At The Laird's Command (Sword and Thistle Book 3)

by Laurel Adams

  The Macrae sucked in a breath, grasping me so hard I worried it might crush my bones. Then he shook me. “You little whore,” the laird choked out, with what must have sounded to anyone else like anger. Like rage. Like contempt.

  But I knew the secret language of my laird’s arousal.

  “You’ve nearly to unmanned me,” he rasped near my ear, the evidence of it in a little spurt of fluid that leaked from the tip of his cock onto the back of my thigh. “How is it you are doing the obeying, but in so doing, you’re driving me to my fucking knees!”

  I’d nearly driven him over the edge is what I’d nearly done, and a little smile played at my lips to the apparent bewilderment of Ian, who tried to soothe my arms where the laird’s fingers left white marks. He didn’t understand our games, but I did, and I delighted in them.

  Especially when the laird growled and said, “Well then, I must fuck you doubly hard. You must get what you deserve…” It was with a ruthless determination that he pressed the tip of his cock between the cheeks of my arse.

  It was tighter than before. An impossible fit. And the pain of it quite nearly overcame my craving to know what it would be like to be filled in both holes. Soft and pliant, I repeated to myself, trying to ease the way for us both, wondering if I could possibly stretch so wide as to take two thick shafts in my body. But I could do anything for my laird.

  As he reached round me to finger the pleasure bud of my sex, a keening sound escaped me. I could no longer buck with abandon on Ian’s cock, but was forced to stillness between them as the laird’s hard pole sank inexorably into me. I shuddered at the first inch, whimpers of pain making Ian grimace and snarl at the laird, “Stop! Do you mean to split her in half, man?”

  “Do you want me to stop, lass?” the laird asked.

  I would have denied it even if it were true, because I couldn’t bear for the laird to be chastised by his kinsman on my account. But fortunately, I didn’t have to lie. “No!” I cried, desperately. “More, give me more. Please!”

  So I got the second inch and the third, until the quaking began in my belly and I feared I might shatter in another orgasm before they were both fully inside me. I bit my lip, hard, to hold it back, for I didn’t want it. Just as Ian had held back to make the pleasure last, now so did I.

  “Good lass,” the laird said, biting my shoulder as he hit bottom.

  We swayed like that for a moment, our bodies all locked together. Our limbs tangled. Our breathing matched. I thought I might die of the pleasure. It was too much. And yet, I could take more still, as I was to find out.

  For my raw pleas sparked off a reaction in both men. The laird began to move, rocking me slowly with each thrust. Then I picked up his tempo, filling myself with Ian’s erection on the downstroke and being filled by the laird on the upstroke. As we all moaned and gyrated and thrust together, it was the most sinfully erotic feeling in the world.

  I was being penetrated by two men. Stuffed full. The center of their lust. And the only thing that stopped me from screaming in ecstasy with every thrust was the fact that I was too breathless and dizzy with arousal to do it!

  “Jesus Christ,” Ian cursed again, tapping his head back against the headboard as if to keep his senses about him.

  As I said, I was too breathless to scream with every thrust, but I did scream at the rough, raw ride I was getting from both men and my helplessness to do anything but experience it. They touched me, everywhere. They used me with increasing abandon. Ian sucked and kissed at my neck until it became an erogenous zone of its own, pulsing and feeding my lust. And my very womb seemed to ache with need until Ian finally groaned. “Come with me. Give me that.”

  His hand was somehow tangled in my hair and the laird’s hands and one might be forgiven for not quite being sure who he was speaking to. But Ian’s breath exploded in a grunt, his muscles tensing in the throes of passion as he spurted warm seed up into me with enough force, I felt it as a splash inside.

  Then came the flood of it, some of it rushing up inside me, some of it leaking out around the base of his cock and balls, wetting all three of us. And it was that feeling—that sticky, tawdry, torrid feeling of Ian’s seed that set me off.

