by Paula Quinn
“I fear if I take ye, I won’t let anyone else ever do so.” It was a statement of truth that pained him as it left his lips. He kissed her chin, the column of her neck, to redirect his thoughts.
“And I fear,” she whispered into his hair as he bent his head to her throat, “that if ye take me”—she inched her thighs open wider and almost purred in his ear while she moved, a subtle shifting that pressed her crux to his hard shaft and ignited his passion into something he was no longer sure he could control—“I will never be satisfied with anyone else.”
Aye, he wanted that. He wanted her to refuse the chancellor’s hand, unable to marry him because of memories that plagued her. Memories of Edmund inside her, atop her, behind her, beneath her. He wanted to drive her wild, make her scream, and drench him in her desire. He smiled as he wedged his cock against her and she undulated her hips. She wanted him.
“Ye want to know pleasure, woman?”
She nodded, then laughed nervously when he began unbuttoning the front of her gown. She caught her breath when he pressed a kiss to the milky mounds of her breasts. Another button unfettered, more of her exposed, his hot tongue spreading like fire over her until her breasts spilled out into his hands. He groaned like the beast she set free and dipped his hungry mouth to her sweet coral nipple. He alternated between sucking her, laving his tongue over the small tight bud, and then grazing his teeth over it. She writhed in pleasure when he outlined her other breast with his finger. When she moaned, he tore the rest of the buttons away and kissed the flat belly he exposed.
He wanted to pleasure her but he wasn’t certain he could do it without wanting her more than before. He had to stay strong. She’d already decided to go forward with her proposed marriage to the chancellor. The last thing he wanted was to lose himself to her completely…or to bring a bastard into the world. He wouldn’t send her off carrying his child. He’d made sure that he’d left no babes behind after he lay with a woman. There weren’t many women, but he used precautions. His true father hadn’t cared about his bastard son or the lass he lay with and it had nearly cost Edmund and his mother their lives.
With that thought guiding him, he controlled his breath and his desire while he inched down her body, exposing more of her, kissing her everywhere, loving the sounds he dragged from her. He pulled her skirts up over her belly and basked for a moment in the sight of her gartered thighs and soft white hose covering her legs from the knee down. She looked like an enticing, intoxicating goddess lying there, waiting for him to continue undressing her. He did, taking his time, enjoying every inch of her.
He kissed the gooseflesh along her inner thigh. She trembled but he went farther, mindful of her short, shallow breath, of every quiver of her flesh. The scent of her so close drove him wild, but he took his time freeing her from each tied garter, rolling down her hose and plucking them from her feet.
She laughed when he kissed the top of her foot, her ankle. The slide of his fingers up the back of her bare calf made her arch her back and call out his name.
She was so lovely, so perfect. He rose up on his haunches, his cock stretching the wool of his plaid and making her large eyes even wider. He spread her legs. She closed them again.
“Lass.” He smiled down at her. “Be at ease.”
She nodded and at the gentle nudging of his fingers, she spread her legs wider.
When he bent to her and pressed his mouth to her warm, moist center, she cried out, then giggled and squirmed away. He laughed, watching her, but soon his intentions grew darker and this time when he moved to taste her glistening pearl he cupped her buttocks and drew her up, stopping her from moving.
He drank his fill, holding her steady, plunging his tongue inside her. Her groans grew louder, higher, until he thought Lucan would surely hear them. He didn’t care. He wanted to bring her to the pinnacle of passion.
“Edmund, I can’t…Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” She gasped, then moaned, and then shuddered to her core.
He laved her engorged nub and suckled, his own blood coursing through him like the sea in the fury of a storm. He watched her lose herself, clutching fistfuls of his bedcoverings, grinding her hips into his face over and over until she collapsed, spent.
He sat back on the bed and swiped his hand across his mouth. Hell, she was irresistible lying there, out of breath, sleek with sweat. She looked at him and he smiled, satisfied with what he had done for her. Her eyes dipped to his erection jutting toward the ceiling beneath his plaid.
