Sins of the Highlander (A Highland Erotic Romance)

by Dawn Halliday

  “I want to kiss you, Aileen,” he murmured. “Everywhere.”

  “Are you…are you sure?”

  “Aye.”

  Fear tinged her expression. She searched his face with her gaze. “You…it won’t hurt, will it?” she breathed.

  He clenched his jaw. This woman had never been properly loved.

  He placed a heavy hand on her thigh. “Open to me.”

  Tension hummed beneath her skin as if she were a frightened bird. But she gazed at him in the eye and nodded.

  This was an altogether different side of the take-charge, confident lady he knew. The lady who ran her castle efficiently, who endured the abusive husband, ultimately using her own sharp intelligence to control their relationship.

  Aileen Munro was inexperienced. Frightened by the intensity of what she was feeling, frightened of what he could make her feel.

  “Don’t be afraid, Aileen,” he murmured. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

  In a way, that was a lie. They both had so much to fear. He could be killed for touching her, and she could be banished.

  Yet he could not stop. Neither, it seemed, could she.

  Spreading her legs wide, he moved down and eased himself between them. Her slit opened before him.

  The breath caught in his throat. “Have you ever seen yourself as I am seeing you now?”

  “Nay,” came the throaty answer from above.

  “You are open to me and shining pink.”

  As if she needed some contact with him, her foot stroked along the length of his hip.

  He inhaled a deep breath through his nose. When he spoke, his voice was gruff. “You smell like woman, like desire. You smell like you want me.”

  “I do, Niall. I want you.”

  His cock throbbed, pulsing in demand.

  Opening her wider with his thumbs, he swiped the tip of his tongue in a straight line from the top of her glistening slit downward. She bucked, but he held her firm. He trailed little kisses against the inside of her pale thigh. “Your cream tastes like heaven,” he murmured. “I want to devour you. Drown in you.”

  Consumed by her heat and her smooth flavor, he slipped one finger deep into her sheath.

  Her hips rose off the bed and she cried out, a thin sound filled with desperate need.

  She grew hotter against his mouth as the blood rushed between her legs, plumping her slick lips. Her channel throbbed around his finger, pulsing in time to her heart. The rasping sounds of her breaths grew louder above him. He circled his tongue around her hardening nub, coaxing it from its protective cowl.

  Slowly, he drew his finger out of her and then, just as slowly, pushed two back in. She was so tight. He groaned against her slick flesh, thinking of replacing his fingers with his stiff cock, of her core clenching around him, drawing him out, bringing him to completion.

  Do it, Aileen, he commanded in his mind. Come for me.

  He thrust his fingers into her wet heat. Her hands threaded in his hair and pressed his mouth against her.

  She grew tighter, hotter. Her taste surrounded him, enveloped him. Her body twisted and writhed, but he held her firmly with his free hand, grazing his fingertips over the taut bud of her nipple. Gently, he sucked her nub between his lips.

  Her whimpering noises stopped, her body arched and froze. Her hands fell from his head. From his fingertips, Niall felt her shudder. Deep pulses rolled down his fingers, up to his lips. Niall closed his eyes and let her pleasure flow into him.

  When it subsided, he kissed her gently one last time then moved back. Her plump lips glowed, now a deep, lush blood-red in color. Slowly, he withdrew his fingers, stroking softly up her slit before he crawled up her body, rubbing his cock against her silky skin all the way.

  Her eyes were closed. A small smile curled the corners of her lips. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was asleep, dreaming pleasant dreams.

  “I’m not finished yet,” he said, his voice husky.

  “Mmm.” Her smile grew, but she didn’t open her eyes.

  Gently, Niall rolled her onto her stomach.

  What he saw on her back made him hiss in a breath. Slender, raised silvery lines marred her perfect ivory skin. They crisscrossed from her shoulder blades down to the swell of her bottom.

  Walter’s work.

  “Aye,” she murmured, and he realized he’d hissed the words aloud.

  A murderous rage flooded through him. With shaking fingers, he traced one of the lines. How could he have left her under that man’s thumb? How could he have been so selfish, so cowardly?

