Her husky cries were like an aphrodisiac. He cleaved to Morag, influenced by the woman under him the way the moon pulled the tides, as he spent his seed on barren ground, wishing it were otherwise.
Head thrown back, muscles immobile as though clad in iron, with the last particle of his brain still within his control, he noted the shimmer of the Northern Lights in the night sky, a view enhanced by the rewarding ring of Morag’s screams.
Music to his ears.
It had been a long day, tiring, almost as wearisome as some of the days when she and Rob trudged through miles of seemingly endless, soughing mud. Yon had been nights when she sought for sleep only to have it stay tantalisingly out of reach.
Yet tonight…
Tonight, she was equally tired but instead of her body starting at the sound of every wee creature, seeking shelter in the dark, her body felt lax, content, and her desire to sleep far, far away.
Betwixt, the angels lighting the room as they danced outside the window, painting the walls with colour and Euan’s particular care and attention to her intimate pleasures this night seemed like the Green Lady’s magic.
Cushioning her cheek on his chest, she snuggled against his shape, sighing as the crown of her head fit into the curve of his broad shoulder. She delighted in sensation, Euan’s fingers combing her hair, untangling, smoothing the long strands covering her shoulders and back.
Her hair, never cut since the day she was born, had grown till it reached her hips, and fascinated Euan as much today as it had in the gloom of the cave—a place where his touch had played a bigger part than sight.
He wrapped a slippery handful of hair around one fist, holding it to his nose and breathing deeply. “Lying here like this has brought to mind the lass this scent reminds me of. She was my first love.”
Her heart felt as if it had been punched. She shuddered with a spasm of bittersweet pain. An unsteady swelling under her ribs that Euan mistook for laughter, saying, “What’s that, perhaps you imagine I never had one? Can’t you imagine me thus, vulnerable as a canny youth, though perhaps with better taste.”
His chest rose under her cheek in heartfelt sigh that she wanted to echo but held the breath in her lungs instead before she gave herself away.
“You may laugh,” he said, all seriousness, “but my back still retains the scars of the crossbow bolt she removed to save my life. A guid reason for loving someone you might think, but it was more than gratitude.”
“Laugh? who would dare?” she retorted. Truthfully, she felt more bemused than amused, for she had thought all memories of the girl she had once been, were wiped from his mind.
“It was my first experience of a battle, and almost my last. Yet though I was a Scot and her enemy, she risked the condemnation of her kinfolk and put my life ahead of her own.”
He paused but a moment, a fraction of time to reflect on the past. “But more, she made my heart pound like a drum in my chest at her touch, and the scent of her would send my head burling. As I healed, we became lovers, but in those dark hours after she returned home, I knew fine my love put her at risk.
“I never spoke her name, never heard it cross her lips, it was best not to know anything that could betray the other. I simply called her Love—better going without that other intimacy than betraying her if I were caught.”
She turned in his arms and laid her hand over Euan’s heart, silently revelling in the thud of it under her palm, knowing it beat that hard in memory of her, of the lass she used to be.
“They were dangerous times,” he continued, “even worse than these days. On that ground west of Berwick, we faced the best that England and Northumbria had to hand. It was slaughter of the worst kind; yon bastards led by Farquhar of Wolfsdale, gave no quarter, aye nor asked for aught. If I had been found, they would have slit my throat without compunction, and the lass’s an’ all. That’s why I left her as I did, there one day and away the next, with ne’er a word of thanks in gratitude.”
Euan laid the palm of his hand against her scalp, smoothing its length with the flat his palm. His touch was soothing, considering the unruly state of her emotions. To know that he hadn’t left her without a backward glance was a sop to her vanity. “I’m sure she understood. She must have loved you to have braved her family to take care of your wounds. To love is to forgive all.”
“I can but hope you are right. All I had was what I stood up in, a soiled plaid and the remnants of a shirt, but the day I heard voices nearby in the woods, though they were but charcoal burners, I knew it was time to leave, and so I did that night.”
