Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Elspeth’s hands were fisted in his shirt when he drew back enough to look at her. A long, unhurried look that stripped away every argument she might have made about propriety, or the hour, or the fact that they were standing in a room full of blades.
He moved toward her, and his hands were on her waist, pulling her against him. The wool of his kilt scratched through her thin dress, but she didn’t mind.
His mouth found hers in a kiss that started gentle but quickly deepened. His tongue slid against hers in a way that made her knees weak.
His hands roamed over her body, tracing the curve of her spine, the dip of her waist, the swell of her hips.
Elspeth had never been touched like this before, never been touched at all, really. Her breath hitched when his thumbs brushed the underside of her breasts.
Magnus broke the kiss, his lips trailing down her neck. “Ye smell so good. Like wildflowers after rain.”
His teeth scraped against her pulse point, and she gasped, her head falling back.
One of his hands moved to the laces of her gown, his fingers working them loose with practiced ease.
The dress pooled around her feet, leaving her in only her thin shift.
The cool air made her nipples pebble against the fabric.
“Look at ye,” Magnus murmured, his eyes dark with hunger. “So beautiful.”
He lifted her onto a sturdy weapons chest, the wood cold against her bare thighs. His hands pushed her knees apart, and her face heated. No one had ever seen her like this, so exposed and vulnerable. But the look in Magnus’s eyes wasn’t mocking or cruel; it was reverent.
His fingers traced the hem of her shift, slowly pushing it up her thighs, higher and higher until the fabric bunched around her waist. Elspeth squeezed her eyes shut, her heart pounding against her ribs.
“Open yer eyes, lass,” Magnus commanded softly. “Look at me.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. Magnus had dropped to his knees before her, his broad shoulders filling the space between her thighs. His hands gripped her hips, holding her steady as he leaned forward.
The first touch of his tongue against her folds made her cry out. It was unlike anything she’d ever imagined, wet and hot and utterly overwhelming.
Magnus licked her slowly, deliberately, as if memorizing her taste. His thumbs spread her open, exposing the sensitive bud hidden within. When his mouth closed around that tiny nub, her back arched off the chest. Pleasure, sharp and exquisite, shot through her.
Magnus sucked gently, his tongue swirling in patterns that made her toes curl. Her hands found his hair, her fingers tangling in the thick strands.
“Magnus,” she breathed, his name a prayer on her lips.
He responded by increasing his pace, his tongue moving faster, harder. One of his hands left her hip, and she felt his fingers probing her entrance. She tensed, her body instinctively resisting.
“Easy now, lass,” he murmured against her flesh. “Let me in.”
She tried, taking a deep breath and consciously unclenching her muscles. His finger slid inside her, thick and calloused. It felt strange at first, full, almost too full. But then he curled it just so, and pleasure exploded through her.
He added another finger, stretching her carefully. His mouth never stopped its wicked assault on her bud. Elspeth could feel something building inside her, a pressure that grew with each lick, each thrust of his fingers. Her hips began to move, rocking against his face.
“That’s it,” he growled, the vibration of his voice sending shivers through her.
The words shocked her, but they also thrilled her. She let go, abandoning herself to the sensations. The pressure inside her built higher and higher, until she thought she might burst.
Magnus seemed to sense how close she was. He sucked harder, his fingers pumping faster.
And then it happened. The pressure broke, and pleasure washed over her in waves so intense they stole her breath. Colors exploded behind her eyelids—blues and golds and purples, like the northern lights dancing across a winter sky. She was flying, falling, soaring all at once.
Magnus continued licking her through the aftershocks, his movements gentler now. When Elspeth finally came back to herself, she found him watching her, his chin glistening with her juices.
“Did ye like that, lass?” he asked, a smug grin playing on his lips.
Elspeth could only nod, her body trembling.
Magnus stood up, his kilt tented. He leaned down to kiss her, and she tasted herself on his tongue.
“Good,” he said, his voice thick with satisfaction. “Because that was just the beginning.”
She still hadn’t caught her breath enough to answer him properly.
