Chapter 38
He kissed her the way he had wanted to since the day a priest had bound them, with nothing held in reserve and nothing kept back for safety, and she met him at every turn.
She had thought, the once or twice she had let herself think of it at all in the dark of the south tower, that a man like Ragnall would come at this the way he came at a fight—all force and certainty.
He did not.
He kissed her slowly, deeply, and thoroughly, one large hand slipping into her loosened hair to cradle the back of her head, the other warm on the small of her back to bring her flush against the entire hard length of him.
He took his time, learning her mouth as if they had all their lives to do it, which she now understood dizzily that they did.
She sensed the restraint within him, the careful way he handled things, and recognized it for what it was. He had wanted her for a month, and he planned to take his time with her.
“Ye’re certain?” he said against her jaw, her throat, the soft place below her ear that made her knees go weak. It was not quite a question. “Say it, lassie. There’s nay rule left to stop us, and that’s the very reason I willnae move a hand ye havenae asked for.”
“I ken.” She turned her face into his and felt him shiver.
“Ye mind what I told ye the night of the weddin’, when ye kissed me and I stopped ye?
” His voice had dropped to something she felt in her chest more than heard.
“That when ye came to me, it’d be because ye wanted the man ye ken me to be.
Nae the enemy. Nae the gratitude. Nae the duty.
Me. I will have it that way or nae at all, Olivia.
Even now, even with me half out of me mind for ye. Tell me it’s me ye want.”
“I ken who ye are.” She drew back just far enough to hold his dark eyes, her hands coming up to frame the scar that ran from the corner of his eye to his lip, tracing the old silver line of it with her thumb without flinching, watching him fight the old habit of turning from her touch and lose that fight.
“I’ve ken who ye are a good while now, whatever I said with me sharp tongue.
It’s ye I want, Ragnall Crawford. Nae the Laird, nae the monster I made ye in me head that first black night.
But ye. The man who binds his own wounds sooner than wake a soul, and rocks a bairn in the dark, and takes a blade for an auld woman.
Now, take me to bed, husband. I’ve wanted ye that long; I am half-mad with it. ”
Something came loose inside him then that she felt, more than saw, a low sound breaking in his chest.
He bent and slid an arm behind her knees and lifted her off her feet as if she weighed nothing at all, and carried her the few steps to the wide tower bed and laid her down in the candlelight with a care that belied the hunger she could feel running through every line of him.
He undressed her slowly, treating it like a reverence.
The laces of her bodice loosened one by one under his patient fingers, and he followed each new inch of exposed skin with his mouth—tracing the slope of her shoulders, the wing of her collarbone, and the soft swell of her breasts as he pulled the shift down and away.
She lay bare to the cool night air, the warm gold of the candlelight, and the darker heat of his gaze as it traveled the entire length of her.
Under his gaze, she did not feel exposed at all. She only felt wanted, and that feeling unraveled her more than any touch had so far.
Instead of pulling away, she reached for him and saw the wonder in that hard look on his face, knowing he had marked it too.
“Look at ye,” he said, low and rough, like a man come unexpectedly upon something holy.
“I nearly died wantin’ this. Ye will never ken the half of it.
The nights I lay a handsbreadth from ye in the dark with me fists clenched in the linen so I wouldnae reach for ye.
I’d listen to yer breathin’ go slow, and I’d lie there and burn and call it honor. ”
“Then daenae make me wait for it any longer.” She reached for the hem of his shirt and dragged it up, and he pulled it over his head and let her look her fill in turn, the broad scarred plane of his chest, the dark trail of hair below his navel, the old wounds and the new one bound at his forearm, all the hard-used map of him.
She pressed her palms flat against his chest and felt his heart pounding beneath them, just as wild as her own. The awareness of that—knowing she had wrecked him just as thoroughly as he had wrecked her—was its own kind of intoxication.
She let her hands drift down over the contours of him, learning him the way he was learning her, and felt his breath catch when her fingers reached the laces of his trews.
He came down over her, careful of his weight on his good arm, and set his mouth to her breast. She arched up off the bed with a gasp as he drew her nipple between his lips and worked it slowly with his tongue.
