Then her mouth was against that shoulder, gleaming golden in the light of the fire. Warm on her lips, smooth against her tongue, with a strength that flexed under the grip of her hand. She felt a chill on her back and realized he’d pushed her shift off her shoulders. She wriggled her arms out of the sleeves and let it fall, whisper-soft, to her feet.
She’d never been naked in front of anyone but her sisters. Now, upon her toes with the firelight on her skin, Lachlan leaned back so he could run his gaze from her scalp to her feet. His look felt like the brush of a thousand fingers.
His member rose stiff between them. A pulsing thrill coursed through her, settling heavy in her loins.
“Send me away,” he said, his voice husky. “For your own sake.”
She answered him by scraping her mouth down his jaw, over his neck and collarbone, to where the neckline of his tunic sagged. Seeking beneath the weave, she found the nub of his nipple and did to him what he’d once done to her.
He flattened his hand against her back until, with a groan, he lowered his face into her hair, breathing hot against her ear. He dragged his hands down her spine—long scraping pinpoints where his fingernails rode—until he grasped her bottom with both hands.
As he hefted her bottom up, she felt her cleft open wetly. Oh, how she ached to feel him there.
The world tipped as he hauled her up and stretched her across the bed. She saw the canopy above her and then Lachlan’s face as it descended.
He took her hand and hauled it over her head, holding it there. Then he took her other wrist and hauled it up, too, grasping both tightly with one hand. The movement made her arch off the bed, her breasts—her nipples tightened and tingling—pointing toward the canopy. Lachlan lowered his head.
His hot, sucking mouth shot tremors through her body. He tugged and licked and teased her with the edge of his teeth, gently squeezing the whole of her breast in his hand so he could suck more than just the nipple into his mouth. She was vaguely aware that she was thrashing, jerking her arms against his restraint, lifting her legs on either side of him. She loved the pressure of his body against the mound between her legs, but wanted to feel more, wanted to feel him.
He slipped his hand between them and slid his fingers along her cleft. She gasped and went still. His lips and fingers did not. He rolled his tongue over her nipple, then exposed it to the cold air, even as his fingers slid down, deeper, spreading the wetness between her legs. He switched breasts as he pressed the butt of his hand against her mound and probed deeper.
With her head thrown back, one thought skittered across her mind—that this wasn’t how she’d expected it to feel. Yes, yes, she’d known that there would be pleasure. She couldn’t avoid the minds of all the lovers upon Inishmaan. How she’d envied their intimacies, the wholehearted joining, and the simple, trusting pleasure that made lovers temporarily blind to all else but the sensations coursing between them. But she hadn’t really understood this, the sweet physicality of the act, the intensity of it, the rising ache and the unfettered urge that took her over as surely as a wave sucking her under the sea.
She wasn’t even trying to read his thoughts anymore, but she sensed the merging of minds nonetheless. They were in a bright place speaking a language without words.
All of a sudden, he released her wrists. Her fingertips tingled from the tightness of his grip. She lowered her hands, intending to pull him up for a kiss, but already he was trailing down her body. His soft hair brushed her breasts, her ribs, her belly button, where he paused for a moment to roll his tongue in the hollow. She reached for him, for he was going in the wrong direction. She didn’t want him to slide off her—she wanted him covering her body. She wanted to bring his loins between hers and open herself for his thrust.
She grasped his head but he slipped out from under her grip. He slid down between her legs even as she struggled to rise up on her elbows. He thrust a shoulder beneath one leg, forcing her thigh high, and then did the same for the other. She glanced down as he spread her legs wide, vibrating with excitement at the sight of him hovering above her cleft. He glanced up at her, his expression unreadable, his hair haloed by the golden light of the fire, and then he pressed his lips there.
Later she would remember that first moment and her heart would skitter-pound and the muscles of the inside of her thighs would clench and she’d lose the ability to speak, breathe, think in a moment of bright blindness that would make her stumble to a stop in whatever she was doing. All she sensed was his hair soft against the inside of her thighs and the rough brush of his tongue opening her wide. A pressure built in her body as he plunged his hot, muscled tongue around and between and deep inside her.
Her mind went blank. She arched against his hands before the light in her mind blinded her. Her body convulsed around the pressure of his kiss. She heard herself give a husky shout before she arched up, again, and again, and again, moaning.
Lassitude spread over her. She pressed her cheek against the blanket as every touch of his mouth sent aftershocks shuddering through her body. Cold air bathed her as he pulled away. The mattress sagged as he settled his hands on either side of her, and he drew his body higher on the bed. She felt a hard, throbbing pressure against her belly. He laid his face beside hers, rocking against her abdomen, pushing his forehead into the covers until he stiffened and held his breath. She heard a low groan as something hot and wet bathed her belly. His body went lax while he buried his face in her hair.
She burrowed her fingers in his long hair. The only sound in the room was the harshness of their breathing. With their skin pressed together, she could feel the moisture between them. With that came a quiver of disappointment. She knew what he’d done. He’d spilled his seed upon her, so he wouldn’t spill it in her.
