Chapter 12
“Where I come from, they would be fools to want me,” Victoria said unevenly.
Speaking had become difficult with his closeness.
She was so… aware of him, in a way she had never experienced before: the slight shift as he unconsciously moved his weight from one leg to the other, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, the motion of his throat as he swallowed, the gentle grip of his hand on her scarred wrist, the searching look in his eyes.
“Aye, well ye’re nae in England now,” he said.
Clearly conscious of her injuries, he grasped her around the waist and, eliminating the gap between them, he kissed her fiercely.
She had secretly hoped to feel his kiss again, but she had not expected it to happen.
As such, it took her a second to respond, and when she did, she kissed him with all the tension and passion and anticipation that had been gathering between them since the last time.
She grasped fistfuls of his shirt and raised on tiptoe, pulling herself further into his embrace. The lock of his arm around her felt like the safest place in the world, not shackles but a promise of protection.
They kissed until they were both breathless. His hands wandered the contours of her body as if she were something to be sculpted, running over the hourglass of her waist, shaping the loose fabric of her dress until it echoed the figure beneath.
Is this what I have been missing? She lamented the opportunities that had been wasted if this was what she could have been experiencing. But she would not allow herself to think of how abruptly he had ended the kiss last time, and how quick he had been to apologize.
This did not feel like something to be sorry about.
“I cannae stay away from ye,” Arran murmured, his hands grasping slightly as they smoothed over the rise of her backside.
He rocked his hips and pressed her closer to him, the movement making it hard for her to catch a full breath. How was she supposed to urge her body to do ordinary things like breathing and thinking when he had her so distracted?
Suddenly, he picked her up, his hand guiding her leg around his waist in a slow brush that made her shiver with delight. Her other leg joined the first in a tight lock, her breath catching as she felt a hardness nudge against the heat between her thighs.
“Were you trying to stay away from me after…?” she moaned, her fingertips sliding through his hair as she pulled his head closer, kissing him harder.
He smiled against her mouth and carried her to the nearest wall, a fresh gasp leaving her mouth as her shoulder blades gently struck the stone.
He pressed against her more insistently, his kisses ravenous, feeding her own hunger for more of everything that he could give to her.
She was greedy for him, each moment healing more of the wounds that Charles had inflicted with the balm of pleasure that Arran possessed in every kiss and touch, and tease.
When his tongue flicked into her mouth, her eyebrows rose in pleasant surprise.
It should have felt wrong, that glide of his tongue against hers, but it was anything but: it was entirely right.
A thrill sparked through her. Emboldened, she let her tongue move with his, eager to learn everything there was to learn.
She tightened the grip with her thighs on him, and he pressed her harder into the wall, his hips tilting upward. That hardness was more insistent now, and though she longed to explore what it was, the grip of her legs around him prevented her from putting her hand between them.
The same, however, could not be said for Arran.
“Ye’ve been living in the wrong place,” he growled against her throat as he kissed her there and moved his hand downward in a tantalizing caress.
Her skirts had been rucked up to her hips when she had locked her legs around him, each rock of his hips pushing them further back. His hand disappeared beneath the gathered fabric… and his fingertips brushed over a part of her that she had not known existed.
A gasp rocked her, her parted lips unable to meet his kiss, such was her intense surprise.
He kissed down the curve of her neck and over the bare skin of her chest as his fingertips slowly circled that center of pleasure. When his mouth found hers again, she kissed him more fiercely than she had ever kissed him before, as if to spur on the bliss that charged through her.
From the wall to her writing desk to the door to the bedpost, he kissed her and touched her, speeding up and slowing down to keep her guessing, to keep her wanting.
All the while, she clung to him, clawed at his back, grasped his shirt, and kissed him back with equal fervor when her gasps and moans of ecstasy were not parting her mouth.
She never wanted it to end. If he had broken away from her then, it would have ruined her far more than any gossip from society or the scandal sheets could have done. She needed this in a way that was tantamount to madness… or perhaps everything she had been doing before was the true madness.
