Highlander Mine (18 page)

His eyebrows furrowed in thought, as though he was uncertain whether or not he should share such clandestine information. He traced the wing of my eyebrow with his finger. “Perhaps, if you wouldn’t mind...perhaps I could
show
you instead.”

It went against his principles to debauch me here in this boathouse, yet here he went again with his promises. And I was on the verge of yet another ecstatic collapse, just from his gentle threats and the sublime rock-hard pressure of his damn manhood.

I could see that Knox Mackenzie was conflicted; this was easy enough to read from the juxtaposition of his furious desire and the entrenched discipline that he could intermittently control. I didn’t want anything to do with his conflict. I wished he would rid himself of that infuriating control. All
I
wanted of him was a furious abandon. So I said, almost demurely—although that particular act was admittedly ridiculous considering my state of undress and the still-rippling effects of his weight and his touch—albeit breathlessly: “I might allow you to show me one.”

“Only one?” he murmured, disarming me once again with a barely there half smile. Each time his mirth shone through, the sparkly night seemed to take on a new radiance. “All right, then. Just one.”

He raised himself up, lifting with his arms. I felt both relief and lament at the removal of his closeness and his warmth. His muscles bunched and coiled with his movement as he prepared to do whatever it was he was going to do.
Damn him,
I thought as I regarded his face, the mane of his hair, the outline of his broad, muscled shoulders
.
The man was an absolute specimen of masculine magnificence. Sculpted and dominating and silver-eyed.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Lie still.”

I was still somewhat incensed by this inequality. That he would pleasure me but that I would not be allowed to return the favor. But I was too curious—
and too aroused
—to refuse him. Knowing what I now knew about the extravagant pleasure he was able to give, my refusals were difficult to summon. My pulsing, secret place was brimming with honeyed anticipation. Would he touch me there again?
Oh, Holy Ghost,
I hoped he would. I was almost shaking with the crave and the covet of my anticipation.

“Relax,” he murmured. “I promise you will enjoy this.”

Obediently, I tried my best to do as he asked.

“Keep your eyes closed,” he commanded, and this time, the forcefulness of his authority only fueled my excitement.

Still perched above me, he kissed my parted lips. I opened to his soft demand and he kissed me with long, lush, heated tenderness, taking his time, finding ever more intimate angles until I was beyond the threshold of rationality, existing in an altogether different realm of lust and beauty and serene, willing acceptance.

He kissed a trail to my jaw, then my neck, biting gently, licking and nipping a path to my breasts. He took one, then the other, wetting them, pulling them into the fiery deliverance of his mouth. I was moaning, but I took care not to plead, nor to beg. I didn’t want to do anything that might give him pause.

His momentum had not slowed. His tongue dipped into my navel, making me squirm with the delicious torment of his ravishing. And he was moving again. Lower. He was pulling my gown higher, revealing all of me. He would see how wet and wanton I was. How ready. He would know that he had done this to me, and made me want him so very much. I didn’t care. He could win every game and every challenge,
this
way.

It was then that Knox Mackenzie kissed me,
there,
in that most intimate, aroused, delicate place imaginable.

“Holy God,”
I moaned.

He chuckled against my skin. “‘Esteemed laird’ will suffice.”

I wound my fingers through his hair. He was gentle, at first, just kissing me. He was murmuring something. How good I tasted, how beautiful I was. But then his tongue began to lick, burrowing and exploring. And then his lips closed over the tiny, piqued nub of my sex, licking and sucking that acutely sensitive peak into his mouth. With careful, insistent deliberation, he sucked in furtive little pulls as his tongue flicked and delved. The pleasure began in my belly, rushing up in a building, excruciating surge that consumed me in dazzling bursts. My ecstatic core clenched around his invading tongue as he continued to tease every ounce of rapture from my body.

I couldn’t move, or speak. I willed him, silently, to give me more, to release his manhood and possess me fully, aggressively, right now.

“
Now
I know how to quiet you,” he said, a satisfied smile in his voice.

I realized he was covering me with my dress, pulling it back down to my knees. Then he began to button my bodice. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“We’re going back to the manor. It’s getting late.”

“I don’t want to go back to the manor yet. I’m not ready.”

“You’re ready,” he said, and every ounce of superiority had returned to him.

To my intense dismay, it seemed that he had completed all the acts of lewd debauchery he was going to bestow. I began to protest. “I’m not going yet,” I said, sitting up and smoothing my regrettably now-fastened dress into place.

“All right,” he said, sitting next to me. He leaned forward to place his elbows on his knees to watch me, his head tilted and propped on his supporting fist. There was something so strikingly masculine about the stance that it inflamed all my feminine wiles. What would it
take
to undermine his mulish self-control?

I twirled a strand of my hair distractedly.

He looked out across the water and I followed his gaze to the smooth, twinkling surface of the loch, which shone brightly with the cast of lively moonglow. The sight was festive, almost heartbreakingly beautiful.

“’Tis not at all gentlemanly of you,” I commented.

