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Oh. Well. That was just what a girl liked to hear…
At a loss for what else she might possibly say, Arabella murmured, “Sorry.”
He lowered his eyes. “I haven’t held a woman like that since my wife.”
Arabella swallowed, though she could scarcely believe it, since she vaguely remembered that somew
here in Davy’s story about being trapped in the snows there was a mention of a harlot. “Not even in a bawdy house?”
Malcolm squinted. “A man doesn’t go to a bawdy house to hold a woman.”
He didn’t explain himself further, but he didn’t have to. Arabella understood, in the rueful silence, what he meant by it. In holding Arabella in his sleep for comfort—rather than sex—he felt disloyal. “But surely you can’t mean to sleep alone all your life, Malcolm.”
“I’m no celibate monk,” he said, quietly. “But I’ll never remarry. I vowed that on the day she died.”
It seemed a foolish vow to make for a man in the prime of his life, but it was a vow made from love. And since love was a mysterious thing to Arabella, she dared not question it. Especially since that seemed to be all he meant to say on the subject.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“A crofter’s cottage. You’d have never made it back to the castle, and my father’s farmstead was too far away. We brought you here but sent word to the laird. John Macrae will send men to help us, no doubt. And the sooner you get well, the sooner we can leave.”
Though his color had come back to him, and he seemed far more lucid than he had been at any point the day before, a sweat broke out on the man’s brow. “You can’t be here. War bands might not be far off, and if they learned you poisoned the others…best that we ride to the castle at once.”
“You can’t ride,” Arabella said. But the man paid her no mind, and swung his long legs off the bed. “Malcolm, you can’t even stan—”
“Och! Goddamnit!” he cursed in pain, and his bad leg rebelled so much against putting weight on it that he fell back upon the mattress, his eyes rolling back. He must’ve blacked out, she thought. But then came a sign of his wakefulness in the form of a small punch he landed to the mattress. “God-fucking-damnit.”
“I warned you,” Arabella said softly.
After a time had passed and he had composed himself, she pulled back the covers to check his wound, hoping she would not have to stitch him back together again. Then a worse thought occurred to her. Fearing infection, her cool fingers gently probed his powerful thigh, searching for fevered skin.
Finding none, she exhaled. “You’re lucky…it—”
She broke off upon looking at him, her view partially obstructed by…a rather tall spire of manly flesh. Unless she were to count the times she’d seen a farmhand pissing in the stream, she’d never seen a grown man’s private parts before. Certainly, never so close as this. She marveled at his erection—and not just because she wouldn’t have thought a man who had lost so much blood could possibly be capable of such a virile display. Fascinated by the blunt, swollen head of it, Arabella could scarcely tear her eyes away until she heard Malcolm say, “Don’t be frightened, lass. Just ignore it.”
She wasn’t frightened, but there was no earthly way she could ignore it. Painfully curious, she whispered, “Is that…is that because of me?”
“Do you want it to be?” He asked the question without any mirth or teasing. It was a question in deadly earnest.
Under his scrutiny, Arabella felt as trapped as if he was holding her by the wrists. Taken entirely unawares by the strong sensual pull between them—a pull no less real for being invisible. “I—I’m not sure. I only know that I want to touch you.” How in the world had she uttered such a brazen sentiment? She hadn’t felt like a wanton when she’d been kidnapped, but something seemed to have cracked open in her since, and she was now curious about all the things a good girl ought not be curious about at all.
“You shouldn’t want that,” he replied.
It felt like a slap. She knew it. She knew that she must be wicked and sinful. But it was the second time a man had told her what she shouldn’t want, and such a burning resentment rose inside her that she snapped, “Why not? Am I too sullied for you?”
In his dark eyes, she saw a flash of something feral and angry. “You’re no sullied thing. I say you shouldn’t want to touch me, because you can do better than a miserable accursed man who accused you of witchcraft.”
Then, before she could even utter an apology, he did grasp her by the wrist, and dragged her hand to his shaft, wrapping her fingers around it underneath his own. She gasped, both in surprise and exhilaration at the feel of engorged flesh. She delighted in the velvety skin and the way his cock pulse beneath her fingers. Every thought but her own arousal fled when he began to move her hand up and down, teaching her how to stroke him in a way that gave him pleasure.
“Oh,” she whispered, sliding up beside him so that her arm had more room to move. They came nose to nose, breath to breath, his stare so intense that she was lost in the black depths of his eyes, and scarcely knew what was happening.
“Is that what you wanted, lass?”
She nodded, loving the way his hand felt so strong around hers. How the size of his palm covered her hand completely, making her feel small and delicate as a true lady, even if the act she was performing was anything but ladylike. “Yes, this is what I want.”
“Then don’t ever do that again,” he growled. “Don’t use what I told you about my dead wife to get your way.”
These words shamed her, but this time, she knew she deserved it. She’d used his deepest pain to wound him and she wasn’t proud of it. Not entirely anyway. What she’d learned in the past day or so about herself was that when someone hurt Arabella, she tried to hurt them back. And while she’d have been a better person if she could turn the other cheek, she wouldn’t have survived if she did.
