Sing Me Home by Lisa Ann Verge Page A

deep.
    “They do,” he conceded, “but an Irish chieftain expects a different level of play-acting, and Arnaud has promised them the entertainment of a fine young songstress.”
    “I heard as much when Arnaud came upon the O’Dunns’ man on the road.” She scratched the squirrel under the little tuft of his ear while the squirrel’s black eyes fluttered closed. “I suppose you won’t let me sing Angelus ad virginem .”
    “Arnaud would prefer some song of love to please the ladies.”
    She took a deep breath, those white shoulders rising and falling in a way that pulled on him, and not solely in his braies. Innocence, he thought grimly. He’d forgotten what it looked like. He’d forgotten, too, what it was like to be that young, constantly surprised by the strange ways of the world.
    “Will you teach me a song, Colin?”
    She tilted her face. Her cheeks and forehead were beaded with steam and flushed from the heat of the cooking fire. Her lower lip trembled. He wanted to touch that lip, prove to her that the world could be a sweet place. He wanted to feel that lip give under his own mouth when sharp words weren’t rolling past it.
    Damn, he had an itch for her.
    “Walk with me,” he said, gesturing toward the deeper woods. “I’ll teach you a song but we’d best do it away from the mockery of these minstrels.”
    Rising, she deposited the sleepy ball of fur back into the woven basket she’d hung on a branch, and then fell into step beside him.
    “I suppose ‘Holy Trinity Save Me’ wouldn’t be considered a love song?” she asked, as they wove through the trees.
    “It’s not hymns that we’re singing, lass.”
    “Well, if it were, I’d prefer ‘Sin Threatens Our Ruin.’”
    “Aye, I could see how you would,” he said, casting her a smile as he remembered their earlier conversation. “My favorite hymn is ‘My Body Is My Soul’s Foe.’”
    He caught her surprised look.
    “Well, then, if it were hymns we were choosing,” she added in a small voice, “I think I’d best learn ‘Answer Not Insult.’”
    He heard the oblique apology in her words, but she did not meet his gaze. They walked in silence for a few minutes, long enough for him to notice the flecks of dirt that speckled her skin, making her look freckled and mussed and earthily appealing.
    “Teach me what love song you will,” she finally said, in a rushed little voice, “but please not the ‘As I Roved Out Into The World’ song I heard Maguire singing yesterday. There were endless rounds of that, and I believe my ears are still blistered.”
    “We can find you something better than that.” He riffled through his memory, going back to his student days at the school at Emain Macha, the royal seat of Ulster, when he spent hours sitting around the peat fire listening to a wizened bard chant old poems.
    He asked, “Do you know the story of Deirdre and the three sons of Usnach?”
    “Aye. Sister Agnes used to tell us that one, and stories of the Fenian warriors, too.”
    “I know a song about Deirdre’s farewell to Naoise, when he insists on returning to Ireland—”
    “—despite Deirdre’s dream that he will be betrayed as soon as he steps foot on his homeland.”
    He paused. “You know the song.”
    “Only the story. I had an education of sorts, living amid the nuns. Though it hasn’t served me well outside those walls.”
    She filled her lungs with air, and he watched the rise and fall of her full bosom, the nipples well delineated against the wool kirtle.
    His cock took notice, too.
    “Teach me that song,” she said, “before I have second thoughts.”
    Colin paused by a thick oak and ran through the song in his head as he traced his hand over the furrowed bark. “Matilda’s voice is better than mine, but I suppose I can muddle my way through it.”
    So he began. “ ‘Farewell, dearest love, the tide doth rise …”
    He spoke-sang the words, transported back to the springtime woods of his student days,