“Oh,” she squeaked as her entire face erupted with heat. “I–I see.”
“Are ye sure?” He searched her gaze. “We can wait until tomorrow, after we’re married. Or even until we’re at the castle and ye have had a few days tae unwind yerself. There’s no hurry, Bry. Not when we’ve the rest of our lives tae enjoy each other.”
A flicker of nervousness–followed closely by anticipation–coursed down her spine. “Do you want to wait?”
His answer to that was a short, incredulous snort. “What I dinna want tae do is push ye before ye’re ready.”
“It’s not pushing if I’m pulling.” Darting another glance around the room to ensure no one was paying them any mind–they weren’t–she lowered her voice and murmured, “Could you…could you do that thing with your mouth on my thumb again? I quite liked that.”
“Oh, love.” Lachlan’s grin, wide and wicked, could have rivaled Lucifer’s own. “If ye liked that, ye’re going tae love what else I can do with my tongue.”
A single candle lit the bedroom in a hazy orange glow, casting shadows far and wide. Brynne was grateful for them, as they helped to disguise the pink blush rapidly overtaking every inch of her skin as Lachlan closed the door and quietly locked it behind him.
The ceiling was low, accentuating his massive height and the breadth of his shoulders. Goodness, but he was large. Far larger than she. In the vast halls of Hawkridge Manor, the difference wasn’t as obvious. But here, in this little room with its single bed and dresser, she couldn’t help but wonder how they were possibly going to fit together. For an instant, her gaze centered on his loins, and then jerked guiltily back to his countenance as her blush deepened.
“What…what do we do first?” Her fingers curled inward, nails pressing into palms that were already slicked with perspiration.
The wooden floorboards creaked beneath Lachlan’s weight as he crossed to her; a small sound compared to the pounding of her heart. He clasped her hands, raised them to his mouth, and placed a kiss on every single knuckle before staring into her eyes.
“First, we make ye comfortable. This isna something tae be rushed, or endured. It’s meant tae be enjoyed, every bit of it, from the first moment tae the last. I willna lie and say there willna be an awkward moment or two, as surely there is with any new thing. But it doesna have tae be as serious as ye would have some people believe. Nor nearly as fast. Lovemaking is intended tae be a celebration. A feast for the senses, and the souls, for all involved.” While he spoke, he began to undress her. Slowly. Gradually. A tied string here. A button there. As if it were the most natural thing in the world when no one else had ever taken off her clothes except for herself and her lady’s maid.
Her dress was the first garment to fall. It pooled at her feet, was followed by her petticoat, a swath of fabric that tied at the waist to give shape to her skirt, and then her boned corset. Her drawers were next and, finally, her chemise, leaving her clothed in nothing but air and shadows and the weight of Lachlan’s gaze.
“Ye have a beauty that outshines the moon on its fullest night.” Lowering his head, he pressed his mouth to her shoulder, his breath warm against her ivory flesh. “A thousand stars would bow before ye, and it’s a blessed man that I am tae be able tae claim ye as my own.”
A poet, she thought dazedly as he kissed a path across her collarbone and up her neck. She hadn’t known he was a poet. With his words as much as his hands.
She trembled when he traced the shell of her ear. Quivered when his hands skimmed down her back to cup her buttocks, and who knew there so many nerve endings in that particular part of her anatomy?
He kissed her lightly. A teasing brush of his lips across hers. A little nip. A husky sigh. Then he stepped away and began to undress himself, his countenance somber save for the faintest tilt of his mouth.
With half the amount of clothing to remove, he was naked within a matter of seconds, and her breath caught as she studied the rugged planes and valleys of his chest and abdomen, his sculptured muscles carved from a land that made men out of boys and warriors out of men.
“You’re so…big,” she ventured, and that was even before her gaze traveled below his waist.
“Thank ye,” he said solemnly, as if she were the queen with a scepter in her hand and she’d just placed it upon his shoulder to award a knighthood or other valor of honor. “Surely the greatest compliment I’ve ever received from the lips of the bonny lass whose opinion matters the most.”
