His Judas Bride (16 page)

“And he will be cross with you, which is why I am so sorry when I am so disgraced, to find you this hard to reach, so tainted by all you have suffered, you see a villain behind each bush. Even in me.”

“
What
?”

“But it doesn’t stop me trying.”

Of course she readily conceded she had not wanted to stay in bed, because she had vowed not to open her legs again. If she were to cast herself, cast herself into his arms, then would he stop asking questions? Lord save her, even if he knew this elaborate performance wasn’t real, would he? If she were to edge her fingers just that little bit, over his chest. Lower. Down the sculpted muscle to the hard wall of his stomach.

If she were to skirt them further still to the fastenings of his breeches. Never mind the fastenings. Why trouble with the fastenings when she could just as easily slip her fingertips inside? When she could slip them around him? There were other ways to pleasure a man weren’t there and stop him asking questions?

In all truth and the little honesty she had left her, it wasn’t just her body she sought to protect from what he roused. Coming here she had troubled herself not a wit about what might result, opening her legs for Ewen McDunnagh. A baby? Why would it happen now when nothing had ever resulted from these forced couplings? But with this man, this man it pained her to admit, when her father’s plans excluded him, how would it trouble her? Enough that she even acknowledged it was cause for concern?

So this—she edged her leg across his thighs—this, when she obviously made him ravenous as she made him angry, was something she could do.

If she had but known all the time he held her ankle in that steel grip, how much he wanted her, when she was so adrift and disorientated, she’d have forgotten all the nonsense about trying to explain herself and stuck her fingers into his breeches, to work him, sooner.

She just wasn’t going to kiss him. No. If he got a mouthful of hair instead, that was too bad. His kisses were devastating. Last night had been a torture that way. Although she could certainly count on him to play friskily and on him curving his lips. He was enjoying this.

Being thwacked on her back so the breath left her body in a gasp, she was less sure of. Or he way he somehow captured both her wrists either, dragged her hand clear out of his breeches. Especially not when his warm breath brushed her cheeks, the lips she feared him kissing. Especially not when she’d been the one in charge a second ago.

“Please.” She tried wriggling free. “Don’t you understand? I want—” She tried arching her back. The fact was she couldn’t move, not just for his weight on her but the heat that lay on her skin, a hot, clammy fever. Her stomach knotted. Her breath came in ragged pants.

“Has anyone ever told you, you’re too bossy for a woman?”

Often. But not with their lips in her hair. “My father said I should—”

They also never said it when they ran their free hand down her arm, stopping just short of her bare breast either. “Be bossy?”

She must stop this. Free her hands. While it was good he had finally responded, she didn’t want it like this. With her at his mercy. Not even the pelt to cover herself. How it had happened was not something she intended asking herself. Not when it was vital she regain control.

“No. He—”

“To be such an inexperienced woman too. You know, that’s what most astonishes me about you.”

Did it? Not according to the knowing way he not only locked his gaze with her, he hardened it too, even as his breath, hot and sinful, enveloped her. Oh God, she had misjudged this, hadn’t she?

“But maybe that’s what you learned in Edinburgh? Hmm?”

“No. I—”

“Whatever your father said was noble of him when it comes to pleasing a man but we’re doing this the proper way.”

Were they?
Hell.
Did he think she didn’t see what he was about here? The little game he played? She couldn’t, she wouldn’t let him between her legs. Not when what it did to her was something she did not want.

He lowered his mouth to her breast. “Unless of course, you want to explain your objection? Along with these marks?”

When last night’s hot wire re-extended itself from her breast to her sex, she wanted desperately to. But she did want Arland, and she was not likely to get him if she explained herself. What she was likely to get was her throat cut. She was a whore. And her father had killed the Wolf’s wife. Tell him that? When patience did not seem to be among his virtues?

“Sir…I’ve told you—”

“You want me, don’t you?”

How was she meant to answer that? Every bit of her squirmed. But he raised his chin and looked down at her. The look was one of pure burning steel. If she argued, if she argued now, when she’d stuck her hand down his breeches, how guilty would that seem? Her legs were already open, his body positioned between them. It was but a question of parting them further.

