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He drew me closer, squeezing me into his arms, kissing me again and again, as if he were the one marveling at me. “How do you know to do that?”
“Do what?” I asked, brushing softly at his lips with mine.
“How to draw all the poisons from me,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “…you are more of a healer than my physicker.”
A healer? I had never thought of myself as such beyond tending to the little cuts and scrapes my siblings took in their days upon my father’s croft. “Perhaps you think of me that way because you were wounded the day we met and I tended to a cut above your eye.”
His next words were spoken so softly I wondered if I imagined them. “The wounds you heal are on the inside, lass.”
I stroked his face so tenderly then, he seemed not to be able to bear it. He rolled away to fetch a wet cloth from the basin. He liked to be clean before he slept; before the siege he sometimes indulged in the luxury of having water hauled in for a bath instead of swimming in the loch. And though I didn’t think I could make my knees hold me upright, I murmured, “I can do it, laird.”
“You’ve done enough,” he said, bringing the basin over to wipe me clean—the cool water soothing upon sticky, sore flesh. And for a moment, I felt like a small, cherished child. He washed me gently, then washed himself, then slipped back into the bed beside me and pulled the covers atop us both.
“Will you be able to sleep better now, my laird?”
“Oh, aye,” he said, at once. “I must thank you for that, lass. The way I feel now, I could conquer a whole army with one arm. I am certain to be rested and clear-headed, better able to command my men.”
I had done that to him. For him. The thought that I—a woman in disgrace—could have such influence over a powerful man. Have influence over him and the whole clan, just by surrendering him in this way…what a heady feeling!
I quite nearly sang to think it. Meanwhile, the laird gently caressed my bare bottom with his strong palm, which was calloused from where it so often gripped his sword. Though I was sore where the paddle had landed, there was a deep pleasure under the rubbing. The soreness was a badge of honor, a reminder that I treasured of the experience that we’d just shared together, and I purred a bit to be touched this way.
“I want you to tell me the truth,” the laird murmured. “The whole truth.”
“I would never lie to you.”
His eyes narrowed. “When you gifted me this paddle, did you hope I’d use it on you tonight?”
“No, my laird.” It shouldn’t be this hard to admit, I thought. A harlot would admit it and that was what I wanted to be for him. A woman with whom he could find his relief and give him succor without making demands. He wanted to know about my hopes, for which he shouldn’t have concerned himself at all. And yet, I shamelessly confessed, “In truth, I hoped you would use it on me every night.”
He blinked. Then his hand drifted to my chin, forcing it up, making me look him in the eye. “Every night? I don’t think you could take it.”
“I could take anything for you,” I said, savagely.
And I meant it. I meant it with all my heart.
Chapter Three
THE LAIRD
John Macrae nearly wept with amazement at the woman in his arms. A woman so delicate, so soft, and yet so strong. Because it took strength to accept all that he did to her in bed. Not just the spankings and paddlings, but the vulgar words that spilled from his mouth. The ways in which he had humiliated her…
She’d drawn it out of him this time.
He’d known perfectly well what she was doing, taunting him about her nightclothes. Working him into a state. And he’d let her do it because he’d needed her to do it. He should have been the one to reassure her that those things he said and did in the heat of passion were forms of love play. That they did not speak to a lack of feeling on his part, but rather, a kind of surrender of his own. She was the sexually inexperienced one, and yet, she seemed to know, without needing to be taught, how to make him feel safe expressing parts of himself for which others would deem him a monster.
How was that she did such a miraculous thing?
If he ever doubted that he loved her, all doubts fled. He loved her more than anything or anyone he had ever loved. And how would he ever bear to part with her when the time came? “I will treasure this paddle, my sweet,” he told her. “No one has ever given me a gift I like better. Excepting, of course, the give you gave me when you surrendered yourself to me.”
“But the paddle was a gift for me too, my laird,” she said, her eyelashes fluttering against his cheek. “I can never seem to tell you enough how happy it makes me to please you. But I will keep trying to tell you until you believe it. Until you really do believe it.”
He was starting to, but he had to understand. “Does it make you happy because you are a good girl who likes to sacrifice for her laird, or because it feeds something in you to obey me just as it feeds something in me to command you?”
“What difference does it make?”
It made a difference to him. “What if I was not the laird?”
She startled, as if she couldn’t imagine such a thing. “You will always be the laird. You cannot be afraid that the enemy will take the castle…”