Her brows jutted in bemusement…until she happened to glance lower, and then with a sharp gasp she met his twinkling eyes. “You’re…you’re…”
As comfortable with his nudity as she was self-conscious of hers, he rested his hands on the edges of his hips. “Big is as fine a word as any, and the perfect way tae stroke a man’s ego if ye were after such a thing.”
Big?
He was enormous.
And if she’d questioned whether they were going to fit before, she was convinced they wouldn’t now.
“Lachlan,” she said hesitantly, “I–I don’t think this is going to work.”
“Aye, and I’m sure that’s what they said about the Great Pyramids when they started laying the first row of stone.”
“We are not the Great Pyramids.”
He grinned. Glanced down. “Speak for yerself.”
If his intention was to make her laugh and thus loosen the coil of tension wrapping her body in thin, invisible string, he succeeded. Her fingers relaxed. Her shoulders eased. The knot in the middle of her temple unraveled.
His toes bumped into hers as he cupped her jaw with one hand while the other plucked the pins from her hair and scattered them across the floor. Undone, her pale tresses tumbled all the way to the small of her back where he gathered a fistful of curls and gazed at them with the reverence of a pirate king admiring his chest of golden treasure.
“Blessed,” he repeated, letting the tendrils slide through his fingers before he brought his mouth to hers and slid his tongue between her lips in a kiss that was neither light nor teasing.
She tasted his hunger. His need. His raw, aching desire to possess. To take. To conquer. All tempered with an exquisite level of self-control that far exceeded her own.
As lust smoldered and flames licked, she wound her arms around his neck, nipples tingling where they rubbed against the soft mat of curls spread across the top of his chest. She tentatively probed his mouth with her own tongue, and when he growled and hitched her against his body in a taut embrace that brought her belly in direct contact with the hardest, hottest part of him, her exploration grew bolder.
They went to the bed, the back of her knees pressing against the wooden foot rail before Lachlan picked her up and placed her on the mattress, her head cocooned on a pillow stuffed with goose down, her arms never loosening from those broad shoulders.
He knelt over her, bracing his weight in his thighs. Cords of muscle rippled and stretched beneath her fingertips as he kissed the sensitive space right beneath the curve of her jaw, and then the base of her neck, and then her breasts, suckling the tender buds one at a time while those large, callused hands spanned her ribcage before beginning a perilous descent that had her arching off the bed, first in surprise…and then pleasure.
When he touched her there, gliding a single fingertip along the velvety wet seam of her most intimate place where even she hadn’t dared venture for fear of committing some ungodly sin, it was as if a new color had been added to the rainbow. A shimmer of light that she never knew existed before Lachlan opened her eyes and allowed her to see it.
It was stunning.
Glorious, even.
Then his finger slid inside of her…and the rainbow fractured into a hundred different colors, each brighter than the last.
For a long while, Lachlan just petted, and stroked, and kissed, all while whispering sweet nothings in her ear in a language that her ears didn’t comprehend, but her heart did. Dividing his attention between her lips, and her
breasts, and the curls between her legs, he seemed to be driving her towards something…a hill, or a peak, or even a mountain. She was too delirious to care which. Too drunk on desire to notice how high they were climbing.
“Aye, and ye’re wet and wanting, are ye not, ionmhainneach?” he rasped, and when she nodded–because of course she nodded–he captured her wrist and gently guided her hand to the core of his body where he was nearly as damp as she, and hot, and pulsing besides.
Tentatively, and then with a growing confidence spurred on by his groans, she encircled his staff and ran her palm along its heavy length all the way to the base before reversing direction, instinctively pleasuring him as he had pleasured her.
His jaw clenched. Candlelight reflected off the sheen of sweat clinging to his temple. Without warning, he grabbed her arm, and when she looked at him in question, he made a tortured sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a moan. “I was soon tae spend meself like a green lad if ye didna stop.” He tenderly brushed a curl off her cheek. “Are ye ready for me, Bry?”
Her eyes widened. “That wasn’t…that wasn’t it?”