  I convulsed, screaming, writhing, making sounds of another world. Clutching their bodies as waves and waves of pleasure crashed over me like the loch splashing the rocks below the castle wall. What I was in that moment I cannot say. Lover, whore, or bride. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. The only thing I was sure of was the laird’s pleasure as he, too, finished in a frenzy. Driving his cock hard and fast, plundering my arse until he shouted his orgasm with a stream of curse words, each more foul than the last.

  Which is how I knew he had enjoyed it.

  Then he collapsed upon me, all of us sweating and panting.

  “She’s very beautiful,” Ian said to the laird. And then, bashfully, he seemed to remember that I was not merely an object to be spoken of. “You—you’re very beautiful. And…very…”

  “Wanton,” the laird panted. “Which makes her even more beautiful. There is no sweeter music than when she screams in pleasure, which we will make her do again this night.”

  And they did.

  Ian had surprisingly clever fingers; he knew how to rub at my nipples and the swollen pearl between my nether lips, to bring me to climax again. And the laird tugged at my hair and took me again in the arse, as if he had decided it was his favorite way to take me.

  It would be a lie to say that I did not desire Ian Macrae.

  Like fire to ice, his softer touch was the balm to my laird’s rougher ways. And something came about between the three of us, that seemed to connect us beyond the body. Perhaps it was if all the ways of the world were suspended for the moment, here, in the laird’s bed, where neither man had to hide from one another the lusts of his heart. Where neither man bothered to stifle a cry or show any concern for skin against skin.

  I came again and again, with both men, until I lost count. Until just the sight of either man’s softening cock became a challenge to rouse it again. Until both men were sated and drained and wearier than I was.

  Chapter Seven

  When I came to awareness again from whatever blackness had taken my mind, my head was resting upon Ian’s outstretched arm, and I heard the deep breath of his sleep behind me on the pillow. My own arm was stretched across the laird’s broad chest, fingers lightly tangled in the short hairs there.

  I thought that he, too, must be asleep. But I’d spent enough nights in his bed to know the laird’s habits; he was too still for sleep, his breathing too shallow.

  My laird had told me that sharing me with Ian would ease his mind and take a burden from him; that he would rest easier if I did it.

  So why was he still awake and restless?

  “Laird?” I whispered into the dark.

  His finger pressed softly to my lips to quiet me. That’s when I realized that he was not only awake, but staring at me. He’d been watching me in the moonlight all this while, and I wished I could see his features better. What would I see in his eyes? As I wondered, he took my face in his hands and brought me closer to him. So close that our foreheads touched, making a little space between us that admitted nothing and no one else.

  His warm breath caressing my face, he whispered two words very softly in Gaelic. So softly I was sure that I’d misheard him. Then he said them again, with more intensity than before. “Mo chridhe,” he whispered. My heart. That’s what he was saying to me. I startled at this tender term of endearment. Truly I did. Especially when he followed it with, “I have never loved a woman before. Never let myself love a woman. Never wished to love. But, oh, how I love you…”

  No. He couldn’t mean it; especially not now. Not when another man’s sweat and seed were cooling on my body. Not when another man’s skin was still naked against mine! Perhaps that is why I so breathlessly said, “What?”

  “Shhh,” the laird whispered, pressing his mouth to my ear. “Don’t wake Ian. I w
ould wait to say it until he had gone, but my heart will burst if I wait.” He took my fingers and held them against his heart, which throbbed hard and strong beneath my touch. “You have stolen this heart lass, little by little, each night since I met you. But tonight you claimed it completely. I cannot deny it to you, or to God or to anyone. Now you are my heart. Mo chridhe.”

  Sudden tears of joy wet my lashes as I was overcome with emotion. I had his heart? Not only his protection, his kindness and his body, but his heart. It seemed to change everything. Such a thing seemed a miracle to me. A blessing beyond comprehension. I started to say as much. To tell the laird that I loved him, too.

  When suddenly, the laird’s hand clamped over my mouth to hush me.