  Again Niall regretted Walter not being alive so he could kill him himself.

  The scars ended just above the swell of her buttocks. She was trembling now, just a slight vibration of her body. Whether it was a reawakening fear or arousal, he didn’t know.

  He pressed his fingers into the flesh of her arse and brushed his lips against her rounded cheek, breathing in the musky scent of her lust. Sliding his hand down her cleft, he felt her, slick and hot, her arousal dribbling down the inside of her thigh.

  His fingers skated back through her drenched folds to circle her tightly clenched hole, and the desire to claim her that way skittered down his spine and through his ballocks, making his cock jump.

  He rubbed her gently, pushing the merest tip of his finger inside. She gasped.

  No, not tonight. Tonight was for gentle pleasures. When she was completely comfortable, when she trusted him, when she knew without a doubt he would never hurt her like Walter had hurt her. In a month or two, maybe…

  Reality slammed into him like a punch in the gut. In a month she would be promised to someone else. Not him.

  Never him.

  Niall couldn’t stop the low growl that emerged from his throat.

  “Niall?”

  He forcibly relaxed his fingers, which had clenched and dug into her flesh.

  “I must stop thinking of you with someone else,” he bit out.

  “There isn’t anyone else. There never has been.”

  “But there will be.”

  “Nay. Never.”

  With those simple words, spoken with complete confidence, he relaxed. The future didn’t matter. The past didn’t matter. Not right now. For now, she was his. Completely.

  He kissed the pink fingerprint on her bottom where he had gripped her so tightly. She wiggled into his lips, groaning. Smiling, he rubbed his thumb over the taut flesh, down to the soft crease where it met her thigh. His lips followed the path of his fingertips, reveling in the petal-like softness of her skin.

  Her thighs were equally soft. He rubbed and explored them, moving lower to the backs of her knees, brushing them gently with his lips until she gasped.

  Niall loved the little sounds she made. She was his water nymph, small, sinuous, and smooth.

  He moved back up her body, kissing the rounded curve of her arse cheek, but he couldn’t avoid the scars. God, there were so many of them. Who had cared for her wounds? Who had held her through her pain? It killed him that he wasn’t there. That he hadn’t helped her.

  Mistaking his silent fury for disgust, she twisted underneath him. “I’m sorry, Niall. I know they’re ugly. Repugnant. Please—”

  He pressed his hand over her back, not allowing her to move.

  “Nothing about you is ugly or repugnant, do you hear me? Nothing.” His voice was harsher than he’d intended.

  She stilled, and Niall swallowed hard. “What he did to you…”

  God, he’d let it happen. If only he’d found a way to stop it. But he’d been ineffective. Useless. Because of him, she’d suffered.

  Closing his eyes, Niall imagined the beatings. He imagined her back covered with blood, open wounds.

  “I’m so sorry,” he choked out. “It’s my fault.”

  “What?” she gasped. “It isn’t your fault!”

  “I should have stopped him.”

  “You couldn’t have.” She twisted again beneath him. “Please. Let me
see you.”

  He released her, and she flipped over, half rising to wrap her arms around him as she looked into his face.

  “Understand this, Niall MacRae. Walter was a violent man. He punished me as he saw fit, and, aye, I hated him for it. But the guilt for my scars rests on no man’s conscience except for Walter Munro’s, do you understand? It was his doing, his sin. No one else’s.”

  “If I’d stopped him—”

  Reaching up, she cupped his face in her hands. “You were half his age. A warrior already, but still young and untrained. I knew you hated him too. I knew you wanted to challenge him, to make him stop. But there is no way you could have. You were bound to him, to this castle, and you did what any smart lad should have done. You waited for the right moment, and you left.”

  “I left you alone,” he said, his voice rough with self-derision.

  Her fingers tightened over his cheeks, her eyes shining as she gazed up at him. “I was shackled to him by a sacred oath, until death. Nothing could break that, not even an honorable young warrior. If you’d asked me to run away with you, I wouldn’t have gone. If you’d asked me to conspire against him, I wouldn’t have done it. You knew that, and you had too much intrinsic honor to even imagine such schemes.

