Chapter 7 #3
“Not if I explain things to him,” Alina
insisted. “Not if I tell him how you helped me escape. He
understands making mistakes, big mistakes, and atoning for
them.”
Roark’s gut twisted. “My atonement to you
will be making sure you get safely away,” he told her. “Say you’ll
let me do this for you. It eats at my insides I was a part of
bringing you here. I knew it was wrong even when I believed Roger
only wanted to ransom you back to your family. I can’t bear to
think of you being sold by some slave trader to be kept as a
pleasure woman for some desert king.” He reached over and pushed a
stray lock of her hair behind her ear. “Please,” he said, cupping
her jaw and gently rubbing the apple of her cheek with the pad of
his thumb. “Let me do this for you. Let me save us both.”
She leaned her cheek into his hand and held
his gaze, her own sad yet determined. “I’ll wait.”
Roark blew the breath he’d been holding out.
“Good,” he said. “Good. Thank you for trusting me, especially after
what I—”
“Stop.” She covered his mouth with her hand.
“Stop beating yourself up over what’s been done. It’s in the past
now. A past neither of us can change.”
He laid his hand over hers, pressed his lips
to her palm, and lowered their hands. “You’re an extraordinary
woman, my lady owl. I knew it the first time I saw you, watching
you race your horse along the shoreline through my spyglass.” He
grinned. “The two of you were flying.”
“Can I ask you something?” she said, breaking
the silence that’d fallen between them.
“Does your question begin with why?” he
teased.
The apples of her cheeks pinked. “Part of it
does.”
“Ask away.”
“You told me on the ship you meant what you
said to me at the lake when you kissed me and…”
“Asked you to marry me?”
She nodded, her cheeks flushing darker.
“I meant it.” Roark cupped her chin and held
her gaze. “I still do.”
“Then why haven’t you kissed me again?”
When Roark remembered to breathe, he took a
slow, deep breath in and let it out with a ragged sigh. “Because,”
he told her, “when you leave here, leave me, it will be like
severing a limb. If I kissed you again, it would be like cutting my
heart out.”
“Oh.”
Roark stared into eyes as green and faceted
as cut emeralds, eyes reflecting the same recognition and desire
coursing through his veins since the moment he’d spied her racing
her mare on the beach.
“Ah, damn.” He pulled her to him. “Either
way, I bleed out.” At least this way he’d die with the memory of
her lips on his. Lips that met his for a hot, hungry kiss. Her
hands clung to him as desperately as he held onto her. He sucked
his breath in as she slid a leg over his lap and groaned as she
straddled him.
Clasping her to him, he slanted his mouth
across hers, his hunger growing with the warm, wet, taste of her
lips on his, the feel of her full breasts pressed against his
chest, of her taut backside moving in his hands, the slight
friction of her breeches rubbing against his, causing his cock to
swell and grow.
He broke their kiss, running both hands back
through her hair and gazing into her eyes, heavy-lidded with
desire. Roark may not have been the womanizer Leif and Donald were,
but he’d known a few intimately, including the older, experienced
widow of a neighboring laird. Yet not a single one of those women
had made his heart swell even bigger than his cock.
Until Alina.
Swaying back in his arms, she smiled at him
through lowered lashes, shy and sweet and so damned sensual that
Roark closed his eyes with a growl. What he wanted to do was lay
her down in the straw and make her his. To claim her, body and
soul. Yet he was honor-bound to get her back to her father, safe
and sound. And virginal. He touched his forehead to hers, his
breath as ragged as his voice. “I cannot. We cannot.”
“I know.” Her voice was a raw whisper, her
breath a soughing sigh. “I know.”
He hugged her to him. “You have no idea how
much I wish it were otherwise,” he whispered hotly in her ear.
“Oh,” she said, leaning back with a shaky
smile. “I have more than an idea.”
A quick, short whistle brought them both to
attention. “Someone’s coming,” Gare said, shutting the door Roark
hadn’t heard open behind him. “Pretty sure it’s Leif.”
Roark grit his teeth as Alina scrambled off
him, her gaze lingering a moment on the visible bulge in his
breeches. She pushed her hair back and smoothed her tunic as Roark
stood, and then she slipped a lead rope around Ash’s neck and got
him to his feet. Roark opened the gate and loosened the stays of
his breeches.
When Leif entered the stables, Alina was
slowly walking the foal back and forth along the open area between
the rows of stalls while Smokey jumped and ran circles around them.
Roark was raking a pile of straw in the brooding pen and Gare was
milking one of the nanny goats.
“My father sent me to check on the foal,”
Leif said in the Northern tongue as he leaned against the gate to
the pen, ogling Alina’s trim backside with a wolfish grin.
“As well as on us, no doubt,” Roark
added.
“No doubt,” Leif said as Alina turned the
foal around. “Especially her.”
Alina lifted her chin as she approached Leif.
“I’ve told you and your father many times I won’t try to leave
here. I’ll wait for my father to come for me. I’m always under
guard, and besides, where would I go? What would I do? I don’t know
the land or the language and I have nothing to pay or bargain with
for passage on a ship.”
Leif reached out and twirled a lock of
Alina’s hair around his finger, making it impossible for her to
move away from him. “A sweet thing like you,” he said. “You have
plenty to bargain with.”
“Leave her be, Leif,” Roark growled.
“Now.”
Leif unwound her hair and Alina backed away
from both of them. Behind him, Roark heard the scrape of Gare’s
stool.
Leif stood at his full height and puffed his
chest out. “How dare you tell me what to do,” he huffed. “I’m the
son of a laird.”
“As am I,” Roark said, refusing to back down,