She froze as she realized what she had just thought.
She loved Ewan MacAllister.
She loved everything about him. Even that harsh, furious frown that he wore so often.
She never wanted to leave him and yet she dared not admit it to him.
He couldn’t welcome the news. That much she was sure of.
“I have no wish to think on that, Ewan,” she whispered. “Especially not while I’m with you. Let me love you, my lord. For tonight, stay with me and pretend that we have no families. Pretend there aren’t any obligations or fear for either one of us. No past. No future. There is only now. Just me and you and nothing else.”
Ewan trembled at her words. He trembled at the warmth of her soft woman’s body contoured to the hardness of his own. Her stomach was feather soft against his erection. Her hands tender on his shoulders.
He stared into her ever curious amber eyes and lost himself there. What would it be like to spend the rest of his life staring into those eyes?
To hold her like this when they were old?
At this moment, he could see her ripe with his child. See her warm and welcoming in his bed forever.
The thought both terrified and thrilled him.
How could he even think such a thing as keeping her when he had his oath to Kieran?
The day of his return whispered through his memory and he saw himself again on the shore of the loch where Kieran had drowned himself.
The winds had been fierce and cold. The water dark and choppy. He’d looked out across the waves, his heart sickened by the news that his brother was gone. His soul burdened by grief and self-hatred.
“I will never again take any pleasure in my life. I swear it to you, Kieran. I shall make my home here by the loch so that I can look out every day at where you rest and remember what I did to you. I will spend the rest of eternity paying penance for my stupidity.”
Nora reached up and cupped his face with her hands. Her touch brought him back to the present. Back to the only pleasure he had known since the day he had released Isobail into the arms of her lover.
“Have I lost you this night?” she asked quietly. “You look as if you’re far away in your mind. Will you come back to me or should I go?”
“Stay with me, Nora.”
Stay with me forever...
How he wished for the courage to say that last bit aloud.
But he couldn’t.
He didn’t dare.
She opened her legs to him and wrapped them around his hips, then leaned up to kiss him blind with bliss.
Ewan let her taste roll over his senses. He inhaled the precious scent of her hair and breath as he laid himself flat against her.
Her touch reached deep inside him, setting him free of his past. Free of his guilt.
Nora ran her hands through Ewan’s hair and down his whiskered cheeks. How she loved the manly feel of him lying atop her. She ran her feet down his legs, feeling the crisp hairs that dusted them and reveled in the differences between their bodies.
And it was then she realized just how much she did love this man. How much she treasured his rare smiles.
Her unrefined bear was just what she wanted.
It was what she needed.
This man whose kisses set her afire. Whose strong touch made her weak.
