her grew firmer. He skimmed his hands up her sides, his thumbs chafing her nipples into aching points.

He took her mouth again with his. She shut her eyes and felt as he tilted her up and back down to rest on his now naked body.

The feel of him sent a spark flashing through her. His erection was hot and smooth at her cleft, and she kissed him again, hungrily, moaning her need into his mouth.

He lifted her up, slowly easing her onto him. The physical memory of their first time still lingered inside her, the full feel of him, the wet scent and slide, and she was desperate for more.

She clutched him to her with her arms and legs, and ground her hips down hard, begging with her body to intensify their rhythm.

He rocked into her, devouring her mouth and neck and breasts. His kisses left a trail of damp on her hot skin, a map of his passion chilled at once by the night air, and the sensation was as if he seared into her, marking her.

She grew frantic, couldn't get him close enough, and MacColla rose to his knees, pulled from her, and flipped her to kneel before him.

Haley gasped a complaint when she felt him slide out, but MacColla was immediately back inside her, from behind, so deep and so full she felt her body bursting from the joy of it. Her love for him filled her up, spilled over, overwhelmed her.

She felt a wild thing on her hands and knees before him. The sensations were almost too much to bear. Her blood raged through her, flushing cheeks and chest, throbbing between her legs, demanding release.

Her body was spinning out of control. She leaned forward, trembling as she rested her weight on her forearms. The beach was gritty and cold on her knees and at the tops of her feet. She dug her fingers into the chilled sand, trying to ground herself, but her conscious self was receding into some faraway place.

Her body rocked as he thrust into her. Her vision was fractured, registering a dreamy patchwork of images. A hand - hers, she realized - clawed into the sand.

She tilted her chin to look down along her body. Saw his hand, so large on her breast, rubbing her, chafing her, cradling her. And the sight of it shattered the last of her rational thought. She became pure feeling.

Neither spoke now. His muttered words of having her, of loving her, of keeping her, replaced now by his heavy breathing. The sound of him filled her head, echoed the wash of the waves and the short panting of her own breath.

He suffused her, so completely, her body, her mind. The rhythms of her heart and breath. MacColla filled her utterly.

She'd let her mind go, and now the last of her physical self surrendered. Her climax wracked her body, blood thrumming through her in heavy waves. She felt rapturous, as if she'd transcended her body to become some metaphysical thing exploding into space.

She heard MacColla as if from a distance. A low groan, the huff of his breath. He pumped hard and quick into her. Then a roar at her back as he found his own release.

He kissed the nape of her neck, and spoke words that felt hot on her damp skin. “You'll never forget you're mine.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“You can't go to Ireland,” she stated simply.

“Och, love.” MacColla turned Haley to face him. They stood at the water's edge, ready to sail once more.

They'd landed safely on Islay, situated Colkitto at Dunyveg Castle. Though they'd gathered almost a dozen men for their journey, the MacDonald castle had to be ready for what protracted siege might come, and neither provisions nor weapons could be spared. Not wanting to tax the already overburdened Islay stronghold, they were to leave immediately for the northeastern coast of Ireland.

“ We travel to Ireland,” he said. “I need to gather more men.

I have no choice.”

“You always have a ”-

“Hush,” he whispered, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Heed me, leannan. Campbell blazes through Kintyre. My clansmen barely hold Dunyveg. With disaster to the left of me and death to the right, my only choice is but to plow forward.”

But Haley knew. Disaster and death lay before him as well.

MacColla looked at someone over her shoulder, and she turned to see a knot of approaching clansmen. Rollo managed stiffly, shuffling ten paces behind the group. He gave MacColla a grim nod.

That would mean all was ready. The time had come.

Heart skittering in her chest, Haley climbed into the boat. The birlinn's bench was hard beneath her, and she was forced to sit rigidly upright, her discomfort doing nothing to calm her.

She looked across the sea as they set out, focused on those few sounds that filled the air, but they only agitated her. The creak of wood as the men rowed. The small splish of oars dipping in and out of the water. The rhythmic slap of the sea against the hull. They approached closer to Ireland, and every noise tightened the knot in her stomach.

