Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
Alasdair looks at me for a long moment, the candlelight flickering on the sculpted planes of his face, before he stands and offers his hand.
I stare at his palm for a moment, wondering what will change forever if I take it. Because if I take it, there is no going back. I am going upstairs to be ruined by this man.
And I’ve never wanted to be ruined like this before.
I put my hand in his and it suddenly feels like I’m entering into something I’ll never properly come out of, like a physical but still binding contract.
He brings me up out of the chair, being extra careful with me, and does not let go of my hand.
He leads me out of the dining hall and up the stone spiral staircase.
With the stone walls circling us, I have a strange sense of being back in time.
It’s not hard to imagine what it was like back then, not in this place.
The corridor at the top level is dim. The candles in the sconces are lit, every single one of them, the flames small and steady. The light moves on the stone as we pass, making shadows dance.
We enter the bedroom and it somehow looks different than yesterday.
The fire is built higher. The candles on the mantel are full and lit.
The four-poster has been turned down, the heavy quilt folded back, the linen sheet beneath it crisp and white.
The heavy red curtains at the corners of the bed are pulled back and tied with gilded rope.
The leaded glass of the long window is fogged at the edges with the heat of the room and the cool of the rain outside, and the rain has settled in now, hammering steady on the glass.
If I wasn’t so nervous about what’s about to happen, I’d think it was epically cozy and comforting.
He closes the door behind us, and the sound echoes across the walls. It feels final, like we’re locked inside, like there’s no turning back, and I have to fight the urge to panic.
He turns me to him and gently cups my face in both hands.
“Iris. There’s something I want to ask you.”
“Okay.”
“You have been with…how many?”
I blink. I hadn’t expected the question. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t that.
“One,” I admit. “Just Ryan.”
“Your husband.”
“Ex-husband,” I correct. “But yes. Just him.”
It was one of the things I’ve been annoyed about since the divorce, actually.
All throughout my teens and twenties I could have been sewing my wild oats, but instead I settled with him and there were barely any oats sewn at all.
Sure, there had been a high school boyfriend I fooled around with before Ryan, but Ryan is the one I officially lost my virginity to.
Feels like I wasted so many of the “good years” of my life, even though I know that’s nonsense.
“Aye,” Alasdair says. The expression on his face gives me nothing.
“I have an IUD,” I add, because the question has put me in the headspace where I am telling him things he might want to know. “I’m not going to get pregnant. I have no interest in getting pregnant, believe me. That isn’t a thing you need to worry about.”
His expression softens for a moment.
“Aye, foxglove. Thank you for telling me.”
“And…” I clear my throat. “I’m clean. Sorry, that’s a terribly outdated thing to say.
I mean, I don’t have any STIs. Only been with the one person and it’s been over a year and I hadn’t been with anyone else.
I mean he was with someone else, that rat bastard was cheating on me, but when I found that I got tested and… ”
“I understand,” he says, giving me a placating smile that says I don’t need to keep on blabbering.
“And you?”
He looks at me like I’ve humored him.
“It has been a very long time,” he eventually says.
“How long?” I ask, because I’m nosy.
“Long enough that you don’t need to worry about anything I might give you. Long enough that the asking embarrasses me, foxglove.”
That was not the answer I expected, and yet it’s the answer I should have expected.
He’s a man who lives alone in a castle on a tidal loch in a part of the Scottish Highlands that does not have a town for fifteen miles or a city for hours, a man that doesn’t seem to interact with anyone but me.
Of course it’s been a long time. Then again, small towns can surprise you.
“Okay.” I surrender.
“Okay.”
“Are we…good?”
“Aye, foxglove.”
He kisses me.
The kiss is different from the kisses he has given me before.
It is the kiss of a man who has stopped negotiating with himself; who no longer wishes to be held back.
His mouth opens against mine and his tongue is in my mouth, full and wet and wanting, and his hands are on my face and then on my throat and then at my shoulders, and I’m being pushed gently back toward the bed without my feet quite finding the floor between his steps.
The backs of my knees hit the edge of the mattress.
He pulls back.
He looks at me for a beat, as if to read my reaction.
Then he undresses me.