He gave the other nipple the same unhurried ruin until she was writhing beneath him and her hands had found his loose black hair to hold him there, her breath coming quick and helpless in the quiet.
“Ye mind the other thing?” he murmured against her skin, moving lower, his beard rough against the flat of her belly.
“That first night I made ye lie in me bed and touch yerself for me, with me hands fisted at me sides, sworn nae to help ye? I watched ye come apart in the dark and thought I’d go mad with nae bein’ allowed to be the one who did it.
I lay awake after and cursed meself for a fool that I’d agreed to a rule I’d have to keep. ”
His breath ghosted warm over the crease of her hip, and she felt him smile against her.
“There’s nay rule tonight, lassie. Tonight, me hands are me own to give ye. And I mean to give ye every last thing I couldnae then, till ye’ve forgotten ye ever kept a handsbreadth from me.”
He settled his shoulders between her thighs, spreading her open with his broad hands, then pressed his mouth to hers with purpose.
She felt a rush of heat as she realized he was finally about to finish what the feud had interrupted during the festival. There was no metal on the wind this time—only the candle, the river, and his mouth. She surrendered to it with a broken sound, both her hands finding their way into his hair.
She came undone on his tongue almost immediately, too tense from the confession and the long month of resisting him, crying out his name into the dark of the tower with her fingers tangled in his hair and her heels digging into his back. He worked her through every last shudder and didn’t stop.
He drew it out long past where she thought she could bear it, lazy and merciless by turns, learning the sounds she made and chasing each one down, until she was sobbing his name and half-pleading, boneless and burning at once, sure she had nothing left to give and finding him patient enough to prove her wrong.
Then he slid one thick finger into her, and a second, crooking them deep while his tongue kept its slow, relentless work, and she felt herself climbing all over again, writhing and desperate, her whole body strung tight as a bow.
He murmured against her, rough and low, that she was bonnie like this, that he’d dreamed of her like this during the long, empty month she was gone, that he could spend the night between her thighs and count it the best night of his life, and the wicked burr of the words drove her as surely as his clever hands did.
“Ragnall.” She hardly recognized her own voice. “I want ye. I want all of ye. Now, please. I cannae wait. I will die of the waitin’—”
“Ye willnae die.”
He crawled back up the length of her, unhurried even now, pressing his mouth to her belly, her breasts, the wild flutter of her pulse at her throat, and she felt him shed the last of his clothes, felt the hard, bare heat of him settle against her at last with nothing left between them and no rule in the world to keep them apart.
He braced himself above her on his forearms, not caring for his injury, his black hair falling loose around both of them like a curtain drawn to shut out the world.
For a moment, he only looked down at her, and she saw the old fear still lingering beneath the desire—the terrified thing that had lived behind his door for ten years.
She reached up, drew him down, and kissed that fear right out of him.
“I have ye,” she whispered against his mouth. “Whatever ye are afraid of. I have ye now, and I willnae throw ye from any window, ye stubborn man. I am nae goin’ anywhere at all.”
It was the right thing and the wrong thing at once, and she felt the laugh break out of him, ragged and helpless against her lips, and felt some last knot of dread loosen with it.
He reached down between them, notched himself against her entrance, and pushed into her slowly, watching her face the entire time, giving her the chance to take him.
The stretch, the fullness, and the overwhelming feel of him drew out a sound from her she had never made before, and he caught it with his mouth, returning a groan that she could feel in her bones.
He stilled when he was seated deep, his forehead dropping to hers, both of them breathing hard, joined at last after a month of held breaths and locked doors and careful, cruel distance.
“There’s me hellion,” he breathed, shaking with the effort of holding still for her. “There’s me wife. Are ye with me, Olivia?”
“Aye.” She hooked her leg over the back of his thigh and drew him impossibly deeper and felt him groan against her throat. “Move, ye great fool. I willnae break.”
He moved slowly at first, deliberate and confident, as he learned the rhythm that made her breath catch and her nails dig into his shoulders. He pulled back almost entirely and then sank forward again, until she was gasping with each thrust and rising to meet him.
