Sue-Ellen Welfonder

by Master of the Highlands

  God’s breath, but he could be a buffoon when it came to expressing himself!

  He started to turn away, just long enough to regain his composure, but she circled her fingers around his arm. Her grip surprisingly strong.

  She stepped closer. “What am I? Pray tell me, for I dearly want to hear.”

  Warning bells tolled all through him, but he blurted the answer anyway. “You are my Bane,” he said, saying the words quickly before prudence could stay the fool-sounding pronouncement.

  “’Tis a clan legend,” he rushed on, trying to get past the explanation before her eyes widened any further. “The Bane of the MacLeans. A blessing or a curse, depending on how it strikes.”

  “I am your… bane?”

  She still did not understand.

  Confusion clouded her lovely eyes.

  “Bane is what the Legend is called by the bards.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, kneaded them. “See you, MacLean males are said to have but one true mate,” he began, praying she’d believe him. “One true love. A woman bound to them from time immemorial according to the Legend. No other love can compare, and a MacLean male will search relentlessly, ne’er finding peace or contentment, until he is joined with this woman… his Bane.”

  “And you believe this Legend?”

  “I do now.” That said with utter conviction.

  She stared at him, her beautiful eyes luminous in the candle shine, the gold flecks in her irises turning deepest amber. “Are you telling me that I am your Bane, Iain MacLean? That I am this woman to you?”

  Iain heaved a great breath, full drained from his little speech and feeling just a mite… silly.

  Half-afraid she might laugh.

  Or think him daft.

  Madeline Drummond was an intelligent woman. She might easily scoff at old Celtic myths and tales.

  But she’d voiced a direct question, and he’d answer her with equal candor.

  “Aye, lass, you are the Bane of my heart, and I have known it, known you, for months now.” He told her true. “I recognized you inside my heart… knew of your existence the very first moment I sensed your presence.”

  She gasped at that, her red-gold brows winging upward. “You sensed me?”

  The warning bells came back with a vengeance, and louder.

  “I felt you… deep, deep inside me,” he admitted, watching her carefully, wondering at her lack of surprise. “’Tis the way of the Legend. When the time is right, the MacLean male becomes aware of his Bane. He will sense her, the sennachies claim. He’ll know she is out there, somewhere in the great vastness of the world, and so he waits for her.”

  She tilted her head, her glossy braids gleaming in the candlelight. “He doesn’t search for her?”

  “He will if he can. Och, aye, lass, if he can, he will search the width and breadth of the land, and tirelessly, until he finds her. For a certainty,” he said, and meant it to the roots of his soul. “But sometimes circumstances prevent him.”

  “And you were one of the ones who had to wait? Who wasn’t able to… go searching?” She blinked, her eyes bright.

  “Aye, I could not seek my fate at will as others have done before me. Nor did I believe in the Legend.” He glanced aside, expelled a long breath.

  “I don’t think I believed any of the tales until that day in Glasgow Cathedral,” he owned. “Then I knew I could no longer deny it… I knew you were inside the instant I dismounted before the cathedral steps.”

  He traced a finger down her cheek, and that one wee touch blasted heat all through him. His knees began to feel wobbly again, but for a wholly different reason. Jesu God, just standing close to her, seeing those nipples peeking at him, begging to burst free, near unmanned him.

  God, but he wanted her, and soon.

  “You knew I was inside the cathedral?” She peered at him, her eyes bright with something very much akin to desire, and his pulse pounded harder at the sight of it.

  “Aye, I knew, but mayhap a part of me knew even before then,” he said, marveling at the silken warmth of her skin, how precious it felt beneath his touch.

  How right and dear.

  How very much his.

  Her eyes widened. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because I had been feeling you so strongly inside me,” he clarified, toying with a loose curl just above her ear. “’Twas a fine golden warmth that would come unbidden to spool all through me.”

  And set my loins like granite.

  “I have felt you in a similar way,” she said, throwing him off-balance.

  Delighting him.

