Chapter 14 #3
He leads me out of the room, across the front hall, and up a stone spiral staircase I’ve not been on before, the steps worn in the middle from centuries of feet. At the top of the stairs is a long corridor with doors on either side. He leads me to the one at the very end and opens it.
It reveals a massive bedroom with a very high ceiling.
The bed is a four-poster of dark wood, hung with heavy curtains in the same deep red as the velvet blanket downstairs.
There is a fire in the small fireplace, already going.
There are candles lit, as if they were waiting for us, and a long window with the bay outside it, the late dusk just visible through the leaded glass.
He closes the door behind us then turns me toward him. He cups my face in both hands and I’ve never felt so dainty and small.
“Foxglove?”
I swallow hard. “Uh huh,” I squeak.
“Tell me what you want.”
He’s going to make me spell it out? “I told you yesterday,” I say.
“Tell me again.”
So he is going to make me spell it out.
I take in a deep breath. “I want you.”
“Aye.”
“All of you,” I add.
More than just getting finger-banged in a forest.
He tilts his head, as if thinking something through.
“You’ll have what I can give you tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I will have my hands on you and my mouth on you in a bed for the first time, foxglove. It means I will make you come for me until you can’t anymore. It means I will not yet take all of you, because I am keeping that for a day that hasn’t come yet.”
My brows go up. “Why not?”
“Because there are still things you don’t know about me.”
Things? Oh, just things? How about mostly everything?
“Okay, so tell me them now.”
“No,” he responds, somewhat firmly. “Not now. Tonight you are mine in the ways I can have you. The rest is for tomorrow.”
I should push him and make him tell me. I shouldn’t let him put my body in his bed without telling me what he’s been waiting to tell me.
But I don’t push him, because I am a horny fool, and because the idea of his hands and mouth all over me reduces me to those two bumbling brain cells again.
I let him kiss me instead.
The kiss is long and slow and undoing. He has me in his bedroom, with the bed behind me, and he’s going to take his time.
He undresses me piece by piece—the camisole, my bra, the pants, my underwear.
He kisses along my skin where it becomes bare, then folds each thing as he takes it off me, setting them down on a side table.
Eventually, I’m totally buck naked and he’s still fully dressed.
Just like last night, before I got in the water.
But unlike last night, while I do feel on the spot, I don’t mind him looking so much.
And he looks. He takes his time and my skin erupts in gooseflesh where his heated gaze has been.
“You are unfairly lovely,” he murmurs, his eyes flicking over me.
I make a whimpering noise, my cheeks and chest flushing.
“You need to take your clothes off,” I manage to say.
“In a minute.”
“Now. You’ve seen me naked like this twice now and I’ve not seen you.”
“Oh, but you have seen me naked,” he jokes with a small curve to his lips. “With binoculars of all things.”
“How did you…” I begin, but he walks me back to the bed. He lays me down on it slowly, his hand at the small of my back, easing me onto the heavy quilt. The bed is soft and old and the smell of it is woodsmoke and clean linen and him, more him than any room I have been in.
He stands at the foot of the bed and stares at me.
“Open your legs for me, foxglove.”
I make that whimpering sound again.
I open my legs for him.
He kneels at the foot of the bed.
“Christ, Iris. Look at you.”
But I can’t look at him. I look at the canopy of the four-poster above me. The wood is carved in places, the shapes are flowers, or knotwork, or…
Fuck it, I can’t focus on them anymore, because he’s sliding his hands up the insides of my thighs and pushing them wider, wider. And his mouth has come down to me; the first long, flat stroke of his tongue against me is the kind of thing that takes the air out of my lungs.
“Fuck.”
He laughs against me. Low. Pleased.
“Aye. Quiet, foxglove. The whole castle will hear you if you start now.”
The whole castle? Who else is here? I raise my head to meet his eye, but his attention is elsewhere. And then my attention is elsewhere.
He goes slow at first and licks me like he’s been wanting a taste for a long time and has decided he’s going to finally enjoy it.
The flat of his tongue, then the point of it.
The slow drag from where I am wet to the place where I need him most. He works me there with the tip of his tongue, small steady circles, while his hands hold my thighs open, and his thumbs press into the soft skin of my inner thighs hard enough to bruise.
I have never been done like this. Ryan only did this once and said he didn’t like the taste. But Alasdair is making sounds against me that suggest the opposite, small low groans that vibrate through me, like he’s the one being pleasured.
He shifts. He flattens his tongue and licks me long and slow from the bottom up, and at the top of the stroke he closes his lips around my clit and sucks, gently, and I make a noise that’s borderline embarrassing.
“That’s it,” he speaks against me. “That’s it, foxglove. Let me hear you.”
“I thought you said…”
“I said quiet. Not silent. Let me hear you.”
He puts his tongue back on me. He puts a finger inside me, then two, and the curl of his fingers finds the place inside me I’ve read about and never properly found in myself, the combination of his mouth and his fingers and the low steady pressure he is keeping has me undone in less than a minute.
I come on his mouth; a loud gasp turned into a breathless moan that fills the room. He keeps his tongue moving on me through it all, slow, easing me down, and his fingers stay inside me, the steady pressure of them the only thing keeping my hips from bucking off the bed.
When I am breathing again, he kisses the inside of my thigh.
He makes his way up.
He kisses my hip. My stomach. The space between my breasts. He kisses my throat, and my jaw, and my mouth—his mouth on mine tastes of me—and the way he kisses me with my own taste in his mouth is something I’ll dream about for a long time.
He pulls back and looks at me, just the faintest touch of red on his cheekbones, the gloss of me on his full lips.
“Turn over, foxglove.”
“What?” I eke out.
“Turn over for me. On your stomach.”
I do as he asks, with his help, his large hands around my waist. The quilt is cool against my front; my face half-turned into the pillow. I can hear him moving behind me, can feel the shift of his weight. The sound and feel of his hand sliding up the back of my thigh.
“Spread your knees.”
I spread my knees.
“Wider, foxglove.”
Oh, lord.
I move them wider. I am embarrassed and turned on at the same time, and the balance is shifting fast toward the second one.
“Christ.” His voice has gone lower. “Look at you. Look how wet you are.”
His hands grip my hips. He lifts them slightly, so I am on my knees and my chest is still against the bed, and the angle puts me on display for him in a way I have never been on display for anyone.
Oh my god.
“Alasdair…” My voice is muffled against the pillow.
“Hush.”
His mouth comes back to me.
From behind.
I cry out harshly in surprise, and his tongue is on me again, but from a different, better angle. He administers the same long, flat strokes from before, but now also on places I had no intentions of ever letting anyone near.
He puts his mouth everywhere.
He licks me where no one has put their mouth on me—or anything—in my whole life. He does it without ceremony, without asking, like the whole of me is his to taste, and there is no part of me that is exempt.
I make another noise that is muffled by the pillow because I have buried my face in it.
“Don’t hide from me,” he chides me but I keep my face where it is, practically suffocating.