Chapter 27
Caelan’s blood was pounding through his body with an urgency he’d never experienced before.
Clara’s eyes were huge, but she nodded. Her hair was dampening her chemise, making it cling to her body. She looked like the embodiment of his dreams.
“I’d be in this state anyway, but you smell like me. Like me when I’m coming in the open air.”
She turned pink. “I don’t understand. Why don’t you touch yourself in privacy, in your own bed?”
“As you do?”
He held his breath.
She made a strangled sound in her throat. “You shouldn’t ask me that!”
“I shared a bed with my wife.”
If he hadn’t had his eyes on her face, he wouldn’t have seen the wince that went through her whole body. They were man and wife, and at some point they had to talk about his first marriage, about Isla, for all he hated the idea.
“When I was widowed, I brought in that old bed and moved to the study. Mrs. Baldy would bring me meals there. Weeks passed when I left the room only to go fishing or to the kirk. I felt most alive here, in the water.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “That’s heartbreaking, Caelan. I’m so, so sorry. I wish that Isla hadn’t—”
Without thinking, he lifted his hand. “Don’t be.”
“I’m sorry,”
she said with a gasp. “I didn’t mean to say her name.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to discuss her now, not with you and me here, and you so damn beautiful, and me—well, I’m so damned naked.”
“You are very naked,”
Clara agreed.
Thankfully, she didn’t sound destroyed. His wife was a resilient woman, with all the best qualities of a Scotswoman. She must have been tough to have survived her mother and that bloody prince.
“That’s why I don’t allow the household to wander over here without notice. After fishing, I always come here for a bath.”
“And to practice your bagpipes!”
He jerked his head up, startled. Clara was giggling madly.
“I love that sound, lass. Did anyone ever tell you that your moods change so quickly that they could give a man whiplash?”
“No one pays attention to my moods,”
she said blithely and without a hint of self-pity. “Last night when I was drunk, I must have sounded like a proper ninny.”
“You didn’t,”
he told her. “A whole pub full of men fell in love with you and your giggles.”
“Pooh,”
she said, shrugging it off as a fib and smiling at him, dimples in play.
His cock responded the way a lad’s might at a sketch of a breast. Happiness, her happiness, affected him like an aphrodisiac.
“Weren’t you planning to show me something?”
she asked, her eyes mischievous.
Caelan upended the bottle into his palm and stroked down his cock. Even that one stroke brought him to the edge of coming. He clenched his teeth, watching as her curious eyes ranged over his body and froze on the broad head of his cock above the clutch of his hand. She didn’t look distressed or disgusted, although the mushroom top was red with blood, and likely his face was too.
“I’m about to make a mess,”
he said, the words strangled in the back of his throat.
To his infinite shock, she came toward him. “May I?”
His hand fell away before she finished the sentence. Her hand wrapped around him and then his heart caught as disappointment filled her face.
“I don’t think this will work between us,” she said.
Nausea gripped him, his heart pounded in his ears with a sickening beat. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Bad?”
She looked startled. “What’s bad about it?” She added another hand below the first. “You’re too big, and that’s a fact. When I saw you fishing, I thought that you and I were perfectly suited.” Her cheeks were rosy. “I shouldn’t have been thinking that. It wasn’t ladylike or polite, because you didn’t know I was there.”
Relief felt like a benediction. He dragged heated air into his lungs before he fell into a faint. “You’re not disgusted?”
“Did I look disgusted?”
She tightened her hand. Caelan bit back a groan. He would come. Soon.
“No,”
he rasped. “Maybe?”
“If I wasn’t a small person, I’d be—”
“Do that again,”
he groaned, unable to stop himself.
She did. He caught an arm around her and took her lips in one of the deepest kisses of his life. His other hand closed around hers, and he began coming in waves such as he’d never experienced before, his cock trapped between their bodies, against her softness, pulsing through her palm.
