Page 58 of Blood of the Thistle

His hand left her breast, sliding downward and away, and she whispered his name again, this time as a desperate plea that did not embarrass her.

He pulled his lips from hers a moment later and once more touched his forehead to hers.

Anna opened her eyes. His expression was not one of pleasure but of conflict, a grimace of frustration carved deep into the lines of his face. She recognized that it wasn’t rejection, but the look of a man wrestling with his own restraint—the effort it took to pull away from her.

“Why...?” Her question came out as a hoarse whisper.

“ʼTis nae safe,” Bram said, his voice like gravel. “To be so distracted.”

His words hit her before she’d finished processing them, and her first instinct was to beg him to find somewhere safe. Her second, more ridiculous instinct was that she didn’t want to be safe, she wanted to be in his arms.

Bram withdrew, his hands dropping away slowly, his gaze riveted on her chest, his expression fierce, as if he yearned to reclaim what he’d so abruptly surrendered.

Anna was much slower to remove her hands from him, even as she knew exactly what dangers surrounded them.

Bram turned away first, his jaw set, the muscles in his neck corded with tension. He strode toward the horse without a backward glance, his bare feet silent on the damp earth. Anna watched him go, her lips still tingling, her body humming with the ghost of his touch. Her legs felt unsteady, as if the ground beneath her had softened.

The horse stood patiently, its dark coat gleaming in the late afternoon. Bram busied himself adjusting the horse’s tack, his movements efficient, controlled.

Anna hesitated only a moment before approaching, her feet leaden. She stopped just behind him, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body, close enough to touch him. Unbeknownst to him, she lifted her hand between them, but just as quickly clenched her fist and lowered her hand, unable or simply unwilling to touch him voluntarily, to lay her hand against his broad back, perhaps with some hope that her touch could say what she had not.

Without a word, Bram turned and reached for her. His hands settled at her waist, firm and sure, and lifted her smoothly onto the horse. She clutched the saddle horn reflexively as he climbed up behind her in a single, quiet vault, his arm momentarily encircling her to steady himself. He’d met her gaze only fleetingly, and she didn’t suppose she was able to read his expression any better now than before he’d kissed her, but she convinced herself she saw nothing of regret in the depths of his blue gaze. His gaze was neither cold nor distant but, if anything, charged with a smoldering, unresolved intent that made her feel warm all over again.

When he urged the gelding forward once more, Anna leaned back against his chest almost without thinking, and was struck by how astonishingly ordinary the moment felt despite the extraordinary thing that had just happened.

They rode in silence, but it was no longer the same silence that had accompanied them across the landscapes north of York. Something had shifted in this secluded spot, because of that most startling but superbly satisfying kiss.

She wasn’t alarmed that Bram hadn’t spoken to her since explaining why he’d put a stop to their kiss, since she didn’t yet have words herself, had yet to fully grasp what the kiss had meant, the full ramifications of it, her own uncharacteristically wild and wanton response to it, or what it might mean going forward.

In fact, as the horse carried them along the muddy verge of the ancient road, Anna found herself grateful for his silence. The hush between them was not heavy, but charged—with possibility, uncertainty, and the dangerous, exhilarating weight of what they’d just done. Her mind replayed the kiss in all its sensuous detail, each recollection more vivid and consuming, her body still humming with the echo of his hands on her skin. She’d always thought herself sensible to a fault, a grown woman more likely to talk herself out of an impulse than to let longing seize her—yet there she’d been, clutching an imposing Highlander to her breast, kissing him as though she’d been waiting all her life for only that. Who was this person, this Anna, who had wanted so fiercely, who had dared to answer his hunger with her own?

She wondered if he was as shaken as she was. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this, for the dizzying fall into a man who should have been nothing more than a ghost.

Anna let the rhythm of the horse and the Bram’s arms around her lull her into a kind of contemplative state. Again and again, she reflected upon the astonishing heat of that kiss, the way her own body had answered him, reckless and resounding and alive in a way she hadn’t known possible.

But under the feverish daydreaming, a second, colder reality swirled. Anna was not so naive as to forget the mountain of context bracketing this moment: the centuries between them, her own displacement and underlying desire to return home, the fact that she was something like his ward and that, for all she knew, he might go the way of others before him, eventually choosing something else other than her.

Yeah, she was in serious trouble. Not just the obvious, ever-present time-traveling sort, but the kind that left bruises on your inside. She only knew that she wanted more, and that her journey through the fourteenth century had just become infinitely more complicated.

Chapter Sixteen

Three days later, she felt herself becoming simply Anna again, the bold Anastasia who’d kissed Bram having quietly retreated beneath the weight of his continued silence and growing reserve.

The kiss hadn’t been repeated, let alone mentioned. His touch, whether lifting her onto the horse, helping her dismount at day’s end, or simply encircling her as they rode, had become wholly practical once more. His hands never strayed or lingered, and neither did his gaze. Anna could imagine no explanation for the change except regret.

Oh, he remained unfailingly courteous. He made certain she ate before he did, gave her as much as he took of whatever little food he found, and saw each night that she was better sheltered from wind and cold than he was. He never complained when weariness overtook her and she rested against him as they traveled. He hadn’t withdrawn his protection, only himself.

Anna had tried to draw him back out. She asked about Scotland, the war, Craig na Coille, his family, even the horse, receiving mostly polite answers that seldom extended beyond a sentence or two. Eventually she resorted to simply talking about herself, filling long stretches of the journey with stories of home and especially Mallory. By the end of the second day, Bram knew that her sister was three years older, dark where Anna was fair, possessed fourteen tattoos, two children, a juvenile record she hadn’t added to in a decade, and an unfortunate inability to keep possession of a valid driver’s license. Anna even confessed that she sometimes envied Mallory’s ability to make a disaster of something and then simply get on with her life instead of worrying endlessly over what everyone thought of her.

At one of their stops, Anna tried her phone again with little expectation of success. She held the button down but the black screen remained stubbornly blank. The battery, which had somehow managed one last resurrection before, was finally and completely dead.

“This,” she announced to Bram, holding it up, “would have been much more impressive if I could actually show you what it does.”

He glanced at the dead phone but said nothing.

Undeterred, Anna explained how she could use it to speak to Mallory from hundreds of miles away, take photographs and videos, read books, listen to music, find directions, send messages almost anywhere in the world, look up information in seconds, check the weather and, with considerable difficulty, tried to explain the internet.

Bram finally responded, but only to wonder why anyone would she would want other people to be able to reach her every hour of the day.