  Her gaze steady on his, she reached for his hand, laced her fingers with his. The simple contact flooded him with giddy excitement. He shoved a hand through his hair, tried to remember he was supposed to be the seducer. The one in charge and control.

  “I would feel you this night, too,” she vowed, smoothing her free hand down the loose spill of his unbound hair. Undoing him.

  “Feel me?” Not that he didn’t ken what she meant… it was written all over her bonnie face.

  The hard throbbing ache at his groin knew, too.

  Indeed, that part of him burned to be… felt.

  To feel her as deeply and thoroughly as only that part of a man can feel a woman.

  But his old doubts made him narrow his eyes at her. “Do you realize what you are saying, sweet?”

  Lifting her chin, she looked him full square in the eye. “I am saying I would share this night with you, sir. Share it fully.”

  “This fully?” Iain skimmed his fingers lightly across the lush, upper swells of her breasts.

  “More fully,” she breathed, touching his face with equal gentleness, lighting her fingertips along the hard line of his jaw.

  Carefully watching her face, Iain took hold of her hips, drew her close. “I will not deny that I want you,” he said, his voice thick with need, well aware she could feel the hard length of him straining against her through the layers of their clothes. “But I will not press you into something you might regret on the morrow.”

  “It is because of the morrow, sir, and what may transpire, that I want this,” she said, pulling away from him to strip back the bedcovering with a resolute jerk.

  “It is my wish to open my heart and body to this… this force between us, lest the fates conspire against us and the morrow finds one of us with cause to grieve.”

  Grasping her shoulders, Iain turned her. “You wish to lie with me, lass?”

  “If you will have me, aye,” she declared, her voice firm.

  Determined.

  “Then so be it,” he said, lowering her to the edge of the bed. His dark eyes smoldering, he removed the pins from her hair, and began undoing her braids. His fingers working so gently in her hair and against her scalp sent delicious tingles cascading down her back.

  Leaning down, he nuzzled her neck through the waving curtain of her unbound hair. “Saints, but I want you so fiercely I can scarce breathe.”

  Madeline nodded. “I am not a woman to speak lightly, sir,” she said, her pulse racing for he’d somehow not only undone her braids but also managed to untie the laces of her bodice, magically sliding it and the undershift down her shoulders without her even realizing it.

  Her naked breasts sprang free, naught standing between her bared skin and his heated gaze but the cool night air streaming in through the chamber’s one, halfopen window.

  “You have magnificent breasts, lady mine,” he murmured, his fingers toying at her nipples. He traced slow, featherlight circles around the puckered flesh of her areoles and each new circle sent spirals of exquisite heat winding through her to pool at her very core.

  “And your touch is as I knew it would be… tender and dear and so sweet it steals my breath,” she said, feeling most wanton for having voiced how he made her feel. “I wanted you from the first,” she said, lifting her hips as he eased her clothes down her thighs, helping him by waggling her long legs until he’d pulled every last stitch
from her body and she sat full naked on the edge of the bed.

  Full naked and wholly unashamed.

  Needy.

  So needy, she was convinced something inside her would soon burst into countless shards of the tiniest of pieces.

  “Wanted me, did you?” Iain stepped back so he could look his fill at her, admire her nakedness as he removed his own clothes. Her hair, a glossy wealth of tumbling red-gold curls, spilled in wild abandon clear to her hips, her hardened nipples thrust through the gleaming strands.

  “Do you ken what it does to me to see you naked? So open to me?” he asked, now as unclothed as she. Stepping forward, he took each nipple between gentle fingers and just held them, lightly squeezing, every once in a while giving a wee firm tug.

  “Tell me how you wanted me, lass, for I would hear the words.” He lifted one hand from her nipples to brush her hair behind her shoulders and free the whole of her breasts to his touch. “I would know that you truly need this.” He caressed down her sides, splayed his hands on the curve of her hips, squeezed lightly. “That without our joining, you are not whole.”

