by Jill Barnett
I’ve gone too far, she thought…too late.
“What I wanted? I shall give you, sweet Glenna…” (There was nothing sweet about his voice or his meaning) “…exactly what you wanted.” His hand moved so fast she did not know he had pulled off her hat until he tossed it aside.
She gasped in reaction.
His fist gripped her thick plaited braid already hanging heavily down her back, and she cried out, reaching for it as he spun it around his hand and held her tightly. His hard mouth swept down and closed powerfully over hers, possessing her in a way that shocked and weakened her, his tongue forcing its way inside, exploring, demanding, robbing everything from her he could steal and more.
The kiss was not all what Glenna had thought kisses were, soft sweet touches of the lips, like the touch of a butterfly, not this grinding, warring of tongues and even wilder warring of passions. Her blood rushed quickly to her head and made her light headed, made her skin and face flush so very hotly that she felt faint. She was melting…in her very core.
From somewhere in the back of her mind, she heard Fergus barking.
He pulled his mouth from hers. “Get away dog. Go! Lay down!”
Then his mouth was on hers again, softer this time but still greedy with hunger. He released his hold on her hair and cupped the back of her head. Some deep place between her legs ached and she moved closer to him, her chest against his, and she had to tighten her hold onto him lest she fall apart and break into a thousand pieces.
To feel powerless, swept away by feelings she never had and could not control was too much for her and she felt the swell of tears in her tight throat and the backs of her eyes. Then her traitorous body had completely forsaken her, squirming, needing with a sense of desperation to move against his, and reacting in all ways foreign to her. She was on fire, wanting a touch she had never had and not known she could want, between her legs, in a place where before now there had been nothing, not even a ripple of need.
Secretly, she had thought herself immune to romance, to a woman’s need for a man, for his touch, and for coupling.
He was right. She did want this.
His lips left her mouth to slash hungrily across her cheek to her ear, and she moaned, wanting his kiss again, wanting the feel of tongue on hers, wanting his passion and his taste.
“You do want this. You want me,” he said over and over as he kissed her and touched her whole body with his roving hands, her legs and arms, her breast and throat, hands that wickedly knew where she wanted his touch, lifting and turning her at one point, then he pulled her legs up to his waist, pressing her against the hard length of him, rocking her until her body melted and was answering his rhythm instinctively.
It took a moment before she realized he had pulled her tunic over her head and that was only because his words changed from soft caresses to curses at the cloth bindings he had demanded so passionately that she wear beneath.
In the next moment, she heard the sound of renting linen as he ripped free her breasts and pressed one upward, his head bent as he took it into his mouth, his tongue playing again. Desire so strong she cried out his name swept through her and she pressed her hips down on him, wanting more, needing more, so much more.
He slid down from the saddle, his arm clamping her against him and he carried her--feet dangling off the ground, him still suckling her—over to the trees and backed her against one with his knee and body. His mouth moved to her other breast and his hand finally lifted and cupped her possessively through the crotch in her trouse, one long finger rubbing the rough cloth between her legs. He did not stop, over and over, and she moaned, rising a little with each stroke. When her breath was out of control and her need almost too much to bear, he took her hand and pressed her palm to him. He taught her his need with his hand over hers, up and down, showing her what he wanted while his touch and the rough cloth took her higher and higher.
She was blinded by feeling, and though her eyes were open, she could not see anything and found she was capable of naught but a single sense: she could only feel, and she was flying, soaring like a hawk in the stormy skies, and her whole body raced and raced toward the heavens, feeling lighter and as if she were going so high she would shatter among the stars.
And she did.
* * *
Lyall was mad, completely, absolutely mad, insane, knocked senseless by the fall in Steering mad. Or he had somehow in the past three days turned into a formless being driven into idiocy by his cock. Her soft, sweet cry of ecstasy was like a bucket of cold water over him, and he tried to catch his shallow, panting breath, all the while staring painfully down at her awe- and passion- washed face, at her flushed skin bright with satisfaction from the upturned, sweet pink tips of her bared breasts to her glistening, kiss-swollen lips.
The sweet, salty, and smoky taste of her, the lingering taste of the sea on her skin and the smoked fish in her mouth was still on his tongue, driving him secretly insane and he wanted nothing more than to take her there against the tree. His lack of control scared him. His hands shook slightly when he stepped back away from the tree and eased her down until her feet were on solid ground.
Her eyes were the color of coal they were so dark, now rimmed in moisture and glowing from pleasure. The soft, sweet, unguarded way she looked at him then, with something akin to her heart in her eyes, touched him in a place where he was most vulnerable, a place he hid from all and told himself did not exist…could not exist, not ever again.
He turned his back to her, his brain hot and feeling as if his head was going to blow off.
She should hate him. He needed her to hate him. Eventually, she would hate him. That was inevitable.
He stepped farther away and drove his hand through his hair, frustrated and trying to find a way to fix what he had just done, find some way to change the bewitched look in her eyes.