His fingers found the curve of her ear, softly caressing the folds therein. Back and forth, back and forth, a touch that sent hot tingles straight to her breasts and from there to between her thighs, to a place where Euan’s hard length had given her the greatest pleasure a woman could ever experience—one that compared well with holding Euan’s son in her arms while he suckled at her breast.
“It pains me to have deserted her without a word, with only the silver cross my mother hung around my neck the day I left Cragenlaw to show I had ever been there. But that and my McArthur ring were all I had.” He looked at his hand and displayed the ring on his finger, and the silver crest that had betrayed his identity.
Morag lifted her head then dipped to drop a kiss into the hollow of his throat. No matter what happened later, no matter what happened when the curse was gone and life at Cragenlaw returned to being the stronghold of a chieftain and his family, at least she would have had this.
“Hmmph,” he sighed, it rumbled through the wall of his chest, tinged with remorse and self-recrimination. “Now, there was the work of a brave man. I still regret it, though I’m ashamed to admit the memory surfaces in my mind a mite less than it once did.”
She pulled his hand down from the tender sweep of her nape where it had settled to place a kiss in its centre. “I’m sorry to have wrought such sad reminders of the past. Forgive me,” she whispered, then flicked her tongue where her kiss had landed an instant before. She felt the roughness of calluses against the tip, marks of a warrior, a chieftain with a castle to defend and hold. Yet, but moments before, the lad she had loved long ago had held her in his arms once more.
His confession made her heart swell, and tears well up under her eyelids, tears of happiness, and she thanked her Maker for the darkness that disguised her emotions, since the fire now burned low in the hearth.
Pulling his hand again, she laid it against her breast, making sure the dampness at its heart covered her nipple, pressing the solid strength of it hard against her aching flesh.
“So what’s, this bonnie lass, are you trying to distract me, or attract my attention? Either way, you’ve succeeded.”
He rolled her into his arms with her atop, breast to breast, navel to navel. Immediately obvious was the long generous length of his cock, pressing from root to tip against her belly. “I believe you, McArthur. The result is all I could wish for.”
So saying, she spread her knees wide, resting them either side of his hips. She smiled to herself as she felt the tip of his shaft lift, following her. When, he would have placed his hands on her waist, she gasped, “No let me do it, Euan. I want to please you this time.”
Gently, carefully, she guided the broad head of his erection to her entrance and slowly sank down its length. Euan groaned, she sighed, sounds mingled, much as the heat and damp of their bodies sank one into the other. Morag lifted her hips, sliding up his shaft, slipping down. Up and down. Up, down, finding her rhythm from the angels swirling in the sky, wings blue, red and white outside the window, as if they, too, danced to the music of their passion, the loud groans, the swift panting breaths, and the words she sang were a wish not to be barren, to fill her womb with his baby once more, whether or no she died in the process.
It would be her gift to him, the man she had loved in the past and the present, no matter what the future might bring.
Chapter 17
Euan was up at the cra
ck of dawn, as fresh as the dew that would silver the grass, whereas she felt as if she had been bowled by a horse—perchance Euan’s huge destrier, Diabhal, the one Rob loved so much.
“You lie abed a while,” he told her. “Yesterday was a day to sap all the energy from a body. I know I should have let you sleep last night, but though I shouldn’t admit it, you are the one temptation I can’t resist.”
“Then where,” she asked, “are you off to in such a hurry, leaving me alone in this big bed—a bed that was surely built to hold two?” She sat up, letting the top cover slide down to her waist—brazen, but she didn’t give a jot.
For all the words he had whispered in her ear over night, she was still a barren woman, useless to save his clan or his castle. As she watched, he arranged his plaid over his shoulder and fastened it with the McArthur pin. “I’ve summoned a council of war, with Ruthven, since he’s here, as well as Graeme and me. This latest attack on me and mine will no be shrugged off as just another occurrence. Cateran get short shrift on McArthur lands, but few have had the temerity to come so close to the castle. There is more behind these attacks than meets the eye; and I’ll swear on my life that Erik the Bear is behind yon barefaced acts of intimidation.”