He couldn’t speak afterward for gasping; the orgasm turned him inside out. He thought he was finished, but her hand shifted, and one last spurt burned its way up his cock.
“Bluidy hell,”
he whispered a moment later.
Rather than springing away from the mess he’d made, she leaned against him. They stayed like that, no sound but a lark singing far up in the blue sky. “Clara,”
he said finally.
Her face tilted up to his, and what he saw there shocked him to the core. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips parted, eyes glossy. When he looked down between their bodies, her hands had slipped away from him, and one was curled tightly between her legs, over her chemise.
He lost himself for a moment, blinded with relief, his whole body simmering with joy. “Darling,”
he said low and soft, like a man trying to lure a wild creature. “Will you let me help you, please? You’re so fucking beautiful. You ruined me, and I can’t leave you wanting. I can’t.”
“You said not on a rock,”
she whispered.
“There’s moss,”
he managed. He pulled off her chemise, wet with his come, and threw it to the side, snatching his kilt. Then he drew her into the woods until he could toss the kilt down on the moss and set her down as carefully as an egg.
“What are you doing?”
she asked.
“This.”
He fell on his knees before her and pushed open her legs. Clara squeaked and reached down to cover herself.
“No.”
He took her hand and nipped her palm. “You’re so beautiful, glistening in the sunlight, wanting me.”
She made a stifled noise. When he glanced up, she had her hands over her face, as if she were pretending to be somewhere else.
Caelan settled down on his stomach, crushing his cock, which had risen straight up as if that orgasm never happened. First he looked at Clara’s pink fluted beauty, and then he leaned in, delicately running his tongue up the heart of her.
She gasped, and her hands fell off her face. She came up on her elbows. “Caelan,”
she said hoarsely. “Are you sure we should be doing this? Is it allowed?”
“Every good Scotsman knows the art,”
Caelan told her. “Can’t say about the British. If they have rules, we don’t bother with them.”
“I’m not sure,”
Clara whispered.
“I’ll stop if you don’t like it,”
Caelan said, as soothing as he could be. He bent his neck, and what he did next must have pleased her, because she sank back and covered her eyes again.
In a matter of minutes, Clara’s hips were twisting, and she had her hands over her mouth instead of her eyes. When he added a finger and then two, cursing silently at how small she was, she flung her arms over her head. “This is bliss,”
she said hoarsely. “Come here!”
“Nay, we canna do that, lass. Not in the out-of-doors, your first time.”
“Aye, and I say we will,”
his little wife ordered, her eyes wild. “I don’t know how to put this politely, Caelan. I might shock you to the bone, but come here.”
No man had ever been as lucky as he. She was so beautiful, her hair curling around her like a mermaid, covering her breasts.
“Don’t you want to?”
she cried.
“Jesus, take you, my new wife, on my kilt? On my land?”
She stared at him. “Well, then?”
“It’s your first time, you, a delicate lady.”
“I’m not feeling delicate, more like empty, wanting, lustful. Not ladylike things.”
He came up on his knees and paused to lavish attention on her breasts until he had her crying out again. It wrecked him to feel her open for his cock, to nudge inside, sink farther.
“Bluidy hell,”
he groaned, about halfway. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You’re too big,”
Clara whispered. “I knew it.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No! It’s merely impossible.”
She arched, wiggling her hips. “Frankly, it will never work—”
It did work.
His cock slid home. She abruptly stopped talking.
“Lass,”
he said hoarsely. “Clara. Tell me it’s possible.”
“Well.”
He braced himself over her with his elbows in the moss. “We could go back to the castle and go to bed. Or try again tomorrow.”
Who would have thought her green eyes could darken to the color of fir trees? Become ferocious? “Caelan.”
“Aye?”
“If this is all there is to it, you’ll need to leave me to a bout of grieving. If there’s more, get going and do more, because I thought there was more.”
She frowned, taking one arm off his neck and threading it between their bodies. “I can help.”
