by Anna Durand
Excitement buzzed over my skin and fluttered in my tummy. I didn't want him to do it because I'd tempted him, inadvertently. If and when he threw me over that desk, I wanted it to be his decision alone.
I righted my robe and tied the sash. "Sorry. Didn't mean to flash you a full-frontal shot."
"Wasnae blaming ye." His eyes blazed with need. "I was enjoying the view."
"Oh, I knew that. It was written all over your gorgeous face."
His fingers, spread on the desk, curled and then straightened, curled and then straightened. "Ahm burning for ye, Em."
A shiver of electric awareness robbed me of any capacity for thought, speech, breath, movement. No man had ever beheld me with such wanton hunger or spoken his need aloud with so much intensity. I loved — in all caps with three exclamation points — the raspy way he'd called me Em.
His body seemed to melt against his chair. His arm remained on the desk, limp, and with his other hand, he gestured with one finger. Come to me, he commanded.
I went to him, sidling up to his chair.
He rotated the chair toward me, keeping his arm on the desktop, his face at the level of my breasts. The magnetic power of his gaze energized my skin, and my nipples shot erect, jutting against the satin of my robe.
He hooked a finger inside the sash and ever so slowly unfastened it. As the delicate strip of fabric fell away, my robe gaped open. He glanced at my groin and the thatch of fine hairs covering my mound and shut his eyes while he inhaled a long breath. His eyes flickered open. His lips curved upward just enough to convey his deep pleasure at the sight before him.
Moving both hands to his lap, he patted his thigh.
I climbed onto his lap with my knees straddling his hips and my sex poised over his thighs. "Do you need a special kind of cuddle?"
"Aye."
With a hand on each of his shoulders, I kneaded the bunched muscles until they softened under my fingers and he sighed with pleasure. I guided my palms up his throat, tenderly feeling the pulse point, measuring the beats of his heart as they accelerated. His lips parted, his cheeks grew ruddy. I slanted in, swept my palms up to his cheeks, and rubbed my lips over his.
A distinct lump had formed in his pants.
He cupped my hips, coasted his hands up my sides, brushed them against my breasts. "Yer bonnie, soft, sweet… perfection."
I swayed into him. "Kiss me. Touch me. Anything you want, please."
He held still for a long moment, his breathing uneven and harsh, his hands at the sides of my breasts, his thumbs lazily stroking the undersides. His hands wandered down to my waist, his thumbs sketching circles on my skin. One hand roamed down to cover my mound.
I rocked my hips into him, pressing my mound into his waiting palm. The heat of his hand, the firmness of it and the gentle pressure, felt so good a soft moan whispered out between my parted lips. When his fingers toyed with the damp hairs under his hand, I released another moan, this time low and throaty, evocative of the need rising within me.
"M'eudail," he murmured, his voice gone hoarse. He whisked his hands up to my shoulders, under the robe, and slipped it off. The fabric tumbled to the floor.
I was naked. He wasn't. This would not do.
Sinking into his lap, his erection trapped beneath me, I yanked his shirt out of his waistband.
The weight of his hand settled over my mound, his fingers molded to the swollen lips of my sex.
A potent cocktail of hormones intoxicated me, scattering my thoughts and searing my veins. I soared on a natural high, every sensation intensified. My fingers scrabbled to unhook his shirt buttons, even as lust compelled me to get him naked right now. Screw this. I grasped the lapels and tore his shirt open.
Buttons rained onto the rug.
Rory's eyes bulged, gradually narrowing as his lips formed a smile of erotic appreciation. "I love your enthusiasm."
"Too amped to be subtle."
I raked my nails down his chest, loving the way his body tensed and his dick twitched.
He shoved his hand between my legs, into the slick heat of my sex.
"Yes, baby." I rocked against his palm, finding a slow and sensuous rhythm, shuddering when he stroked me with his middle finger. "I want you so bad I can't think. Take me hard, do it fast, I need you inside me."