  For a moment, I thought it love play. But then I realized that he wasn’t tensing for action; he was listening. Listening with all his senses. And so I listened too. I heard the faint sound of a scrape, like a shoe across the floor. A breath that wouldn’t have been discernible if I hadn’t been holding my own.

  There was someone else in the room.

  Someone other than Ian, who had also gone silent and breathless.

  Things happened very swiftly after that.

  I heard the whoosh of something slice through the air just before the laird twisted and threw me off the bed, onto the floor. The fierce fighting began while I was still prone, gasping from the shock of landing so hard on my hands and knees. Shouts erupted from the bed where I caught glimpses in the dark of my laird wrestling some shadowy figure.

  Goods Blood, was it Ian? Had he treacherously used this moment to—

  But no.

  It was Ian Macrae who delivered a kick that sent an attacker flying, before managing to find his sword in the dark. The clang of metal against metal filled the air, and I began to shriek, realizing that there was a second attacker. The enemy had somehow gotten over the wall—snuck into the castle—and would slaughter us all.

  I screamed, hopelessly vulnerable in my nakedness, but searching for something, anything, to use as a weapon. A dressing table went over in the close-fighting of the men and with it a candlestick—and I used my bare hands to stamp out the flame before the room caught fire.

  We’re all going to be murdered, I thought. But I knew my laird would fight to the bitter end, and so would I. I grabbed up the candlestick and wielded it, bashing it into the leg of the man my laird grappled with.

  Another bloodcurdling scream split the night as Ian’s sword punched through a man’s guts. I saw the attacker’s figure slump against the wardrobe and fall to the floor just before my laird came down hard upon his own attacker, wrestling for a dirk.

  Pounding footsteps could be heard on the stairs—our men, or the enemy, I couldn’t know. I somehow scrambled to my feet just as the door was flung open and the room flooded with torchlight. I screamed again, for this light revealed the exact moment that the laird shoved a blade into the skull of the man atop him.

  Then the dark, grim, unsmiling Malcolm appeared in the doorway, sword drawn, and I’d never been so glad to see him before. Our men. Thank God.

  “Laird!” Malcolm cried, as he pushed into the room.

  “Are there more?” the laird snapped, shoving the corpse off him.

  “No,” Malcolm replied, after a quick search of the room.

  The laird wasn’t taking any chances though. He found his plaid and was arming himself in an instant. Meanwhile, I backed up against the wall, naked and horrified by the bloody carnage of the scene.

  Ian was a vision from hell, naked and covered in red blood from neck to toe. The bed itself was a destroyed mass of feathers and straw, an axe stuck in the mattress just where I’d been before the laird threw me to the floor.

  And my laird—oh, he was a rampaging figure of rage, slamming the door shut to let no one else in, then shouting every curse word I’d ever heard in English or Gaelic.

  I realized how lucky we were. These men had come to kill the laird. They had decided to kill him in his sleep, when he would be defenseless and alone but for his harlot. They’d obviously feared him enough to send two assassins instead of one. But they hadn’t counted on finding another swordsmen in the laird’s bed.

  And if Ian hadn’t been there…

  I shuddered to think. The laird would be dead.