Dutifully she obliged. She even quirked her mouth as if it was no trouble. She supposed this insistence meant it wasn’t, when she could see exactly what he was about here, but after a few hurried movements as he unfastened his breeches, she struggled, despite the way he pushed into her, and her skin tightened, not to gasp her surprise.

Of course, she admitted she was slick with his seed from last night, but even so the instant of clarity was chilling. He was rock hard and she just adjusted. Adjusted in a way she never had before to so rough an entrance.

One that, she swallowed the gulp, if he thought he was going to screw the truth out of her, he was mistaken. On that she was determined. Without even trying she was determined. In that respect he didn’t know what he dealt with here. She arched her back.

He did too, his eyes staring down at her with a desire that glazed them, a desire she could not afford to think was anything other than feigned, when she dared not close her own eyes. When the feel of his hardness was all of a passion and heat, she knew she must meet with cold icy disdain. She didn’t do this for pleasure. She did it because she had no choice. And she knew he did it—God almighty, the way his mouth found hers, she wasn’t sure why he did it. Her mind emptied of all conscious thought and her mouth tingled from that devastating touch, as these parts of her she had been a stranger to, until last night anyway, leaped in response. So horribly, all she could think was, as she fought not to tug her hands free and tangle her fingers in his hair, not to want more of his mouth, more than his mouth, not to desire to absorb every blazing inch of him, that this was like what she’d thought. What she’d imagined that very first day. The firestorm.

She shifted to try to avoid his mouth. If it was some kind of duel, then it was vital she disengage herself from what he did to her, answer him in ways that would make him come undone. Yet, if it was, and she knew it was, why had her body opened like this? So all she wanted was to stop the lascivious gasps, the trembling, pulsing, the fire that flamed through every part of her. She couldn’t. Even before he hiked her legs over his hips, she couldn’t.

To be so attuned to a man’s body was something she’d never truly experienced. Not even Lachlan had been quite so powerful, so raw, as when this man hiked her legs and pushed harder, waiting for the reaction. If he wasn’t so savoring of the moment as this, it would have shocked her to her core to know she was at this man’s mercy and still despite that wanted it, wanted him. Wanted to feel, although these were shores she desperately needed to be a stranger to, that she could walk them. And feel safe.

She couldn’t. She couldn’t ever. Yet she gasped for air, her whole body trembling with milky warmth, warmth that suffused every bit of her. Shuddering she clung to him. Every muscle convulsed. She was seeing sparks, there at the back of her eyes. Things bubbled in her veins she’d no control of. Her breath neither, coming in ragged pants.

Not even last night had there been so fierce a release as this. This was a fire pit she’d never thought to be in.

She was a husk. Shattered stone. She was so drunk on what he did to her she didn’t even care that the hot juice of his own release flooded her.

The warm essence of his skin. The hard thud of his heart drumming against her chest. Even the breath, he couldn’t control tearing his lungs.

Nearby a log crackled on the fire. A candle flickered. The breath she held returned to her throat slowly. Ice and stone? She quirked her lips. What a bloody joke.

“Are—are you all right, Princess?”

His voice, deep and caressing, rumbled against her hair. She was anything but. Really truly, not with what bubbled, what nearly burst, the stupid, stupid desire to laugh, when nothing else was left her. All right? Was he mad?

He brushed back the strand of hair curling over her face to gaze more fully into her eyes.

“Yes…I am. Thank you.”

He’d brought her completely to her knees. Oh yes. She wasn’t going to deny it. The only trouble was she couldn’t very well stay on them.

What else could she say? Or do? But thank him as if he’d just given her an oatmeal biscuit and a cup of heather ale, instead of the sex of her life? The best bannock, the finest ale maybe, but a bannock and ale just the same.

He just mustn’t look at her in a way guaranteed to make her think what had just happened was something for him too, something he’d never experienced like that either. He was a man, wasn’t he? So he had experienced everything. How well did she know that? Yet a tight knot formed in her throat much as she tried to untie it. He even breathed in tattered rags. How could he do that?