She reached for him, her eyes wide with apprehension. He wondered if she had ever seen a man naked before.
“’Tis all right, Amelia,” he said softly, moving out of her reach. “This time was fer ye.”
She nodded, smiled at him, and then closed her eyes. “I never thought anything could feel so good.”
He moved along the bed to lie beside her and take her in his arms. “There are things that feel even better.”
She leaned her head on his chest and wrapped her arm around him. “Sarah has always told me as much, but truly, I can’t imagine anything feeling better than that. My body is still tingling.”
He pushed himself down and pulled at his plaid. He wanted to show her, but it could wait.
“Thank ye, Edmund.” She pressed a kiss to his chest, then snuggled closer to him, her bare breasts making it extremely difficult to rid himself of his erection.
He’d wanted to give her pleasure. He had. Why then did her gratitude feel the same as when he held the door for a woman? And why the hell did it feel so bad?
Chapter Nineteen
Sarah reached her hand out to Lucan’s door for the fourth time in the space of ten breaths. Each time she retreated, not knowing what to say when she stepped inside. She had stayed away for days. What excuse could she give him? She certainly couldn’t tell him the truth, that Amelia was correct about her. She was a coward. She’d always lived her life with careless abandon, never giving her heart to one man, but sharing it with many. Because she was afraid to. She was young, pretty, and unbound by the shackles of nobility. She could do as she pleased. And she did. She’d never cared what anyone at Queensberry thought of her, save Amelia.
The men who partook of her never cared what became of her afterward. She liked it that way. No attachments. No expectations. No heartache.
Malcolm Grant was the perfect man to give herself to. But she hadn’t. And the reason was lying in a bed behind that damned door.
Her heart banged loudly in her ears as she reached for it again and this time the sound of Amelia crying out halted Sarah’s movement. She turned, agape, and stared at the door to Edmund’s room across the hall. Then she smiled.
“Well, good fer ye, Amelia dearest. I’d love to see yer mother’s face after she heard that.”
She wasn’t angry with her friend over the words they’d shared earlier in the garden. Sarah had been wrong to stay away from Lucan’s bedside. The poor man had almost died. She intended to make up for her callousness by apologizing—no harm in doing that…if she could just open the door!
Girding up her loins one last time, she pushed on the door, then paused outside of it when it creaked open.
“Grendel?” a husky male voice called out. Damn it, but that voice plagued her dreams.
She stepped inside the room. “Do I look like a hairy, overgrown beast to ye?” She tried not to look directly at him, but her eyes had a mind of their own. And goodness, but he looked unforgettable!
It frightened her that for all of Malcolm Grant’s charm and striking good looks, Lucan’s was the face she thought about all day. His smile didn’t beguile with dimples but with sincerity and with the kind of grace that only true beauty possessed. It didn’t hurt though that his color had returned and his clean dark hair hung loose around his shoulders. Coupled with the gleam of his golden eyes, he looked more like a wolf lying there than a man.
“Sarah.” He propped himself up higher on his pillow and smiled at her like nothing she could ever do could
offend him. “’Tis nice to see ye.”
He was not like any other man. He had touched her heart, and there was no sign of him letting up.
It was a mistake coming here. She nodded, then turned and looked at the door. Was it too late to turn and run out? Nae! She would admit to being afraid to feel anything for him but she wouldn’t run away!
“How are ye feelin’?” she asked, strolling into the room and keeping a firm grip on what she was too scared to give anyone else. “Ye look fine…good…better.” She wanted to bite her tongue off and then fling herself out the window for sounding like such a fool.
“I’m hoping to be out of bed in a few days.”
