And that was when she knew, knew with rock-bottom certainty, she was going to lose this.
Since he’d found her in the forest, Callm had gone through every emotion known to man. The worst wasn’t what gripped him that first instant, what he’d believed Ewen had done when he was ready to put his name on any peace treaty to stop her marrying the turd, to go to war with him if necessary.
The worst was the second time her mouth touched his and he’d believed—damned stupidly at that—she did want him. Really, truly. The taste of her lips was so sweet.
Why was he here? Because desire for this candle-kissed wanton blew the top of his head off? Because she wanted him?
Hell. If only.
How big a fool did she think him that he didn’t smell her deceit? Now he was just intrigued to know how far she was going to go. And why, when she was a supposedly virginal glen princess.
At least he hoped he was.
Because it was one thing to want the truth of the damned minx’s calculating seduction, and another, now she lay soft and open to his touch, not to be moved by the extraordinary tallow-lit beauty beneath him. The milky soft skin. The exquisite breasts. The feel of her body against his. Skin on skin.
Christ, he didn’t want to be forced on a broadsword tip up the aisle. But he did want the truth from her lying lips. Such beautiful ones at that, especially now the blood had pumped back into them.
He skimmed his palm over her thigh. How could she be so far beneath his defenses he had considered affronting Morven by signing anything? This creature’s father was a lying, conniving, murdering piece of shit, and from the start he’d known she was lying. Who was she really on her way to meet?
“I don’t want to hurt you.” A lover? If it was she’d stop.
“Don’t worry. You won’t. I mean, I shan’t complain.”
“That’s considerate of you. But I want to know if I do this, if it gives you pleasure.” It was time to do what he’d been avoiding, so he slid the length of one finger inside her. Anyway he had only to think, Morven, Morven, to keep control.
She almost shot up from the bed. At last a response. “Yes.”
“Or even here, like this.”
He’d forgotten so much but even he was astounded, at the complete ease with which he delved deeper.
“Please.”
“All right then.”
“I didn’t mean…I meant—”
Of course she didn’t. Christ. He’d vowed to think of Morven though. It was actually strange she was miles from his thoughts. While this woman was like living silk against his fingertips. Welcoming in a way Morven sometimes wasn’t.
Anyway she couldn’t be far from cracking. She was going to get a little fidgety. Never mind starting. She was going to crack. Any minute, any second now. He had only to keep the pressure on to ensure it. Let his fingers swim a little further. Edge his lips against hers. The truth was coming.
“You’d like more?”
“Please…I’d like…I want…”
While Callm was stunned to find himself praying with a fervor that bordered on the ludicrous for her to say stop, what exercised his mind most was the shock he got as she reached down and dragged his swimming fingers out of her body. Her eyes smoldered.
“I want you to stop that and just get on with it.”
Get on with it? Callm had never heard the likes. Not that he was averse to bossy women. In fact he found them quite a turn-on. What was more, Morven hadn’t wanted to feel him satisfying her, the first time he took her. Morven, in fact, had been a bit of a nuisance when it came to sex. He was never done trying to please her, which made it irritating she haunted him, he had to say, while this woman…
His throat dried completely. Suddenly it was like standing at the foot of a mountain without a cripple in hell’s idea of what to do to climb it. She was so damned beautiful with her head tilted back like that, she was too much for him. It was what he got for lying. Because suddenly he didn’t think she was.
His palms sweated. Now the damned fool he was going to look, if word of this got out. His hand fisted in blind confusion in her hair.
“Shit.” Cold fear bathed his spine. He’d better start praying she was that unexpected thing. The thing he believed she wasn’t. A virgin. Fortunately her eyes were closed. So she did not see him contort his mouth as his forehead struck the pillow.
“I said…” Her voice came in a strangled burst from her throat.
Before he could stop her, she reached down between their bodies, grabbed him. He gasped in shock as she dragged his flaccid flesh against her. Mother of Christ, didn’t she know? Didn’t she see, that though he tried to thrust… His breath caught in his throat. The sensation of her flesh was so unlike anything he remembered, the world changed. Shifted.
