Protected by the Scotsman (Stern Scotsmen Book 2)

by Katie Douglas

  Bobbie sighed. “I was fine,” she hissed back. “Let’s just get on with this and save the silliness for later.”

  When he put one hand on her shoulder and squeezed hard, Bobbie wondered if he was trying to be reassuring or to remind her that he could easily overpower her. She was very aware of his presence as they explored the structure together, trying not to draw attention to themselves as they worked.

  The building was truly beautiful on the inside, even in feeble light, and Bobbie thought it was a shame no one lived here, or used it regularly, anymore. She wondered for the umpteenth time what drove people to abandon such lovely monuments.

  “Have you seen the carvings on the walls?” Sean asked. “They must have taken years to complete.”

  “The styles in the rooms we’ve walked through so far show that they started it about two hundred years before it was completed. In the first room, the leaves were rudimentary, then as we moved through the years, elephants started appearing, and carved heads of men. The naked women, of course, are also rather detailed.” Bobbie’s voice was more detached as she explained about the history of the place.

  “It must have been one hell of a party place, if it was full of elephants and dancing girls,” Sean said.

  Bobbie giggled and nodded, realizing it was sort of nice to have someone around who wanted to know about these things. He must have been the first man she’d ever met who asked her for factual information, who believed that she might know enough about something to be able to share it. Most men she’d had to work with in the past had simply told her their thoughts on the histories of various locations, making no allowance for the possibility that she might know anything about it.

  In fact, Sean had been quite easy to work with since they called a truce. Now that he wasn’t trying to drag her home to her parents, he was much more interesting. Bobbie smiled to herself, then widened her eyes in horror. Was she… getting feelings… for a man? She pressed her lips together and tried to reason with herself. This had never happened before, and all things considered, she’d really thought she was immune to men as a whole, beyond occasional sexual encounters. Not that she was especially interested in women, either, although she’d gone to a girls’ boarding school and knew what went on sometimes after lights out. She simply wasn’t interested in forming a romantic relationship. Or, rather, she hadn’t been. Until now.

  Bobbie was so distracted thinking about her newfound feelings for Sean that she almost forgot where they were and what they were doing, until the handsome Scotsman squeezed her hand. She looked up and returned to Earth. Well, mostly. There was still a small part of her that was bouncing around against the walls of her mind at the fact that he was holding her hand.

  This was a bad state to be in, and she worried that she was going to be too distracted to do her job. She tried to concentrate. They had walked into a big hallway, with a huge statue of a many-headed god dead centre. It was painted mostly gold, although this had flaked to show red, white and black underneath. Around the walls, there was the usual array of friezes. The pictures on the walls weren’t so much telling a story as showing an assortment of random scenes that appeared to be unconnected. Bobbie wondered if there was something behind them, but as she tapped and pressed the wall, nothing happened. Then, she almost kicked herself. The statue’s eyes glittered on the central head. She approached it, wondering how best to investigate.

  “You’d best not be thinking of climbing that,” Sean warned her.

  She ignored him and vaulted up onto the statue’s crossed legs, but hands around her waist pulled her back down again.

  “The eyes,” she protested, climbing back up again.

  “I said no. I’ll go and look.” He firmly lifted her back down, holding onto her waist this time, so she stood barely eighteen inches from him as his huge hands encircled her middle, reminding her of how strong he was.

  “But you’re bigger than me, and heavier. If it’s going to break on me, it will certainly break on you,” she replied.

  “Yes, and if it does, I’ll be the one who falls, not you. Stay put.” To her surprise, he kissed her on the forehead. Even more strangely, her legs turned to jelly and heat stole across her countenance.

  “Well, when you put it like that…” She trailed off. She couldn’t help but obey him.

  He nodded with a sense of finality and turned to climb the statue. Within moments, he held the glittering diamond eyes in his hands. “Now what?” he asked.

