Highlander's Rage: A Scottish Medieval Historical Romance (Unbroken Highland Spirits Book 2)

by Alisa Adams

  All it would take was a little more...

  Before he could doubt himself or wonder what was really at the core of his behavior, Lachlan loomed down upon Aoide and sealed his mouth over hers.

  10

  As Lachlan’s lips claimed possession of hers, Aoide screeched a gasp of surprise. It was muffled, squashed into a note of blurry confusion, unable to breach her lips, and forced back down into her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She possessed no more air. Her eyes were wide.

  What is going on?

  Then, the pressure upon her mouth shifted, and a sparking ember caught flame in the center of her chest. It didn’t matter that her lungs were empty, as her heart had swollen to twice its size, and her stomach had leaped to her throat. There was no space for air, anyway.

  As Lachlan kissed her, his mouth claiming hers in a rush that was both violent and exciting, Aoide was helpless to the way her eyes drifted shut, and her lips parted under his. Immediately, her mouth was assaulted by the slick wetness of his tongue, her own rising to meet him gingerly.

  But she wasn’t permitted to be shy.

  Lachlan claimed her mouth with a mastery that would have seen her disintegrate were she timid. If she shied away from meeting his kiss, she would have faded into nothingness, burnt away into ash. Her only course of survival was to be bold, to meet his touch and his taste at every advance.

  Their tongues dueled, their mouths clung. When Lachlan drove his fingers into her hair, Aoide clasped handfuls of his shirt and held him tight.

  Her scalp stung with sweet little sensitivities, and she gasped in a defeated moan when the full weight of her commander landed upon her belly. His hips became cradled by hers, and she felt that fire again, that burning deep in her core.

  A hunger, her mother had called it. Aoide could not deny the appropriate name. It was a hunger—a need that demanded satisfaction, a hollowness that needed to be filled.

  As their kiss was broken by the need for air, Aoide’s lips trembled on a whimper, and her eyes flung open. The face that stared down at her was at once a stranger’s and yet so familiar to her. He was a man that she had never truly spoken with but whom she had already caught watching her through those very same eyes.

  Something in her soul told her that this stranger, this man who stared at her with eyes blacker than night and hotter than coals, was the real Lachlan. The man hidden beneath the mask of the stoic commander.

  And, at that moment, Aoide realized why she had returned to the camp.

  Left in the office of the treasurer, with nothing to her name but her own two hands and a headscarf that smelt of man, Aoide had known the sort of future that stretched before her.

  Identified by Lachlan as a victim of circumstance, she would have found work or been given sanctuary at a convent. She’d have had food for her belly and a roof over her head. Her path forward had stretched out ahead of her, with more hope and benefit than she had possessed in a very long time.

  And yet, she had walked away.

  She had taken to the road and made her way, by memory, back to the encampment of soldiers that she knew had made rest just over the rise to the west.

  The entire way, she had worried and panicked that she was throwing away her best shot at survival—that the lure that drew her back was a strain of madness lost in the darkness of her mind. That was what ignorants had always claimed of her mother...witchcraft. Madness.

  The look on Lachlan’s face at her return had hardly encouraged her to trust her instincts. Instead of pleasure or relief, or even disregard for her presence, her appearance seemed to have conjured great fury. Confused in that she had never seen such anger turned on her before, even when he had thought her a thief, Aoide had barely had a moment to regret her choice. Instead, she was whisked away to the privacy of his tent, reunited with the smells and visuals that had made her feel safe these last few days, and unceremoniously dumped upon his bed.

  Now, looking up into the face of a man driven mad by her very presence, emotions wracking his features as they never had before, Aoide realized above all else why she had returned.

  She had been searching for this man.

  The Lachlan that was trapped amongst his world of honor and forbearance.

  It was for him that she had come.

  As they stared at one another, caught in their own spirals of lust, their chests pressing together with every gasp and their cores set ready to burn, Aoide cast away her fear. She leaned up, her neck long and her lips eager, seeking his kiss once more.