There was that devilish grin again. Stealing across his mouth like a thief through the night. “Oh, luaidh mo chèile. We’ve barely begun.”
She didn’t understand what he meant…and then, all at once, she did.
He was right.
There was more.
So much more than she was ever capable of imagining. But then, how could you explain the infinite vastness of the ocean to someone who had never stepped foot upon the sand?
As sensation after sensation washed over her, she clung to him, her slender calves wrapping around his muscular buttocks to follow the undulation of his hips as he filled her, deeper and deeper. Until suddenly, they weren’t climbing the mountain, they were standing on top of it.
A plunging thrust of his hips as he claimed her mouth in a possessive kiss that demanded she give all of herself to him, and both Lachlan and Brynne soared over the edge together.
Chapter Sixteen
Never, in all his life, had Lachlan felt complete.
There was always something…restless stirring inside of him. Something that never permitted him to fully settle. To halt whatever he was doing, take a breath, and find satisfaction in what he’d already done.
But as he laid beside Brynne, his arm draped securely around her waist and her wee little feet tucked between his legs, he knew nothing but contentment. Nothing but a sense of fulfillment that came not from a job well done or money earned, but from filling a space inside of himself that he hadn’t even known was wanting.
Or maybe he had known, and that’s why Brynne was always the one for him.
As a boy teetering on that sharp, uneven edge of manhood, he’d found solace in her company. She was a safe harbor to share his innermost thoughts and feelings. Someone who accepted him as he was when no one at Eton, with a few rare exceptions, wanted to accept him at all.
As a young man with no bloody idea of how to navigate the shark-infested waters of High Society, she’d provided another port in the storm. Their one dance, on that one night, had carried him through an entire Season of dullness and drudgery.
As a man full grown and filled with ambition and grueling purpose, she’d given him a reason to continue his uphill battle in resurrecting the abandoned dreams of his great-great-grandfather. The kiss by the brook, his first taste of genuine magic and all the power it contained, had led him to persist when everyone else told him to quit. And while the distillery was a dream still outstanding, this–finally having his arms around the woman he loved–was not.
Every step he’d taken, every decision he’d made (both the good and the bad), every road he’d gone down…it brought him here. To this night. To Brynne. For that he was grateful, and humbled, and more determined than ever to see the rest of his hopes realized. For himself. For his soon-to-be wife. For the children they’d make together. Raise together. Love together.
When morning dawned, he watched his bride get dressed, his heart filled to the brim with pride and possibility as she patiently ran a comb through all that thick, luscious hair before using the pins he’d dropped the night before to fashion it into a loose chignon at the top of her head with tendrils to frame her face. His gaze lingered unabashedly on her shapely calves as she donned her stockings, and a delightful blush, warm and pink, spread across her chest when she caught him staring at her breasts as she slipped into her chemise.
“It isn’t fair,” she said, slanting him a reproving glance. “All the layers of clothing women are required to wear as opposed to men. You’ve been ready for nearly an hour, and I’ve yet to even put on my corset.”
He gave a dismissive shrug. “Go without it.”
“Go without a corset?” For all the incredulity in his tone, he might have suggested that she parade down the aisle naked.
“Aye. They’re little more than devices of torture as it is, and I’d like tae meet the person who decided the female shape needed tae be changed from the way God designed it. Ye dinna alter perfection. Besides,” he went on, a roguish glint shining in his eyes, “I’m just going tae be undressing ye later. Seems a waste of time tae wrap up a package that’s soon to be opened.”
“I suppose it would make for more comfortable travel on the train,” she relented. Forgoing the corset–they really were accursed contraptions–she stepped into a pair of white drawers that tied at the waist, and then turned to the dress she’d carefully laid out on the back of a chair. “Would you…?”
It was the invitation Lachlan was waiting for. In an instant, he was off the bed and guiding the gown over her outstretched arms.
“This was my mother’s,” she said softly as he went behind her to assist with the round pearl buttons that ran between her shoulder blades. “Not what she wore to the cathedral, but after, at the reception. I found it several years ago while looking for an extra trunk to store my canvases.”