Why should this be deemed so wrong? She was beginning to think that society had no idea what it was talking about. There was nothing wrong or sinful or deviant about this at all. It felt like… the most natural, wonderful thing in the world.
Just then, Arran carried her to the bed and, kneeling slowly, he set her on the edge of it. The bed was high enough that his head came up to her chest, though it did not make him seem small. With those broad shoulders and so much muscle, nothing could have made him seem small.
Throat thick with want, lamenting the fact that he had stopped circling that bundle of nerves, she gazed down at him.
If someone had told her not so long ago that she had the power to get a man on his knees, she would have laughed…
or flinched with the fear of what might happen to her.
There was no fear now. No fear at all with Arran.
From the moment he had taken her away from the Earl of Ashbrook’s manor, roots of trust had begun to take hold, wrapping around the thorns of caution and unease that Charles’ arid soil had forced her to grow.
A sultry smile curved his kissable mouth. “Am I a fool?”
“Pardon?”
“Am I a fool?” he repeated, his calloused palms slowly sliding up her thighs, gathering her skirts back up to her hips.
She frowned, a nervous laugh bubbling up. “No, I do not think you are.”
“Exactly,” he replied.
For a moment, she did not know what he meant, and she did not have any opportunity to ask as he enlightened her with his tongue.
A shocked gasp left her throat while her hands grasped the coverlets that draped over the edge of the bed.
Her back arched instinctively, her thighs parting wider for him, her astonished gaze turning up instead of down at him, as if she was not supposed to unveil the mystery of the sudden bolt of pleasure that shot through her.
“Oh…” She managed to moan, his tongue rolling slowly over that part of her that she had no name for.
But how could she not have known of the existence of something with such…
power? It was as if she had had a powder keg inside her all these years, and Arran had ignited the fuse.
Fresh pulses of crackling energy thrummed along the branches of her veins and her nerves, more intense than before, like galloping scouts hurrying to light fresh beacons of pleasure.
One flared in her chest, shallowing her breath. One ignited in her stomach, unleashing a rush of lively butterflies. Two were kindled at the tops of her thighs, that feeling shivering down her legs and back up into her abdomen. It seemed impossible that she could not have known such a potent thing.
Arran fluttered his tongue quickly against that center of total bliss, stoking up the flames of those blissful beacons.
She finally looked down to observe his talent in action, running her hands through his hair, completely overwhelmed by the thrill of seeing him on his knees with his head buried between her legs.
As if he were worshiping her. She had never known a feeling like it; not just the stroke of his tongue against that unknown bud, but the feeling of being somewhat in control, and knowing that he was doing this entirely for her pleasure.
As he rolled his tongue upward, he raised his gaze to her, the connection between his eyes and hers as potent as his intimate caress. She gasped breathlessly; everything intensified.
Just then, his hand slid higher up, skimming over her hip and onto her stomach, bare beneath her dress, at least up to the edge of her short stays. With some light pressure, he pushed her backward, and she did not resist, as the down-stuffed mattress molded around her.
“Oh, Arran…” She murmured in a daze as his tongue continued to tease her, torment her, and pleasure her in the most remarkable way. “Yes… oh, yes…”
She became aware of something building inside her, though she could not do it justice with description.
The closest thing she could compare it to was when someone scratched a particularly good itch, or the intense sensation before a sneeze, yet even that did not encompass what was rising with each stroke of Arran’s tongue.
Victoria writhed upon the coverlets, raking her hands over the linens and the woolen blankets, her thighs already shaking.
It was like a thousand threads being pulled at once that seized her body, and Arran was the one holding them.
She relinquished control willingly, letting herself feel every sensation, not running from that unknown feeling within her but hurtling toward it, because she knew that he would not abuse his control.
He merely meant to create something good from it.
At that moment, when he curled his tongue around that secret bud and sucked gently, she soared.