  Instead of joining her in another rush of feeling, however, the merest brush of her mouth on his had Lachlan scrambling. Blinking at the oddity that was a man so large falling about so disorderly, Aoide had not the time to feel more than shock as Lachlan found his feet and backed away from the bed.

  His shirt was twisted, pulled out of line by her desirous touch. One large pad of muscle and its small brown nipple was on show. His hair stood on end, and his kilt was misshapen, caught in the hard mass of arousal that had grown beneath.

  Her cheeks flaming, Aoide braced her hands at her sides and sat up. To her shame, her own appearance was not much better. Her trousers were pushed up to her knees, and her dirty feet were staining the sheets. Her shirt had gaped open, torn at the neckline, and, in a mirror reflection of his own state of undress, had fallen to expose one breast.

  Pulling her shirt back into place and pushing a tumbling mess of red curls away from her face, a bubble of hysteria rippled through Aoide’s chest. A strained laugh escaped her lips, and she found herself unable to meet his gaze.

  “I... I had not expected—”

  “And nor should you.”

  At the deadened tone in his voice, Aoide’s shyness disintegrated, and her eyes rose the great height to his. Surprise had removed any fear of meeting his gaze.

  In the work of a moment, the man she had uncovered, who had laid claim to her in the most instinctive of ways, had disappeared. A veil of reserve had come down over his face, and his body was tense, held at an angle of rejection. The only sign that remained of that man—the true Lachlan—was the mass at his hips that had yet to fade away.

  Though, somehow, Aoide felt that he was rejecting of that too.

  Hesitantly, she swung her legs around and dropped her bare toes to the floor.

  “I did not bring you here because I wished to, nor will I do so again,” he asserted, every syllable a nail in the coffin of any romantic aspirations. His voice was so staid, his breathing perfectly normal.

  Had she imagined the fervor with which he had kissed her? Surely, not…

  And even if she had, he had been the one to initiate it. What had it been about if not desire?

  “You did not seem to dislike my...my presence.” Aoide stumbled over the right word to use. She was not about to meekly accept his discarding of what they had discovered here.

  “No male dislikes the touch of female skin,” Lachlan claimed. He even waved a hand dismissively. “It has been a time since I was home.”

  ...since I was home.

  “You are married?” Aoide was surprised at the way that thought clawed at her heart. The idea that he might kiss another the way that he had taken her had the bottom of her stomach dropping to her toes. How could a man in love, pledged to another, kiss someone else with such—

  “No.” The single denial unwound the tension spiraling through Aoide’s chest. “I am not married. And yet it matters not if I were. I have no desire to possess you. You will return to Scone.”

  Aoide had never been a fearful sort. Obedient and submissive, perhaps but never timid or frightened. The last few days had had her running the gambit on her emotions, jumping from one extreme to the other. But fearing for one’s life had a way of doing that.

  Now, she had returned to this tent by choice, a free woman. Lachlan could hardly return her to the town, changing his mind and explaining that she was in fact one of the thieves that had attempted to rob him. How would that look?

  No
. Now she possessed a certain protection, an autonomy that was allowing her to return to her natural self. The Aoide that did not spend every moment terrorized by what others would decide to do with her life.

  Aoide did not cower before hard choices or bend to threats if she could help it. She found her own truth in things and refused to argue with those that tempted to belittle it. While her life had taken her on difficult paths and hemmed her choices in by boundaries and compromises, she took pride in owning the limited choices that she could make.

  She was no lion. But she certainly wasn’t a mouse.

  Yet, she had rarely been so brave as to argue against a man that was three times her size and armed to the teeth. Perhaps stupidity had taken the place of courage, or mayhaps her sense of self-preservation had evaporated in the heat of their intimate moment.

  Regardless, she refused Lachlan’s order and denied her subservience in obeying it.

  You will return to Scone.