He’d missed this so badly, heat rushed through his blood as he thrust his tongue beyond her lips. He kissed her deeply, withdrew from her body, then buried himself inside her again.
If she was a virgin he should go slow. But the emotional connection not only took him by surprise, it took him by storm. How the hell was that? He’d had lovers before Morven, too many to remember here, so while he’d forgotten so much, he still knew how to please every line, every curve, every nerve, of a woman’s body. How to build this. How to hold. But it stirred his pride to have one who was so sweetly warm in his arms, a little fearful as he broke the barrier of her, her eyes actually were what occurred to him on that first thrust, the way they held his on that second. As if she gave him something she was afraid of giving him.
And yet, this woman wasn’t just easy to please, she gave lavishly in return. Grasping his shoulders. Cupping his face. Angling her body.
He was going to come apart any second now, and it was going to be like nothing he had ever experienced. He just wanted to see her pleasured first. The breath jammed in his throat with the effort, as he raised his head and looked down at her. She dug her fingernails into his buttocks. She wrapped her legs around him as if to push him further.
He held her. He didn’t know how he did it. But he wanted to marvel, before giving himself up to her and burying himself fully inside her one final time.
His body shuddered. Virgin or not, he shouldn’t empty inside her. But her hands refused to release him.
Sweet Jesus, he had never had a climax like it. She was so sweet and warm, and sinful, he felt completely fulfilled. By the time it was over his brain seemed to have ceased functioning. Everything, from the ordeal when she collapsed in the snow, to this satiation, combining in a feeling of wrung out exhaustion. Five years was such a long time. The only thing…
“Shit.”
All right. Crass, wasn’t it? He knew by the way her already lowered gaze edged sideways, he should have kept his big mouth shut. Surprise battered his chest that even as he acknowledged it, he should also feel more than the desire to escape being trapped.
“I shouldn’t have…done that. I…”
“I…it…”
“Spilt inside you.”
In so far as it was possible for a gaze both to smolder and to freeze, hers did. When he thought of what she’d just given him, for whatever reason, what tore his chest, was it so unexpected?
“I mean, I apologize. I don’t suppose your father would want to be a grandfather just yet.”
What was unexpected was the way her fingers touched his mouth as if to silence him. His throat dried completely in that moment. Noble of her, but he refused to be silenced.
He kissed her fingertips, his mouth faintly crooking, of its own accord too. “No, listen. I swear I’ll take care of you. But for your sake too, Princess, that may not be what you want right now.”
Why did that odd huff of breath escape her? These damn lips that were made for sin tremble, be it ever so slightly, he couldn’t help brushing his thumb pad across them?
He didn’t know and he didn’t want to. The crook of her neck was warm. How long was it since he’d felt the warmth of soft, cocooning flesh against
his own? Too damned long.
Chapter Six
Something was wrong. Very wrong. Places lit by faintly smoldering tallow lanterns meant lying shivering under a blanket Kara could spit through. They didn’t mean lying flat on her back. Naked, yes. But under a wonderfully, luxuriant covering of heavy, thick animal fur, and something—something hard-angled but warm. Something she felt the urge to press her lips to. Something she just did—him, oh Jesus God. His arm fastened around her as if she was his and woe-betide anyone taking her away again.
She closed her eyes, edged a breath. What had been in that whiskey she’d finally drunk last night, that even now, she couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t remember a blessed thing.
No. Actually she could. She could remember several things. In fact she could remember everything. Not a single one of them fell into the category of blessed.
What was she thinking about? No, really. And not just that. How could she possibly stay here now?
She edged a foot out. The shingle floor was here somewhere if she just felt for it. It was tricky. She didn’t want to jerk her foot free and wake him any more than she wanted to fall on the cave floor, if she didn’t untangle it.