He pulled his bonnet down hard over his lowered brows like an act of defiance, but his eyes were on her, on her breasts. “Seems in my eagerness I’ve marked you, and for the rough handling, my apologies, but for the eagerness I’ve no need to beg pardon.”
She heard the words, yet saw no abject contrition dull his dark eyes. Instead, she glimpsed the same boldness that had been there the day he claimed her for his leman, a glint that had dared her to object. It was a look that emphasised the hirsute roughness of his cheeks—the real reason for the tenderness lingering on her breasts, keeping her nipples poking out eagerly at their centre.
She pulled her shoulders back, increasing the thrust of their round cherry-pink points, not unlike the fruit growing on the tree in the bailey. With the aid of that one wee gesture, she virtually beckoned: taste me, bite me.
“God’s blood,” he whispered, the expletive more effective for the softness of his tone. “I’ve turned you into a siren, and if I don’t escape this instant I’ll be giving you what you so obviously desire.”
The skin around her eyes crunched up as she curved her mouth in a coy smile. “And here was I but thinking that the solution would be to help you shave before I let you into bed tonight.”
“Away with you, Morag, you’re a wicked, wicked lass … wild enough to keep a man like me the happiest he has felt in years. I’ll make sure my knife is sharp enough to cut, but not to kill. The death of me will be losing my rod in your heat, the whole night long.” He grinned at her, a twinkle in his eyes, then, swiftly strode out of the Chieftain’s apartments, as if the sight of her really did tempt him to return to bed.
After, he had gone Morag cupped the sweet tender skin of her breasts in both hands, lifting them higher to test their fullness and marvel at the wondrous pleasure Euan drew from them with both hands and mouth. The flush tingeing her skin Morag blamed on the roughness of his cheeks, but if that were true why did her nipples tingle by simply remembering the sensual experience. His mouth … his hands … implements of the gods.
Their coupling was the much the same as, yet so much more than, their first joining in the cave. At least, she could see his physique now, store the memory of his slim hips and thickly muscled thighs, something to take out and look at when the dark days came back.
The days when she was no longer with Euan.
She dropped back down onto the wolf skins, savouring the emotions he had wrought in her the night before.
He’d called her wild, but he was a stallion in bed. When he towered over her, leaning on his hands, thrusting his hips in a rhythm that wouldn’t be denied, Morag could do naught but surrender to the delight.
Her mind again went back to their days in the darkness of the cave. Was it any wonder they had made a child? Although they had hardly been more than babes themselves, and Euan recovering from a fever at that, they had been enamoured by each new discovery and delight.
For Euan, the circumstance of having a fever of being in pain in the darkness weren’t favourable to recalling her face.
She’d remembered his only by looking at her child.
Rob, her son.
Euan’s son.
The part she could never forget was the hours in his arms, something she had never deigned to share with another. Euan was the only man she had known, in the biblical sense.
Betwixt them, they had created a baby big enough to tear her up so much inside that the midwife had told her she would never ever have another.
Though bloody and battered, she had survived.
At first, she had felt nothing. Her mind and feelings numb until the sublime moment when they put Rob in her arms. After that nothing else mattered.
Her father, Angus Farquhar, the Wolf, had felt shame, black affronted that she refused to name her baby’s father, so that he could either force Euan to marry her, or kill him.
There were but two choices.
But after Rob, she had no longer cared.
She’d had her son to love, what more could anyone want, or ask? Now she’d rediscovered how it felt to be Euan’s arms, she felt torn. Every day, she tidied their bed and took care of his clothes, so he was always on her mind. The scent of him filled her head as she mended torn shirts and darned hose, all the things a wife would take care of.
Yet she would never be his wife.
In her father’s house Morag had felt invisible.
That didn’t mean she’d been dissatisfied with her lot. It had been comfortable, if free from excitement.