  “The way I want you can scarce be described for ne’er have I known the like before I felt you here.” Taking his hand, she pressed his fingers against her breast, there, where he could feel the steady beat of her heart. “You flooded my senses and filled me with need the very first time you came to me,” she breathed, seeing no need to lie.

  “You consumed me and I ached for your caress.” She drew a long, slow breath, arched her back, desire pulsing deep between her thighs as he began toying with the tightened tips of her breasts as she spoke. “Aye, touch me so… please,” she murmured, “for even just the few moments you took to smooth back my hair left me feeling bereft for your hands on me.”

  Slipping her own hands beneath her breasts, she lifted them for him, offering him their fullness. “Aye, bereft,” she repeated. “And full, tight, and achy with need for… more.”

  She sighed, melting beneath his heated gaze. She burned to pull him to her, rub her breasts against his naked chest, delight in the friction of his chest hair against her bared skin.

  “Och, aye, I shall give you all of me,” he promised, leaning down to flick his tongue across first one nipple, then the other. “You are purring, sweetness,” he added, and drew a nipple into his mouth, taking the hardened peak lightly between his teeth, using his fingers to circle and pluck at the other.

  “Do-not-stop,” Madeline breathed, the sweetest tension spreading through her belly, pulsing there and deeper.

  “Oh, I shall not, minx.” He pulled back to look at her. “Not until I have tasted and sated myself on all of you. I mean to drag my tongue through your deepest heat and savor the very essence of you, lass.”

  Madeline’s breath caught at his words, at the determined smolder in his eyes. Heated tingles rippled through her. “Do you mean what I think you do?” she asked, that part of her already dampening in delicious expectation.

  He nodded, a roguish smile spreading across his face.

  “Oh dear saints!” she gasped, excitement humming inside her as he traced the outer swells of her breasts with his fingertips, then slipped his hand beneath their fullness to cup and weigh them.

  He slid his thumbs slowly back and forth across the tightened peaks, and each passing glide shot white-hot bolts of pure, molten pleasure straight to the tingly warmth pulsing deep between her legs.

  “You are mine, sweetness,” he murmured, easing her onto her back and stretching out beside her. “And I am yours. This night and always, for all time.”

  He pulled back to look at her, then rained the lightest of kisses along the curve of her throat, across the sweep of her bared shoulders. “You are my greatest joy,” he whispered, trailing his kisses lower, once more across the lush fullness of her magnificent breasts, then lower still, across the flat of her belly… toward the sweet tangle of abundant red-gold curls at the juncture of her thighs.

  “Finding you has made me whole again,” he said, smoothing a hand down her side, caressing her with gentle, looping strokes. His fingertips swirled across her abdomen, brushed fleetingly across the very tips of her feminine hair.

  He teased her there, toying with her intimate curls with lighter-than-air touches. He slipped one hand over a breast, settling his palm upon her hardened nipple and just slowly rubbing until she trembled and gasped with the pleasure of it.

  “And you have made me whole in ways I ne’er dreamed I could be,” she sighed, parting her legs, gladly opening them so he could intensify his ministrations.

  Wanting, needing him to do so!

  “Make me yours in all ways this night,” she urged him, sliding her hands over the hard muscles of his shoulders and upper arms.

  “You are so lovely,” he said, and obliged her, closing his palm over the heat of her woman’s flesh. Very deliberately, he rubbed her with the same, deliciously slow circling motion his other hand used on her breast.

  “Aye, make me yours so fully I will be able to taste and remember your scent on my skin for the rest of days,” she whispered, trembling with need. “Only so could I bear the stretch of my tomorrows if the next setting sun should find me without you.”

  “Och, aye, I shall claim you, lass,” he promised, squeezing and stroking her breast. “But you needn’t fret o’er the morrow. The fates would ne’er be so unkind. I have already paid them a goodly enough tithe, I’d say.”

  Pleased when some of the worry left her brow, Iain shifted his position and lifted her legs, settling them over his shoulders. His own need now an acute, pounding ache, he looked straight into the glory of her, savoring her beauty.