He pressed his forehead against hers and maintained that slow, deep rhythm long after it should have been easy, his large frame trembling with restraint, until she was the one to break it, until she bucked her hips against his, dug her heels in, and begged him, in words and then beyond words, to stop being so gentle with her.
God forgive me, I cannae hold it. Ten years I kept it locked, and she has undone the lot of it with her heels in me back and her sharp tongue gone soft in me ear. Let it break, then. Let the door come off its hinges and rot where it falls. I willnae be a locked man for her. Never again.
Whatever careful control he had maintained since the day they got married snapped.
He took her the way he had longed to and never allowed himself—deep, fierce, and thorough—one hand fisting in the wild red spill of her hair, the other hooking beneath her knee to open her further.
He murmured rough, broken Gaelic into her skin, calling her name again and again like it was the only word he had left in his mouth.
The bed frame knocked against the wall, but neither of them paid it any mind. Olivia matched him stroke for stroke, fierce as she was in everything else, giving as good as she got and demanding more.
He thought faintly through the roar of his blood that of course she did, that she would never in her life lie still and be passive, that he had married a hellion and thanked God on his knees for it.
He lifted her leg higher over his hip, adjusting the angle until he found a spot inside her that made her cry out and grip him, and he stayed there, working her mercilessly through it as she broke apart beneath him a second time, trembling and clenching tightly around him, gasping his name.
He gentled only long enough to let her ride it down, then set his teeth and built her back up again, for he found he was greedy for it now, greedy for every sound and every shiver, ten years of famine come due all in one night.
He moved a hand between them and found her aching bud and worked it in slow circles in time with his driving hips, and felt her wind tight and tighter beneath him, her breath sawing, her cries rising, her whole body gone taut as a bowstring drawn to its full.
“That’s it,” he groaned against her ear. “Once more, lassie. Come apart on me. I have ye. Let go and let me feel all of it.”
She came apart a third time with him buried deep inside her and his hand between them driving her through it, clenched tight, shuddering and pulsing around him.
It was his name on her lips and no other, crying out broken into the darkness, and that was the moment that finally pushed him over the edge.
His whole body went rigid and then broke, his face pressed hard to the curve of her neck as he spilled into her with a sound that was half a groan and half her name, his arms caging her to him as if he feared the pleasure would tear the two of them apart.
For a long while afterward, neither of them spoke.
He had rolled to take his weight off her and pulled her against his side, her cheek resting on his heart, his hand tracing slow, gentle paths up and down her spine, and the candle burned low.
She felt more at peace than she ever believed a body could feel in this life.
“Olivia.” His voice rumbled under her ear.
She felt him gather himself, felt the old fear rise in him one final time, and felt him set his shoulder to it and shove it aside for good.
“I love ye. I ken it’s a poor time to be learnin’ the sayin’ of such a thing, with me the age I am and never once said it to a livin’ soul, but I willnae keep it behind me teeth another hour.
I love ye. I have for a good while, and have been too much of a coward to admit it, even to meself in the dark.
There. It’s out. And I find the roof’s nae fallen after all. ”
She lifted her head to look at him, and her eyes were wet, and her smile was the sweet, unguarded thing he had spent a month coaxing out of her by inches.
“I love ye too,” she said. “Ye great locked door of a man. I love ye. And I will say it as often as ye need to hear it, till ye stop bein’ afraid of it, and then I will say it a while longer for the pleasure of watchin’ ye go soft when I do.”
“That’ll be a long while yet, I warn ye.”
“Good.” She settled her head back over his heart and felt his arm tighten around her, sure and unafraid. “I’ve nowhere else to be, and I never will.”
He lay a long time in the dark after her breathing had gone slow and even, his enemy’s daughter asleep in the crook of his arm with her hand fisted loose against his chest, and he stared up at the black beams of the tower he had once thought to keep her prisoner in, and he waited for the old dread to come and tell him what he now stood to lose.
It did not come.
For the first night in ten years, the locked room in him stood open and empty and unafraid, and he pulled the plaid up over both of them and slept the whole night through.