Chapter Thirteen #3
He stretched his fingers through the cool silk of her hair, savored its sweet slide across the back of his hand. Didn’t dare to trust the wild hope beginning to well inside him.
“Did Janet and Dagda perchance catch you in this . . . unusual activity?”
She said nothing, but the way she compressed her lips and a slight tensing of her eyelids proved ample answer.
An awkward silence she couldn’t keep for long.
“Botheration!” The expletive burst from her lips and she swiped another hand across her cheeks. “A grand and merry pox on whiche’er of the two told you.”
Magnus folded his arms, waited until a particularly strong buffet of wind ceased rattling the shutters before he spoke. “And will you tell me why you engaged in such foolery?”
Biting her lower lip, his bonnie bride said nothing.
Not that she had need of words—the delicate flush inching up her neck and making her face glow as bright as red-burning peats screamed her ill ease with a loudness more deafening than the sharp cracks of thunder shaking the chamber’s thick stone walls.
He cocked a brow, let the slightest of smiles take any harsh edges off his words—and hammer away a few more chips of stone from the mammoth clump of granite.
His smile broadening, he went on, the words flowing now. “A lass traversing a turnpike stair is none so rare a sight in any keep, I’ll wager, but a fair lady occupying herself with such a task for hours on end is . . . in- triguing.”
And encouraging beyond measure if he was correctly guessing the reason she’d indulged in such nonsense.
He hadn’t developed his physical stamina and muscular build without long hours of hardest training.
She swung away from him, tossed a sheaf of gleaming black hair over her shoulder. “There is naught intriguing about it,” she declared, her voice ringing. “For a braw champion of the lists, you are precious dull at kenning a woman’s heart if I must color my reasons for you!”
“Ahh . . . but you color so beautifully,” he said, feeling almost two-and-twelve again, bursting with hope.
“Saints, but you are bonnie when you glow like that,” he blurted, grinning at her lovely profile.
Noting well the bright red of the cheek turned his way, he wondered if a similar flush kissed the lush fullness of her breasts.
“So-o-o, you would you see me color, would you?” She whirled to face him, a blaze of MacLean fury sparking in her dark eyes. “If I say you what I was doing on those stairs, I shall flush a brighter red than a hundred Highland sunsets!”
Magnus folded his arms, waited, amazed to feel a grin crinkling his eyes and deepening the creases in his cheeks. His dimples. Mother of God, he’d almost forgotten how damned good it felt to smile.
Apparently too caught up in explaining herself to notice his mirth, Amicia snatched a convenient flagon off the table and poured herself a measure of finest uisge beatha, tossing it down in one choking gulp.
“Good sir, I mounted and descended those stairs so that I need not blush when standing before you unclothed,” she announced, her voice rising as she set down the cup with a loud clack. “So that my . . . er . . . exertions might pare a bit of the womanliness from my hips.”
She blew out her breath on a hot, gusty sigh. “See you, I’d hoped to rid myself of a bit of extra flesh—lest this body’s roundness repel you!”
Her color deepening indeed, she threw open his plaid and flung it aside.
“Look you, Magnus MacKinnon,” she charged him, grabbing a barely-there roll of flesh at the top of her abdomen, pinching it hard before she let go to smooth her hands along the well-rounded curves of her shapely hips, “see my nakedness—the plumpness marring my belly, my . . . form!”
Magnus stared at her, too flummoxed to find words.
Did she truly not know how desirous she was?
How intoxicatingly beautiful?
Saints, the slight swell of her tummy delighted him.
The luxuriant tangle of sooty curls at the tops of her thighs stole his breath, and the large, dark rounds crowning her breasts had him moistening lips run impossibly dry.
Sheerest lust and raw, raging need swept through him like rivers of molten fire.
“Merciful heaven, dinna tell me you believed I’d find you displeasing?” he got out, strangle-voiced. “You—of all women?”
“And why not me . . . of all women?”
Because for more years than you know, just the whisper of your name across my heart has filled me with a warmth brighter and more beautiful than the light of a thousand suns.
Blinking, Magnus rammed a hand through his hair.
Scalding heat crept up the back of his neck.
Sakes, he half-expected to glance over his shoulder and discover Hugh had somehow let himself into the chamber, that his word-gifted bard of a brother hovered close behind him and had flustered the flowery sentiment in his ear.
But inside he knew.