Her head fell back, her face slackening with bliss as her fingers drifted over the place where they joined. “Who would have thought it’d feel so good to have you inside?”
Joy was not an elusive emotion in Caelan’s life. He’d been lucky in small things: the joy of catching a fish, throwing his nephew into the air, writing a sentence he liked.
But this?
Delight burned down his spine. He came up on his knees, sank even deeper, put his hands on her hips and tilted Clara’s hips up.
“Oh, my,”
she breathed.
He grinned and pumped into her.
“Oh, my.”
It took some adjusting to find the perfect angle, the one that made her start whimpering, broken words bursting from her lips, her hips arching frantically to meet his.
He asked her twice if it hurt before she threatened to swat him. It felt awkward when he balanced on one elbow and bent his head, but when his mouth closed over her nipple, and she screamed?
Glory.
Sometime later, he was braced on his elbows so that he could kiss her, and she had wound her legs around his hips. Short legs, the right length. Everything about her was right.
Clara’s hands were on his bottom, her eyes squeezed shut, sweaty cheeks, luscious hair everywhere, the two of them so wet that obscene noises echoed into the quiet woods . . . Somehow he hung on until she sucked in a breath and shrieked like a teakettle. He might have to tell the household to stay in the stables, not just away from the loch.
Her cunny tightened around him and he knew he was stretching her, but she had promised it didn’t hurt, and elation poured from his loins in a burning flood.
When he could see again, and think again, he found his wife giggling. He was so deep inside her that he could feel her laughter. He’d only just come, but his cock stiffened.
“Stop,”
he whispered, kissing her.
“Stop what?”
she asked a while later.
He was hard again, still inside her to the hilt. He didn’t have the words. Any words.
Clara looked at his face and broke into a proper belly laugh that sent sensation down his cock.
“Oh, heaven above,”
he rasped, and started pumping because he literally couldn’t do anything else. He felt between them, his fingers sliding in the warm mess they’d made together until he brushed her the right way.
Her laughter died, and her legs came up. He caught her right knee and pushed it back a bit. Clara’s eyes opened wider. She started talking—of course she was talking. He wanted to listen. He would listen next time.
But this time, it was all he could do to move, keep moving, keep going, until thankfully she started pulsing around his cock, and he let go of his control. Again and again and again until his body emptied out and he was lying on her, barely propping himself up so she could breathe.
Trying to catch his own breath, shaking.
“Clara.”
He meant to say things with her name that he couldn’t put into words.
“It’s all very untidy.”
She put a hand between their legs and brought it up, glossy and wet, and then—dancing eyes on his face—rubbed her fingers against her breast.
He groaned. “You were the Honorable Miss Clara Vetry, pursued by royalty. You are a lady. You rubbed my . . . me into your breast. That was not ladylike.”
“I feel shameless,”
she told him. “Also, as if I’d like another bath.”
He was filled with wild gratitude, but words failed him still. He carried her back into the pool, half expecting the water to hiss and boil. Instead their sweat washed away, and he felt like a man newborn.
The luckiest man in the whole damn world.
The only man with a mermaid who rubbed soap all over him, even the inelegant parts, her curious fingers leaving little trails of fire.
When they emerged from the loch again, he wound his kilt around her waist rather than his.
“I can’t walk into the castle like this!”
Clara cried, her eyes large as she looked down at her breasts.
“You are ravishingly bare-breasted like an Amazon warrior. And you’re wearing my kilt.”
He brushed back a thick curl of hair so he could see her nipples. “When I’m on my deathbed, I’ll be thinking of you at this very moment.”
To his shock, her eyes blurred with tears, and she stepped closer, throwing her arms around his neck. “I know you’re living with fear of mortality,”
she said earnestly. “I promise I’m not planning to die for years and years, and you won’t either.”
Once again, he—a man writing two books—couldn’t find words to express what he felt, not with his wee wife in his arms, her breasts against his chest, his kilt around her hips. Clara came up on her toes and dotted his jawline with kisses until he tucked his chin down so he could take her mouth.
