Chapter Fourteen #3
“Lie still, Amicia.” He pressed a gentling hand to her stomach, used slight pressure to calm her. “Relax. Open your legs more. . . . yes, that’s it . . . full wide so I have best access to you.”
“But—”
“Shhhh . . .” He shushed her with another hot glide of his tongue.
He watched her as he licked, holding her gaze with the same concentrated effort he used to slide the tip of his tongue along the sleek folds of her pulsing heat.
“Your womanhood is like a perfect rose, see you,” he said, spacing each word between another probing dip of his tongue into her honeyed moistness. “Sweet, soft petals to beguile and enchant, fragrant and beautiful, but possessed of thorns as well.”
She blinked at that, lifted her head to stare at him, her eyes widening in confusion. “Thorns?”
Damning himself for his clumsy way with words, he reached for her hand and brought it to his shaft, circling her fingers around the hot, rigid length of him. “That is the thorn I meant, sweetness.” He jerked, near spilling himself when her fingers tightened around him.
“Sweet and soft as you are, delicious as is the urgency building between us, it will hurt when I enter you,” he tried to explain. “That is why”—he swirled his tongue over her again—“I would know you full aroused before—”
“I could ne’er be more desirous,” she countered, shuddering as she circled her fingers tighter around his hard length in a firm, clinging grip that ripped a wordless cry from his own lips.
Then she moved her hand on him, just one innocent upward pull, but torturous enough in its mind-numbing exquisiteness to rip through his last threads of restraint.
Unable to withhold himself another moment, he swept her into his arms and carried her to the bed, flinging aside the elaborate hangings to lower her onto the startling white of the bridal sheet.
Beyond words, he followed her down, stretching himself full-length above her.
He reached between them to pry her fingers from his hardness, then used his own hand to rub the tip of his shaft along her slippery wet heat.
Sighing her pleasure, she slung her legs around him, lifted her hips to increase the tantalizing friction of each smooth slide of his tarse against her hot, quivering flesh.
“Have done,” she breathed, grinding her hips in urgent circles against him, needing him. “Make me yours now—this moment.” She clung to him, her trembling lips begging for kisses.
“I love you,” she whispered, the words a breathless little plea. A wee sound, closer to a whimper than coherent words, and almost overpowered by the lashing rain, the tears glistening in her eyes nigh undoing the last stubborn knot tied so fiercely around his heart. “I have e’er—”
“Do not speak,” Magnus pleaded, the tightness in his chest near stopping his heart, his damnable pride seizing the moment to close fast around his weakness. Black and cloying, it stole his breath and used his need to seal his lips before his heart could answer her.
Hating himself for the fleeting shimmer of disappointment that darkened her eyes, he gave her what he could, and thrust into her body, muffling his groan in the cool silk of her streaming raven tresses, losing himself in the tight, satiny heat of her.
Through the haze of his passion, he felt the tearing barrier of her innocence, heard her sharp cry.
Her body’s one protest against this new, demanding intrusion.
But then her sharp sob of pain turned to soft whimpers and she clasped her legs tighter about him, digging her fingers into his shoulders as he opened his mouth over hers, taking her cries into his own and letting their hot breaths mingle as he eased himself deeper inside her, filling and claiming her.
He made her his in the only way he could, until she arched high against him, the sheer, blinding force of her fast-approaching release sweeping him over the glittering edge of his own.
The whole length of him shuddering with mindless need, he cried her name and shattered on the unstoppable tide of a white-hot conflagration so laming in its intensity he doubted he’d e’er have the strength to climb up out of its wild, whirling depths.
And somewhere in the sweet madness of it, Colin Grant’s recently spoken words rose from the spinning, tantalizing brilliance to taunt him.
Only his friend had erred.
It wasn’t his ability to pleasure a woman that he’d rediscovered in his lady’s arms.
Och, nay, the sweetness—the joy of her—gave him something far more substantial and lasting than mere physical bliss.
’Twas the rediscovery of his soul.
Amicia woke to the furious splatter of rain, a cold, empty bed, and a dull, aching discomfort in the private place deep between her thighs. Thunder echoed and re-echoed somewhere in the distance, each deep rumble heralding the begin of another chill day of mist and rain.
But already a warm fire of freshly-stoked peat lit the room and a round wooden tub of steaming, herb-scented water welcomed her to morning.
As did the anxious-peering faces of a full score of kitchen and laundry maids.
Amicia blinked, their curious glances and craning necks dashing the last vestiges of slumber from her as soundly as if they’d thrown back the bed coverings and roughly nudged her awake.
Together with Dagda and Janet, they bustled about, tidying the chamber and throwing open the window shutters to let in the gusty, rain-damp wind.
An urgent necessity as her first deep breath of the day proved—for the smoky-close air in the bedchamber was still heavily scented with the night’s activities, the pungent smell of musk and sexual arousal firing her cheeks and filling her with keen embarrassment.
“A good morrow to you, milady,” Dagda crooned, her expression knowing, and pleased.
Coming closer, she whipped back the half-opened bed curtains and the coverlet, which Amicia hadn’t thought to hold tight about her nakedness.