He kissed her again, slower now, and she felt him tremble faintly where his weight pressed into his arms, felt the effort it was costing him to go slow when every line of him was strung tight as a bowstring. He hadn’t caught his breath either.
She had pressed her hand flat against his chest, feeling the unsteady thud of his heart under her palm, when the pounding started at the armory door, hard and frantic, no patience in it at all.
“Me Laird!”
Magnus went very still above her.
“Me Laird, ye’re needed!” The voice belonged to one of the stable boys, cracking with either youth or panic, likely both. “Fire in the furnaces, me Laird! It’s spreading fast!”
Magnus was already reaching for his shirt and throwing it over his head, moving with speed.
“How bad?” he called through the door, snatching Jinny from the bench and sliding her home in her scabbard in one motion.
“Bad enough, me Laird! Duncan’s got men on it already.”
“I’m comin’.”
Elspeth slid off the edge of the chest, pulled her dress back up over her shoulders, and reached up to lace it with hands that hadn’t quite steadied yet.
“The storm,” she said. “It must have been the lightning. Surely, it struck near the place.”
“Aye, likely.” He said it too fast, too flat, a man agreeing with her because arguing cost time he didn’t have, not because he believed it.
He crossed back to her before he left, caught her face in both hands, and rested his forehead against hers for one long breath, as though he needed the contact more than he needed the seconds it cost him.
“Magnus.”
“I have to go.”
She caught his wrist.
“If I lose control of this fire, people will die,” he said plainly.
“If I lose control of meself while it’s burning, more of them will.
That’s why I cannae stay here a moment longer than I already have, and why I willnae be the man who kisses ye and forgets there’s a castle full of souls depending on him doing his job instead. ”
“I ken. Go.”
He kissed her once, hard and quick, and then he was gone, boots loud on the stone, shouting orders before he’d even cleared the armory door.
Elspeth stood alone among the racked blades, her whole body humming with the aftermath of her release, and watched the narrow window at the far end of the room go orange at the edges where the sky had no business glowing at this hour.
* * *
The furnace shed was already half engulfed by the time Magnus reached it, flame running up the timber supports faster than any lightning strike could manage, black smoke rolling out low across the yard instead of rising, which told him before anyone said a word that the wind was working against them.
“Buckets!” He didn’t wait to see who heard him. “Two lines, well to the shed, now! MacTavish, get the horses out of the closest stalls. The rest will bolt once they smell the smoke!”
Men were already running. Duncan appeared at his shoulder half-dressed, sword belt hanging loose off one hip, and didn’t ask what had happened, only where he was needed, which was the only reason Magnus had ever trusted him with anything.
“East wall’s going next if we daenae wet it down.” Magnus was already moving toward it. “Get me six men and every barrel of water in the kitchens.”
He put his own shoulder into the first beam that came down, burning at one end, and hauled it clear of the doorway before it could block the men inside, the heat of it close enough to singe the hair on his forearm.
He did not stop to consider whether that was wise. There wasn’t time to consider much of anything beyond what needed doing next.
Mrs. McAulay had the frightened servants moving before he’d even thought to send anyone to fetch her, herding them out of the sheds nearest the blaze. Elspeth was beside her.
He hadn’t ordered that. He hadn’t ordered anything of the sort, and when he caught sight of her—skirts knotted up out of the mud, hauling a squalling goat by its lead rope while a stable girl half her age wept into the animal’s neck—his first instinct was to shout her back toward the keep where it was safe.
He didn’t. There wasn’t a spare breath to waste on an argument he already knew he’d lose, and the goat at least seemed to trust her more than it trusted anyone else currently attempting to move it.
“Water’s short at the south line!” someone called.
Magnus turned toward it and found his eyes had gone to Elspeth first anyway, checking the distance between her and the worst of the flame, before he let himself look at anything the man calling for water actually needed.
She was fine. She was thirty feet clear of the fire, hauling a second goat now, Mrs. McAulay shouting instructions at her that she seemed, against all odds, to be following.
Magnus turned back to the water line and did not look at her again for the better part of ten minutes, which cost him considerably more effort than carrying the beams had.