She dug her teeth into her lip. She didn’t want to shriek either, but with the agonizing bolt that shot up her leg, it would be better to edge it back.
How could she do that though? If she just could pretend last night was an aberration, if only her deepest self had remained unmoved. She wasn’t even thinking of the actual sex here, although God knew, that was shattering enough. The price for securing his protection was prohibitive. It was difficult to see how things could have gone more badly wrong.
She should have remembered, when it was what her father had murdered Morven in the hope of all those years ago, she had no right to lie in this man’s bed, in his arms. She should not have indulged in seeking his protection to get back her son.
She wiped that from her now. Just as she left here. Wiped too the wedding night that might have been then. The consideration, the strange things that had somehow touched her. All she had to do was edge this fur pelt free from his clasp and tiptoe across the shingle here, taking care to make no noise.
If only her sight wasn’t arrested by her petticoat hanging from a rope on the other side of the smoking fire. If only she didn’t remember him pinning it there, a stupid thing, as if on her heart. She didn’t have a heart. And even if she did, she didn’t want a man in it.
If only what trickled from inside her hadn’t run down her leg either. When it was vital she get out of here now, she didn’t need the treacherous memories of how either of these things had gotten where they were. To think it hadn’t been all lust, had it? Or that he had treated her with a consideration. She couldn’t think of that now.
But those weren’t logs smoldering in the darkness there. Dug’s eyes glowed like amber coals from the other side of the hearth.
Kara held up a warning finger. “And you, don’t you dare. This has nothing to do with you, you pathetic excuse for a wolf. So keep out of it. I mean it. One bark and this time, you’re dead.”
“Going somewhere are you?”
She smothered a shriek. Jesus, God, and all the saints. The Wolf. As she dared imitate him too. “Me?” She darted her gaze sideways. “Yes…I mean no. Not as such. I mean I was just—”
Before she could gesture at whatever it was she didn’t have a clue she was just doing, he snapped his fingers. Dug scrambled up so Kara found herself considering her fur-edged petticoat across the top of the cur’s shaggy back and bared fangs. She raised her chin higher. It was as if he knew she meant to escape.
“So now you’re preventing me from fetching my petticoat?”
“Are you meaning that thing hanging there by any chance?”
If it was, he should know. Seeing as he was the one who’d put it there last night. The Black Wolf of Lochalpin, who people, McGurkies anyway, ran away from in terror. His face was set in an idiotic grin—not that veiled, dimpled cinch of his lips—a proper grin that made him dazzlingly, boyishly handsome. That explained these deep-cut dimples that said in another life he’d smiled often.
“Yes. I want to get dressed.”
If that came as a surprise to him, so much the better. If she couldn’t get out of here, she’d need to keep this man at bay, better than she had last night.
“What the hell do you want to do that for? You’re very nice as you are.”
Kara straightened her spine. If the cold air creeping up the backs of her legs was anything to go by, half naked was what she was. “Be that as it may—”
Another snap of his fingers. “Dug! Here girl. Good. That’s it. Sit. Uh. No. Sit, if you’re wanting breakfast. So? Fetch it.”
Did he address Dug? Or her? “I beg your pardon?”
“Since you’re the one who wants it.”
Wanted it? Well, she did, but it did hang above her head rather high.
“Dug and me are all eyes.”
She was willing to bet he was anyway. Dug was probably eyeing what bit she could best sink her fangs into if Kara reached up there. Still she had fought men in less, with less, hadn’t she? Beaten them too. Been beaten herself, it was true. But it hadn’t stopped her learning—oh, how she had learned—that where men and their desire were concerned, freezing, hard, formality could be the most shriveling weapon of all. The only weapon she had to hand at this precise moment.
Maybe he thought that after last night she would be ready and willing to accommodate him further? Maybe? Obviously he did. But he was mistaken.
He was also mistaken if he thought she’d turn around too. She compressed her lips. “Sir.”
“Sir? You know, I like that, especially after last night. Why don’t you come back to bed and call me that?”