  “I shall not,” she told him. Despite her nerves, her voice was firm. “I appreciate all that you did for me that saw me freed of shackles, but life in Scone is not what I wish for.”

  “I do not care for what you wish for.”

  “I think that you do.”

  The allegation seemed to surprise him.

  Emboldened by his silence, Aoide slowly stood up, as if she were trying not to startle a wild bear.

  “Let me come with you, back to your lands.” The words were out of her mouth before she could reason their wisdom. She had no desire to see the Mackenzie lands, nor did she think herself likely to form any stronger attachment to the towns there than she had to Scone. Her only interest in the north was the fact that it was his destination. Her instincts were driving her now, more than her head, urging her to remain close to him.

  Perhaps then she would be able to see the real Lachlan again.

  “Why?”

  Aoide scrambled for an excuse.

  “I have an old aunt there. You could return me to her care.”

  Lachlan’s eyes narrowed over her lie.

  “You’ve never mentioned her before.”

  “I didn’t think I had to. I thought you were taking me to prison, remember?”

  They stood as if at an impasse, two warriors facing off against each other in a way that was almost comical. She was three times smaller than him, delicately built with pale skin and red hair. He was tall, broad, tanned dark from the sun, and bearing dark hair and eyes—a towering shadow of death to her little ray of sunlight.

  And yet, Aoide wasn’t afraid.

  She had meant it when she had said that she thought him caring of what she wanted. Perhaps he didn’t take a personal stake in the specifics of her desires, but he certainly didn’t bear her ill will. She was a woman alone in the world. If she told him that she had family in Mackenzie, he would take her there. She was sure of it.

  She had never met a man so full of honor.

  “You’ll sleep outside,” he told her by way of admitting defeat.

  Aoide simply shrugged, feeling a sense of power fall over her.

  “Agreed. I have no issue sleeping amongst your men. I’m sure they’ll make me welcome.”

  Realizing that she was actually having fun, Aoide noted the little tick that had started up in the corner of Lachlan’s jaw.

  Oh yes, his honor was his bond.

  “You’ll sleep here. Over there.”

  He pointed to the corner opposite his cot.

  Fair enough. Aoide was not about to start arguing for a bedside place. Despite every inch of her loving the moment she had just spent tangled in his arms, it had come with a good dose of nervousness that Aoide wasn’t yet ready to face and conquer, no matter what that hunger in her gut was telling her.

  “You are…” Lachlan growled, looking for the right word.

  “Obstinate?” she suggested.

  “Obnoxious,” he corrected.

  Aoide began to smile.

  “That wasn’t a compliment,” he said, as if afraid of that smile or of what it might become if it was wholly let loose across her face.

  “I know what obnoxious means.”

  Lachlan’s eyes trained upon her.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Pardon me?” Now it was her turn to be confused.

  “I did not think you would be educated,” he admitted. He showed no guilt for the assumption, as if his judgment, however erroneous, had been a statement of fact. Aoide couldn’t summon the offense needed to bristle. She didn’t possess shoes. Why would he think her anything but an illiterate idiot with a head full of wool?

  “I’m not,” Aoide admitted with a shrug of her shoulders. “I can’t read or write. I just know stuff.”

  “A lot of stuff,” Lachlan mocked.

  She shrugged again.

  “Blame my mother.”

  Fanny Hopley had been a woman of many contradictions. Born to wealth, living a life of exile, never wishing to marry and yet having a daughter, wanting only to help and yet hateful to all those that called her a witch for her malady cures. Aoide had never much understood her, always following with a blind look of wonder on her face, listening to Fanny’s constant lectures about life.

  She might not have ever had formal lessons or a tutor, but it was impossible for the daughter of Fanny Hopley to grow up without an extensive understanding of the world.

  Opening his mouth as if to press her further, Lachlan paused mid-expression. Apparently, he thought better of the question and snapped his lips shut.

