Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(39)

She burrowed her fingers in his long hair. The only sound in the room was the harshness of their breathing. With their skin pressed together, she could feel the moisture between them. With that came a quiver of disappointment. She knew what he’d done. He’d spilled his seed upon her, so he wouldn’t spill it in her.

She stared up at the canopy as the implications of what he’d done sank in. It was a strange side effect of her gift that she knew more about the many ways of lovemaking than most married women. As such, she knew that married men gave their seed to the linens sometimes, in order to give their wives a rest between children. But that was the exception. Mostly, it was unmarried men who did this: Unmarried men catching a woman behind a rock-pile fence on a spring day, or cheating on their wives or sweethearts, or coupling with a woman they didn’t want to bother with past the one moment.

Men did this, she thought, when they did not want to be bound.

She closed her eyes, not wanting to believe that Lachlan would act so. Then, by habit, she spread her thoughts toward the walls that always stood between their minds—and the darkness she had warred against for so long suddenly crumbled.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


Her hair smelled like Inishmaan.

With his nose buried in it, Lachlan imagined they were lying upon the windswept heights while waves crashed upon the shore below. In his mind, he carried her there like a bride. He laid her down amid the heather. He peeled her clothing off her body and watched the way the sea mist beaded upon her skin. He licked those beads off her belly and drank where they pooled in her navel. He took her hips in his hands and slipped into her while she arched up off the ground in pleasure.

His cock swelled despite the fact that he was only moments past his own pleasure. She lay warm beneath him, every breath bringing his chest in contact with her soft, pliant breasts. All it would take was a shift of his hips and he’d make that fantasy real.

The idea filled his head and cast a haze across his conscience. He groaned and mustered enough control to roll off her. He seized her hand and pressed her knuckles against his lips, trying to ignore the hollow craving in his heart. Blinking up at the carved underside of the bed’s canopy, he counted diamond panels in order to cool his blood, then he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to think of other things—duty, honor, obligations. A vision of her father rose into his mind, whose countenance demanded he do right by the woman who now lay naked beside him.

How could I resist her? He’d been so sure she would come to her maidenly senses once she dropped her clothing. But the woman who’d emerged had not covered her body, had not shrunk with shyness, and had not looked up at him with eyes begging for gentleness. She’d stood with her shoulders thrown back. Her gaze had been a challenge.

An ache reignited in his balls.

Damn it.

He shifted to his side, bracing himself for the sight of her face, passion-flushed, and her lips begging for more.

Instead he saw tears.

He shot up onto his elbow. “Cairenn—”

She pushed away quicker than he could stop her. He reached for her but all he caught was a lock of her hair that slipped through his fingers. She shot off the bed, swept up her shift from the floor, and strode naked to the other side of the room. Stopping in front of a table near the privacy screen, she seized a cloth and dipped it in a bowl of water.

By the bend of her neck he surmised that she was washing her belly. Her sweet, rounded bottom swayed with every stroke.

“Mo chridhe,” he whispered. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head once but did not turn to face him. Maybe it was his restraint that had angered her. Maybe he needed to explain that he had held off from spilling inside her so that there would be no complications from their coupling. He had enough experience pleasing willing women, but narrow experience with an eager innocent. Somehow, he’d fallen short of her expectations.

No, he thought. He could still feel her body throbbing against his mouth. That was surely not the problem. Whatever bothered her hung heavy in the silence. He cast back to their previous conversation, wondering what he’d said that had pushed her to tears. He’d given her every opportunity to send him away.

Then a slow, creeping sense of dread took hold of him. He raised his gaze to the curve of her naked back and thought, as loud as one could think, Turn around, Cairenn.

She didn’t twitch or pause or shift her weight or make any acknowledgement that she heard his thought, but he was not reassured. A woman under the constant onslaught of other people’s minds would have long learned how to control her reactions to even the loudest, most sudden thoughts. Back on Inishmaan, she’d claimed she could read everybody’s mind except his. He’d dismissed her remark because he hadn’t believed in her gift. Now he believed in her gift, but was all the more confused.

Why, amongst all the people in the world, would her gift fail when it came to reading him?

He knew the answer. Her gift didn’t fail at all. She’d lied to him, because it was easier that way.

“Don’t ignore me, Cairenn,” he said, trying to stanch a knot of panic as he shifted to the edge of the bed. “I know you’re angry.”

“Am I?”

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or do I have to drag you back to this bed and kiss you until you speak?”

She crumpled the linen aside and then spread her hands on the table as if to brace herself. The shift she’d hung over her arm slipped off her elbow to puddle on the floor. He tried not to run his gaze over the swell of her buttocks, to the space between her thighs, and the shadows of her sex, but the next thing he knew he was standing behind her and his hand was reaching for the path his mind had explored.