Go back to bed? Kara swung around before she could stop herself. Was it so clever though? Even in the shadowed light, the shards of lazy sexuality glinting in his eyes, the faintly dimpled smile, weren’t the only things that were dangerously inviting. That he wanted her unequivocally was bad enough, but she was again struck by that easy confidence, so when it came to looking in windows, thinking that maybe she stood on the threshold of a room she could enter…
“Not just now.”
The blackened array of cooking utensils scattered about the hearth was daunting. As was the fact she hadn’t a clue how to use any one of them. But fiddling with them would be a lot better than fiddling with him, wouldn’t it? “You see, I am going to make us some breakfast.”
“Breakfast?”
Why did his eyes widen as if he thought her incapable of such a domestic chore?
“A glen princess who cooks?”
No. Not exactly. She had never cooked a meal in her life. But he couldn’t know that so she was going to give it a try. Ma had once said that was the way to a man’s heart. Not that she wanted particularly to find her way to the Wolf’s heart. But she was keen for him not to find his way between her legs. So she thought the saying could be reworked.
“Yes. Edinburgh was not all about balls and parties and learning French. It was my noble father’s idea that I should be an ideal chieftain’s wife in all regards. Dutiful—”
“Some men prefer beautiful.”
Her palms sweated. Perhaps some men did? But that wasn’t her, so she wished he would not say it.
“Obedient and capable of running a household and making a meal that would please and honor her chieftain man—”
What a pity her attempt to be obedient and capable was marred by her lack of knowledge about what was in fact a cooking utensil and what was for poking the fire with. Or maybe they all were. Maybe he didn’t have any cooking utensils. Maybe the deal he’d done with the devil involved him not doing any cooking.
Yes, that was it. So now, not only was she going to look even stupider, she couldn’t even wipe her perspiring palms down the pelt, unless she wanted it to fly open.
Nonetheless she stepped forward, her progress ins
tantly arrested by the sharp crack her ankle gave. It was the last thing she needed, to be propelled onto the shingle. Or maybe the last thing was him, naked, catching her.
“Please, sir, I must insist.”
“If that’s the way you walk, we’ll be starved by the time you make breakfast. Why don’t you hang on?”
She swallowed. Beneath her show of indifference, her heart kicked into a pounding gallop. Hang on? Not when Arland was still out there. Not when her father’s plans for Lochalpin didn’t include this man, could she do that.
“What on earth for? Do you lift every woman about when she fixes breakfast?”
“Not really. There’s other things I much prefer a woman to do.”
He did too. If last night was anything to go by.
“Seriously, if you’re not about the most stubborn chit I’ve ever come across, you’re certainly a close second. Now hang on.”
She considered refusing but she’d seduced him, hadn’t she? Touched his manhood, so now he obviously took it for granted his neck would hardly be a problem. And under other circumstances she admitted it wouldn’t be. It was just these ones, in here, that made unease flicker.
Taking a careful breath, she slipped an arm around his neck. “There. All right?”
It wasn’t, she saw with a horrible start, as he swung her up against him and held her there against the hard wall of his chest, and not just because that shore she so needed to remain a stranger to, swung into view. That he stirred arousal was bad enough. The door of that room, the room she felt she could only ever stare through clouded glass at, seemed to loom before her.
Ridiculous. All he did was lift her. But his naked proximity sucked all the air from her. Men didn’t pick her up like this. If she landed back in his bed now, she’d plead her ankle. Maybe even her head as well? She could do that, couldn’t she? Versus her son, her freedom, versus everything that had been done to her, this man was no opponent. So why did feelings she could not quite quantify flicker all along her veins? Ones that were not just disturbing, but more than.
“Me?” She cleared her throat. Vital when his lips were close as this. “So, who was the first? Lady Morven?” Of course there were ways to deal with it. Morven would always be first with him, and were he to know Kara’s real truth, he’d think himself better off carrying a leper.
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