Chapter Thirteen #4
Amicia blinked, her breath quickening. She was acutely aware of the hot passion blazing in his eyes and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. “But I do not understand.”
“You are those raven-haired lasses! Always you! They were but pale substitutes for what I could not have.” He almost shouted the confession at her. “You and only you—the lass I have coveted since I first laid eyes on you. The lass I knew I could ne’er hope to possess.”
“Oh, dear saints,” Amicia gasped, her heart swelling with such joy she thought it’d surely burst. Her eyes streaming, she looked at him, not even trying to check the flow of hot-scalding tears.
“Oh, dear saints,” she said again, the words almost too wobbly to be understood this time. “Can it be true?”
In answer, he pulled her against him, lowered his lips to hers in a searing, soul-stealing kiss. A blinding fusion of seeking lips, sweeping tongues, and hot mingled breath.
Years and years of need unleashed.
Over and over again, he kissed her with a reckless abandon that melted her bones and left their Claiming Ceremony kiss far behind.
The wild tangle of their tongues watered her knees and moistened another, suddenly very damp and tingling place that pulsed and throbbed with an urgency that shocked her.
“Aye, it is true.” He broke the kiss just long enough to breathe the assurance against her cheek. “It has always been about you.”
Pulling back a bit more, he gave her a wolfish smile—a full, dimpled one that filled her with a golden warmth to rival the sun. “Think you I would have lost that long-ago archery contest had I not caught a glimpse of you standing near?”
“Oh!” Her heart flipped helplessly at his words, and a torrent of pleasure washed through her. Sweet, sweet bliss, the likes of which she’d ne’er thought to experience. “I—I . . . distracted you?”
Faith, she could scarce believe it.
“You, and none other,” he assured her, lighting a flurry of soft, heated kisses along the slope of her neck, each touch of his lips on her flushed skin arousing sensations that set the world to spinning around her.
Dear, sweet saints, indeed, but he ignited a tempest inside her that would soon be impossible to contain. Especially where her blood burned the hottest.
He pulled back to look at her. “Then, as now, you alone held the power to stop my heart,” he told her, skimming his hands along the curving lines of her body, letting them pause at the side swells of her breasts to stroke and caress with featherlight touches.
“You, and no one else, stole my breath and, aye, fired my ambitions.”
“Your ambitions?” She could scarce find her tongue.
“To win you,” he said, his voice thick. “To work as hard as I could to make myself worthy and viable enough to seek your hand—and then, years later, when I thought I’d met that goal, and others, I—”
“Shush you, say no more.” She pressed two fingers across his lips. “I am yours now, as was e’er my most fervent hope and dream. And you have proved to me that you love me with the same fervor I have e’er loved you.”
Something in his face changed upon hearing her words, and her heart dipped at the transformation. Some of the tingling warmth rippling over her woman’s flesh drew back to linger in a slow, tremulous pulsing deep inside her core . . . a tightly coiled waiting.
“You do love me, then?” she had to ask.
“I have dreamt of you every night of my life since I was two-and-ten.”
He was still caressing her breasts, and now began flicking his thumbs back and forth across her nipples, tracing slow circles around their edges, the deliciousness of his touch melting her, making his no-answer answer fade into the oblivion of visceral pleasure spreading through her.
“You dreamt of me?”
He nodded. “Nigh every night. And if I did not, it was only because sleep eluded me. But even in those times, you were there in my heart.” That, at least, was a truth he could share. He had held her in his heart, cared deeply for her.
He still did.
Especially now.
Leaning forward, he planted a wee tender kiss on the tip of her nose. “To be sure, my precious minx, your shadow walked beside me in my every waking hour.”
She watched him from heavy-lidded eyes, leaned back to allow his stroking fingers greater access to her full, firm breasts, her body accepting what he could offer her even as the slight tremor in her voice underscored her heart’s plea for more.
Her disappointment that he refused to tell her he loved her.
Truth be told, he didn’t know if he did, even feared himself incapable of any emotion deeper than ambition, pride, and the hot-burning desire he felt for her.
Her vital, voluptuous womanhood . . . her bright smile and the way her dark eyes appeared to hold the very sunfire in their depths when they glowed with excitement. Having her near made him feel alive.
It was enough for him.
He’d make it enough for her.
“Aye, lady mine, I have always wanted you. Never you doubt it. ’Twas only your over-flowing coffers and the emptiness of my own that had me declaring I’d return you to Baldoon.”
He moved his hands to slide gentle fingers to and fro in the warm softness of her breasts’ lower swells, sought to use pleasure to dispel the slight frown that creased her brow upon his mention of her coin.
“What will it take to make you realize that a deep heart holds a thousand times more worth than the deepest of purses?” she asked him, her magnificent eyes glinting with fiery MacLean heat again.
A joyous strumming began somewhere deep within Magnus’s chest. Not in his heart. Och, nay, not there. But close enough to make him uneasy.
“Do you not ken I’d rather have you than all the richest nobles in the land combined?
” she said, her voice strong and firm. “Shall I tell you that I enjoyed each shattered offer of marriage my brothers sought to gain for me—e’er in the hope that someday, somehow, I could be yours?
Every word is true, my lord. Never you doubt it. ”
Magnus stared at her, knew without looking down that the almost-real chunk of granite sitting near their feet had just sprung a rending crack.
A deep fissure, indeed.
And one that made him highly uncomfortable, for if he wasn’t careful, he’d fall right into it.
“Well?” she pushed him, reaching to light a finger through the dusting of red-gold hair on his chest. She thrust out her pretty chin, let her sheer will demand an answer. “Do you know it?”
“If I didn’t yet, I do now,” he said, knowing himself lost. “The saints know, I would even if you hadn’t voiced the words. Your eyes talk more than plain, my lady.”
She smiled at that. “So do yours, Magnus MacKinnon,” she declared, eyeing him boldly. “I know you love me—even if you will not admit it.”
“Then let us waste no more time and allow me to show you how very much I . . . adore you.”