AllFreeNovel
Share Us
How had he come to know her so well, in such a short time?
“I prom—” she started, but Murray had come inside with the required items. Then left her at the mercy of the wolf.
“Sit,” he ordered, pointing at the armchair in front of the lit fire.
The fire had been blazing when she came in, despite the shortage of means for firewood. Or should she say the previous shortage, for as of late, firewood piled in every room, thanks to the troll currently ordering her about.
Her eyes shot daggers at him, and she had this impulse to stay put, his commands be damned.
“Will you do it by your own will or mine?” he taunted.
Why he seemed to be furious with her when her welfare was her business, she would not ask.
Without an option she mulishly sat. “Give me the cloth,” she said stiffly.
For a variation, he did not heed her words and sat on his haunches.
Those capable hands moistened the cloth as his head lifted to her. The fire light gleamed on his hair, on his tanned skin, and made his eyes even hotter. When he extended an arm towards her face, her nostrils inhaled his pine and sandalwood scent, mining her resolve.
“You look like a Pict warrior with your face all painted, except it’s mud,” he murmured before the warmed cloth rested on her brow.
The contact of his hand with her skin induced her to close her eyes and feel. Feel the cloth rubbing on her, and feel his manly muskiness; and her every nerve ending come to life.
He washed her eyelids, her nose, her cheekbones, her chin. Unbidden, a sigh escaped her just before the cloth came to her lips.
Her hazel eyes snapped open. To meet the intensity on his. It was as if he held a magic power over her. Because her spine sagged against the back of her chair as she let him wash her.
The cloth slid down to her throat, spreading goose-bumps over her skin. He washed the curve of her neck, her nape. His other expert hand undid the ribbon on her hair, freeing her locks to spill everywhere. There was no rational reason he should undo her hair, since he was not going to wash her chestnut mane. But she had been so busy stopping herself from throwing herself at him, she did not question him.
“You have the most beautiful hair,” he drawled in his warm Athol Brose tone of his.
Their stares never unglued as she tried to gulp air into her starved lungs, to stanch her starved body from attacking him.
His fingers strolled up her neck, over her ear, to fork into her riotous curls. Time froze for so long it became pure agony.
If he kissed her, she would die. If he did not kiss her, she would perish in an inferno of desire. But this suspended sentence was already killing her.
In a swift movement, he pulled her to him, and their mouths collided. Together with the onslaught of sensation that dominated her every sense, her mind fell into oblivion as she raked her finger through his luxuriant hair. An urgency she never experienced in her life.
There was no finesse in his kiss, no. This would not be a foppish Englishman, ever. He simply invaded her mouth in an open, hungry kiss that took her by storm. The same storm with which she corresponded.
There could be only one name for how she drank on him. Despair. She kissed him back with the despair of four years of wanting a man who was not for her, who would treat her as a tryst, no more. Nonetheless, all her repressed want over the years came to the surface in one gargantuan wave that threatened to choke her. Choke her with the desperate thirst she could not hide from him.
Moans echoed in the air, but she could not tell if they were hers or his. The sounds lost their meaning when his other arm banded her waist and pulled her to his lap.
And she went, relieved to glue every part of her to every part of him, straddling his taut body as if she were a survivor from a shipwreck.
The kiss turned carnal. Open mouths devoured each other, devoid of any inhibition. Any censure. Any shame.
If she revealed to anyone this was her first kiss, they would have laughed. However, she had fantasised for so long about doing it that she felt it came naturally.
After an eternity, he separated their lips just enough for air to pass, they continued feathering each other, unwilling to let go.
“Bluidy hell! You’re an explosion waiting to happen,” he growled.
To hell with him for stopping. She resumed the kiss, this time taking the lead, to do everything she had dreamed of doing with his banquet of a mouth. She nibbled on the lower lip, sucked on the upper, savoured one corner, licked the opposite. Her tongue probed inside him in search of its pair. This time she was certain the moan she heard was his.
As a reward, he laced his arms around her waist and flipped her to the carpet. Only to steal the lead from her and maraud her mouth with doubly primitive intent.
