Highlander Mine (27 page)

“We’ll rest here for a time, to dry our clothes. The wind has picked up and you might catch a chill.”

He set me aside a haystack that was as tall as I was, looming large like a hulking, mounded sentinel. The fog had cleared with the breeze, but the sky was thick with dark clouds.

“Do you have a woolen blanket in that bag?” he asked.

“You mean you don’t
know?
” I said, petulant. “You didn’t have your guards rifle through my belongings to scour for clues and incriminations?”

“Actually, I did. I
do
know you have a woolen blanket in that bag. That and your wrap will keep us warm as our wet clothes dry in the wind. We’re both soaked to the skin. We’ll hang our clothes on the branches of this tree.”

Silver eyes challenged me to protest, which I promptly did. “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d
love
me to strip naked right here in the middle of this field and hang my clothes on that damn tree.”

“As a matter of fact, I would,” he replied, and I detected his brazen superiority was mildly ruffled by the very thought, and also faintly amused. “I
will
enjoy watching you remove your wet clothing as you hang it on that damn tree. I’ll also enjoy the fact that you will most probably survive the night if you’re dry and warm. The cold and the damp have a way of taking their toll on a blustery night. Such a chill can be deadly. So, if you value your life and your health, you’ll follow my orders.”

I stared at him warily. It was true I had little experience with such things. I’d spent most of my life indoors. I knew enough about cold, but had never spent a night out-of-doors in the wind or the rain. The scenario had once been one of my deepest silent fears.

Sensing my doubt, he said, “I’ll not take nay for an answer, and you can test me all you like. I’ll undress you myself if you refuse. Take your time,” he added generously.

I accepted, not without a degree of rancor, that he was probably right. “I can’t undress while I’m chained to you.”

He contemplated me evenly. Then he reached to pull the key from inside his clothing. “I’ll warn you now. I’m faster than I look.”

“It would hardly be in my best interests to bolt across this field into the unknown without a stitch of clothing on, now, would it, Laird Mackenzie?”

His eyes flashed with my impertinence, but he unlocked my cuff, then his own. He put the contraption back into his pocket. The key, he looped back around his neck. Then he removed his saturated coat and hung it on a low-hanging branch. In silence, we undressed. It was true the air had a frigid bite to it. My skin was cool and dimpled with the chill.

But with each item of clothing I removed, the center of me grew warmer. I was cold and damp in the breeze, and I found I was not averse to feeling the broiling heat of his body against mine. I reminded myself that this was all about survival.

“Can I keep my shift on, at least? ’Tis hardly wet.”

“Nay,” was the soft reply. “’Tis warmest skin to skin.”

Skin to skin.
Aye, we had lain skin to skin last night, but that romp had come about with fervor, and abandon. Disrobing in this deliberate, teasing way was a wholly different experience. I found my pulse quickening, not only in my chest but in the heated tenderness within me. I removed my shift with not an entirely unintentional flair, revealing all the abundance of my eggshell-white curves, which fairly glowed in the muted afternoon light.

He came to me, holding up the woolen blanket he had retrieved from my bag. It was impossible not to notice the significant protrusion of his massive arousal, which slid against my stomach as he wrapped the soft wool around us. “Pay no attention to it,” he said.

“How could I possibly do
that?
It’s enormous, and as hot as a newly forged sword.”

“I’ll thank you for the resounding adulation, milady,” he said. “Now come. We’ll rest here until our clothing has dried.”

Keeping the blanket wrapped around us, and holding my woolen wrap, which was nearly dry from the wind, he maneuvred us onto the haystack. He placed his weapons belt next to us within easy reach. Under our weight, the hay compacted, molding around the shape of us. It was in fact quite comfortable. We lay back into our pleasantly soft bed, and Knox draped the fur cape over our wrapped bodies, which were pressed together. Side by side. Skin to skin.

Above us, the dome of the dark sky was strewn with pillowy clouds that rolled and blustered across the heavens.

I was very aware of Knox’s hot flesh insinuated tightly between us. The velvet-hard texture of him against the skin of my stomach was having a potent effect on the already softening, delicate throb between my legs. He made no move to touch me in any other way.

After a few minutes, I felt mildly disappointed by this.