He does this slowly, even slower than he did yesterday.
He undresses me like he’s unwrapping a present he’s been waiting all year for.
The cardigan first, slid off my shoulders and laid across the chair beside us.
Then his fingers at the hem of the cream waffle-knit, lifting it, pulling it up and over my head, the cotton catching briefly on the half-up of my hair before he frees it. My hair falls back around my shoulders.
He looks down.
I am bare from the waist up, my boobs free.
The realization that I didn’t wear a bra moves across his face the way a slow tide moves across a flat beach.
“Christ, Iris,” he says, inhaling sharply.
His hands come up. He cups my breasts in both hands, slow, like he’s weighing them. His thumbs find my nipples already hard from the air of the room and from him. He drags the pad of each thumb across them and I make an involuntary sound.
He bends and puts his mouth on my left breast.
His mouth is hot as he takes my nipple between his lips and sucks once, gently, then with more pressure, then he uses his tongue and his teeth in a small careful combination that goes through me like a wire pulled tight.
Holy fuck.
I clutch his hair.
He moves to the other breast and does the same. Even slower now, spending a long time. By the time he straightens, his mouth is slightly red, my breasts are wet from his mouth and aching, my nipples are hard as pebbles, and I’m barely standing.
He unzips the skirt at my hip.
It falls.
He looks down.
Nothing under it either.
He goes very still and lets out a slow, rough exhale.
“Did you walk into my house wearing nothing under this skirt?”
I bite back a grin. “Sure did.”
“All through the dinner.”
“Yup.”
A long beat.
“Iris.” He meets my gaze. “You’re going to ruin me.”
“That’s the idea.”
He laughs, a short, rough sound and tugs the skirt down the rest of my legs, then helps me step out of it. He gazes at me with the firelight on the side of his face and his mouth slightly parted, and the look on his face is the look of pure carnal desire, barely leashed.
Then he undresses himself.
He pulls the sweater and shirt off over his head in one motion. Of course, I’ve seen him shirtless before, felt him shirtless before—last night, the swims in the bay—but right now he looks different. He’s allowing me to look, wanting me to take him all in.
So I do.
He has the build of a man who has come from hardy stock, lean, hard, the muscles long, the skin pale, with a faint dusting of chest hair.
There are small scars I had not seen before, faint, white, scattered across his shoulders and ribs the way a body collects scars across decades.
I wonder where they’re from, wondering if he’ll ever tell me or if he’ll evade like he often does.
He unbuckles his belt, then unbuttons his trousers. He pushes them down and steps out of them.
He is fully bare.
I have seen him through binoculars, and I have had my hand on him in the loch and for three strokes in the dark, and I saw him last night after he came.
I have not seen him like this, within touching distance, in firelight, fully and openly hard for me, his cock long and thick and standing flat against his stomach.
I forget to breathe.
He is terribly beautiful. He is terribly beautiful in a way that should not be possible for an actual man standing in an actual room, and the part of my brain that keeps trying to put rational frames around him is having a hard time tonight.
Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s a terror built into him.
His beauty is something sublime, but not that of a god, least not a benevolent one.
He reminds of that statue of Lucifer, Le Genie du Mal, that sculptor Jozef Geefs made in 1842 that the church deemed too sexy for Satan, so they hired Jozef’s brother Guillaume to remake the statue, only his version was even hotter.
Yeah, that even hotter second statue of Lucifer is on par with what I’m staring at right now.
And I’m this close to telling Alasdair that, but he wisely closes the distance between us and pulls me to him.
He kisses me deeply as he lays me down on the bed slowly, the linen cool against my back.
The room smells of beeswax and woodsmoke and him.
He stands at the foot of the bed for one more second and looks at me bare and waiting on his sheets.
Then he’s on me.
He kisses me hard, far harder than before, deep and with punishing strokes of his tongue.
He kisses my throat. He kisses my breasts again, longer this time, until I am whimpering.
He works his way down my body. He runs his tongue over my stomach and my hips and the soft skin at the inside of my thighs, and his hands are everywhere, sliding under me, lifting me to him, holding me open.
I expect his mouth again, there, but I don’t get it.