  “I think he wants an offering,” Bobbie replied. “Look.” She pointed to his hands, which rested on his knees, palms up. Sean placed one of the diamonds into each of the statue’s hands and stepped back. There was a grating sound from the floor, and they looked around for the source. Behind the statue, a panel in the wall had slid away and revealed a gaping passageway.

  “We have to follow it,” Bobbie explained.

  Sean looked put out by the idea, but he entered behind her all the same. Once they were inside the dark tunnel, Bobbie lit a candle—she always carried at least one in her pocket—and looked around. A grating sound behind them made her heart sink.

  “What happened?” Sean asked. The surprise in his voice reflected how Bobbie felt.

  “The opening closed.”

  “So we’re trapped?” he asked.

  “Or at least, we can’t go that way,” she said. “We’ll have to press on and hope it’s not a death trap.”

  Moving forward in the dim light of the single, guttering candle, Bobbie felt a breeze coming from further down the tunnel. That meant air flow, which almost certainly meant there was another way out of this. She was proved right when the tunnel abruptly turned into a huge cave. The ground was almost completely covered by a wide, rushing stream.

  “This is the way out?” Sean shook his head in disbelief. Bobbie shrugged.

  “Obviously we’re going to get wet, but it’s not the end of the world,” she replied. “I think we need to go against the current to find the vanquishing stick.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “There’s a little opening up there, can you see it?”

  Sean craned his neck and narrowed his eyes, then nodded. “The stone is just about wide enough to traverse,” he remarked.

  Following Sean, Bobbie carefully edged across the rock at the side of the fast stream, clinging to any crags in the wall that her fingers fitted into. She tried to not think about what might happen if she slipped, because such things were silly and irrational, and anyway, she was a decent swimmer. When they reached the opening, Bobbie was surprised that it was carved with friezes once more.

  “Wow, they really went all-out to hide this thing,” she remarked.

  “Aye. Shame they didn’t hide the snake-summoning artefact so well,” Sean added dryly.

  “That would have saved everyone a lot of nuisance,” Bobbie agreed.

  They made their way down the narrow passageway, and at the end of it, on a pedestal, there stood the object they had been looking for. It was eighteen inches long and looked a little like a metal lightning bolt. Bobbie stared at it for a long moment then picked it up. Nothing untoward happened. She stuffed it down one of her stockings, so the fabric held the long stick against her thigh, and they made their way back out to the underground stream.

  “I suppose it’s time to get wet,” Bobbie quipped. Sean chuckled grimly. This wasn’t going to be the most pleasant part of the trip. Bobbie only hoped there were no leeches. They leapt into the water and let the current carry them out of the cave. There were a couple of worrying drops, as the water made its way out of the cave, but overall the temperature wasn’t terrible and there didn’t seem to be a huge amount of rocks beneath the surface.

  A pinprick of white grew larger, and then they were out in the daylight, still being carried down the river.

  “I say,” Bobbie called out. “How do we get back out again?”

  “I dinnae ken. I thought you were the one with the plan, lass!” Sean’s accent see
med to thicken when he was stressed. Bobbie sighed and tried to swim to the side of the water. Up ahead, the landscape came to an abrupt stop. The water carried them toward that point, and Bobbie was almost certain it was a treacherous waterfall. She redoubled her efforts to get out of the water, and finally managed to catch a rock.

  “Here! Grab onto me!” she called to Sean, as her skirt tried to drag her downstream. He caught onto one of her ankles and her hands slipped from the extra weight dragging her toward the current. Determination won out, and she managed to pull herself out of the stream, onto the shore, at which point she gave a hand to Sean.

  They lay on the banks of the water for a long minute, gasping with exertion.

  “You still got it?” Sean asked.

  Bobbie nodded. “Now we just need to find out how the bloody thing works,” she added, once she could speak again.

  In the cloying, humid air, the coolness from being soaked through was nice. She rolled onto her side and gazed up at Sean.