“I see you had a fine night,” the seneschal declared, her unerring gaze zeroing in on the reddish-brown smudges staining Amicia’s inner thighs, the larger smears and streaks on the soiled bridal sheet.
“H-how late is it? How long have I slept?” Amicia snatched a largish pillow from behind her, pulling it round to use as a shield. “Where is my husband?”
“Ach, ’tis not long past the hour of prime,” Dagda informed her, gesturing to one of the laundry maids who stepped forward to offer Amicia a small wooden cup of steaming herbal tisane.
“It will ease your . . . soreness, milady,” the lass said, her cheeks flaming nigh as bright a red as her hair.
“T-thank you.” Amicia tilted the cup to her lips, let the soothing brew trickle down her parched throat.
The girl nodded and stepped back from the bed, but not quick enough to evade Dagda’s firm grip to her elbow.
With a jerk of her head, the old woman indicated the pile of folded linens stacked on the table.
“Place the drying sheets to warm on the chair before the brazier, then help your lady to bathe,” she ordered.
“The sooner she’s freshened herself, the sooner she can greet her lord husband in the great hall. ”
A sharp glance and a brisk nod at the other lasses had them scurrying forward to strip the bed, the bloodied bridal sheet the clear objective of their task.
Amicia glanced at Janet. “Magnus is belowstairs?”
Janet nodded, but didn’t quite meet Amicia’s gaze. “He was called below over an hour ago,” she said, offering Amicia a bed robe. “One of the lookouts thought he spotted an approaching galley, but the day is yet too dark to tell for sure.”
“Hech! Like as not an ale-headed loon as crazed as the old laird,” Dagda snapped, aiming a censorious look at Janet. “Now, that one is full of himself this morn . . . strutting about the hall a-raving about ghost ships and claiming we should have heeded his warnings.”
Ignoring her, Janet turned aside, as if distracted, and took an iron poker to jab at the red-glowing peats on the hearthstone.
Amicia watched her, an odd foreboding tugging her brows together as she scrambled off the bed’s high mattress and slipped into the bed robe.
Of all the women crowding the room, Janet alone didn’t seem plagued by blushes or the urge to aim not-too-discreet stares at the various telltale remnants of the night’s doings.
Nor did she seem to share Dagda’s obsession to get the bridal sheet yanked off the bed and hurried belowstairs where it’d be paraded about the hall like a war trophy.
Nay, Janet’s pretty face bore an unusual pallor and dark smudges beneath her eyes bespoke a night as sleepless as Amicia’s own.
But not a pleasant one.
“Is aught amiss . . . Cousin?” Amicia sought to win the other’s confidence by using the familiar form of address, surprising herself at how easily the term left her lips.
She laid a staying hand on the younger woman’s arm when, at last, the little troop of visitors began exiting the bedchamber, a smug-looking Dagda in the lead, the bloodied bridal sheet tucked securely under her arm.
Janet hesitated, then cast an almost frantic look at the backs of the other women. “I must speak with you,” she whispered, the urgent plea spoken almost too low to be heard above the hard-pelting rain.
Frowning, Amicia opened her mouth to speak, but the younger woman waved a stilling hand.
“Aye, we must speak, and at the soonest,” Janet urged, dropping her voice even lower. “But not here, not anywhere near the castle.”
“Where then?” Amicia spoke equally low, icy chills snaking up and down her spine at the glassy-eyed fear in the other woman’s eyes. “Tell me and I will be there.”
Janet waited but the space of one breath. “The Beldam’s Chair. Meet me there within the hour.”
“The Beldam’s Chair?” Amicia forgot to whisper. “But that is in the middle of the high moors and the weather is fierce—”
Growing more nervous by the moment, Janet swooped Amicia’s fur-lined cloak off its peg by the door and tossed it over a chair back. “Wear your cloak and the storm won’t touch you. Just come, I pray you.”
Amicia glanced at the cloak, her stomach beginning to knot with ill ease.
Janet reached for her hand, squeezed it. “Be there, my lady,” she pleaded. “Lives depend on it.”
About the same time, but far out to sea, in the silent waters belonging to another Hebridean isle, a gentle soul sat in solitude upon the black-glistening rocks of a lone tidal islet and murmured protective prayers as she combed cold fingers through her wet and tangled hair.
Sad-eyed and cloaked in a shimmering mist of lightest green, the gruagach plucked at the clinging strands of seaweed she could ne’er quite get from her hair.
She could, though, do other things . . . and had.
Aye, she’d cast her every blessing around those she’d once held so dear and still did.
Something she’d done since all time was, and would continue to do forever onward so long as the sun rose upon each new day.
She only hoped she’d done enough this time, and that her warnings had been heeded.
For as with old Devorgilla’s own brand of witchy magic and incantations, there was only so much that enchantments and spells could do.
The only true magic rested deep inside every mortal man’s soul—and even the bitterest blackest wind would collapse upon itself and be turned away by a heart that loved true.
Her own heart beginning to beat more quickly, the gruagach ignored the numbing cold that e’er surrounded her and sent her own love across the tossing waves.
Her love and all her determination, for she, too, had once spent time with the steely-backed MacLeans.
A quality she hoped the Lady Amicia would make fullest use of in the coming hours.