A Pirate's Wife for Me (18 page)

A prickle of warning ran up her spine. Turning her head, she caught Taran watching her. His dark eyes gazed on her as if she were the most glorious female on earth, and her instincts stirred as she stretched, spreading her hair across the blanket, giving him a sultry smile.

He didn't smile back. His head lowered, his nostrils flared. He looked furious, or … not furious, but pained. As if it hurt him to look at her here.

"You don't even understand a smidgeon of the power you hold," he said, and his guttural voice puzzled her.

Her smile faltered. "What do you mean?"

He shook his head. "I shan't tell you. I have to save myself somehow."

She still didn't understand, but she so seldom understood men and their vague pronouncements.

Coming to her side, he dropped to his knees. He picked up one of the locks of her hair and rubbed it between his fingers. "You have the most beautiful hair I've ever seen. You must never cut it."

"Some people disdain red hair as immoral." She let her eyes twinkle up at him. "But I know my hair gets a man's attention."

"That it does. Too many men's attention."

"Better yet, all kinds of stories circulate about a woman with red hair — that she's tempestuous, spirited and given to wicked thoughts." Cate grinned at him "You lads can think what you wish, but I'm no more tempestuous than the next girl."

"And I think" — he leaned down and kissed her lightly — "that you don't know yourself at all."

She circled his neck with her arms.

Stretching out beside her, he gazed into her face. "You're a peculiar girl. You say whatever you think."

"Only to you! You understand me."

"No. I don't."

"What don't you understand?"

"You say you love me, but I don't know why."

"All the lasses love you. Don't they?" She felt her smile dip and quiver. "Kiernan says you've bedded half the maids."

"I pride myself I've given them the best thirty seconds of their lives."

She didn't really understand, but she laughed because she thought he wanted her to.

"But they don't love me," he said. "They say they like my accent. They say I'm big and strong and handsome."

She touched her fingertips to his lips. "You are."

He kissed them. "You always loved me, even when I was skinny and scared and mean. I don't understand why."

"Because you're like me. You want adventure. You want to be strong and brave." She plucked at the buttons on his shirt. She couldn't look at him. Not when every word she spoke was torn from that secret, earnest corner of her soul. "You're more than merely an orphan fostered by the MacLean clan. You can do great things, and you will. I know I can do great things, too, and I'll do them at your side." She peeked up at him.

He stared at her, his mouth slightly open. "By the saints, Caitlin MacLean, you're a marvel."

She could see maturity in the shading of his black beard on his chin, the bushy line of his eyebrows, and his shoulders, which were broad enough to block out the sky. Yet remnants of boyhood clung in the smooth, unmarked skin and in the way he stared at her, as if she were someone unique and wonderful.

Sliding his arm under her head, he kissed her. Not a kiss like the one in the orchard, but a real kiss this time like the ones the other girls — the ones who had lived in Edinburgh and thought themselves so chic — talked about. He opened her lips with his. He sought her tongue. It felt odd, this melding of their tastes, but after a moment of indecision she decided she liked it. Shutting her eyes, she let him feast on her. Dimly, she could still hear the wind in the branches and the singing of the lark. Her arms encircled his neck, his torso pressed against hers, and she liked that, too.

Lifting his head, he flicked his finger at her open buttons. "Did you think to seduce me?"

"Yes." She grinned saucily. "Is it working?"

"Everything you do is a seduction." He smiled. A slow stretch of the lips, all temptation and promise. "Do you remember on Midsummer's Eve when the clans went out to the hills to light the fires, and you fell asleep on that rock?"

"Yes." She had the feeling she wasn't going to like this.

"I found you. You were sleeping so hard you were drooling —"

"Taran!" Humiliated, she tried to shove him away.

He wouldn't let her. "Still I wanted you. I want you when you're yelling at Graeme for not letting you play cricket. I want you when you've been carrying wood for Cook and you have smudges all over your face and wood chips in your hair. I want you when you're returning from a crofter's cottage, alight with the miracle of helping deliver a wee babe. You're tall and you're beautiful and you're kind. I want to absorb you into my soul."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Taran's intensity frightened Cate. She tried to turn her head away, but he kissed her cheek and the corner of her mouth, and she found herself turning her face to his like a daisy toward the sun. This kiss was deeper, warmer than any other that had gone before, and she experienced the beginning of a sea change. Like the tide, she moved inevitably and intuitively, concentrating completely on the sensations that welled in her heart and in her body. Taran unbuttoned her bodice past her waist, and she didn't really even notice until he spread it and her chemise apart. Then she gasped, and looked at herself, at her pale breasts exposed to the sunshine.

She blushed again, such a foolish reaction, but the way he stared at her!

"Taran?" Her voice wobbled. "What are you … what are you thinking?"

He didn't answer. He lightly touched the tips of her nipples with his fingertips. Color burned hot in his brown cheeks, and his chest rose and fell in hard jerks, as if the effort of breathing required attention, and he had no attention to give. All his concentration was on her.

A combination of embarrassment and agitation made her push his hands away.

Instead, he caught her and pressed her fingers to her breasts. "Show me what you like," he whispered. "At night, when you're alone in your bed and want pleasure, what do you do?"

She was afraid she would succumb under a fit of mortification. "Taran! I don't —"

He smiled at her. "Don't you?"

"I can't show you …"

But he began to move her fingers for her. He pressed her breast, then lifted her fingers to circle her nipple. "Like that? Do you do that when you think of me?"

"Y…yes. And … this." Closing her eyes, she wet one finger in her mouth and touched herself.

He caught his breath harshly, then his mouth closed on her other breast.