The words dwelled in the deepest part of himself. There in the darkest, most intimate corner of his heart where they’d always been and, like as not, would e’er remain. Through this life and beyond.
Forever.
For eternity.
“Come you, Sir Magnus . . . tell me why.” She took a couple of steps toward him, her breasts swaying. “I am none so fragile that I cannot hear the truth.”
“The truth ought to be clear enough for you to see,” he said in a voice near as tight as the hot iron hardness lifting his plaid.
He stared at her, unable to tear his gaze from her voluptuous bounty, the raven curls adorning her woman’s mound. Saints help him, but a faint trace of her musky femininity wafted up from that jet-black triangle, the heady scent beguiling him.
“I need the words, my lord. My eyes see—and very well. Mayhap I see the truth. But even so, my heart would hear the words.”
“I’ faith,” Magnus swore, the boulder making itself known again. “Could you not tell that your kiss during the Claiming Ceremony near brought me to my knees? Is that not truth enough for you? Of my desire and my . . . affection?”
“And do I have your affection?” She touched a hand to his chest, smoothed her fingers across the hard-planed muscles before pressing her palm over his heartbeat. “I would know. Now. Before we . . . proceed.”
“Aye, sweeting, that you do—hold my affection. With all surety,” he admitted, the words freeing him even if they only told half the tale. “Never you worry.”
He looked at her, saw the doubt still swimming in her darkly luminous eyes.
“But I do worry, see you,” she said, blessedly making no move to cover herself.
Instead, she jammed fisted hands against her hips, the movement causing her large breasts to sway to and fro, the nipples tight and thrusting in the chill night air.
Magnus groaned, no longer trying to even conceal his aroused state. Indeed, he threw off Colin’s plaid, tossing it aside as swiftly as she’d had done with his.
If she wouldn’t believe the truth of his words, she’d be hard-pressed to deny the rigid length of him riding hard against his groin.
But she scarce noticed, her hot gaze fixed on the peat fire, her fingers digging fiercely into the sweet flesh of her abdomen.
“How could I think otherwise when, from my first day here, Janet made it clear she was your intended and you, my lord, made it more than plain you did not want me?”
“Janet was e’er a lass with . . . problems,” Magnus owned, lifting a handful of her hair, letting the silken strands spill through his fingers. “And I, lass, have been the good part of a fool.”
It was the most he was willing to concede . . . the most he could concede.
“I think you are anything but a fool,” she said, leaning back against the table’s edge, her expression softening, her eyes growing misty.
Too misty for his liking.
For it was affection and a fine lusty union he meant to share with her—not moon-eyed revelations and sentimental sighs.
“Colin has asked for Janet’s hand,” he blustered, seeking a topic to cool the heart-fire glowing in her eyes. To save him from having his own eyes grow all soft and dewy if she kept staring at him with her heart on her sleeve.
“He is man enough to master her problems—just as I am thinking she will prove every ounce the strong lass he will be needing at his side when he leaves here.”
Amicia gasped, her own cares momentarily forgotten.
She’d seen Colin and Janet together, and had harbored her suspicions, her hopes, for them both. But she hadn’t heard anything beyond the usual castle prattling and blether. The most of it snatches of vague speculation amongst the tongue-waggling kitchen and laundry wenches.
“Y-you truly do not mind if she leaves with your friend?” She had to know. “She seemed so . . . smitten with you.”
“For the love of Saint Columba, sweetness, have you not heard a word I’ve told you?” He looked at her, the blue of his eyes almost indigo in the firelit room.
“Nay, I see well that you haven’t paid heed to anything I’ve said. Mayhap deeds will speak all the louder?” He almost growled the words, the huskiness in his deep voice exciting her—the implication behind his words melting her.
A most determined look coming over his handsome face, he snatched up one of the discarded plaids, bunched its soft folds into a semblance of a cushion, and, reaching for her, hoisted her onto the table’s edge, thrusting the makeshift cushion beneath her to soften the table’s hard surface.
His hardness caught her eye, the sight of it undoing her.
Some wee demon inside her made her narrow her eyes at him in challenge. “I ceased fretting about Janet when I learned about the raven-haired lasses. Knowing about them—”
At her words, a strangled groan ripped from his throat and he urged her legs apart, stepping between them even as he splayed his hands around the curves of her buttocks, kneaded the soft plumpness he found there.
“There-ne’er-were-any-raven-haired-lasses, do you hear me, Amicia?” The words tore from his throat. “Nary a one. Not in the sense you understood.”