"Ah, mo leannan, yer so wet and hot." He rasped two fingers along my outer folds while his longest finger swirled around my entrance. "Ahm starved for ye, Emery."
He plunged his finger inside.
With a gasp, I latched onto his shoulders. As he pumped that finger in and out, the rest of his fingers chafed the insides of my folds and the heel of his hand rubbed my mound. My hips moved of their own volition, rolling in sync with the thrusts of his fingers. The storm of sensations had me panting and writhing, my breasts splashing against his chest. I raised onto my knees, placing my sex inches from his face, riding his hand while clinging to his shoulders.
"Rory," I gasped. "Yes, oh God, yes."
I clutched his head, and he buried his face against my belly, showering my skin with wet kisses, circling his tongue around my navel and then diving it inside at the same instant his finger pushed into my opening. I teetered on the verge of climax, about to careen over the edge.
"Oh shit," I whimpered. "Please, Rory, please, I need your cock inside me."
He snarled something in Gaelic.
I ground my body against his hand.
"Fuck," he growled, and yanked his hand away.
Bereft of his touch, my orgasm snatched away from me, I gaped down at him. "What…"
He launched out of the chair, dropping me down on my feet.
I wobbled a little as my brain, clouded by a thwarted climax, floundered to sort out the abrupt shift in our positions. Never had I experienced such an overpowering need to come, so I flailed for a way to encourage him. "It's dark out, but we can go to the bedroom if you want."
"Ahmno worried about the location." Breathing hard, he palmed his raging erection, imprisoned within his slacks. "Cannae wait a second longer."
He glanced at the desk, and I could almost see thoughts clicking into place in his mind. Rolling his shoulders back, he kinked his mouth into an expression of carnal resolve.
Oh yes. Gratification, here I come.
He swept one arm across the desktop, sending everything on it except for the computer toppling to the floor. Papers spewed across the rugs and wood flooring. Satisfied, he picked me up and laid me across the desk.
I grinned. "Rory baby, I love this new side of you."
His gaze pored over me, absorbing the sight of my nude body with an analytical squint to his eyes. The light from the floor lamp spilled over his bare chest, and I couldn't resist smoothing my hands over his pecs. He grasped my hips and dragged me closer, so my ass rested on the very edge of the desk. My legs dangled, and the coolness of the wood on my skin made me shiver, though not from cold.
Rory unzipped his pants and shoved them off his hips, along with his boxers. His cock sprang free, bouncing as it curled up toward his belly. Moisture beaded the rosy head. The mass of his clothing caught around his ankles, dammed there by his shoes, but he paid no attention to trivial things like having his legs shackled by his own slacks. With single-minded focus, he braced himself with both hands on the desk at either side of my head and positioned his erection between my thighs, the tip nudging my entrance.
He drew his hips back and plunged into me, penetrating deeply with one seamless thrust.
I gasped, my hands wrapped around his biceps. His length consumed me, the thickness of his hard shaft a hot and delicious invasion. I clasped my ankles behind his ass. "Oh Rory, don't stop."
"Say the other thing."
His request stopped me for a moment, until I realized what he wanted. "Rory baby, my Rory baby."
He plundered my mouth in a brutal kiss, his tongue lashing and his teeth scraping on my lips. I reveled in the taste of him and t
he velvety seduction of his kiss, lost in the overwhelming power of his hunger for me. I sank my fingers into his shoulders, scratched them down his back, gripped his ass.
"Bod 'a chac," he said. "Ye feel so fucking good, m'eudail."
I loved the way he said my name, but the rough tone of his Gaelic phrases sent me into a frenzy, head thrashing, hips undulating, my sex pulsating around his shaft.
He jerked his hips, withdrawing, then slammed into me again. And again. And again. I cried out, bucked my hips, clawed at his ass. My heart beat so hard and fast I couldn't catch my breath, and every punishing thrust pushed him deep inside me, so deep I had the crazy notion we'd become a part of each other in the most intimate, physical way possible. I flung my arms around him to bind his body to mine, my face mashed into his shoulder, my cries echoing off the walls and mingling with his grunts and shouts.
