The Scot Beds His Wife

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “If a woman loses consciousness in my company, it’s generally due to a swoon. Or pleasurable exhaustion.” As she drew abreast of him, Gavin looked down at her to weigh the effect of his innuendo and, once again, found himself enjoying that she was among only a handful of ladies he’d met in his life who were taller than his shoulders.

  Because he wanted to smile at her, he frowned, sternly.

  The sound she made was so unladylike, he couldn’t tell if it was a snort or a laugh. “You saying that’s what happened here? You tuckered her out with your lovemaking?”

  Her cobalt eyes danced with self-satisfied mirth, and yet he found himself surveying their surface with the same appreciation he’d done for Loch Awe beneath the rare noonday sun.

  “Nay.” The droll syllable should have dried up the relentless rain. “Seamus McGrath said he spotted a rabid deerhound in these woods not three days ago.” He gestured to the high canopy of ancient elms and beyond. “I think it got to one of yer beasties.”

  She returned her pistol, which she’d been aiming from close to her hip, to its holster before venturing ahead of him. “What makes you think that?”

  Gavin tried not to notice how the fine cut of her serviceable dress exhibited the dramatic indent of her waist. How her nose and ears and the skin beneath her freckles was tinged pink with the same cold that painted her quivering lips a vibrant red.

  Before he knew it, his own lip was caught between his teeth in a gesture of unwelcome deprivation.

  She was his rival. His prey. He shouldn’t be wondering where her cloak was in weather that could turn to ice and illness in her lungs. This was no time to follow the beads of moisture clinging to the damp curls not protected by her sopping hat, its once-proud feather now weighted and listless against butter-yellow felt. Her dark hair tumbled loose down her back, and bounced with her avid movements. Those curls, they beckoned to a man’s hand. He wanted to stroke them. To test them. To wind his fingers in them until he could anchor her head back and lay siege to her impenitent mouth until she was—

  “I don’t see evidence of a bite or an attack,” she reasoned. “Though with a coat this long, it’s hard to tell.”

  “Look here.” He pointed. “There’s a bit of foam about her mouth, and she’ll flail intermittently as though in immense pain. Also, see how bloated she is about the middle?”

  “Hmmm.” Ripping off her hat and discarding it to the moss, her delicate features pursed with scrutiny, she made to approach the animal. “I don’t at all think it’s rabies. It looks to me like she’s just about to—”

  Unaware of what he was doing, Gavin seized her arm, pulling her up short. “What do ye think ye’re doing?” he demanded. “Did ye not mark the place where I told ye that large beast with sharp hooves and horns known to gouge a man clean through was prone to flailing?”

  “You’ve obviously never wrangled Texas longhorns.”

  “Nay, but ye’re daft if ye think I’m going to let ye go over there.” The vehemence of his statement seemed to startle them both. He’d never thought himself as much of a hero, but a protective instinct welled in him from a place so deep, he’d thought it dormant.

  She stared at him in wide-eyed wonderment for a rare, silent moment before her features hardened with stubborn defiance. “Let me go,” she commanded, wrenching at her arm. “Don’t you have someone else to cheat or hassle?”

  “Ye seem to be the only woman alive to find my company a hassle,” he countered.

  “I doubt that very much.”

  He’d been right, Gavin noted, his hand did span the entirety of her arm so that his fingers touched when he encircled it. She was delicate, but not exactly frail. Sinew flexed with strength beneath the wool of her pelisse. Though her bones would disintegrate like spun sugar should he desire it.

  The flash of fear in her eyes advertised the instant she read his thoughts.

  In that moment, he recognized his prey. With her, he needed to be the lion. Maybe if she feared him, she would run. Leave Erradale to him. “It’s a mystery to me how such a reckless woman born with an obvious lack of sense has lasted so long in this world without someone to protect her,” he drawled.

  “Protect me from who, you?” she retorted with false bravado. “Thanks, but better men than you have tried to break me.” She reached for her pistol again, but he abandoned his rifle and caught her other arm. In no time, he had her pinned against the closest oak, her wrists caught between them.