  “You were not bound to him by unbreakable ties as I was, Niall. I was so happy you found a way to escape from under his thumb. I know that you suffered as much in your training as I did in my marriage.”

  Niall shook his head, but he slipped his arms around her and held tight. The feel of the raised silvery lines beneath his fingertips deepened the ache in his gut.

  “Never again,” he whispered. He meant it. He knew he would be forced to let her go. He understood that the Mackenzie would marry her to some high-ranked lord, maybe a Lowlander or even a Sassenach. He would find a way to live with that, because he had made a blood oath of fealty.

  But from now on, Niall would protect Lady Aileen. If any man touched her in anger, ever again, that man wouldn’t live another day to tell the tale.

  “Kiss me,” she whispered. “Please, Niall.”

  He touched his lips to hers, at first seeking with desperate tenderness, and slowly allowing all his regret to flow out from the kiss. He nipped at her soft lips, sucked them between his teeth, and explored her sweetness with his tongue. The kiss evolved from a question to a claiming. As he kissed her, he settled her back onto the bed on her back with him over her, resting his weight on one elbow while the other stroked over her silky skin and then lower.

  Easing his hand between her legs, he cupped her mons in his palm. Moaning, she ground wantonly against the heel of his hand, scorching him with the hot, wet folds of her sex.

  Oh, aye, she was ready.

  He drew back to gaze down at her. Her eyes glowed as she smiled at him. It was the first time he’d seen her look truly happy.

  Biting her lip, she drew her arms around him and slowly opened her legs wide in blatant invitation.

  Niall held his cock at her entrance, his control so near to shattering that his legs shook. Slowly, he nudged inside, closely watching the expression on her face.

  Her lips parted. She wiggled, trying to rush him along, to force him deeper, but he took his time, again savoring every delectable inch her body took him in. Finally, with one last nudge, he sheathed himself to the hilt. Aileen’s breath released with a whoosh, and her body arched up to greet him.

  She was wrapped around him to the root, as tight and hot as a glove. He groaned as the pleasure spread from his cock to his ballocks and through every nerve in his body. “You fit me perfectly.”

  Then he began to move. Slowly at first, so he could revel in her sheath gripping him so tightly. But then the world disappeared and there was only heat and friction and the clenching that took his breath away. She wrapped her legs around his hips, opening wide for him, pushing him deeper with her heels. Her nails raked over his back, and she gasped and sighed, her little sounds of pleasure ramping up his own desire for her.

  Staring down at her face, he thrust deep, until his pelvis ground against her. Her lips parted, and her eyes squeezed shut. Suddenly, she stiffened. Her nails dug into his back and she cried out.

  There it was again, that glorious pulsing. All around the most sensitive part of him, and he felt her everywhere—through him, over him, deep inside at the very core of his being.

  Niall’s jaw clenched as he pounded into her ruthlessly, abandoning all thoughts not having to do with the intensity of this pleasure. Pressure built in his ballocks, drawing them up tight against his body, but he grasped for a thread of control and held on desperately. He wanted to pleasure her. He wanted to make it last.

  Aileen wriggled beneath him, making little keening sounds. The fist of her sheath gripped him harder, viselike. He couldn’t hold on, not for much longer. Sweat beaded on his temples. Aileen’s movements became more desperate. Her body undulated as the waves of another orgasm washed over her. Niall rode the wave, unraveling the taut thread of his control. In the midst of it, his own dam broke. With pulses that made him shudder all the way to his toes, he shot his seed deep into her body.

  With the last of the contractions, Niall collapsed onto his forearms. Beneath him, Aileen’s arms slipped limply to her sides. Niall smiled at her then brushed a kiss against her slightly parted lips. She lay relaxed and limp, like a rag doll. Fearing he would squash her, he rolled to the side and pulled her against his chest.

