Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(25)

She broke from his kiss with a gasp. She arched her neck as all sensation focused on the tightening nub of her nipple against the heat of his skin. His hair, as soft as thrice-brushed linen, feathered against her neck. His kiss was a spark in the hollow of her throat. He shifted his grip then flicked the pad of his thumb over her taut, aching nipple.

She forced his face level so she could look into his eyes. He kept rolling her nipple as his gaze moved from her hair to her lips. She sensed he understood her expression with a clarity far greater than she could glean from his mind. Sitting on his lap, she felt as open and vulnerable as if she were lying naked, splayed on his pallet, her hair spread across the pillow.

There—another flash of revelation in the darkness—that was what he was imagining right now. It was the same thought that filled her senses. This merging of thoughts was a new and strange sensation and she slipped into its current. She toed off her leather shoes, one slipper after the other dropping to the floor.

“Cairenn.”

A soft voice in the darkness, a real voice this time, for his breath brushed her skin.

“You’re in all my dreams,” he said against her throat. “You’re in all my waking thoughts.”

She kissed him to quiet him. She didn’t want to get caught up in words.

“You, and this place,” he said, hoarsely, between kisses. “You’ve both bewitched me.”

The word bewitched rasped through her consciousness. “There’s no witchery in this, Lachlan.”

“Then I have no excuse but my own weakness.”

“And mine.”

He tugged on the neckline of her shift. She lifted one shoulder to let the neckline slide down. His breath warmed her skin. When he pulled back from her kiss, she glimpsed her naked breast set free of her neckline just before his head blocked her view.

The touch of his lips on her breast was like a torch set to a bonfire. She buried her fingers in his hair to control her own shudder of pleasure. He kissed her nipple, open-mouthed, hungrily, and she sensed the teasing graze of his teeth. All the while his hand slid across her body, down her hip, over the top of her thighs and across her knees.

Wool and linen feathered up over her knees. Cool air bathed her thighs. She wanted to say, take me to the pallet, so they could have what they both wanted. She wanted to say, let’s lie upon the floor, but then his fingertips grazed her inner thigh and words became impossible to form.

Through her mind flooded images of all the times she’d gazed unwittingly into the minds of young lovers—seeing their memories of rolling caresses and fleshy entwinements. It seemed she’d always known the mechanics and the variations of the coupling, but she’d never really understood the intensity of all of it until now, this very moment, as she couldn’t help but part her thighs to make a straight path for his fingers. He boldly took the invitation and ran a fingertip inside her cleft.

With her lips pressed against his hair she again sensed his thoughts like a series of shooting stars streaking through a dark night, a series of thoughts that matched her own.

I want to sink inside her.

I want you inside me.

I will have her.

Take me.

His fingers settled on a spot and made swift little circles. Her hips quivered and then moved to match his rhythm. Arched on his lap like this she couldn’t move as much as she needed to, and beneath the yearning grew a vaulting frustration. She became conscious of the hardness of his sex pressed against her hip. She wanted to touch him, give him the same pleasure he was giving to her, let him know that she wanted to join him the way men and women were made to be joined. She tried to push off his lap—to the pallet, to the floor—to any place where she could open her thighs for more than just his fingers.

But he ignored her wriggling and slipped his slick finger deep inside her.

“Lachlan.”

Her cry was a question. His answer was to lower his head and suck her nipple back into his mouth.

His thumb circled the top of her cleft while his finger plunged in and out of her and his lips suckled her breast. Sensation flooded her body while her inner muscles clenched. She’d finally broken through the barriers of his mind to know what he wanted—and she wanted more than anything to give that to him—yet what they were doing right now would not bring him the pleasure he needed—

—but it would bring pleasure to her, she thought, as her head fell back, as her body knotted, as her mind went blind.





CHAPTER TEN


When her sweet body finished throbbing around his hand, Lachlan cupped her sex, trying not to think of what it might have felt like to have her body throb like that around his cock. A cock that now stood upright in his braies, with nothing but linen between it and Cairenn’s soft, curved bottom.

She reclined in his arms while her lungs worked like bellows. The lass with her slimness and pale-milk skin gave off an air of fragility, but holding her so close, he felt the tensile strength of her long, lean body. Her tapered thighs, the firmness of her belly, the fierceness of her grip. His fingers could still feel the imprint of the moist pressure he’d felt inside her. Where she’d gripped him, his shoulders would bear bruises tomorrow.

How easy it would be to slip off the stool and onto his knees, spread her across the warm hearthstones, and sink himself deep. She would welcome him—he felt acquiescence in every quivering line of her body. She would wrap her slim ankles around his back and her arms around his shoulders and make little, heaving gasps with every stroke. He could bring her to the height of pleasure again and himself, as well, and for a while—a short, brilliant, welcome stretch of oblivion—he could believe that in her arms lay peace and a life of unfurling happiness.