  Standing there silently, Aoide couldn’t decide if the quiet was comforting or awkward. In both senses, there was tension in the air.

  An awareness.

  Like wild animals, the two of them circled each other. Lachlan moved towards his bed, careful not to step within reach of her. Aoide kept back against the wall of the tent, aiming for the spot he had assigned as her bed. She wasn’t sure whether they were each anxious of the behavior of the other or of themselves.

  By the time he was back on his side of the tent, he was shaking his head.

  “I don’t know what I’ve done to have God put you in my path,” he muttered, mostly to himself. Aoide responded anyway.

  “It was hardly God. I’d ask whoever told Garrett about the chest.”

  Having reached down to arrange the blanket that she had slept under the night before, Aoide missed the sudden change in Lachlan’s demeanor. Behind her, he had turned taut from head to food, tightened in the shoulders, curled his fingers into fists, and now emitted a blast of cold energy as he turned slowly to face her.

  “What?” he asked.

  The single word was a bark so aggressive that it had Aoide jumping. She dropped the blanket.

  “What?” she asked back.

  “Someone told your Garrett of my unit?” he demanded.

  “He’s not my Garrett. But yes. We were waiting for you on that cliff face. You thought it was a happenstance that we were there?”

  The look on his face suggested that maybe he had.

  “Who was it?”

  The force of his questions had him crossing the room and snatching her wrists. He held her captive as his eyes bore into hers. He had gone from perfectly calm to now manic with fury.

  “I don’t know! I don’t even know if it was someone in your unit. Ow! Hey!”

  Instantly, as soon as pain flickered across her face, Lachlan let her go.

  He didn’t apologize, but his eyes had dimmed their fire, filling instead with a cool contrition. It was enough.

  Aoide rubbed at her wrists, confused until he explained the vehemence of his reaction.

  “No one knew of what we were carrying,” he told her. “No one, save those in my unit, and the Mackenzie laird himself.”

  “Oh.” Aoide’s quick mind cottoned on to his meaning fairly fast. If his own men were the only ones who knew and Garrett had been aware of where they would make a stop at the loch…then there was a traitor in Lachlan’s camp.

&nbs
p; “Yes,” Lachlan agreed, his tone deadly. “Oh.”

  11

  By the time the two of them had realized the danger that lurked in the camp, the day was starting to draw to a close.

  Not wanting her to overhear his conversation with his lieutenant, Lachlan had told Aoide to wait outside and not to stray from camp. Despite there potentially being a dangerous spy amongst his loyal followers, Aoide knew that she had little to worry about. By accepting her return to his unit and allowing her to wander the area free of shackles, Lachlan was silently communicating two things to his men. One, that she was his guest within the militia and two, that he did not worry for her safety. The first secured a certain level of protection around her like an iron cloak. The second kept any deceitful personage to their own concerns instead of alerting them to the possibility that Lachlan was aware of their presence.

  Even with this assurance, Aoide wished she had asked for her rock. Lachlan still had it, buried somewhere in his possessions. Having only just secured his acceptance in his company, however, she wasn't brave enough to go digging in his things for it. Not with the idea of a spy about. She had managed to hold on to her rights to journey with him by the thinnest of whiskers. She couldn't afford to put that fragile trust at risk.

  Instead, Aoide had to summon her courage and step out amongst Lachlan's soldiers with only bravado and the implication that she was under the captain's protection as her weapons.

  By the time Aoide had moved around the camp a little, searching for a way of whiling away her time or helping Lachlan in identifying anyone who was untrustworthy, she had realized that it wouldn't be hard to convince the men of Lachlan’s preference for her. With her shirt ripped and her hair wilder than usual, the men had only to look at her appearance to know that something had happened. Likely their minds would go further than the kisses truly had, but she didn't see fit to speak of it. She kept her chin raised and felt the light sting of her kiss-swollen lips with pride. They could think what they liked. If it kept them from eyeing her as they had done when she was their prisoner, she would accept the scandalous associations.