Chapter 18 #3
"You already asked with your eyes," Diana said. "The mouth arrived late."
"I'm learning to confirm."
"Confirm, then."
He loosened the first lace, then the second, with a patience that contradicted the tension in his shoulders.
The cloth slackened and slid down her arms. The warm air of the hearth touched the uncovered skin, and his mouth followed the path the linen had opened.
Diana resisted the impulse to cover the scar at her collarbone.
She did not need to.
Alistair bent and put his lips to the pale line the ice had opened sixteen years before, and he stayed there. Diana closed her eyes.
When her hands went to the neck of his léine, they found the linen cords that closed it.
Diana undid them slowly, watching the binding that protected the right side of him. The cloth was still dry.
She drew the léine off the wide shoulders and helped him take it over his head, careful not to strain the stitching.
The léine fell across the blankets.
Under her palms were the warm skin and the old shape of the scar on his shoulder, the same one she had recognized behind a wall before she saw his face.
Diana's hands had closed wounds, held blades, and stitched by the poor light of a mill without shaking once. They shook now.
Alistair saw it.
He covered her hand with his own and held it against his chest, where the calm he showed the others had already given up.
She took him to the bed.
Alistair let himself be taken, and there was something in that surrender he offered no one else: the man who turned every uncertainty into an order had no order to give there.
The rest of what they wore came off along the way.
The wool blankets were rough under Diana's skin, and warm from the fire.
She had the weight of him above her, held on his forearm, clear of her hurt shoulder and of his own wound. His mouth went down her neck and found the curve of a breast, and Diana arched against him before she thought to hold the movement back.
His hand ran along her side and down the curve of her hip. She learned, from her own shiver, what anticipation did to breathing.
Alistair took his time. He learned where a touch made her hold the air and where a murmur escaped her before she could stop it.
His beard scraped the soft skin inside her arm and across her belly, and every place kept a response he seemed to be collecting.
Every answer of hers interested him more than his own wanting, and the patience of a man who meant to know each movement before he took anything for himself made Diana abandon the control she had kept over herself since the road.
When he moved to settle between her legs, he stopped and searched her face.
"If I hurt you—"
"You will know. I am not known for silence."
His mouth touched hers in something close to a smile.
He came into her slowly. There was a moment of discomfort, and Alistair went still, his forehead against hers, his breath held.
Diana knew the effort in that stillness: his body asking for movement, his will refusing.
"Breathe," she said.
He laughed, low and rough, against the skin of her neck.
"That used to be my line."
"Now it is borrowed. Breathe."
He moved.
The discomfort gave way to something warm and rising, a tension that gathered every time their bodies met. Diana lifted her hips to him, and the rhythm stopped being careful.
Her hands went over his back and found the muscles working under the skin. They went up to his nape, to the hair damp with sweat.
His mouth came back to the curve of her breast, then to the base of her neck, where her pulse beat fast. The breathing of both of them filled the room.
The low light of the hearth touched the sweat on his skin and the tight line of his jaw, the effort with which he held his own rhythm to keep to hers. Outside, the wind went through the gaps in the house; inside, there was the heat and the sound of breath breaking.
When it came, it came in waves that surprised her with their force. Diana closed her fingers on his shoulder and said his name against his mouth, without the title, without the distance of the months in which she had pretended he was only a patient.
Alistair followed her a little after.
The sound that escaped him was low and almost unwilling, the sound of a man who had spent his whole life without letting himself need anything and who, in that moment, needed.
Diana held him there, her bandaged palm open on his back.
The knock at the door came only after daylight.
She and Alistair were dressed when Graeme spoke from the corridor.
"Laird. One of the men sent south is back with news."
Alistair opened the door. Graeme stayed outside and did not look into the room.
"Malcolm?" Alistair asked.
"He's gathered the men he has left at the old MacPherson holding. More came in from Inverness during the night."
"How many?"
"Enough to attack."
Dugald appeared at the end of the corridor.
"A messenger reached the shelter less than an hour ago. Malcolm has men on the east road already."
Diana finished pinning up her hair.
"He knows where the clan is."
Graeme nodded.
"He is gathering force against the shelter."