  Her words caught somewhere in the vicinity of his chest, and he had take in a breath of frigid air to remain cold. Calculating.

  “Nay, bonny, not from me. From yerself.”

  Her nostrils flared and her eyes flashed like the sea goddess Li Ban, summoning her stormy wrath.

  “Why worry about me?” she demanded, attempting to wrench her arm out of his grasp. “I get kicked in the head, or gored by old Bessie here, and your problems are solved. No one stands in the way of you getting everything you desire.”

  “What do ye know of my desires?” His blood ran through him like liquid heat, a startling sensation against the freezing rain. Every vein dilated, allowing the molten awareness of her to spill through him with confounding potency.

  Uncertainty splashed across her features and, for once, her eyes darted away from his, only to snag on his lips, and then lower, to the white shirt the rain had painted onto his body. “I know you desire Erradale, and that’s all I need to—”

  Following a foreign and reckless impulse, Gavin stole her words with his mouth. Even as he made the conscious decision to kiss the soft lips that only uttered hard or foul words, he acknowledged the foolishness of the act.

  She was right about Erradale. He desired it above all else, and he was beginning to realize that he desired to possess everything that went with it.

  Including its current owner.

  Even as he claimed her mouth, the urge to do so confounded him. She was nothing like the coy, buxom mistresses he usually coveted, or the unspoiled maidens he allowed to chase him. She was slight, crude, and prickly with all the erotic enticements of a willow switch.

  But when he pressed his mouth to hers, more to shut her up than anything, he was distressed to find that years of intently practiced seduction abandoned him instantly.

  Arousal lanced him with stomach-clenching swiftness, threatening to steal both his breath and his wits.

  He couldn’t afford to cede his wits. Not to her. She’d throw them in the tall grass and set them ablaze only to spite him. Yet here he was, hard as a diamond and uncertain as an untried whelp.

  They stood there beneath the dripping oak, damp and frozen in more ways than one. Lips locked and still but for shared tremors that weren’t entirely produced by the unrelenting cold.

  Her eyes were closed, he noticed, squeezed shut in what he hoped wasn’t a grimace, and her breath carried sweet notes of port wine and promises of wild, artless passion.

  It was that promise that mystified him into stillness.

  Life as the second son of Hamish Mackenzie, as brother to the Demon Highlander … as someone who’d loved and lost as profoundly as he had, had taught him a very important lesson.

  Passion, in all its forms, was a man’s undoing. Lust and hunger were permitted, of course, as these were functions of the body and instincts primordial.

  But passion.

  Passion was consuming. It painted everything with a pall of red, the only thing identifiable with any sort of clarity the object of the obsession. It was an ardent, zeal-provoking, violent mania, and it had no place in his heart, or in his life.

  Best he feel nothing. That he remained composed. That he control all desire so that it didn’t control him. Best he feed his hungers and lusts so that his passions remained eternally banked and his heart perpetually cold.

  Like any muscle, the heart atrophied with disuse, and it was upon that fact he heavily relied. That he’d survived all this time. If one did not love, then one could not hate. For each emotion wa
s equally consuming.

  Equally passionate.

  And, some-fucking-how, Gavin recognized that the woman in his arms was comprised mostly of untamed, unspent passion. Her very matter flooded with it. She tasted of it. Rich and spiced with exotic enticements. She would respond to his every maneuver with it. She would use it as a battering ram against the ramparts of the walls he’d fortified with cavalier mirth and selfish wickedness.

  What if … what if passion was contagious?

  With a stunned gasp, she turned her head, tearing her lips from his.

  In the time it took for her to form the indignant words “What the fuck do you think—” Gavin’s decision was made, and it no longer paralyzed him.

  His fingers released her wrist and anchored in her hair, where they’d previously itched to be. His next kiss was so fierce, it drove her head against his palm, and the back of his hand against the tree.