  He inhaled deeply of her rousing female scent, pulled in great, greedy gulps of her essence. “Jesu God, but you undo me,” he said, his deep voice husky with arousal.

  Consumed with the need to possess her, he lowered his head until his lips hovered just above her fragrant heat. His breath coming hot and ragged, he parted her lush curls and touched his tongue to her, flicking its tip oh-solightly up and down the soft crevice between her thighs.

  “I shall ne’er let you go,” he breathed against her silken warmth. He laved her now, dragged his tongue again and again through her pleasure-dampened sweetness.

  “I do not want you to let me go, and ’tis you who are beautiful,” Madeline whispered, stretching her fingers through the heavy spill of his hair, holding his dark head close to her center. “Ne’er have I—… oh!”

  She cried out, arching upward, pressing hard against him as he circled his tongue around and over a maddeningly sensitive spot near the top of her woman’s mound.

  “So sweet, so sweet,” he whispered against her pulsing flesh. He licked her slick, female heat with long, wide-tongued strokes, drawing his tongue over her with exquisite, bone-melting slowness.

  “Sweet, aye,” Madeline gasped, looking down, incredibly roused by the sight of him between her thighs, by what he was doing to her down there, the way he seemed to revel in drawing in her scent, her taste.

  Wave after wave of sheerest tingling pleasure streamed through her, and her entire body quivered with desire. Ne’er had she known such languid deliciousness, ne’er had her heart felt more full. Her very soul, for he touched her that deeply.

  Her need began to lift and soar, her body tensing, stretching for something bright and beautiful spinning ever tighter deep inside the part of her he was kissing. A wild pulsing began at her very center, an astonishing intensity about to shatter, the pleasure of it saturating her.

  “Heart of my heart, I adore you,” Iain vowed, rubbing his cheek against the tender flesh of her inner thigh. He rose then, stretching himself atop her, his weight on his arms. Easing her thighs wider, he settled himself between them, let his hardness rest against her as he reached down between them to keep stroking her soft, female heat.

  He slipped his fingers into her damp curls, returned to the tight and throbbing nub there, stroking gently with concentrated, cir
cling strokes. “Ne’er doubt that I love you,” he murmured, his passion almost breaking when she parted her legs farther, opening them full wide beneath him. Her soft whimpers, and the gentle rocking of her hips, inviting him to make her truly his.

  “And I you,” she gasped, reaching between them, circling her fingers around his hardness, guiding him to her. “I believe I have since I first felt you deep within my heart. Mayhap even before. Aye, I shall love you until the end of all my days.”

  “Our days and beyond, my minx,” Iain corrected, at last lowering himself into her heat, pausing only for a heartbeat at the thin barrier of her virtue. “Naught-shall-e’er-part-us,” he half groaned the words as he pushed inch by slow inch into her honeyed depths, losing himself in the satiny tightness of her. His heart split wide, cracking full open to absorb everything she was to him and he to her.

  Everything they were to each other.

  And always had been.

  “You-are-glorious,” he managed, waves of molten pleasure crashing over him as he moved inside her, rocking gently, and taking her with him to the most wondrous place he’d e’er been.

  Unable to withhold himself a moment longer, he drew back, then plunged full inside her, capturing her cry with his lips, kissing her deeply as their hearts and bodies came together in a blinding burst of brilliant, colored need.

  She arched high against him, her fingers digging into his shoulders, clutching at him in fullest abandon, her glory in their union stealing any discomfort and banishing any last doubts about the rightness of their joining, as he cried out her name and collapsed against her, fully spent and wholly hers.

  This night.

  And for all time to come.

  Regardless of the morrow and its fast-approaching shadows.

  Chapter Sixteen

  NOT LONG AFTER FIRST LIGHT, on a dark and dreary morning, Iain and those who’d accompanied him drew rein in the shelter of the wooded uplands some distance behind Abercairn Castle. Cloud-cast and gray, the day’s imminent threat of rain and drifting sheets of fine, whitish mist created a welcome cloak to shield their number from any observant guardsmen patrolling Abercairn’s impressive curtain walls.