She raced past the point of no return and flew, an all-consuming rush of ecstasy carrying her into a different world where nothing evil could exist. It was a realm of light and bliss, and feeling more in control of herself and her body than she had in years, perhaps ever.
She was aware of every nerve and limb and speck of her being, from the prickle of fine hairs at the back of her neck to the violent tremble of her thighs, from her swimming mind to the curl of her toes, from the stretch of muscle in her stomach to the scratch of her fingernails against the woolen blankets, as that pleasure continued to sweep through her.
Slowly, the sensation began to fade, those beacons of bliss dimming down to a few smoldering embers. She relaxed into the bed and gazed up at the canopy, finally able to catch her breath as she lay there with her hand on her heart, feeling its still-racing beat.
Between her legs, Arran tasted her once more in a leisurely, greedy stroke before he turned his head and kissed the sensitive flesh of the inside of her thighs.
She gasped softly and closed her eyes, wanting to feel each kiss that he placed as he made his way up to her mouth instead of seeing it. Curiously, it seemed to anchor her, a means of bringing her transported self back into her mortal body.
“Am I a fool?” Arran asked again as he leaned over her, his hands braced on either side of her head.
She swallowed at the sudden and exquisite pressure where his tongue had been, her parted thighs lining her up perfectly with the peak of his, where that unknown hardness still seemed to strain for her.
“No,” she murmured. “You might be…” Her voice caught as he slyly rocked his hips forward, adding to that sweet pressure. “…the least foolish man I have ever met.”
He kissed her, soft and slow, until her hands relaxed their grip on the coverlets and ran up his muscular arms. She looped her own arms around his neck and kissed him back, so relaxed and so at ease that she could have slept for a fortnight.
What he had just done had brought her a peace she did not know she would ever feel again, and she was determined to embrace it for however long it lasted.
“Ye look sleepy, lass,” he said, laughter in his voice.
“Do I?” she replied and promptly stifled a yawn.
With the same amusement in his eyes, he drew back and pulled her with him.
Slowly, carefully, he grasped her disarrayed skirts and raised the dress up and over her head.
Tossing the garment onto the back of a nearby chair, he just…
looked at her for a moment, his green eyes wandering from the inward taper of her shift’s collar to the glimpse of bare ankle where the undergarment was not quite long enough.
Victoria held her breath. Did he mean to continue? Did he plan to ruin her so completely, so wonderfully, that she could never return to polite society?
He lifted her fully onto the bed and joined her there. He tucked her in rather sweetly and moved to leave.
“Stay,” she blurted out. “Please.”
Arran paused, a smile on his face as he gazed back at her. “I told ye I wasnae that sort of man.”
She frowned in confusion. Back at the inn, she had thought he was referring to… something else when he had said that he wasn’t that sort of man. A truth he had sort of proven to be false tonight. Had he meant that he wasn’t the sort of man who stayed and actually slept at a woman’s side?
“Just lie here for a while,” she said, patting the space beside her. “It is cold tonight, and I think your warmth might help me sleep.”
His eyes narrowed briefly, as if he did not believe her excuse.
Nevertheless, he lay down beside her and curved his arms around her.
She curled onto his side, her cheek to his chest, and marveled at the heat of him.
It was like having her own personal furnace to chase off the chill of the night, far better than any blankets.
“How many battles have you fought?” Victoria asked, breaking the silence that had descended.
With a weary laugh, Arran tightened his arm around her and gently covered her mouth with his hand. An act that should have brought bad memories surging back into her head, but there were none; there was only a smile that shaped against his rough palm.
“Sleep,” he grumbled, a playful note in his voice. “I could bore ye with stories of war, but I’d rather nae give ye nightmares for when ye do fall asleep.”
He withdrew his hand from her mouth, though his grasp on her did not loosen. It was an embrace of safety and security, letting her know that no harm could come to her as long as he was holding her.
Wriggling a little to get into the most comfortable position, she draped her arm over his stomach and closed her eyes.