  Her lips were already parted, and he pressed them wider.

  This wasn’t a kiss, but a claiming.

  The first stroke with his tongue tasted of rain and salt. The second, deeper plunge was flavored of fine, syrupy port and the hint of that uncultivated passion he both craved and feared.

  His body followed close, aching for contact. Though her hands lifted, pressing feebly against the swells of his chest in weak resistance, he drove his other arm between her body and the tree, and pushed his weight against her, craving her nearness. Her vitality. The fire that always seemed to lick at him from behind her eyes.

  She kissed him back, but not with the trained skill of a jaded noblewoman, or the unpracticed vehemence of a virgin. Her kiss resembled all his other interactions with her.

  A battle.

  One she had no intention of allowing him to win.

  Her hands bunched in his lapels with aggression, her wee fists pulling him closer, into her. Though her muscles went rigid, her tongue sparred with his, as he might have guessed it would. Each lick and swirl, each plunge and retreat became a point counted for or against.

  Gavin had never enjoyed a woman’s mouth so much in his entire life.

  And that was a powerful fact, as he’d tasted more than his share.

  He knew the moment she’d stepped off the train that she was unlike his other conquests, but until he’d actually had her in his arms, he’d not known exactly how singular she was.

  He’d thought, erroneously, that it was merely her unique imperfections that lent him a sense of fascination. Though he’d had just about every different flavor of woman imaginable, he’d begun to remember them with the exact same disillusioned ennui. His reminiscence of them became a forest where all the trees were the same size, shape, and color. All the husky moans and screams of pleasure the exact same melody. Perfect in their pitch and percussion.

  And, as everyone who chased excellence came to eventually agree, perfection was boring. It was both predictable and insipid.

  Generally, where women were concerned, it came at a great cost, one way or the other.

  Nothing about Alison Ross was perfect. Her thick, heavy hair belonged to a woman with a much less elegant neck. Her eyes, too wide and shrewd for such a delicate chin and sharp nose, should not have been paired with a brow so prone to censure. She was too tall, too thin, too crass, and much too insolent.

  All of that gave her a sort of uncultivated allure, a beauty much like the forest in which they stood, dappled with several genuses of trees and moss, grass and blossoms. Its own beauty cultivated by its rather random, untamed imperfection.

  He could look at the unsophisticated topography for hours, and not think to move a single tree or replace a meadow.

  These were the eyes with which he appreciated Alison Ross.

  Though she often spoke, swore, and rode like a man, she felt like a woman against him, feminine and fragile.

  She undeniably tasted like a woman.

  And yet … so unlike any other women he’d sampled. To say she was sweeter missed the mark entirely. She was rather like strong Turkish coffee when one had only ever tasted multitudes of tea.

  A shock.

  A revelation.

  As Gavin feasted on lips softened with a rare lack of ire, he realized what dangerous ground they both stood upon. Treacherous because it was terrain he’d promised never again to tread. Paved with sweet stones of consideration and vulnerability that—once outlived their usefulness—were always picked up and hurled at him.

  Instead of taking from her, he was seized with the urge to give. He pressed against her because the desire to infuse her delicate bones with warmth overcame his need for self-preservation. He’d tupped a lass or two against a tree come Beltane or Samhain … and he’d allowed her back the abrasions of the bark to remember their pleasure by.

  But this … this was no casual, alcohol-infused encounter. And it should have been. He’d meant to dominate her, hadn’t he? To show her that he could leave her panting and boneless while he, the great seducer, could stow her convictions with a kiss.

  Then, unaffected, he’d walk away and take her land.

  Well … that simply could not happen now.

  This kiss was a dynamic shift in the very stars that wrote their fates. It peeled back years from his soul somehow, took him back to before he’d become a hunter, and a traveler. Before Colleen had torn what was left of his heart from his chest and left him alone in the world, before his mother was blinded and his father killed.

  Before Liam, his brother, left for the army, thus condemning Gavin’s own childhood to death.