Finishing with the top button, he pressed his mouth to the nape of her neck. “Ye make a beautiful bride, Brynne Weston. Yer mother would be beaming with happiness tae see ye in her dress.”
With flowing lines, an empire waist, and capped sleeves, the gown was a token of a bygone era before bustles and bows and corsets and crinoline. It was the spring green of a tulip, and the swath of beige ribbon beneath Brynne’s breasts matched the delicate lacing along the bodice.
There was only one thing missing.
He went to a satchel he’d brought along with his valise and withdrew a long piece of woven wool dyed in a checkered pattern of red, black, green, and traces of silver. “This is my family’s tartan, and it’s a proud husband I’d be tae see my wife wear it on our wedding day.” He glanced down at the cloth. Once, his ancestors had worn these colors into battle. Now, they hung on a tapestry in the great hall and were largely ceremonial, their significance lost to the unwritten pages of history. But they remained an important piece his ancestry. Of where he’d come from, and who he was. He cleared his throat, and in the emotion of the moment his brogue thickened. “If ye dinna want tae–”
“I would be honored,” she said, cutting him off as she laid her hand on top of his. “You need only tell me how to place it.”
Lachlan was not embarrassed that his fingers shook as he folded the tartan in half, and then folded it again before laying the wool diagonally across Brynne’s chest like a sash and securing it over her right hip with a sterling silver kilt pin that would hold the heavy fabric in place. Unlike the English, who were taught to shield their emotions behind a stiff upper lip, he’d been encouraged at an early age to show what he was feeling. Whether it be with his fists, his words…or his lips.
“The next time we do that,” he murmured after he’d finished a kiss that left them both a bit breathless, “ye shall be my wife and I yer husband.”
She straightened his collar. “I can hardly believe it’s time.”
In addition to a black jacket and waistcoat, neithe
r of which would have appeared out of place in a London ballroom, Lachlan wore a kilt in the same colors as the tartan and a traditional Kilmarnock bonnet that sat at a rakish angle over his right eye. His socks itched, and his shoes pinched, but he’d have gladly cut off both legs at the knee if that was what it took to marry the bonny lass standing in front of him. “Aye, and we’d best go now, before a line forms. Are ye ready?”
It was the question he’d asked before he took her maidenhood.
To his relief, her answer was the same.
The ceremony, once they got to it, was short and strikingly poignant.
Brynne and Lachlan held hands in front of a vicar who, oddly enough, reminded her of Mr. Treadwell, the gardener. A fitting comparison, as it was Mr. Treadwell’s words that had helped her commit to this path. A path that ended with an anvil in front of her, a Scot beside her, and a wooden bench filled with two witnesses behind her.
Sunlight trickled in through stained glass windows, catching on spiraling swirls of dust that rose from a leather tome that the vicar procured from the folds of his brown robes and dropped onto the pulpit which was really nothing more than a large slab of stone. He slid thin wire spectacles onto a long, hookish nose, cleared his throat in an official manner, and then peered straight at them, his first direct acknowledgement since they’d entered the blacksmith shop.
“And who might ye be?” he asked as he laid the tome open.
Lachlan squeezed Brynne’s hand before he spoke. “Lord Lachlan Campbell, sir, and me bride-tae-be is Lady Brynne Weston.”
“Weston…Campbell…” the vicar muttered, running a bony finger up and down the page in front of him. “My we’ve a busy day today, havena we? Everyone’s looking tae wed before the snow sets in, I suppose. Old Vanna McDougal says it’s tae be a fierce winter, and she’s not been wrong yet. Except for the year 1837, and then she can hardly be blamed for that, as she was riddled with triplets and nursing twins besides. A prolific husband, Old Vanna had. May ye be blessed with the same, me lady. Let’s see here.” Squinting, the vicar slowly turned to the next page. “I’ve a Herron and a Greenwood. Ah, and Lord Beckwith is here tae try again. Had his lass whisked right out from under his nose last time. Angry father, ye understand.” The vicar lifted his head. “Campbell, did ye say?”
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