“I’d like to get dressed now, if you don’t mind?” She felt so terrible that she couldn’t do this some other way that she fought the urge to clasp his face. Yes, he was a man. But he was also a man who last night had treated her with kindness, respect. And if she was not careful, the soft way his fingertips touched her face, the sea-green light in his eyes, the hope he had not hurt her, well, she wasn’t going to let him in.

“I…I was rough.” He fought a tender grin. “But you, you…”

If only he knew. It wasn’t a case of losing sight of the real reason she was here. It was a case of facing cold, hard fact. That was her son, sitting in a prison cell, while she frolicked, abandoning herself with this man. It was a lot of things really. Time that couldn’t be turned back.

“Please don’t trouble yourself. About anything. It was fine. Really.”

He gritted his teeth.
Immolating heat, completely as one,
was probably how he chose to describe it. So he probably wouldn’t get his head around this. She stiffened her face completely. Nor would he probably get his head around the regal nature of her expression either when it had all been nice, despite everything for a woman like her.

He snatched furiously at the fastening on his breeches. “Well, I’m glad about that, sweetheart.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling on his boot. Then he raised his chin, grazed her with a burning glance. “I’ll see it’s the same next time.”

The next time? She almost rolled off the bed.

There was going to be a next time. She did not need to listen to his cursing, scrunching presence stomping all the way along the water’s edge to wherever the exit to this place was, to tell her that. The very air crackled when he tore her petticoat off the rope and flung it at her, snarling, “There you go, Princess.”

And in this place, so private, yet not, this place, confined as she had been for five years, in which he readied himself for the next round, she must ready herself to meet it.

Chapter Seven

Catcalls. Whistles. Callm hadn’t even clambered out the cave mouth, when his ears were assaulted by the cacophony.

“What the?” He blinked in the bright winter sunlight. The blizzard had stopped and a fine tang of frost nipped his nostrils. “All right, boys. Fine. That racket will be heard all the way to Glen Gurkie. Do you want the tinker chief here on our backs?”

He feigned good humor, making a silencing gesture, although cold sweat lay on his skin. What the hell else could he do? Say that Lady McGurkie was in his bed? That he reeked of the exchange of body fluids and now…
now…

Well? What now?

Every one of his men, dotted around the water’s edge, and those who weren’t, knew damn fine no glen princess would open her legs without a wedding ring on her finger. This one had. To him. Christ. This
was
as bad as it got. Last night he’d fancied her with the safest man in Lochalpin. It was why he hadn’t thought to take her anywhere else.

What had he just done? Had the shag of his life with her, that’s what. Knowing he shouldn’t have any shag at all when she was lying to him. Thought
naughty, naughty
when he pinned her beneath him there too. No glen princess would have marks like that on her ankles either. Riding accident, his pink kilt. That story took every bannock known to man. What the hell was going on here?

“Jesus, Callm, there ye are. Never mind that, will ye?”

It was the very last thing he needed. Wee Murdie scrunching across the icy shingle toward him. He considered slinking back into the cave. But what would that achieve, apart from giving credence to the joking?

It was morning counsel and morning counsel was always held by nine. He didn’t know what the hell time it was but he was willing to bet, it certainly wasn’t nine. He fixed on an interested stare. Tried to anyway.

“The tinker chief’s the least of your worries today.”

He was, wasn’t he?

Wee Murdie scrunched to a halt. “Can I have a word?”

“Looks like it.” Callm fastened his gaze on the tarnished-glass surface of the loch. The thing was there had been stories for years about the women the McGurkies kept for pleasure. Although he put nothing past them, he hadn’t always believed it. Now he had to consider…

“About her ladyship.”

“What about her?”

This was the bit when he discovered she was false as if he did not know already. Snosh had found whoever was in the glen. It was who she was really running away to meet.

“Shug’s just seen the turd up the glen, near Dunalpin village.”