At that moment the rain began to fall cool and wet against his own hot and flushed skin. He looked up at the dark sky, half expecting a lightning bolt to come down and drive clean through his black heart.
But there was only the rain dripping through the trees.
She stood there, unmoving, looking at him in a way that made his man’s pride almost want to take her to pleasure again. He reached out and pulled her under the shelter of the trees, releasing her arm as quickly as if burned before he stepped back and away from her, putting a safer distance between them.
“Glenna,” he said gently. “I should not have done that to you.”
“Why?”
Frowning, he looked at her. He had not expected such a blunt question. “Why did I do it? The truth is that I wanted to punish you for disobeying me. I wanted to frighten you. The kiss was…natural. It came without thought or reason.”
Her expression did not change.
“I cannot explain the way a man thinks, or acts when his blood boils. I can only say that what happened between us a few moment ago went much too far.” He paused. “And I am sorry for that. ‘Tis my doing. ‘Tis my err.”
She was quiet for a moment, before she laughed at him, which made little sense. He expected her to lash out at him, to call him the fiend he felt he was.
Where was the storm he expected from her?
God’s teeth but the woman looked pleased. He began to pace.
“You are a foolish man,” she said not unkindly and half laughing again. “Not why did you kiss me. Why are you begging for forgiveness?”
Begging? He stopped abruptly and faced her again. He was not begging, he thought in a puff of pride. He did not beg.
With one word she had put his manhood at stake. The silence between them drew out for a long time and the rain picked up, pounding on the ground beyond and starting to slip through the thick crowns of the wide and ancient trees.
Why would he expect her to act like other women, to be meek or practiced?
Why would he expect her to know of men and morals and the rules of courtly love?
She was truly innocent,--as inn
ocent as a thief could be--he thought with irony—and had been raised outside of the world he knew and lived in—a world that taught him not to have faith in much of anything. Faith only made betrayal all that much easier and more devastating.
But Glenna had nothing to do with his past, but his guilt was not done eating at him. Perhaps he should have been begging.
Standing before him as she was, without fear or modesty, bare to her waist and facing him as if they were on equal ground was startling. Truth was: she was high on a hill and he was already deep in a dark pit. There was nothing equal about the two of them. Hell was his future. The day he found her, he had secured his damnation.
His gaze went to her breasts and his body tensed even more, his head ached. He could taste her… “Pull up your tunic!”
She was startled and frowned at him. “Why?” She stood there so proudly naked, her shoulders back, hands on her hips, without a bit of modesty, and she strolled casually in front of him, then stopped barely a foot away and she looked right at him, her gaze narrowed when she said, “You do not like my breasts, my lord?”
“God’s blood, Glenna, cover yourself!” Then he did the only thing he could do to save her innocence: he stalked away, walking deeper into the forest and away from her before he lost control and took her completely.
His whole body was on the verge of betraying him. There was the constant rhythmic crunch of leaves beneath his boots, and the crack of a twig sounded like thunder to his raw ears. He stepped over a felled log and moved even faster into the darkness of the trees, with long strides, his breath coming hard and harder. His hand was already inside his hose, moving and seeking the release he needed.
When he was well out of sight and hearing distance, he stood with his back to a tree and facing away from her, his jaw clenched and his teeth locked tight, head thrown back against the rough bark of a tree, and he closed his eyes closed until his seed spilt far away from her warm and submissive body. But in his mind’s eye he saw her face as clearly as if she were carved on the back of his eyelids, and he imagined her beneath him, her soft pale skin the color of ivory, her lithe legs along his, him looking down into her face and those dark, dark eyes—the ones that had some kind of strange and powerful draw, like a lance that pierced straight through his heart.
10
Glenna stood watching the spot where Montrose disappeared into the woods. Above the thick crowns of the trees, dark clouds hovered over her. In the distance, they crawled over the low hills. The air grew thick, and misty, and suddenly cold. Rain slipped through the leaves and pelted her still flushed face. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then fixed her clothing and stalked over to pick up her hat, slapping it against her trouse to shake off the water. She crammed it on her head and moved toward the horses, both Skye and the black, abandoned and standing some distance away, completely forgotten in all that had just happened.
What had just happened? She wiped the rain from her face.
Something wonderful, she thought when she still had been light-headed and dreamy.
Until Montrose made her feel as if she should be ashamed. What she felt was not wonderful. Apparently, it was something terrible.
Surely their touches were not a sin…a thought she chewed over for a moment, before it struck her that some sins felt good, like cursing loudly.
To discover she was not who she thought she was: a young woman who could never feel a man in her heart, or joy between her legs like men did, was a huge revelation to her. Truthfully, when she had opened her eyes and looked up at him, it was all she could not to throw her arms around his neck and say, “Thank you!”
Lyall Robertson, the Baron Montrose, of all men had made her feel like a woman, and then crushingly apologized for his mistake.
Sadly her shoulders dropped, her heart sinking down to her toes. Try as she might she would never forget what she felt, her whole body and mind flying to the heavens, floating with the stars....