They stopped kissing when she said “Tea”
against his lips.
“You have a proper addiction to the stuff,”
he whispered, grinning. “I’ll have to send someone to the tea auction in Glasgow.”
“I can do without. I’m afraid it’s very expensive.”
“I told you before that I’ve a great deal of money. All that whisky you were tasting last night sells like hotcakes, but we charge a great deal more than we could make for bread. Londoners are perishingly fond of the brew, and they’ll pay a king’s ransom for it.”
“You shall have whisky, and I shall have tea,”
she said, twinkling at him.
He tapped her nose and then kissed it. “We smuggle the whisky out of the Highlands, because the Scots parliament in its infinite wisdom decided to tax the brew, and I’ve no wish to give them my proceeds. I send one wagon with a few barrels down to Edinburgh to sell on to the magistrates, which means CaerLaven brewers haven’t had any problems with enforcement.”
“I have a large dowry,”
Clara said shyly.
Caelan had the vague feeling that fine London gentlemen might think a lady should say nothing of money, but he was of the opinion that more was always welcome. “Excellent. We’ll need it to buy kilts for our fourteen children, so they don’t wander around naked like their parents.”
“We should go back home,”
Clara said, stepping away and winding her arms around her bosom, as if it were a crime for birds to glimpse her nipples.
“I’ll bring toweling next time,”
he promised.
“I don’t think we have any,”
Clara said. “Mrs. Gillan said that Isl—her daughter’s linens were her pride and joy, but I couldn’t help noticing that the only sheets in the house are fit for rags.”
“I suspect they went out the back door with the bacon,”
he said. “The Baldy family is a terrible one for taking a pochle here or there, a pochle being a small thing taken without permission. I dinnae care. I’m a heedless man, and if I had enough books, paper, and ink, I reckon I’d be happy in prison, except that I couldn’t fish.”
Clara’s eyes were fixed on his face, as if she could see to the heart of him. If she had that ability, she’d see that he would break out of any prison in the land to get home to his wife. The wife wearing his kilt.
“You truly didn’t notice that you were eating off battered tin rather than fine china?”
she asked, knitting her brow.
“I’m a rough sort of man,”
he said apologetically. “A brute, at the heart. Isla did her best to shape me into something better, but it didn’t take. ’Twas a terrible frustration to her.”
She opened her mouth as if to say something, but thought better of it, slipping her hand in his, which meant he got to see her breasts again.
“If I’m too much of a beast, tell me,”
he said. “On my own, I’m happy standing about with my parts hanging down.”
Clara being Clara, she laughed. “Your parts aren’t hanging down.”
“They never will, not when you’re standing there in the altogether, but for my kilt,”
he said. “Smelling like the loch, sunshine, cloudberries. You.”
To his utter delight, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around one of his balls. He squeezed her other hand because it was that or fall to his knees as her delicate hand cupped him below.
“They’re in a different position than . . . than when I first saw you in the loch.”
“You don’t mind?”
She made a funny little snorting noise. When he bent to look into her eyes, they were foggy and hungry, and her fingers were caressing his balls, which were aching as they never had before. As if they might implode from lust.
“How can you ask that?”
she said, a bit scolding, as if he were the craziest man on the island.
Clara was sore. She had to be sore because she was so small, and it had been her first time, first two times. “Tea?”
She blinked and nodded. “Tea.”
Her hand went away, and he barely stopped himself from begging for more.
“Later,”
Clara said, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. She was flushed, like a woman who was having a filthy daydream about her husband. And she threw him a mischievous look that promised all the things she knew nothing about yet. All the things he’d ever dreamed of. The things willing women did with men.
Caelan couldn’t help thinking that his wife was a miracle from God himself, with his kilt slipping down her hips, her creamy skin glowing, her eyes soft with desire.
It was one of the best moments of his life and no mistake.