Now, just as when she had looked into her father’s bailey, she could see warriors practising their swordplay but, back then, excitement had been something that existed in other people’s lives. The irony was that not one of the men in the bailey had ever attempted to put an arm around her or given her a squeeze.
And who would blame them?
When Euan first met her, she had been curvy, saucily plump.
Afterwards, though she might have been ignored by her father, starving her had never entered his mind, and food had become her comfort. Six months on the road had taken care of all that, slimmed her down, taken her curves. For all that, Euan called her a siren. She no longer had the hips that lassies wiggled, giggling about being just right for childbearing. The only thing she hadn’t lost was her breasts.
She glanced down at them, picturing Euan’s face pressed against them as she had seen it last night. The gleam of firelight had turned her breasts into a golden pillow for Euan’s head. She yearned for his touch, brushing her palms across nipples that Euan had sucked deep into his mouth. Ooooh, such sweet pleasure he gave her.
How long could it last?
She gazed up at the vaulted stone ceiling. A ray of sunshine slanted through the easterly window, lighting up a corner of the ceiling that was hidden in shadow the rest of the day. She was like that in Euan’s company. The rest of the time her heart hid in the shadows, waiting for that moment when he walked into a room or graced the hall with his presence. He filled her heart with sunlight. The thought of winter approaching depressed her.
But no matter what Euan said, she couldn’t lie abed all day wasting the fine weather.
In a hurry now, she slid out of bed and reached for the ewer to fill the bowl and reluctantly washed the scent of Euan from her body. She tilted the bowl, the better to fill it, and suddenly her head spun and the bowl fell from her hand, the red clay smashing into a thousand pieces on the floor.
That’s how she would feel when Euan abandoned her for another.
They had come to a consensus. Their plans had been made. Colin Ruthven raised no objection to the McArthur hiring mercenaries who would eventually be stationed on a boundary that rode next to Ruthven lands. More, he would allow them free passage though his lands. Once Euan had petitioned
the king for permission to hire said mercenaries, he hoped that, at the king’s pleasure, he would be allowed laissez passer for the mercenaries to travel through Malcolm Canmore’s lands in Strathearn. It was to be hoped that the king was in a generous mood, and that Queen Margaret’s prayers for peace would be answered soon.
Jamie would remain at Cragenlaw, he and Alexander training as squires, with both Euan and Graeme taking the responsibility for the lads’ training, as well as their safety, the lack of which could cost the McArthurs dearly.
With the business at an end, Euan broached a flask of uisge beatha. He filled three wood and horn bowls, and in the time-honoured manner, they clashed the silver rims together. “Slàinte mathas, good health,” they toasted, drinking the spirits in one long swallow until the silver coin in the base of the bowl was revealed.
Finished, Graeme banged his bowl atop the table, and if their attention was what he wanted, he was successful. Feet apart, he stood, like the colossus of legend, daring all who would pass. “Ruthven, I would have you hear my request for your daughter Iseabal’s hand.”
Colin Ruthven said nothing, merely frowned, his blue eyes glowering a significant warning. Graeme took no heed and stood his ground. Euan admired him for it. However, Euan was not about to take sides, Graeme would not thank him for it. No, he would sit back and observe. Sure, the results of Graeme’s request would be as good as a play put on by travelling mummers.
He had every confidence in Graeme’s ability to bring Ruthven round his thumb. It seemed the pair, Graeme and Ruthven, were about to set his plan in motion with no need to nudge either in the right direction. “As you must be aware, the new Keep that Euan is planning will be mine, so you have no need to fear your daughter will have to live above the barracks. What’s more, I’m sure Euan will not mind me telling you…”
Graeme glanced Euan’s way and he nodded his permission.
“Telling you that should he never have a live baby, he has made me his heir. Though Euan is the younger of us two, because of the recent situation with Comlyn, he feels it is better to be safe than sorry.”
The Chieftain's Curse Page 17