Tears choked her throat and stung her eyes, and she wiped them with her sleeve and told herself not to cry. He could not see her like this, though he had hurt her deeply, making her feel unclean and stupid for loving what they had done.
Her mind ran over things, searching for answers, and as she turned to walk back, she decided she might have a clue as to what he was doing in the woods, considering the size of the knot in his hose when he had stalked away…she did have two brothers. One quick look when he returned and she would know.
Once, when Elgin was ten and three, and she was still a brat, she had followed him down the stables, intending to pester him into letting her ride as she usually did, and instead, his furtive movements and secretive manner made her quickly duck into the next stall and quietly hide. But the sounds he was making were curious and odd and made her peek over at him. He sat in a corner holding himself, his hand moving till his seed was gone and he had grown small and lay limp and soft.
She wondered at what she had seen him do, and the memory of it had haunted her. For days she watched him curiously, some days thinking he could grow horns—because of something Alastair once said when he thought she wasn’t within earshot. El seemed unchanged…no different…no horns. She understood what had happened--they did breed horses—but she had not understood why.
Finally, she could keep quiet no more, and in the middle of supper one night she plainly asked her brothers about what she had seen. Elgin stood so quickly he almost knocked the table over, sputtering at her, his face as red as the sunset, and then Alastair became angry—not at her, but at Elgin.
The two of them fought, almost to blows before, finally, frustrated, Alastair had sat down, running a hand through his long red hair, and he had gently told her how a man’s body worked, using their horses and breeding as examples. When she asked him about what he had said once--that men could grow horns--he had laughed and explained it was not true, but merely an old tale. Then he explained to her the way he had always done about life and death and heaven and hell, about people and animals---he told her through stories—told her all he could about the sin of Onan, of a man growing horns, and the old Saxon prophesies of men going blind.
Until today, she had still not been able to completely piece together what she had seen in the stables with what Alastair had tried to explain to her about men and their bodies. She was not a man, and had no woman in their home to ask about her body. Women had fluxes. Men did not.
Naturally she assumed women’s bodies were as different from men as their nether parts, and that women could never have the same reactions—that Alastair was talking about something only men could do and feel.
For most of her life there had been only Al, El and her, and they often thought in different ways, saw dilemmas from different sides of the paddock fence. She was convinced even more by her reaction to Montrose, that she did not understand men.
All the more reason for her to escape.
Her frustration and confusion did not leave her easily, nor did the sudden feelings of her heart. She gathered the loose reins of both their horses and tied the animals closer, under the same shelter of the trees where they could still munch on the grass and easily drink from a small brook. The rain had cooled them down, so Montrose could no longer bluster and be angry with her about ‘riding the horses into the ground.’
Despite the rain, she walked back out into the open, her gaze searching the eastern horizon. But with the mist and low clouds, she could see little that would enable her to get her bearings, and she cursed herself for not learning more of the lay of the land when she and her brothers had plundered across the mainland.
Of course she knew well the long list of names of villages to avoid in Ross-shire and could recite them like a song: “Applecross, Dingwall, Suddy, Cromarty, Plockton, Garve, Kyle, Avoch, Knockbain, and Wester.” She needed to stay as far away from them as she should have stayed from the Steering market fair.
Fergus lay at her feet, his nose resting on his paws, eyes closed. He was snoring. Lyall came
striding out of the depths of the forest with his arms full of wood, which he dropped on the ground in front of her, knelt down, and built a small, warm fire. She watched him, laughing inside. No knot in his hose.
He glanced up at her from the fire. “What is so humorous?”
She turned away from him and muttered, “Nothing.”
He pulled some food from his pack and handed it to her. “Eat something. We will rest the horses.“ He glanced at Fergus. “And your hound. Perhaps the storm will pass.”
She laughed. “The storm that keeps following us? “
He seemed to smile to himself. “Aye.” Sitting back he ate some fish and cheese.
She took one of the turnips and bit into it, chewing thoughtfully. She studied the horizon, where the clouds were almost black. She gestured with her turnip. “Looks as if the storm will not wane.”
“Then we will have a long, cold ride ahead of us.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Beauly Priory.”
Her heart raced at the name. Beauly? Was not that near Dingwall? Would she be safe?
Her mind flashed with the image of a cruel sheriff wearing a deep green wool cloak pinned together with golden leaf brooches , a strap in his hand as he whipped a small frail boy bloody. Beauly Priory was most likely not in the center of any village, since the abbeys and monasteries were towns unto themselves. She decided not to press the issue. If she asked too many questions, he would have questions of his own. So she ate and kept quiet, occasionally watching him.
When it was time to depart, she unrolled the long woolen cloak from her pack and pinned it over the tunic with two leaf brooches she had stolen from a sheriff to distract him from beating a young peasant lad to death.
Montrose was already in the saddle. His look was impatient and thoughtful, as if his mind were leagues away. She repacked her bag precisely, putting each of her few items back in its place.
“I’d like to leave before winter.”
She glared him. “Would you have me shove my belongings in every which way and then have to take three times as long to find what I’m searching for?”