  We both would be.

  ~~~

  THE LAIRD

  That he’d been attacked in his own castle—in his own bed—was a matter of such profound disgrace that John couldn’t bear for the rest of the castle to look on. Turning to wrap Heather in a blanket, John snapped, “Let no one else in the door.”

  Meanwhile, Heather dropped something at his feet. A bloodied candlestick, he saw. Had she used it? “Are you hurt, lass?”

  She shivered, but bravely said, “Not at all.”

  That wasn’t true, though. The blood on the candlestick, he realized, was from her hands, which appeared to have been burned a bit. Or maybe, along with her knees, they’d been scraped when he’d thrown her to the floor.

  And he’d done it because of these wicked fiends.

  “Do you know these invaders?” the laird asked his men.

  Ian and Malcolm were already inspecting the bodies. “This one’s a Donald,” Malcolm grimly concluded.

  “How do you know?” Ian asked, holding his forearm, which seemed to have been cut in the fighting.

  Malcolm’s eyes never left the dead man’s face when he answered. “I killed a man who looked just like him in a clearing not long ago. I don’t forget the faces of men I kill. Especially not those fixing to rape a lass. This one is maybe a twin or a kinsman of the one I killed.”

  Donalds, in his castle. The laird seethed with fury. And yet, according to Malcolm, none of the entrances had been breached. Which lead the laird to conclude, “So they came over the wall…”

  Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not tonight. The men were alert—even young Rodric. There’s a full moon and a snapping vicious wind. Men crossing the loch in little boats would have been spotted if not sent down into the deep. T’would be suicidal for them to have made the attempt.”

  Ian continued to hold his bloodied arm. “So they were more likely here all along disguised amongst the villagers, or someone let them inside.”

  Once, I might’ve suspected that someone was you, the laird thought. But no more. Whether the cause was love, loyalty, or instinct, the plain fact remained that Ian Macrae had saved the laird’s life. Not just his, but Heather’s too.

  And not for the first time.

  It was a thing obviously not lost on the lass, either, who stood trembling now, clinging to her blanket, staring at the corpses on the floor. Thank goodness it had been Malcolm to come running at the sound of her scream. Any other man in the castle might have something to say about finding the laird, his woman, and one of his warriors in a state of undress together in the wee hours of the night.

  Thankfully, Malcolm was so taciturn that not only wouldn’t take any interest in what he saw, but would never say a word about it.

  Even so, they had better get their stories straight lest the castle be thrown into paranoid turmoil. John would have liked to deny the incident completely, but that wasn’t possible, so a story would have to be concocted. “There was a lone attacker,” the laird said, slowly. “Ian was standing guard outside my door—the assassin grappled with him. Knocking Ian momentarily senseless, the attacker burst into the room; fortunately, the noise alerted me before the ax came down on the bed.”

  Heather blinked, but, fortunately, John’s men knew what he was about. “One attacker instead of two,” Malcolm said, with a nod. It would be the official story…one that would leave any conspirators confused and worried. Perhaps enough to accidentally reveal themselves.

  “What do we do with the extra body?” Ian asked.

  Without the slightest regret in his heart, the laird said, “Dump it in the loch.”

  His men would have to arrange it when no one was about; but t
he laird could trust them. For that matter, he trusted Heather, too. This carnage and cloak-n-dagger business wasn’t for simple crofter’s girls or the faint of heart. But he understood a strength in her that no one else knew. “Heather, we tell no one what actually happened here tonight. Not your sister. Not anyone.”

  Heather’s lower lip wobbled. But she nodded. “I understand.”

  “Malcolm, take her to get cleaned up and tended,” the laird commanded.

  Heather didn’t want to go. “I’m no more wounded than you. It’s Ian who—”

  “I’m well enough,” Ian protested, to Heather. “But tending to you will keep the staff occupied.”

  Heather’s violet eyes shifted to meet the laird’s a question in them, which he answered with a nod. “I’ll come find you soon, lass. Go.”

  She went, with only one backward glance at the bed where John had shared her with another man—and where an ax nearly chopped her in half. And her bleak expression would haunt the laird, he was sure, for what remained of his life.

  He’d made his admission of love to her in the quiet of the night, just before these devils had attacked them. It had been an emotional moment, exquisite and perfectly vulnerable. Destroyed now. He was almost as bitter about that as the fact they’d been sent to kill him.

  With Malcolm and Heather gone, Ian kicked one of the corpses and spit a curse. “So the story is to be that I was outside your door…I should’ve been, laird.”

  John decided to ignore the possible double-meaning in his kinsman’s words. He’d shared Heather with Ian to bring them closer together; it would ruin everything if Ian would now regret the experience. “There was no cause for you to be outside my door. You’re not a bodyguard. You’re my second-in-command.”

  Ian gave a frustrated shake of his head. “Someone should have been outside your door. You must have guards now at all times.”

  “We can’t spare them from the walls.”