Chapter Fifteen #2
Anna’s breath caught as his mouth slanted over hers, no longer tentative but insistent, coaxing her lips apart with a slow, deliberate pressure.
The taste of him filled her—clean water and something darker, something wild and untamed, she thought whimsically.
His tongue traced the seam of her lips, and Anna opened instinctively to him, without hesitation.
Then his hands slid from her waist to the small of her back, pulling her flush against him, and the kiss deepened.
His mouth opened over hers again, and the heat of him flooded through her, as sharp and sweet as whisky.
She made a small sound against his lips, something between a gasp and a sigh, and his fingers tightened against her spine, pressing her closer still.
She curled her fingers into the damp linen of his shirt, clinging to him, answering his kiss with an abandon that felt both reckless and freeing, as if some bolder version of herself had taken over.
The kiss grew more demanding, and his tongue stroked hers while his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her hips before he slid one hand upward, his thumb brushing against the side of her breast.
“I want to touch ye,” he rasped against her lips, his beard tickling her chin.
“Yes, please,” she begged and curled her fingers into his shoulders.
His hands slid down along her sides and then, with a firm grip, he cupped the curve of her bottom, pulling her hard against the length of his body.
The sensation robbed Anna of breath; there was no mistaking what pressed against her, or the urgency with which he wanted her.
As he held her there and continued to kiss her, his other hand moved with a care that almost undid her, brushing the open edge of her jacket and finally covering her breast. The cotton between them did nothing to diminish the warmth of his hand, his hand large enough, his fingers long enough to span her fully, and something about the breadth of his palm under her breast made her feel, not small exactly, but somehow delicate.
His thumb traced slow, deliberate circles around her nipple, each pass dragging heat through her, tightening her until she was nearly trembling.
Anna gasped into his mouth, her hands sliding up around his neck, her legs suddenly unsteady, and Bram made a low sound in his throat, a wordless groan she felt as much as heard.
He broke the kiss only to press his face into the hollow of her neck, breathing her in, the bristle of his beard sending tiny electric shocks over her skin.
She threaded her fingers into his hair, marveling at how soft it felt, how utterly real. She arched into his touch, shameless, greedy for him in a way that made her cheeks burn with embarrassment even as she wanted more.
His lips returned to hers, the kiss rougher now, more urgent, and she answered in kind, teeth catching at his lower lip, tongue daring and searching.
The hand that held her breast claimed her fully now, palm heavy, fingers kneading her through the thin fabric in a rhythm that left her lightheaded.
His other hand gripped her hip with bruising hunger, and she was aware of nothing but the wash of sensations.
She knew she was lost, entirely lost and blissfully so, surrendering all the defenses she’d built up over years of caution and heartbreak.
It was a strange thing to fall for someone who had been dead for seven hundred years before she arrived—someone who, by the cold logic of her own timeline, had already lived his whole life without her in it, and yet here she was, and here he was, and the arithmetic of it no longer troubled her the way it should.
He shifted his grip, sliding his hand from her bottom up along her back, sliding beneath her jacket and her shirt so that his palm found the bare skin above the waistband of her skirt, hot and possessive.
She shivered and gasped into his mouth again, her own hands roaming with growing boldness over his chest, up the column of his neck, into his hair again, tugging him closer, and closer still, as if she could pull him all the way inside herself.
His hand left her breast, sliding downward and away, and she whispered his name again, this time as a desperate plea that did not embarrass her.
He pulled his lips from hers a moment later and once more touched his forehead to hers.
Anna opened her eyes. His expression was not one of pleasure but of conflict, a grimace of frustration carved deep into the lines of his face. She recognized that it wasn’t rejection, but the look of a man wrestling with his own restraint—the effort it took to pull away from her.
“Why...?” Her question came out as a hoarse whisper.
“?Tis nae safe,” Bram said, his voice like gravel. “To be so distracted.”