  Every fiber in his being shouted that she was the one for him, the only one. Ever. The intensity of his reaction to her stunned him. How would he ever stop himself from eviscerating any man who dared to touch her? From murdering her future husband in cold blood?

  “I won’t let you go,” he whispered, gathering her more tightly against him. Having her just this once had not sated him. Instead it made him ravenous for more.

  Chapter Six

  Niall claimed Aileen again in the dark hour before dawn. She awoke to his hands unhurriedly sliding down from her breast to between her legs. Instantly, she was wet for him. She kept her eyes closed, half in her dream but fully experiencing every sensation his fingers offered.

  Niall’s lips brushed hers. “Mmm,” she murmured, opening her mouth to him but still not ready to be pulled completely from sleep. He kissed her deep and hard, a lure, a promise of the pleasure to come.

  Then his cock nudged her entrance. Her arousal made the way easy, and with one strong thrust, he glided all the way in.

  “Niall,” she whispered against his lips.

  Niall pumped in and out of her slowly, leisurely, the exquisite friction of his steely cock against her sensitive inner walls making every pore in her body cry out with pleasure.

  All of a sudden, a short, jolting orgasm erupted from her core. She gasped as it ripped through her, and she reached up to clasp her fingers behind his neck.

  “Oh,” she whispered. She’d never felt more safe than with him inside her, holding her, possessing her.

  She came fully awake as Niall found his release, groaning with every pulse of his hot seed into her womb. Afterward, he tucked her into his side and within a few moments had fallen back to sleep, his breathing slow and steady.

  Aileen slipped away from the comfort of his arms and crept back to her chamber, where she lay awake until an anxious Jannet bustled in to prepare her for the journey to Ellandonan.

  ***

  Gilbert bowed low before the laird and stayed down until the Mackenzie told him to rise. When he finally raised his head, he struggled to stay calm. Mackenzie looked as if he considered Gilbert’s presence a joke. His wide, meaty lips fairly twitched with mirth.

  “Come to beg for my sister again, have you, Dunbar?”

  “I have not. I come to you with a proposition.”

  Mackenzie’s pale eyes lighted. “A proposition? I like propositions. Tell.”

  “As you know, the vast majority of my lands lie in the lowlands.”

  “Of course.” The laird rubbed his hands
together like the greedy bastard he was. “I might consider trading Aileen for control of those holdings, plus all of hers, including Dornoch.”

  The Mackenzie’s Highland minions snickered behind him.

  Gilbert gritted his teeth. Stupid Highland barbarian. Though Gilbert’s blood was English and Lowland Scots, he’d learned to live with the Highlanders. He’d inherited a Highland castle and had made his way in this godforsaken place with more success than many of their own—they were too isolated and suspicious of anyone south of their border. That had always been and always would be to their detriment.

  He twisted his lips into a false smile. “Of course I could not do that. But I have an even better proposition, I believe.”

  With a tired sigh, Mackenzie shook his head, and Gilbert noticed for the first time that his hair had begun to turn gray. “What could you possibly offer me that you’d consider better than your lowland properties?”

  Gilbert took a bold step forward. Instantly, the men sitting beside the Mackenzie rose, their hands on their swords. Gilbert pretended to ignore them. Instead, he smiled and leaned closer to Mackenzie. “Perhaps the key to the whole of the Lowlands.”

  ***

  On the third day of their journey, Aileen watched Niall ride ahead of her, sedate on his horse, his posture straight. He never looked back.

  Her melancholy grew as they neared Ellandonan. She and Niall were truly finished with each other. Her rational mind kept repeating the fact, and it knew that it was for the best that he acknowledged her only when politeness dictated he do so.

  Still, looking at him made her body clench with need, while at the same time her heart broke knowing that need could never be fulfilled. When they reached Ellandonan, he’d likely be sent off on another errand in service of her brother, and she would learn the identity of her betrothed.

  A soft mist began to fall, and Aileen shivered, wrapping her plaid more tightly around her. The thought of never seeing Niall again made her skin prickle and her body grow cold.

  “Whoa!”