She stared up at the canopy as the implications of what he’d done sank in. It was a strange side effect of her gift that she knew more about the many ways of lovemaking than most married women. As such, she knew that married men gave their seed to the linens sometimes, in order to give their wives a rest between children. But that was the exception. Mostly, it was unmarried men who did this: Unmarried men catching a woman behind a rock-pile fence on a spring day, or cheating on their wives or sweethearts, or coupling with a woman they didn’t want to bother with past the one moment.
Men did this, she thought, when they did not want to be bound.
She closed her eyes, not wanting to believe that Lachlan would act so. Then, by habit, she spread her thoughts toward the walls that always stood between their minds—and the darkness she had warred against for so long suddenly crumbled.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Her hair smelled like Inishmaan.
With his nose buried in it, Lachlan imagined they were lying upon the windswept heights while waves crashed upon the shore below. In his mind, he carried her there like a bride. He laid her down amid the heather. He peeled her clothing off her body and watched the way the sea mist beaded upon her skin. He licked those beads off her belly and drank where they pooled in her navel. He took her hips in his hands and slipped into her while she arched up off the ground in pleasure.
His cock swelled despite the fact that he was only moments past his own pleasure. She lay warm beneath him, every breath bringing his chest in contact with her soft, pliant breasts. All it would take was a shift of his hips and he’d make that fantasy real.
The idea filled his head and cast a haze across his conscience. He groaned and mustered enough control to roll off her. He seized her hand and pressed her knuckles against his lips, trying to ignore the hollow craving in his heart. Blinking up at the carved underside of the bed’s canopy, he counted diamond panels in order to cool his blood, then he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to think of other things—duty, honor, obligations. A vision of her father rose into his mind, whose countenance demanded he do right by the woman who now lay naked beside him.
How could I resist her? He’d been so sure she would come to her maidenly senses once s
he dropped her clothing. But the woman who’d emerged had not covered her body, had not shrunk with shyness, and had not looked up at him with eyes begging for gentleness. She’d stood with her shoulders thrown back. Her gaze had been a challenge.
An ache reignited in his balls.
Damn it.
He shifted to his side, bracing himself for the sight of her face, passion-flushed, and her lips begging for more.
Instead he saw tears.
He shot up onto his elbow. “Cairenn—”
She pushed away quicker than he could stop her. He reached for her but all he caught was a lock of her hair that slipped through his fingers. She shot off the bed, swept up her shift from the floor, and strode naked to the other side of the room. Stopping in front of a table near the privacy screen, she seized a cloth and dipped it in a bowl of water.
By the bend of her neck he surmised that she was washing her belly. Her sweet, rounded bottom swayed with every stroke.
“Mo chridhe,” he whispered. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head once but did not turn to face him. Maybe it was his restraint that had angered her. Maybe he needed to explain that he had held off from spilling inside her so that there would be no complications from their coupling. He had enough experience pleasing willing women, but narrow experience with an eager innocent. Somehow, he’d fallen short of her expectations.
No, he thought. He could still feel her body throbbing against his mouth. That was surely not the problem. Whatever bothered her hung heavy in the silence. He cast back to their previous conversation, wondering what he’d said that had pushed her to tears. He’d given her every opportunity to send him away.
Then a slow, creeping sense of dread took hold of him. He raised his gaze to the curve of her naked back and thought, as loud as one could think, Turn around, Cairenn.
She didn’t twitch or pause or shift her weight or make any acknowledgement that she heard his thought, but he was not reassured. A woman under the constant onslaught of other people’s minds would have long learned how to control her reactions to even the loudest, most sudden thoughts. Back on Inishmaan, she’d claimed she could read everybody’s mind except his. He’d dismissed her remark because he hadn’t believed in her gift. Now he believed in her gift, but was all the more confused.
Why, amongst all the people in the world, would her gift fail when it came to reading him?
He knew the answer. Her gift didn’t fail at all. She’d lied to him, because it was easier that way.
“Don’t ignore me, Cairenn,” he said, trying to stanch a knot of panic as he shifted to the edge of the bed. “I know you’re angry.”
“Am I?”
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or do I have to drag you back to this bed and kiss you until you speak?”
She crumpled the linen aside and then spread her hands on the table as if to brace herself. The shift she’d hung over her arm slipped off her elbow to puddle on the floor. He tried not to run his gaze over the swell of her buttocks, to the space between her thighs, and the shadows of her sex, but the next thing he knew he was standing behind her and his hand was reaching for the path his mind had explored.
She flinched and stepped away. She dipped down to grab her shift off the floor, and then held it against her breasts as she turned. Her face was stony. Her eyes gleamed with accusations that made him feel shame for no reason at all.
Then her expression changed. She narrowed that gaze upon him like she used to do on Inishmaan, and her words came back to him with force.
The deeper I look into a man’s eyes, the more I see.
Now he understood what this look meant. Without his consent, she was trying to strip him of the privacy of his own thoughts. He became aware of his nakedness with a keenness he’d never experienced, and it was not the lack of clothing that made him feel so.
He said, “Stop.”
