Page 20 of Loving Graystoke's Heir

He held her against him with her chin over his shoulder and a rock steady arm around her body, his hand gripping her hip.

He was running, but she barely felt the impact through her body. How could he be traveling that fast and not bouncing her against his larger form? Not causing her any pain?

Confusion? Oh, she had plenty of that!

But he held her with such tender care that the differences in his behavior made her head spin.

“Donal, stop.”

He continued, but he slowed his pace, lowering her a scant inch along his muscular form.

And that’s when she tensed even more in his one-armed hold.

“Donal?”

He took a few more steps and stopped, coming to rest in a small clearing under a rooftop of trees.

Tamsin managed to release his shoulders from her grasping fingers and laid her palms over the unfamiliar rise of muscles that hadn’t been there when she saw him last. “You’ve changed.”

He didn’t speak.

She heard each breath that passed through his nose and into his body.

Again, she moved her hands and tried to wrap her hand around his arm just above his elbow. She hadn’t quite been able to do it before. It had just been a way to put her hands on him and hold him close, but at that moment, during their sudden and stunning reunion, she doubted that her hand could reach halfway around his arm at that point.

Shaking her head, she lifted her gaze to his face and saw all the ways that he had changed there too.

His hair had always been on the long side. His mother had called him her ‘wild boy’ when they had been children, running around the gardens. And even when she’d passed, Donal had kept it long, choosing to let Tamsin cut it for him even though she was woefully inept at first. Still, looking at it in that moment, Tamsin saw that it had been cut recently, closer at the sides than she’d ever seen it.

Tracing the hairline with her fingers she found herself mourning the length that had been there.

The length that she had run her fingers through as he seated himself inside of her.

The memory flared in her mind like a torch roaring to life and she turned her head to the side as if doing so would make it go away, or put it behind her.

Instead, it burned even brighter, and the heavy press of his body on hers was more than just her imagination.

“Tam…”

She felt the way his jaw moved under his skin, the way it stretched under the heel of her hand, and the stubble bristling against her tender flesh.

“You’ve changed so much.” She said the words, but she wasn’t even sure what she meant, or even if it was about one thing or Donal in his entirety. “I see that it’s you, but there’s so much about you that’s a stranger to me.”

“Tam-” He covered her hand again and turned his head until his lips touched her wrist. “Tamsin. You’ve always known me.”

She wanted to agree.

It would be so easy to do it. It would mean less of a confrontation. Less sadness for both of them.

“No, I don’t think so.”

The eyes that had once been so open to her seemed to shutter in that moment. The shade of the trees fell heavily under the canopy of their leaves, and as she felt him reach for her she stepped back and put enough distance between them that she could regain her physical balance.

And hopefully her perspective.

“How long have you been here?” She reached for an easy topic and hoped she’d found one. “Working with…”

“The Bandile?” He didn’t wait for her nod. He understood her question. “A little more than a year. There are a number of groups that work against the poachers, but this group,” his eyes searched the dark underbrush as if he was expecting something to leap out of the shadows, “felt like friends from the first time I joined them.”

---