  To when these woods were a haven to a kind, sensitive boy, and the open land of Erradale the only bit of freedom he’d ever tasted.

  The only place his cruel father would never look for him.

  Having Alison in his arms now, coaxing a response other than defiance from her, was a chance, a challenge. One he wanted to embrace.

  One he wanted to reject.

  And knew he could not.

  He had to take care with her. To recognize her strength, but honor her softness. To shield her delicate skin from any abrasions but those caused by his own whiskers.

  Or his teeth.

  Fierce hunger reared in him at the thought of any part of her in his mouth. Now that he’d tasted her lips, he wanted a taste of it all. He wanted her writhing in capitulation as he supped on every part of her. The soft lobe of her ear, the taut arch of her neck, the turgid peak of her breast, and ultimately, her sweet, soft sex.

  She broke the kiss only an intake of breath’s time before the deafening report of her pistol shattered the peace of the forest, and drove their heated, straining bodies apart.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Samantha used the time it took the startled Lord Thorne to figure out that he hadn’t been shot—once again—to sag against the tree and catch her breath.

  Everything trembled. Her limbs, her bones, her lips, the leaves beneath the percussive rain. The earth beneath her feet.

  Noting that her aim had not been true the first time, she lifted her pistol, aimed carefully, and shot again.

  This galvanized the astonished lord, and he had her back against the tree and relieved her of her pistol before she had the chance to react.

  God, he was strong. And fast.

  She’d be afraid if she wasn’t so aroused.

  Goddammit.

  “Have ye lost yer bloody mind, lass?” he hissed, his thunderous expression, along with the fingers digging into her upper arm, warned her that he was seconds away from shaking her senseless.

  His was a relevant question, Samantha had to admit, though not in the context he’d meant it.

  She had to be certifiably insane to have kissed him back.

  Damn, but he was the devil. Temptation personified. The theoretical favored son of whichever God crafted such physical perfection. And, like the so-called star of the morning, he infamously used his powers for wicked, wicked ends.

  He made the wrong choice feel so utterly right. In his arms, an immoral sin became
heavenly bliss. But at what cost?

  Her body? Her soul?

  Samantha berated herself with a bleak and stolid self-loathing that reached into the very core of her being. She should have shot him. Put him out of her misery. Her favored Colt had protected her from more than a few drunken cowboys who’d mistaken her for an easy mark. Not that she’d ever actually had to pull the trigger.

  Not until Bennett …

  The moment Thorne had freed her wrists to tangle his fingers in her hair and better lay siege to her lips, she could have drawn and fired.

  Had he treated her like the high-handed, dishonest, selfish, entitled, arrogant bastard that he was, she probably would have.

  But …

  His kiss had conveyed a sentiment she’d thought him incapable of.

  Tenderness.

  And not that disingenuous, overwrought sort a man expressed when attempting a seduction. He’d been anything but romantic, in fact. But there had been something in the dichotomy of his hard kiss and his soft embrace that had captivated her. As mesmerizing as his lips had been, the hand cupping the back of her head had been equally so. As had the other strong arm gliding up her back to cushion her from the rough trunk of the tree. He’d not merely pressed his arousal against her, as Bennett was wont to do, grinding at her like a bull anticipating a rut.

  He’d seemed to … curl around her. Like a warm, muscled shelter from the bite of the winter rain. Delicious, masculine heat had permeated her garments, singed her flesh, and culminated in a pool of aroused sensation between her legs.

  Damn you, she thought up at him. Damn you for making me weak.

  She wanted to snipe at him. To demand he let her go. To give him a tongue-lashing he’d never forget.

  Best she not think of the word “tongue” just now. She winced.

  Seeming to misread the glare and the gesture, his grip on her shoulders instantly gentled, though he didn’t release her.

  Had she been a worldly, witty woman she’d have said something coy and nonchalant. Something that both insulted his manhood and expressed a lack of affectation over what he’d just done to her.