The bucket lines held. That was the only mercy of it. The rain from the earlier storm had left the ground sodden enough that the fire had nowhere easy to run once they’d wet down the walls on either side.
By the time the sky started going grey at the edges instead of merely orange, the flames had dropped to smoke and hissing embers, and men stood knee-deep in ash arguing about whose boots were ruined worse.
Magnus stood in the wreckage of the furnace shed with his hands blackened to the wrists and found himself, for the first time since the pounding had started at the armory door, with nothing left that urgently needed doing.
He looked for Elspeth again. She was sitting on an overturned water barrel near the sheds, a blanket someone had produced from somewhere draped around her shoulders, Mrs. McAulay beside her doing something practical with a cup of something hot.
She looked up and spotted him across the yard at nearly the same moment, and neither of them moved toward the other.
“Me Laird.” Duncan’s voice, low, close, meant for him alone.
Magnus turned and found his cousin crouched near the base of the closest wall, where the stone had gone black and slick in a way the rest of it hadn’t.
“What?”
“Come and look at this.”
He crossed to him.
Duncan didn’t point at anything, only tilted his chin toward the ground, where a dark stain ran along the base of the stones in a line too straight, too deliberate, to belong to anything that had burned.
Magnus crouched and touched two fingers to it. They came away slick, and when he lifted them to his nose, the smell was unmistakable even under the char.
“Oil.”
“Aye.”
“Thunderstorms daenae pour oil onto stones,” Magnus murmured.
Duncan said nothing to that. He didn’t need to.
“Someone wanted this to burn hotter and faster than it should have.” Magnus stood up, wiping his fingers on his already ruined shirt, his eyes moving along the length of the wall, tracing where the oil-line ran, how far it reached, how carefully it had been laid before ever a spark touched it.
“Someone wanted fear, Duncan. Nae just a fire, but fear.”
“Ye think it’s him.”
Magnus didn’t answer that directly. “Whoever it was kent this castle well enough to find the furnaces in the dark, in a storm, and lay a line straight enough that it caught the whole wall at once. That’s nae a stranger’s work.”
“And they kent the timing.” Duncan’s voice had gone quieter still. “The whole clan’s been talking about nothing but the handfasting for a fortnight. Word of that travels. If someone wanted the castle looking the other way, celebrating a—” He stopped.
Magnus looked at him.
“Celebrating an heir,” Duncan finished.
Neither of them said anything further about it, because there was nothing further that needed saying. A castle distracted by a wedding, and soon enough by a cradle, was a castle that wasn’t watching its walls as closely as it ought.
Magnus stood very still in the ash and the grey light, and let himself think, for exactly as long as it took to draw a full breath, about the storm.
About how he’d stood in the armory with his hands full of Elspeth instead of walking the wall as he did every night without fail, about how easy it would have been for a man with oil and patience to slip past sentries who’d been told to shelter from the rain rather than stand exposed to it.
He had been distracted. For the first time in thirteen years, on the one night it might have mattered most, he had been thinking about something other than what was coming for him out of the dark.
That ended now.
“Double the night watch,” he ordered. “Starting tonight, until I say otherwise.”
“Aye.”
“I want men stationed at the eastern border by nightfall. Armed, and rotated so none of them go soft from standing still too long.” He was already walking back toward the keep as he said it, Duncan falling into step beside him without needing to be told to.
“And find Jinny for me. Wherever I left her.”
“Ye left her in the armory.”
“Then that’s where I’ll find her.” Magnus did not look back at the ruined shed, or at the oil-stained stone, or at the men hauling ash and blackened timber into piles behind him. “I willnae be caught unarmed again. Nae in me own home.”
He glanced once more across the yard. Elspeth was on her feet now, handing her blanket off to the stable girl who’d been crying earlier, saying something to Mrs. McAulay that made the older woman’s mouth twitch into a smile despite everything. She hadn’t looked toward him again.
It was wise of her. He had a great deal of walking to do before dawn finished breaking, and every one of the next ten conversations he needed to have would go a good deal worse if he spent them thinking about the shape of her against him instead of the oil someone had poured deliberately onto his own stones.
He made himself walk faster. It helped, marginally.