Hours passed with her staring sightlessly over the water, fear and uncertainty glazing her eyes. The sea was as calm as MacColla promised it would be, and the gray sky darkened so gradually, it seemed one moment it was day and the next night.

As the sky blackened, it exploded into millions of points of light. Just when she thought the vast bowl overhead might swallow her dark thoughts, she saw it. Terror shot through her. Ireland.

It emerged from the shadows, stark and black, looming close. In that moment, she knew such hatred and fear for the place, it roiled in her stomach.

Ireland, that had once brought her such joy, now seemed an evil thing, monstrous and portentous, hovering before them like some great slumbering beast.

As they approached the shore, their boat began to bob wildly, fighting the waves that crested and broke along the sandy cove, shimmering pale in the starlight.

She inhaled sharply and looked up to the sky as if that could help tip back the fall of her tears.

Haley felt a hand on her thigh. His hand. Warm, loving. But for how long? How long until this hero of old lay cold in his grave?

She shivered.

“What will be, will be, leannan” She felt his fingers, strong and sure, stroking her cheek. He cupped her face, turned it toward him.

She shut her eyes tight, unable to look at him, feeling her heart breaking already at the loss of him. Tears squeezed out.

Even before her eyes fluttered back open, she knew what she'd see: love for her tempered by the single -minded drive to do what he could for his clan. She'd see his confidence, his determination that what he did was the right thing. The only thing.

But she knew differently. Triumph wasn't what waited for him on the shores of Ireland. It was death.

And she knew, death alone would sway MacColla from his mission.

It would be up to her to set all to rights.

She opened her eyes, studied him. Shadows blackened his brow, his mouth. He returned her gaze and she knew he'd not be the first to look away.

Haley gripped his hand, felt the give of his flesh in her nails.

She had her own mission. She couldn't lose him.

She no longer cared about James Graham, whether he lived or died. No longer cared about some foolish weapon. Studies and scholarship were meaningless now.

She knew only MacColla, and the future with him she so desperately craved.

Her father's voice came to her from far away. Those words he'd spoken at the bar, so long ago. Our Haley knows what she needs to do.

Flashing back to Boston, to her brothers and her father, brought pain searing through her chest. And her mother. If only she'd gotten to see her mother one last time.

But Haley knew in her heart she had a second family now. MacColla. Sitting next to her, clutching tight to her. Ready to give his own life for what he believed in. For his family.

There was no going back. She'd made her decision to be with MacColla.

Haley knew what she had to do. And this was it.

* * *

Their spirits deflated gradually over the following weeks. They'd landed at Dundrum, in County Down, and had begun the long march south to County Cork at once.

Ireland was rocky and green, rolling endlessly before them. Haley hadn't fully believed he intended hundreds of miles of hard marching, and quickly enough to elude the Parliamentary army.

“It's a long damned way to Tipperary,” she grumbled at some point on day ten. Ever since MacColla told her they skirted south of the famous burgh, she'd had the old World War I marching song stuck in her head.

“What do you cavil on about, lass?”

She looked to MacColla riding beside her. Black whiskers dusted his jaw and his shirt had seen better days, but he sat with a grin for her, as if he could will her into a better mood.

“Nothing,” she said, trying to muster half a smile. Tucking the reins under her thigh, she leaned close to her horse's neck, stretching the stiff muscles in her shoulders and lower back. “It's just… well, when will we get there?”

“Soon now, leannan. A Lord Taaffe waits for us at a place called Assolas House, in Duhallow.”

“Is he a Royalist?”

“Now there's a tricky question. Och, but what I'd do to scrape this from my face,” MacColla mumbled, scratching at his nascent beard. “A Royalist, you ask. Well, he is and he is not. In Scotland, you've got the Covenanters sympathizing with the English Parliament on one side. And then there's the Royalists who stand with the king on the other.”

“I know that.”

MacColla cut his eyes to her, smiling broadly. “Aye, I suppose you do then. Well, things get a wee bit more complicated in Ireland.”

Rolling his shoulders, he assessed the sun in the sky, as if control over their day's ride was a constant buzzing in the back of his mind.