Devil in Tartan (Highland Grooms #4)(58)

He paused to gaze down at her. Her pale blue eyes had gone dark with hunger he understood. What was he doing? Would he bed his prisoner? Diah, how deep this extraordinary esteem pulled between them.

She was looking up at him with an expression he did not understand. “What?” he whispered breathlessly as he caressed her head, her cheek.

Lottie put her hands on his chest and slid them up, to his shoulders, sank her fingers into his hair and answered, “Everything.”

Aulay groaned. He kissed her cheek, her mouth. And then he reached for the hem of her shirt and untied it, slipping his hand onto her bare skin, over her ribs, to her breasts. He dipped down to press his mouth to the skin of her décolletage, kissing the swell of her breasts. Lottie sighed with pleasure, thrust her hands into his hair, and Aulay went spiraling into sensual havoc.

He pushed the shirt up and took her breast into his mouth at the same time his hands slipped into the waist of the trews and between her legs.

Lottie reached for the ties of the trews and pulled them free, pushing them down her hips, and Aulay abandoned himself. He was moving by instinct and sensation, his hands and mouth finding every place on her body that made her gasp with pleasure. He freed himself from his trousers almost desperately; his need to hold her and have her overtook every other thought. It was a need he’d never felt so sharply, had never experienced so deeply in his marrow. He hiked her leg up and pressed the tip of his cock against her on a moan of pleasure, sliding deeper, and then with torturous patience, completely into her, all the way to the hilt, before slowly sliding out again.

He began to move in her, his mouth on her mouth, on her neck, his hands on her breasts. Lottie’s hands slid over him, her fingers digging into his flesh, urging him to move deeper into her. Wave after wave of sensual gratification rolled over him, spinning him like a top toward a release that was building to a ferocious crescendo. Lottie clung to him with one leg wrapped around his waist, her mouth on his skin. He was completely lost, more at sea than he’d ever been in his life, lost and clinging to the only thing that could save him—this woman, this astonishing woman. He could feel his deliverance mounting as she spread her arms and arched her neck, her eyes closed, letting him carry her along in his vortex of pleasure, washing this wretched week away from them. Nothing existed beyond the two of them, beyond her scent and the feel of her body around his.

When the vortex sucked them under, Aulay collapsed on her. For several moments they both sought their breath. But when they had it, Lottie cupped his face in her hands and kissed him gently. Reverently.

But the sound of one of the crew shouting up to another on the mast managed to slip into his consciousness, and Aulay remembered who and where he was. He suddenly broke the kiss and stood up, taking a step backward. Lottie caught herself on the bunk, breathing hard, her gaze fixed on him and filled with need.

How could he have done it? How could he have taken her like this, after all that she’d done, knowing that he would hand her over to authorities in a few days? “Clean yourself up,” he said, his voice surprisingly hoarse. “Get some rest.”

She didn’t move. She remained braced against that bare bunk, watching him like a cat. Wanting him. He could plainly see her desire, could feel it mirrored in him, and God help him, it ran just as deep in him.

Righting his clothes, Aulay walked out of that cabin before he did something mad. His sorrow at what was to come was already closing in on him, squeezing him from all sides. Sorrow for her. For him. For what might have been before he’d had a chance to have it.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

COLD WAS SEEPING into Lottie’s joints. She groped for the woolen plaid she’d found tucked beneath the bunk bed in the captain’s cabin, pulling it tightly around her. It was as damp as everything else. With a sigh, she opened her eyes and blinked back her fatigue.

Drustan was beside her, snoring like her father once had. Pain sharpened around her spine, reminding her of her loss. Not that she needed any reminding—she’d dreamed of him for the last two nights. In her dreams, she was trying to catch him, but he was always just ahead of her, disappearing before she could reach him.

But there was one dream that stood out from the others—that was the dream where she caught up to her father, put her hand to his shoulder, and he turned with a smile and said, “I’m no’ dead, pusling. I’m here with you now, am I no’?”

That dream had startled her awake.

Lottie pushed herself up and looked at the mound that was her brother on the floor next to the bunk. They were in the forward cabin now, where she’d decamped that night after Aulay had left her. She turned her head to the porthole and looked out at the sea.

She’d been completely undone by their coupling. He’d released her from misery, had shown her compassion and hope and a desire like she’d never felt in a moment she’d needed it the most...but that desire had faded away with the light of day.

It seemed so long ago now. A lifetime. She hadn’t spoken to him since that night, and it surprised her that she should feel his absence so keenly. Perhaps as keenly as she felt her father’s absence, but in a different way. She mourned her father, dreamed about him, missed his smile. But she craved Aulay like water. When she wasn’t grieving her father’s death, she was obsessively thinking about those moments with Aulay on his bunk, escaping from her grief, swimming headlong into another sort of grief entirely. She was desperate to remember the way he’d felt inside her, and the way he’d held her so tightly and carefully...and just as desperate to forget it.