His words hit her before she’d finished processing them, and her first instinct was to beg him to find somewhere safe. Her second, more ridiculous instinct was that she didn’t want to be safe, she wanted to be in his arms.
Bram withdrew, his hands dropping away slowly, his gaze riveted on her chest, his expression fierce, as if he yearned to reclaim what he’d so abruptly surrendered.
Anna was much slower to remove her hands from him, even as she knew exactly what dangers surrounded them.
Bram turned away first, his jaw set, the muscles in his neck corded with tension.
He strode toward the horse without a backward glance, his bare feet silent on the damp earth.
Anna watched him go, her lips still tingling, her body humming with the ghost of his touch.
Her legs felt unsteady, as if the ground beneath her had softened.
The horse stood patiently, its dark coat gleaming in the late afternoon. Bram busied himself adjusting the horse’s tack, his movements efficient, controlled.
Anna hesitated only a moment before approaching, her feet leaden.
She stopped just behind him, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body, close enough to touch him.
Unbeknownst to him, she lifted her hand between them, but just as quickly clenched her fist and lowered her hand, unable or simply unwilling to touch him voluntarily, to lay her hand against his broad back, perhaps with some hope that her touch could say what she had not.
Without a word, Bram turned and reached for her.
His hands settled at her waist, firm and sure, and lifted her smoothly onto the horse.
She clutched the saddle horn reflexively as he climbed up behind her in a single, quiet vault, his arm momentarily encircling her to steady himself.
He’d met her gaze only fleetingly, and she didn’t suppose she was able to read his expression any better now than before he’d kissed her, but she convinced herself she saw nothing of regret in the depths of his blue gaze.
His gaze was neither cold nor distant but, if anything, charged with a smoldering, unresolved intent that made her feel warm all over again.
When he urged the gelding forward once more, Anna leaned back against his chest almost without thinking, and was struck by how astonishingly ordinary the moment felt despite the extraordinary thing that had just happened.
They rode in silence, but it was no longer the same silence that had accompanied them across the landscapes north of York. Something had shifted in this secluded spot, because of that most startling but superbly satisfying kiss.
She wasn’t alarmed that Bram hadn’t spoken to her since explaining why he’d put a stop to their kiss, since she didn’t yet have words herself, had yet to fully grasp what the kiss had meant, the full ramifications of it, her own uncharacteristically wild and wanton response to it, or what it might mean going forward.
In fact, as the horse carried them along the muddy verge of the ancient road, Anna found herself grateful for his silence.
The hush between them was not heavy, but charged—with possibility, uncertainty, and the dangerous, exhilarating weight of what they’d just done.
Her mind replayed the kiss in all its sensuous detail, each recollection more vivid and consuming, her body still humming with the echo of his hands on her skin.
She’d always thought herself sensible to a fault, a grown woman more likely to talk herself out of an impulse than to let longing seize her—yet there she’d been, clutching an imposing Highlander to her breast, kissing him as though she’d been waiting all her life for only that.
Who was this person, this Anna, who had wanted so fiercely, who had dared to answer his hunger with her own?
She wondered if he was as shaken as she was. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this, for the dizzying fall into a man who should have been nothing more than a ghost.
Anna let the rhythm of the horse and the Bram’s arms around her lull her into a kind of contemplative state. Again and again, she reflected upon the astonishing heat of that kiss, the way her own body had answered him, reckless and resounding and alive in a way she hadn’t known possible.
But under the feverish daydreaming, a second, colder reality swirled.
Anna was not so naive as to forget the mountain of context bracketing this moment: the centuries between them, her own displacement and underlying desire to return home, the fact that she was something like his ward and that, for all she knew, he might go the way of others before him, eventually choosing something else other than her.
Yeah, she was in serious trouble. Not just the obvious, ever-present time-traveling sort, but the kind that left bruises on your inside. She only knew that she wanted more, and that her journey through the fourteenth century had just become infinitely more complicated.