Bare-chested! A shiver ran down her spine and ended up centering low in her belly. No shirt likely meant he’d stopped for a dip in the pond before coming to meet her. And that meant they might skip lessons altogether this fine day.
A perfect way to say good-bye to summer if ever she’d imagined one.
“We’ve a letter!” he called as he jumped from his horse and gathered her up in his arms to greet her with the kisses she so anticipated. “Fresh from the messenger’s hands.”
She’d been right about the pond; his hair still held water droplets. And his face was freshly shaved, just the way he knew she liked it best.
With his bare, warm skin under her hands, her mind wandered down paths that had nothing to do with the letter he waved over his head, and everything to do with how quickly she could climb out of her shift.
“Brie, love, lessons first, then dessert,” he laughed, dropping to sit before pulling her down onto his lap.
Her man might have only the purest intentions about the lessons, but the bulge under his plaid bumping against her bottom told her his body had other ideas. Ideas to match her own.
“It’s from Chase,” he said temptingly when she tried to turn in his lap. “News from your home. For your lesson today, you can read the letter to me while I relax.”
He scooted her off his lap and stretched out on his back, arms behind his head.
“Fine,” she relented. The sooner she blundered her way through the missive, the sooner they’d get to the “dessert” she wanted.
Chase formed his letters in the strangest fashion, which slowed her reading. She was able to decipher a few words quickly enough to realize the main reason for the letter, though.
“Malcolm and Dani have had their baby!” She scanned over the chicken scratching for more recognizable words. “A boy. They have a son.”
Damn her slow brain, but she couldn’t figure out half of the words Chase had written. “I canna find the babe’s name, Hall. Take this thing. Read it to me. Tell me what name they’ve chosen.”
“Only because my brother has the worst handwriting anywhere.” He hoisted himself up on one elbow and took the paper she held out, scanning over the whole of it before speaking again. “He doesn’t give the name, love. Sorry.”
“No mention of the name? Yer brother is an idiot, Hall O’Donar. Only a man would forget to share such an important detail.”
“Then we shall consider this an opportunity.”
There was mischief behind the smile breaking over his face. “And how would not knowing something be an opportunity for us?” she asked suspiciously.
“Because it will serve as a perfect excuse for you to practice your writing. You can send a note of congratulations to Malcolm and Dani and ask them what they’ve named their fine new son.”
Her husband was a fiend for practice.
“I will, indeed,” she agreed, turning to lean over him, one hand on either side of his body. “As you say, it’s the thing to do. But no right now. I’m done with my lessons for this Saturday and I’m thinking, because of the frustrating nature of that missive, that I’ve earned that dessert you tempted me with, aye?”
“Aye,” he agreed, fastening his hands around her waist as she straddled to sit on him. “We’ve both earned it.”
She pulled the tie from her hair as his hands wandered up from her waist to fasten on her breasts, just as she liked him to do.
Yet in spite of the lure of his obviously ready body, she could only picture a tiny nameless baby when she closed her eyes.
“I canna believe he did that.”
“Let it go, love,” Hall said on a sigh. “Later, when we pack up our blanket and return to the keep, you can busy yourself with planning the perfect revenge on my brother for having denied you that wisp of information that you wanted most out of his letter. I’ll even help you. We’ll think of something truly diabolical, if you like. Later.”
He wrapped one hand around the back of her neck and pulled her head down for a kiss while, with his other, he tugged at the skirt wrapped around her legs.
“If we ever have a babe of our own, I’ll see to it that yer brother doesn’t learn his name until he’s ready to take up arms of his own,” she threatened.
There. See how Chase Noble would like that.
“When, not if,” he corrected with a grin. “It will happen eventually. If we keep practicing your lessons, that is.”
“Lessons, my arse,” she replied, jerking her skirt out from under her so that she sat upon her husband, skin touching skin.
He closed his eyes, groaned, and slid both hands around her waist.
“If we do have children, I’d want them all to be sons,” she said.
His eyes popped open and he dropped his hands from her waist. “Why would you say that?”
It should have been obvious enough. She’d been raised by her father and her brother. “I wouldna ken what to do with a daughter, or how to begin to raise one properly.”
“You’re jesting, right? You’ll raise our daughters as you were raised. You turned out better than any other woman I’ve ever known, so why would we want to raise our daughters any differently?”
He reached for her again and she grabbed his hand.
“You’d no be ashamed of a wildling daughter, with no the first idea of how to put ribbons in her hair or what fancy gowns the other girls wear?”
Hall pulled his hands away and scrubbed them over his face.
“I’ll be every bit as proud of them as I am of you, love. I’ll be happy to have my keep filled to overflowing with nothing but wee, wild, brown-haired daughters, all growing up to be fine, wild, untamed warriors exactly like their mother.”
There wasn’t another man in all the world like hers. “Maybe daughters wouldna be so bad after all.”
“They will be wonderful. But”—he flipped her to her back in a move so fast, it took her breath away—“we’ll never get that keep full of wild, untamed warriors if you don’t quiet your blether and put your mind to the business at hand.”
“I will,” she answered, reaching up to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. “So that’s how you see me? As a wild, untamed warrior?”
“Exactly how I see you,” he confirmed, pushing her skirts out of his way to fit himself between her legs. “My own personal wild and free, untamed warrior, racing over the hillsides, bow drawn, arrow nocked. My perfect lifemate. I would have you no other way.”
How could she have gotten so lucky? To find the one man on the whole of the earth who saw her exactly as she saw him?
Two untamed warriors taking on the world. Together. For the rest of their lives.
© Susie Knezel, www.knezelphotography.com
MELISSA MAYHUE is the award-winning author of ten previous romances featuring the mysterious, perilous Fae of the Highlands of Scotland, most recently Warrior Reborn and Warrior’s Redemption. She and her family live in Colorado in the shadow of the beautiful Rocky Mountains with two insanely spoiled dogs, one domineering cat, a turtle with attitude, and way too many fish in their aquarium. You can visit her website at www.MelissaMayhue.com.
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Also by Melissa Mayhue
Thirty Nights with a Highland Husband
Highland Guardian
Soul of a Highlander
A Highlander of Her Own
A Highlander’s Destiny
A Highlander’s Homecoming
Healing the Highlander
Highlander’s Curse
Warrior’s Redemption
Warrior’s Last Gift
Warrior Reborn
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Pocket Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Melissa Mayhue
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Pocket Books paperback edition December 2013
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Designed by Jacquelynne Hudson
Cover illustration by Kris Keller
ISBN 978-1-4516-4089-2
ISBN 978-1-4516-4092-2 (ebook)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Wedding Day
Epilogue
About the Melissa Mayhue
Warrior Untamed Page 23