Not that we’d planned this outcome, but now that we were
in
this situation, it hardly seemed realistic to expect that something intimate wouldn’t come of it. Yet he lay still, his eyes closed, almost as if he were actually attempting to go to sleep. “You’re not going to chain me up with the cuffs?” I whispered.

“I’m a light sleeper and, entwined as we are, I think you’d wake me.”

I fingered the thin leather cord around his neck. I wanted to rile him. “Let me have the key.”

“Nay. Go to sleep.”

I wasn’t fooled by his complacency. His eyes were closed but it was obvious he was rampantly lusty. I crawled up his body, half climbing onto him as I attempted to slip the cord around his neck. He caught my hand, squeezing tightly. “Drop it,” he murmured.

I obeyed, only because his grip was ridiculously powerful. But I had other ideas. Easing myself down his body, I found what I was seeking, without difficulty. I wrapped my fingers around the rigid length of his engorged shaft. With my other hand, I cupped him from below, quite snugly, too.

He uttered the filthiest oath I’d ever heard.

“Laird Mackenzie,”
I scolded, tightening my hold. “’Tis hardly the way to speak around a lady. Especially one so delicate and meek as myself.”

He began some response that wasn’t entirely flattering, so I increased the pressure mildly and he reconsidered, offering only a muffled curse.

I let my fist slide along his massive silken length. Up and down, I caressed with his pleasure in mind but firmly enough to let him know I was very much in control.

“Please,” he wheezed.

“Nay,” I said, enjoying myself. Without releasing my hold, I slid farther down his torso. My bare breasts skimmed across the hair-roughened surface of his chest and I gasped lightly at the tickling, pleasure-laden sensation. I drew lower, until my breasts touched the scorching hardness I held in my hands. A drop of liquid had seeped from him, and the discovery emboldened me further. I kissed him, licking lightly, tasting his essence, playing the beauty. With my hands, I continued to explore an undulant coercion.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,”
he groaned.

“May I
please
have the key to your metal manacles?”

His oath was pained, his answer unclear. And I was not satisfied.

So I continued. I licked the broad tip, moving my tongue indecently. His incessant moaning and cursing was somewhat removed from my scope at this point. I was quite fascinated by the taste of him, and the textures. And his responses to my exploratory touch. I was very aware that he was entirely at my mercy, that every held breath and broken exhale took place at the direct consequence of my exploits.

Opening my mouth, I took him deeper. I experimented with the suction, the depth. And the continued pressure of my squeezing, wandering hands. Very, very gently, I touched my teeth to him.

He flinched but didn’t dare move too abruptly. I did feel, however, the leather cord being placed on my hair.
“Here,”
he groaned again, more clearly this time, but no less aggrieved. “Here, have it. Have everything. Anything you want.”

I gentled my hold, and I sucked him tenderly now, which only caused him to groan as though his very heart was breaking. I eased him out of my mouth, removing my touch altogether to pull the leather cord around my neck, where I intended it to stay.

As soon as I loosened my hold, he grabbed me in a sudden, clinching movement, turning us, drawing me up to him as he bore me down, pinning me to our makeshift bed. He held my wrists now in the manacles of his own fists. I could smell the river water and the travel dust on his warm skin; that, and the musky sheen of his rage-edged passion. He spread my legs forcefully with his thigh. His hair tickled my face and his manhood pressed strongly into my belly.

I waited for his possession, simultaneously bracing myself and going exquisitely wet with anticipation. His utter forcefulness was arousing me beyond belief. I liked him rugged and riled.

He was still but for the rise of his chest and the beat of his heart. I could sense that this domination was equally as affecting to him, yet he wouldn’t take me by force. There was a note of uncertainty in him: he was unsure if I was entirely willing. I wasn’t exactly sure
how
he could be unsure at this point, but I remembered he had taken a somewhat extended hiatus from intimacy of this persuasion. His instincts might have suffered from the lack of womanly contact.

The longer he waited, second after second, the more provoked I became.

I lifted my head and I could get close enough to graze his lips with my own, but he pulled back, staring down at me with an expression of more supercilious superiority than ever. Lord, but the man was a high and mighty handful! I’d met my match in every way with this brute, but I was determined to get my way.

“Kiss me,” I said. I would
show
him how willing I was. “Give me your mouth.”

It was almost surprising to me when he obeyed. His parted lips eased over mine and I opened to him. I touched the tip of my tongue to his, enticing him, drawing him into me, suckling and inviting.