  “I am awfully sorry about the trouble you’ve gone to, you know.” She played with a strand of her hair as she drank in his features.

  “I know. And I’m starting to see the attraction of all this antiquarianism stuff.” Sean took her chin in his hand and gazed at her. The moment was pregnant with electricity. Bobbie parted her lips and leaned toward him slightly. Sean grasped her hair with his other hand and wound it in his fingers, paying no mind to the fact it was wet. He pulled her face to his then he claimed her mouth, and she gasped as his tongue darted past her lips. A frisson of heat shot through Bobbie’s body and she pressed her breasts up against him as she raised one leg and wrapped it around him, resting her foot on the grass behind his thighs. As she ground her hips against his, she felt his hardness rapidly growing.

  “Would you yield to me, lass?” he murmured in his soft Edinburgh accent.

  “Yes,” Bobbie whispered. She wanted nothing more.

  * * *

  Sean pushed himself away from her and picked up one of her shoes in his hand. It was brown leather, with a thin, waxed lace tied into a careful bow then double-knotted. She wasn’t the sort of girl to allow her shoelaces to come undone over the course of the day. He gently worked at the knot, until he was left with a normal bow, at which point he pulled on one of the loose ends until the lace was unfastened.

  He loosened the laces lower down, then eased the damp shoe off her foot, before casting her garter aside then peeling away her stocking—soft, slightly transparent, with a thick seam down the back—which revealed her foot.

  “If I were you, I would have left the socks on. My feet are disgusting,” Bobbie grumbled, and when he looked at her face, Sean was surprised to see her blushing. How could such a confident, outgoing adventuress be ashamed of her body? He shook his head and bent down, before taking her big toe into his mouth. He sucked at it gently, then ran his teeth along the underside, eliciting a satisfying gasp from Bobbie. He swirled his tongue around the rounded pad, then relinquished it and gazed up at her.

  “Your feet are beautiful,” he murmured, returning to the task of sucking on her toes, until each one had been worshipped. He placed her foot gently on the grass then picked up her other one, carefully unwrapping it from its shoe and sock before showing those toes some attention, too.

  Bobbie was still blushing heavily as she said, “That proves it. Boys are just disgusting and weird. Sucking each of my toes like they were thruppeny lollipops… the very idea!”

  Sean kissed his way across the top of her foot, all the way to her knee, then lifted her leg even higher and lovingly caressed the back of her knee. He knew that was a very sensitive spot for women, and he smiled in satisfaction as she moaned with pleasure. She reached forward, her hands traveling in the direction of his shirt buttons, but he shook his head and caught both her wrists with one of his big hands.

  “Let’s get one thing settled, young lady; I may be worshipping your body right now, but I am in control, here, and you don’t get to do anything other than lie back and enjoy what I’m doing to you.”

  Bobbie looked like she might be about to protest some more, but Sean chose that moment to release his hands and push her backwards. While she was distracted with not falling flat on her back, he slid her soaked panties down her thighs, revealing her glistening pussy between the silky curls. His cock turned into a steel bar in his underpants as he pulled the panties past her ankles, discarding the underwear on the grass before his face took up residence between her legs. She was an active girl, and quite headstrong, and he was almost certain that no man had ever dared take control of her like this. He knew she was confident enough that she would be clear if she didn’t want this. She would learn that a real man liked to take care of his woman, yearned to pleasure her, needed to put her needs before his own.

  “Why is your face down there? Are you trying to look at what I ate for breakfast?” Bobbie’s voice was critical but it seemed like her heart wasn’t in it. Sean was, indeed, drinking in the sight of her exposed pussy.

  “I have my reasons.” Deciding to share them with her, he stuck his tongue out and licked her from her small opening up to where her fur began. She squeaked, and he paused for a moment, but she did nothing to stop him. He did it again, and the squeak became a moan.