She startled and the fierceness of her look eased. He was no coward, but he’d rather face the gleam of a claymore in the hands of a Campbell than have anyone see all his sins, weaknesses, and secrets.
Anger rose like bile in his throat. “You lied to me, woman.”
“No,” she countered. “You lied to me.”
He clenched his jaw and strode around the end of the bed, to where his clothes lay strewn in the rushes. He wrestled into his undertunic as certainty pinched him. Now she knew everything. Lachlan of Loch Fyfe was no mighty warrior. No great avenger. Few people ever saw beyond his name and the gleam on his fine chain mail.
She said, sharply, “When were you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?” He’d be damned if he’d speak of such things aloud.
“Are there so many deceptions that you don’t know which to choose?”
“At least I can only accuse you of one.” He reared up to face her, thankful for the dimness of the room. “In Inishmaan, you told me you couldn’t read my mind.”
“I cannot.”
“You just did.”
“I did not.” Her voice broke and her gaze skittered away. “At least, not just now, though I tried.” She made theater out of the act of shaking out her shift. “Your mind is shut and barred like a fortress again. The only time I can read you is when—”
She hazarded a glance toward the rumpled linens. It took him a minute to realize what she was saying.
She could read his mind while they made love.
He let out a long, harsh breath. No wonder he’d felt such closeness as he touched her, kissed her, made love to her. An intimacy like he’d felt with no other woman before, because she had slipped into his mind.
He shook off the thought and reached for his surcoat. “You should keep out of a man’s mind when he’s in his weakness.”
“Maybe a man should control his thoughts better.”
“How does anyone do that? Even the lowest slave considers himself free to keep his own thoughts.”
“You speak as if I can choose not to hear.”
He ran his hand through his hair, flummoxed. “None of this makes sense.”
“Magic never does.”
“You must know others like me.”
“If there are, I’ve not yet met them.” She swept her shift over her head. Her breasts lifted with the gesture, her nipples tight and tilted. “But you haven’t yet answered my question.”
He had not. He’d been debating how much she could possibly have seen during the time they spent absorbed in one another’s bodies. Surely it took more than a few moments to see into the true heart of a man.
So he told her the only truth he knew. “I’ve never lied to you, Cairenn.”
“You made love to me and withheld the truth. That is no different.” She curled her arms around the bedpost, pressing her cheek against it. “When were you going to tell me about your betrothal?”
***
His promised bride was beautiful. In the brief moment when Cairenn had been coherent enough to peer into his mind, she’d had only a glimpse of the woman, but the image had burned like a brand. His someday-bride had hair as dusky as a winter night. She had a mouth that always pouted, like she was constantly begging to be kissed. The woman wore a belt of beaten links that hung from a slim waist. Her breasts stretched her tunic tight, and her hips swayed when she walked.
Now, standing before Lachlan, Cairenn felt like a bundle of hay, flat and skinny with poky elbows and knees.
Into the silence he murmured, “I said nothing about it because I didn’t want to cause you pain.”
“That’s not an answer.” If he had told her about this woman from the start, maybe she would never have opened her heart. If she’d known he was promised to another, maybe she would have had the sense to stop herself from wanting more. “You kept it a secret on purpose, for your own ends.”
“You are my weakness, mo chridhe.” He spread his hands. “From the moment I opened my eyes on the strand and looked upon you, I felt like I had died from my old life and awoken to a better one.�
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Accusations gathered in her throat but never made it to her tongue. She knew, deep in her heart, that she could no sooner have stopped loving him than she could stop breathing. Now his voice was so tender that it stole all the air from the room.
“I tried to tell you,” he said. “I confessed to being the firstborn of a noble family. It was a shield I put between us.”
“On Inishmaan we walked and talked as equals.” Yes, yes, she knew she had no right to feel betrayed, but she couldn’t help herself. “I saw you as a man—not a chieftain.”
“Would that more people could see me like that.”
“The fact that you admitted to noble blood doesn’t absolve you,” she added. “You kissed me. You touched me—”
“I left you behind on Inishmaan.” His fingers made tracks as he ran them through his hair. “As innocent as when I arrived.”
“Not so innocent as that.”
He raised a dark brow. “Should I have cut your heart in two by telling you about Leana?”
The name made her heart stop for a beat, and then another.
“I determined to leave you behind for your own good,” he reminded her. “But you stowed away on my ship.”
She bruised her forehead with how hard she pressed it against the bedpost.
“And after I found you stowed away yesterday, I made every effort to get you passage back to Inishmaan. But when I asked the captain of that galley—”
“—I branded myself a witch,” she finished, not wanting to listen to the litany of her own mistakes. “I saw her,” she blurted. “As you and I lay in bed together. I saw your Leana, blazing in your mind.”
“What you saw was regret. Regret that the woman I’m promised to marry is not”—he made a sound, like a choke—“that the woman I’m promised to marry is not you.”
It took a moment for the words to seep through the haze of her pain, but when they did, she raised her face to meet his gaze. It would be simple to cross the distance that separated them and press her face in the nook between his jaw and shoulder. But her feet remained flat upon the floorboards, held there by too many weighty certainties.
Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3) Page 12