She had only herself to blame for all the time she missed seeing him in it. She looked now, trying to take her fill in the quickest time possible. He wore a shirt or nightshirt possibly—she couldn’t tell with half of him beneath the covers—but his covering did nothing to thwart the breadth of his shoulders. She remembered tending to his wound, removing his plaid to the vision of carved steel and thinking how ravishingly beautiful he was. But she’d been with beautiful men before. Lucan MacGregor was so much more than good looks. She didn’t know too much about him since he’d been asleep for almost half the time she’d known him. But he’d been nothing but kind to her, and his cousins loved him very much. He’d told her that he dreamed of her. She dreamed of him, as well. She knew what he looked like in the throes of ecstasy thanks to the dreams that tormented her. He had a deep dimple in his chin that she dreamed of licking while he sank deep into her, stretching her to her limits, making her cry out with pain and with pleasure. She shook her head to clear it.
“Ye bring the sun with ye, lady.”
“I am no lady, sir.”
He smiled. “I am no courtly, well-bred man. I confess here and now that a few times when ye thought me asleep, I was in fact listening to ye sing while ye tended to me. I heard ye talking to yerself and to me while I drifted from this world to the next.”
He heard her? What had she said? Her anger that he’d tricked her subsided in the next moment when he spoke.
“Ye captured my attention the first time I saw ye, and then my heart while ye brought me back to life.”
Heaven help her, who taught this one how to put words together and strip a girl of all her defenses?
She didn’t know what to do without them. “Ye embarrass me.”
“Fergive me.”
She thought in that moment that she could forgive him anything.
“I should go.” She offered him an awkward smile, afraid that if she stayed she would never be rid of the thoughts of him naked and sweating over her…or even more dangerous, thoughts of him wooing her with flowers, pretty words, and tender kisses like the ones noble ladies whispered about at balls. “I’m verra’ happy to see ye so well, Lucan.”
She turned away. “Tell me,” he said, stopping her. She returned her gaze to him to find him sitting up taller in the bed and folding his arms across his chest. “I feel like I havena’ been fully awake with ye since we arrived. What do ye think of Ravenglade?”
“’Tis nice…” She gave the room a quick looking over. “A bit dusty.”
“Aye,” he agreed. “Ye would like Campbell Keep. ’Tis more lived in. I’d like to show it to ye.” He looked down at himself and then at her with a crooked grin she found irresistible. “As soon as I’m up and about.”
She chose to ignore how rakishly handsome he was and give her attention to her skirts instead of him. “Ye called yerself a Campbell at Queensberry.”
“My grandmother is a Campbell, as was my uncle. The keep was his.”
“And is the keep now yers?”
“Aye, ’twill be when I take a wife.”
She nodded but said nothing. That was a topic she didn’t want to continue. She decided it best to shift it now.
“May I ask ye something?”
“Of course.”
She turned back to him and even moved closer to the bed, to him. In all her days she’d never found it so difficult to speak to a man. She gritted her teeth and pressed onward, refusing to be rendered mute or witless by anyone.
“Why are ye bein’ so kind to me yet again? I practically let ye die! Why, if it weren’t fer Amelia and Edmund tending to ye day in and day out, ye likely wouldn’t be here right now. I didn’t bring ye back to life, they did. I didn’t even visit ye and here ye are treatin’ me like I did nothin’ wrong. Why? What have I done fer ye that I should deserve such consideration?”
For a moment he simply sat there looking at her like he didn’t know her or what to say. Then he cleared his throat. “I admit that yer absence troubled me. There were even days when I grew angry with ye, but ’twas because I felt hurt. But I decided that when I did see ye again, I wouldn’t waste time clinging to those feelings. I’m baffled about what I did to keep ye away, though. I’ve been worried that mayhap I insulted ye in my delirium.”
She mulled over a few excuses as to why she’d stayed away but they all seemed so trite and made-up—which they were. Damn it, she couldn’t lie to him, and that was just another thing that was so dangerous about him. She never had problems lying to other men.
“Nae, of course ye didn’t insult me. Delirious or not, I doubt ye know how to be discourteous. I just…Well, I can’t…Ye…Och, fer goodness sakes, I am fond of ye.”