  He licked her pussy until milky-white juices flowed out of her hole, which seemed to have opened a little, inviting him to fill it with his cock. By now, the sounds she made were continuous, deep moans from the heart.

  He swirled a finger around her entrance and her hips bucked, as her body tried to entice him inside. It suddenly became clear that he’d wanted this all along and just not known it. From the moment he first spoke to her, he knew now that he’d wanted nothing more than to show her how happy he could make her, but her penchant for getting into dangerous situations kept driving them further apart.

  Now that he finally had her under his hand, he had no intention of rushing her.

  * * *

  Bobbie had been intimate with men before, but none of her long list of ex-lovers had ever been so thorough, or so focussed on her pleasure, and while her itch for human contact had always been scratched in the past, she was usually left with a sense that sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She’d never really understood why Adeline spoke so wistfully of time spent with Edward, as though she couldn’t get enough of being under him.

  Now, however, clarity had appeared. There was the part of her brain that always analysed everything, which pointed out she was lying on the floor of the jungle somewhere in the Orient (that she could easily point to on a map, although perhaps not right now) while the man who had been stalking her for over a year was doing extremely naughty things to her body, out in the open, where anyone could see them.

  The rest of her told her brain to take a long walk off a short pier. The analytical side harrumphed for a moment, then it decided there were enough escape routes from this position, and settled down.

  She realized why her thoughts had drifted, then. The Scotsman had paused in his attention to her pussy and was looking up at her intently. Had he just asked a question?

  “Sorry, were there words?” she asked, her voice soft.

  “Aye. I said you’ve got a beautiful pussy. I could eat it all day.”

  Bobbie sighed and rolled her hips, but instead of resuming his conquest, Sean sat up.

  “What’s the matter?” Had she upset him somehow? She was always sticking her foot in it with men.

  “You’re wearing too many clothes, still. Let me help you with that, lassie.” He reached out and unbuttoned her form-fitting jacket, which was probably not made to get quite so wet, then slid it off her shoulders until it pooled around her wrists. Next, he untied the ribbon beneath her shirt collar, before methodically undoing each button.

  Bobbie felt her breasts spring free as the tension in the white fabric of her shirt was released. She sighed and took a deep breath, savouring the warm breeze against her chest. Sean carefully revealed her st
omach, then her shirt joined her jacket. He wrapped one arm around her back and lifted her toward him for a moment, so she could shake off her shirt and jacket.

  Bobbie had been naked plenty of times before, but this time, she felt exposed. She wanted Sean to think well of her, for some undiscernible reason, and that meant she was worrying for the first time in her life about whether she was sexy enough. It had never even occurred to her before; she had always just been carried along on the current of events with no real emotional involvement in any of it.

  “Your titties are amazing.” Sean’s voice cut straight through Bobbie’s inner monologue of self-doubt and she allowed herself a tiny smile. He liked her.

  “They look even better without the undergarments,” she remarked dryly, then let him reach around with his other arm and release the long strip of hook-and-eye fastenings. It was so sensual to be taken care of like this, to be unwrapped like a gift just for him. She was almost disappointed when her last layer of clothing slid away from her body, leaving her completely bare and at his mercy.

  “You’ve got me, now. What would you do with me?” she murmured. Sean trailed a finger down the curve of her neck, then down past her collarbone until he reached the soft flesh of her breasts. He traced a pattern over the skin, setting her nerves aglow, and she arched her back to try and get more of his touch. As if her latest attempt to take control was intentional, Sean pushed her backwards until she landed on the grass once more, where he seized both her mounds in his hands and caressed the nipples with his thumbs, as her flesh spilled out from between his fingers.

  “First, I plan to devour these titties,” Sean replied, then leaned down and circled her left areola with the warm, wet tip of his tongue. She moaned as his actions teased her, filled her with longing, while he never went near the long point of her nipple. He repeated this action with the right areola, and she shuddered as her clit throbbed with desire.