Her eyes sprang open. She was horrified and … dear God, that felt like heaven. The suction, the dampness, the warmth … he suckled ruthlessly, caressing every nerve. His tongue revolved around her nipple, and dimly she heard herself gasping. It wasn't horror anymore. No, it was sweetness and heat, deep inside. Her legs moved restlessly as between them, she grew moist.

Then she was horrified and embarrassed again, and she pressed her knees together to stop the flow. But as long as he kissed her there … his hand plucked at her other nipple. That doubled the sensations flooding her. And when she pressed her knees together hard, she wanted … her back arched, offering herself to him.

Above her, the branches waved, green needles and brown bark against a blue-and-white sky.

On the blanket, she writhed beneath his touch, and he … he pressed himself against her, moving his hips strongly against her side. He groaned deeply. "Caitlin. I want to be … I want to love you." He tugged at her skirt, lifting it.

Now? Did he mean … now? With her skirt around her waist and his trousers around his knees?

Cool air washed across her bare legs.

Shoving him away, she sat up. "No!"

Shock blanked his face. He looked as if she had slapped him, but she didn't have time to kiss his brow and soothe his feelings. Instead, she tore at the petticoat ties at her waist. Kneeling, she pulled her arms out of her gown. Stumbling to her feet, she dropped the gown, the petticoats to the ground.

A different kind of shock held him now, and he watched her as he would a pagan fertility goddess.

Clad in only her pantalettes and her chemise, she spread her arms wide and stared upward, asking for a benediction. She found it in the sunshine on her skin, the breeze in the trees, the blue sky that stretched to infinity.

Then she shimmied out of her chemise, dropped her pantalettes, and stepped out of them.

She wore nothing. In this beautiful day, in the sunshine and the breeze, she was as God had made her.

She looked down at Taran, still a little fearful, but proud of her body and determined to fling herself into their joy.

"I've never seen anything as lovely in my life as you are right now." He spaced each word as if he had to think before articulating the syllables. His hand slowly reached for her inner thigh. He laid his palm against the skin, then slid it in a spiral up to her hip and around her waist. He cupped her buttocks at the bottom where they met her legs, and he squeezed gently, rhythmically.

She felt it between her legs. The tugging of the skin, the wonder of his intimate touch … she was aware of heaviness in her loins, and once again she was damp and aching.

His finger slipped between her legs.

She stiffened her knees, closed her eyes, and braced herself.

He barely touched her. Only the ends of her hair, little touches that transmuted themselves into great thrills of pleasure.

How could he do so little and she feel so much?

By the time his thumb glided along her folds and opened her to his touch, her knees were ready to collapse. But with his other hand he held her steady, and began a slow, soft exploration of such sensuality she found herself sliding her hands into her own hair and holding her head. For balance, perhaps. Or sanity.

He caressed all around the important parts — the nub she touched when she thought of him, and the entrance to her body. His fingers would get close, and she would tense with anticipation. Then they'd glide away, and she wanted to scream at him for being so ignorant. Didn't he know …? Should she tell him …?

But she couldn't. She couldn't tell him …

She couldn't bear it any longer. "Please, Taran."
"What?" He kissed her hip. "Tell me what you want."

"Please. Touch me."
"I am." The hand on her hips, that one held her steady, rubbed her in a circle.

"Not there. Not there."

"Where?"

Exasperated and desperate, she pressed her hand over the top of his, over her clitoris. "There!"

"Ohh." His voice was deep and almost amused. "There."

He was teasing her. The bastard was teasing her. She would have aimed a roundhouse at the side of his head … but suddenly, he got it right. He found her nub and stroked it.

She whimpered and tried to stifle it with her fist. Inside her, pressure grew for what reason she did not know. She only knew her hips rippled in some primitive dance that she somehow recognized.

Then he found her. The center of her. The dampness. The tightness. The almost-pain of desperate arousal.

He entered her with his finger. She didn't notice the intrusion, or the oddness of having an alien being — a man — touch her there. She only cared that he eased that ache that made her shiver in the bright sunshine. His finger went deep, then out, then deep.

Her knees gave out.

He caught her on the way down, stretched her out on the blanket. He tore at his clothes, but she no longer cared whether he took the time to undress. She wanted him now, there, between her legs.

She lifted one knee.

He paused in the act of pulling off his shirt. He stared, and cursed. The shirt went flying.

She rolled one hip off the ground, the movement like a voluptuous ocean swell along her body.

He dropped his trousers and underwear.

In the dappled sunlight, he was beautiful, an unknown landscape of relentless splendor. Muscles knotted his shoulders and changed into smooth cords along his arms and chest. Dark hair covered his brown skin, lightly along his powerful arms and legs, then gathering in the middle of his breastbone and growing in a column down to his groin. From that thatch of hair thrust his manhood, hooded, rosy at the top, blue-veined … and large. Larger than she'd expected.

Too large?

But she had no time for second thoughts. He was there, his knees between hers. A weight on her body, warm and musky, a dangerous male atop her.

Scent. Strength. Passion. She was drowning in her senses. The rough blanket scratched her bare back. The crushed grass barely cushioned her.

He braced himself on one elbow. He fumbled below with the opposite hand, his knuckles brushing at her until she thought she would go mad.

She combed his hair with her fingers, leaned up and kissed his face, doing anything she could imagine to entice him.

He found her. She felt the pressure, the sense that the final assault had begun. Her eyes slid shut as she concentrated on controlling her intuitive withdrawal. She would not draw back now. Skimming her hands down his body, she grasped his hips and urged him steadily closer.