The room was silent save for Sarah’s heartbeat thudding in her ears like a booming drum. For a moment, she couldn’t swallow. Her head felt a bit thick and she feared she might faint. Did she just admit that she was fond of him? Was she mad? She laughed, praying that he would laugh, too, and they could chuckle over such a ridiculous statement. “What I meant to say was…I think ye’re verra’…Well, yer thoughtfulness makes me…” She finally gave up and slapped her hands against her thighs. “Yer kindness makes me uncomfortable. I know ye’re probably just nice to everyone but—”
“I see.”
Nae! That wasn’t what she meant to say.
“Ye prefer a man like Malcolm, who will use ye fer his satisfaction and then coldly cast ye aside.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
The wry quirk of his mouth was both heart-wrenching and irritating. “Ye may have found it somewhat troublesome to convey, but yer meaning was clear.”
“Nae, ’twasn’t.” She left the window and marched toward him. “A man like Malcolm will never win m’ heart. But ye make me uneasy and I am not a fool to tempt fate and lose.”
Sarah could tell by the glint of steel in his smile that he didn’t understand her meaning. She was glad.
“So then, I make ye uncomfortable and uneasy. Anything else?”
“Aye, angry!” She turned on her heel to storm out of the room. And she wasn’t running. She was leaving!
“Ye make me angry, as well,” he confessed, bringing her steps to a halt. “Angry that a beautiful woman like ye would settle fer a man who couldna’ be bothered to look at her—to look deeper than the shape of her bosom and the curve of her hips. Though there is nothing wrong with those either.”
“Then ye’ve looked,” Sarah said, turning slowly, arching her brow at him.
“I might not be a fickle rogue”—one edge of his mouth cocked upward—“but I’m a man.”
She sized him up and remembered his body while she sewed him back together. He was a man all right. She would give him that. “Ye’re not a rogue. Ye’re more like a knight of old. I have never known one.”
“Thank ye.” He shined his smile on her full force, making her a bit weak in the knees. “I was named after one.”
“A knight?”
“Aye, Sir Lucan from King Arthur and his knights of the round table. Sir Lucan was Arthur’s butler.”
“He was a servant?” Sarah asked, delightfully surprised. When Lucan nodded, Sarah did her best to keep her heart in check. She liked everything about this man and it frightened the wits out of her.
“What if I don’t want a man to look deepe
r?” she asked quietly.
“Then ye haven’t met the right man.”
She laughed. “And how will I recognize this answer to m’ dreams?”
He stretched his arms out to his sides, unwittingly inviting her to fall into them. “He’ll make ye smile as much out of bed as he does in it. He’ll come to know what makes ye happy and then do everything in his power to give it to ye. Ye’ll find his interest in things that matter to ye and his protection from the things that dishearten ye. He’ll see yer faults and love ye despite them.”
God help her, she could love this man. Every nerve ending in her body went ablaze with warning. Run and to hell with what anyone thought! But she took a step toward the bed, and then around it.
“I don’t believe in that kind of love, Mr. MacGregor.”
“Well fortunate fer ye, he’ll convince ye that yer wrong.”
For some mad reason, Sarah felt like laughing and grinning like a loon. Was he that cocky? She hadn’t thought so. What else was he hiding from her? She wanted to find out, but not now. Now, her heart was pounding too hard, and her legs didn’t feel like they could keep her up another moment. Now she needed some fresh air.
“I will be sure to keep my eyes open fer this man,” she promised and turned to leave.
“He’ll be right here.”
Sarah’s blood rushed through her veins as she closed the door behind her and leaned against it.
She knew the right thing to do would be to stay away from him. No good could come from this. He was the nephew of Clan Chief MacGregor of Skye. That likely made him something. She was a servant. If she wanted to protect her heart she should stay away.
The door across from her opened and Edmund poked his head out. When he saw her, he smiled and hopped out of the room, closing the door behind him. “Would ye happen to know where my aunt kept her gowns?”
She pointed right, then watched him go. She looked at the door, debating for only a moment before she knocked and plunged inside.
Amelia sat propped in the bed, clutching Mairi Grant’s torn gown together at her chest. When she saw Sarah, her mortification subsided.