“I can’t...be gentle about it, lass,” he rasped. “Do you want me?”

I was splayed and fastened, unable to move. “Aye, you beast. I want you. All of you.”

After a moment of searching intimacy, he sheathed himself to the hilt in a single thrust. I cried out from the immensity of the invasion. I was expecting pain, but there was none, just a sweet totality. He thrust again, pushing himself even deeper. “You’re mine, Amelia
.
” His invading drives were intensely possessive, pounding deep into my body with the aggression of his need. “How
dare
you run off like that and put yourself in harm’s way?
How dare you?
You are mine to protect, lass. You are
never, ever again
to allow your safety to be risked in this way, do you understand?
Never.
”

Knox’s aggression barely calmed, tempering into an avid adulation. His movements were greedy, filling me entirely with each covetous drive. He released my wrists, and his hands moved down my body, exploring the curves of my breasts, my waist, my hips. As inexperienced as I was, I could detect that the man was carnally
famished.
His rapacious desire seemed to almost hum from his touch.

I wrapped my arms around him. My fingertips glided over his skin as I marveled at the sculpted, muscular perfection of him.

“You’re too important,” he said. “Too beautiful. I can’t lose you. I love you, lass, I love you. With everything I have. All of me. Everything. I love you as I love sunlight and air. You are happiness incarnate. My new lifeblood. I can’t breathe when I can’t see you.”

The words echoed within me, fired and forged with his love and his rage. I understood that this onslaught was all about his fear, that vulnerability in him that I had not only touched but taken ownership of. Whatever glory and sovereignty he embodied,
I
was his true salvation, the one remedy to the unbearable loss he had endured. I could feel this in the grip of his fingers and the completeness of his conquest.

And his thrusting drives continued, thickly impaling; a solid, inexorable grinding that reached my womb with each stroke. His hands cupped my backside, his fingers gripping into my flesh, ensuring that his occupation was absolute. The fullness was overwhelming. The sensual, accumulating friction filled me with star-studded sensation. Each drive forced the aching beauty deeper, higher. I had no choice but to surrender entirely to the building convulsive glow. I was moaning and quivering, my flesh clenching in spasms around his invading, vigorous presence.

“Aye, lass,” he murmured into my ear. “Give in to me. Let me own your body and your soul, as you own mine.
Feel
my devotion and my obsession. You’re mine as I’m yours. Give in. Give me everything. Let go.”

I was melting, perched on the edge of some looming physical abyss from which I might never recover. My legs wrapped tightly around him, to contain the sensation, to hold him and aspire to the promise of a cataclysmic release. His punishing grip was bruising me, marking my flesh with painful force that only compounded the rising pleasure as his plunging drives went on and on. I bit his lip and tasted blood. My fingernails dug into his skin, scratching and clawing as I attempted to pull him closer, to become one with this rise. I arched up to him, meeting him stroke for stroke, consumed by his sublime, perfect assault.

I felt his teeth then, on my neck. The spear of pain provoked a spark deep within me where his pummeling aggression launched a spiraling pleasure so intense I cried his name.

“Knox, oh, Knox. Oh, God, you beauty, please don’t stop.”

And there it was, a bursting peak of rapture that cascaded in jolting rushes through the entirety of my being. The fury of my bliss grasped him, savagely tugging him deeper into my body. I could feel the gushing warmth of his own release mingling with my surging, gripping pleasure. We were lost in this eruptive bond, fierce and entangled, wholly immersed in a lingering moment of completion.

* * *

I
AWOKE
TO
the sound of birdsong. In the distance, the hushed, broad lull of the river rolled in its endlessness. We had slept through the night. I was curled on my side, drowsed with warmth and sleep, entirely encompassed by Knox’s protective embrace. He was kissing my shoulder lazily. His arm, which had been wrapped around me, fondled my breast. He teased my soft nipple between two fingers, rolling gently until it hardened into a tight little bud. Then he moved to the other breast, doing the same, touching them both with the scan of his fingers, playing with sensual tenderness. His hand roved to my hip, caressing lower, to the back of my thigh, which he eased higher, positioning me. I felt the head of his scorching manhood against my backside, rubbing between. His fingers found the moist petals of my sex, opening me. He guided himself into me, just barely entering me from behind.