Our love-making grew so impassioned the desk jounced and thumped.
Rory grasped the desk's edge above my head, his hips pistoning in a frenetic rhythm. The room reverberated with the slapping of flesh on flesh until an orgasm thundered through me. My whole body convulsed around him.
"Oh God, Rory!"
"Emery, ahhhh!"
He punched into me once more, and his climax yanked his entire body taut.
I cradled him in my arms as he fell on top of me, both of us panting.
"M'eudail," he murmured in my ear, "I love — fucking you."
I stopped breathing for a few seconds, my mind straining to decide if he'd been about to say he loved me. His abrupt pause might've stemmed from the fact neither of us had fully recovered our breath yet. I longed to believe he'd almost spoken those three little words, but not in the throes of passion or the glow of a fading climax. I wanted to hear the words when I would know he meant them.
Did I love him? Still deliberating that verdict.
With his softening shaft inside me, I skimmed my hands over his back. "This is another milestone. We had sex somewhere other than the bedroom. Next thing you know, we'll be ravishing each other in broad daylight in the garden."
He raised his head to smirk at me. "Donnae hold your breath for that one."
"No need to hold my breath." I squeezed my muscles around his shaft, earning a wince and a slight gasp from him. "You take my breath away every time you touch me."
His penis was firming up.
I couldn't help smiling. "Again?"
"Mm." He ran a hand down my side, over my hip, up to my thigh still latched around him. "In the bedroom this time. The desk is too hard to do everything I want to do with you."
He pulled me up with him as he straightened, pulling out of my body with a wistful sigh. His gaze tracked down my body and then to his own where he stood naked from the waist down.
"Bollocks," he said.
"What's the matter?"
"Forgot to use a condom."
"Relax," I said. "I'm on the pill, remember? We're covered."
His face lit up. "We are, aren't we?"
"Mm-hm."
"Well then —" He scooped me up in his arms. "To the bedroom."
I pointed at his feet. "Might want to fix your pants first, or you'll dump us both on the floor."
"Ah. Yes. Can't have that."
He set me down and tugged his pants up, zipping them hastily, and carried me off to our bedroom. There, he shed all his clothes — and his inhibitions — making love to me again and again until we both lay boneless and spent on the bed, our bodies slick with sweat.
We fell asleep in each other's arms.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The sensation of cool air on my naked skin tickled me from head to toe, and tiny feet pranced around on my stomach. Tiny feet? As I roused from sleep, a vision of mice cavorting on my belly flashed in my mind. I jerked my head up to survey the length of my body, but there were no mice in sight.
Rory had pulled the covers off me and lay sideways to me with his chin on my hip. His elbows rested on the mattress, but he hovered his hands above my belly with the first two fingers of each hand forked like itty-bitty finger-people. They seemed to be performing some kind of jig on my skin.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
He aimed a sly smile at me. "Isn't that my line?"
"Usually." I tousled his hair, but it was too short to really get messed up. "What are your finger-people doing on my tummy?"
"Playing shinty." He made one finger-person run toward my belly button, then thrust his thumb out. "You have to imagine the caman he's swinging."
"The what?"
"Caman. The stick every player carries and uses to hit the ball."
I pushed up on my elbows. "What is shinty?"
"Something like lacrosse." He smiled. "Only better."
He was smiling. At me. Not a big, overjoyed smile like he'd given his family when they showed up in our garden. But still, he was smiling more than he ever had while looking at me.
My throat constricted.
The finger-people paused in the midst of their shinty shenanigans, and Rory's forehead crinkled. "Are you all right?"
"Fine, yeah." I dropped back onto my pillow and waved a hand. "Go on. Don't let me interrupt your important shinty game."
"It's a match, not a game." He kissed my belly. "You'll learn the lingo when you watch the MacTaggarts play the Buchanans."
"You play shinty?"
"Aye."
"When will this game — sorry, match — happen?"
He shrugged. "We play whenever both families can get twelve members to join in. For the MacTaggarts that means our cousins need to be available. Lachlan may think he's the equivalent of ten men, but we need actual bodies on the field, not just his ego."
The humor glittering in his eyes and lighting up his face made my chest ache in a good way. I loved him like this, relaxed and happy, joking and doing goofy things on my body.
Loved him? I'd thought the words, but did I love him love him, or did I love the way he was acting this morning? Figuring out the answer could wait until another time, because in this moment I wanted nothing else but to watch my husband playing finger-shinty on my tummy.
A few minutes later, when he'd finished his match — the MacTaggarts won, of course, amid stage-whisper cheers from Rory — he lay back on the bed, his head next to mine. He threaded our fingers, holding my hand as we enjoyed a comfortable silence. In eight days, we would stand before God and all our relatives to vow our love and commitment to each other. He didn't love me, as far as I knew, and I wasn't sure how I felt. We'd have to lie to everyone, in public, in front of a minister.
"Do you think we'll be smote by a bolt of lightning?" I asked.
Rory feathered his lips over my fingertips. "Why would that happen?"
"Because we're going to take vows and swear we love each other."
He gave me a patient smile. "If everyone who married without love were smote down, hardly anyone would've survived the Middle Ages. Arranged marriages used to be the norm."
"Right, I forgot about that." I sat up and twisted sideways to look at him. "So, there won't be any smiting. That's good news. But we still have things to discuss, about our wedding."
He exhaled a perfect long-suffering-husband sigh. "Must we?"
"Yes." I swung one leg over him to mount his lap. Towering over him for a change, I planted my hands on my hips. "My family will be here in two days. We haven't talked about where they'll stay."
"I've made hotel reservations."
"You made a decision without telling me. Again."
His hands followed the contour of my thigh down to my knee, then retraced a path to my hips. "You didn't mind when I decided to carry you into this room without asking."
"That was different." I battled against the impulse to moan as he traced his hands up my inner thighs, his fingertips teasing the hairs at the apex. "Stop trying to distract me."
A naughty smile played across his lips.
; I gave his chest a half-hearted slap. "That won't work, you sneaky, sneaky man. My family is not going to stay in a hotel. I haven't seen them in years. I want them to stay here."
Rory glanced around with feigned innocence and confusion. "I doubt we'll all fit on this bed."
I poked his chest with my index finger. "Figures when you suddenly decide to be playful, it's because you want to distract and confuse me in order to get your way."
"Am I succeeding?"
I commandeered his hands, where they lay on my inner thighs, and clapped them down on his belly. "Keep your hands to yourself, Mr. MacTaggart. No matter how cute and sexy you are, I am not letting you bamboozle me into having my family stay in a hotel. I want them here with us, in this ginormous castle. This place has enough bedrooms to host an army."
"I hope you're not implying your family has come to destroy me in battle."
"Only if you tick them off." I snaked a hand down to stroke his penis, surprised to discover it was hardening. "If you agree to let them stay here, I'll make it worth your while."
"In what way?"
"Any way you want." I caressed his length with easy sweeps of my hand. "Say yes, Rory baby. You have no choice but to bend to my will."
Which would be a refreshing change, seeing as I surrendered to his will whenever he flashed me that seductive, wickedly erotic grin.
And sometimes when he didn't.
Yeah, when it came to my husband, I was the easiest score on earth.
I massaged his cock with both hands until it was steel-hard and glistening with the evidence of his desire for me. His body tensed, and his face crimped in pained lust. His chest heaved. Pinkness speckled his cheeks and chest. He rocked his hips up into my strokes, his hands fisted in the sheets.
I bent low over him, my breasts swinging in his face, and spoke in my huskiest voice. "If you give me what I want, I'll give you what you want."
"Bargaining with your body?" He tried to smirk, but the rapturous agony of his need eradicated it. "Isnae that — too much like — ah God, woman. Yer killing me."
I licked at the seam of his lips. "Say yes and I'll use my mouth on you. Don't pretend it's not what you want."