“What isn’t?”

“You know,” I said.

He chuckled. At least, I reflected, I had succeeded in figuring out how to make him laugh. My own frustration was clearly highly amusing to him. “I believe I have been
quite
gentlemanly,” he countered. “And restrained.”

Aye,
too
restrained. Therein lay my problem. “A gentleman would return the favor.”

“What favor?”

I hesitated, but
my
restraint was all but a distant memory. “A gentleman would allow me to indulge
my
lewd, debauched list, as I have allowed you.”

His smile remained, but his expression was serious and tender. “I’m afraid allowing that would most definitely compromise your virtue, lass. And
that
would not be gentlemanly of me at all, now, would it?”

“I’m...” This was somewhat difficult to express but also, at this point, I thought rather obvious. “I wouldn’t mind my virtue being compromised. By you.”

“I gathered that.” Lord, but he was a smug bastard! Unfortunately, his arrogance was no longer off-putting to me. Not at all. In fact, the effects of his haughty self-importance were, conversely, having their way with me, again. One might have thought I would be satiated by now. But nay. In the presence of this glorious hunk of righteous masculinity, it seemed I had no limits where boundaries of desire were concerned. “Nonetheless,” he continued. “
I
would very much mind your virtue being compromised. Not only that, but if
I were,
in fact, to compromise your virtue, that...well, it changes everything. For me.” His gaze returned to my face. He repeated the word, for emphasis. “Everything. And I’m not sure you’re ready for those consequences. Especially if you plan to be on your way in a matter of days. The Munros will visit this weekend and we’ll likely locate your cousin soon after. And if we were to...compromise your virtue, then I couldn’t...” The venerated and always eloquent Laird Knox Mackenzie was having difficulty articulating whatever it was he was trying to say.

“You couldn’t what?”

“I couldn’t allow you to leave.”

Fascinated by this assertion, I contemplated him, noticing once again that flicker of vulnerability beneath his staunchness. I was physically innocent, but I had been raised in a red-light city district, after all. I understood that acts of the night (and sometimes the day) needn’t be binding. Knox Mackenzie was a glorious man, worthy of all varieties of female adoration, and his wife had passed more than two years ago. I had a strange certainty that he was admitting a preference, a lifestyle, a wholesomeness that was certainly not something I had so far encountered in a man of his status. Not that I’d met many men of his status. Not that I’d met
any
men of his status. For this reason, I doubted my own intuition, at first. Was he suggesting that his wife, and
only
his wife, had been the recipient of his sensual...gifts? Until now? I, too, was stumbling over my words. “Surely you’ve allowed
others...
to leave?”

“I have never had need to allow or disallow...others.”

Maybe he only convened with women of his own clan.

“I’m afraid,” he continued to explain, “I’m a hopeless romantic at heart.”

“A romantic,” I repeated, not fully understanding his meaning. “A very
lewd
romantic,” I added.

His white teeth gleamed in the moon-bright night. “A very faithful, particular, singularly devoted and only occasionally lewd romantic,” he corrected, looking into my eyes, communicating his point. “Who has recently encountered a reason to reconsider the direction of my...devotion.”

And I understood what he was revealing to me: he was not promiscuous. He had honored the memory of his wife alone, and was choosing, only now, with
me,
to rediscover this type of sensual communion. This admission was somewhat of a revelation to me.

He had chosen me.

The realization was daunting, to be sure, and also vexing. If he had chosen me, to renew whatever activities he’d been missing out on of late, then why wasn’t he following through on this choice now?

He’s just explained to you why,
I scolded myself.
He doesn’t take this sort of thing lightly.

And neither did I.

In any normal situation, I would have feigned my role as a proper lady and refused his progressive advances. It was true that it had been many years since I’d occupied a social standing or situation that called for propriety, but my early childhood had been confined by these rules and the vestiges of civility remained firmly placed like stern sentinels in the back alleys of my psyche. My mother’s teachings and reprimands visited me often: whispers through time and from beyond the divide of this life and a shadowy past one.

This,
however, was not a normal situation. First, I was soon—within days, if not hours—to face the most perilous journey of my life, to be greeted by a sinister foe whose demands might very well extend into issues of my propriety or lack thereof. Second, the vision before me was of no ordinary man. He was a pinnacle of beauty and position, loftily endowed in every way it was possible to be. I wanted
him
to be the one to compromise my virtue—as he insisted on putting it—before my virtue could be compromised by anyone else. Before I returned to the snake pit of my former life.

Of course, I could not explain to him why I wanted him so urgently. I imagined what the truth might sound like:
Knox, please take my innocence here and now by the shores of this enchanting loch. Please allow me to know what the ultimate pleasure feels like, with you and all your impressive magnificence, before I disappear and sacrifice myself to the untrustworthy mercies of a madman in order to save my doomed sister.

I thought of falling to my knees, clutching at him and begging like some pathetic, lust-blinded wench.

I did not give in to this impulse.

Next, I thought of rising and returning to the manor as reservedly as was possible after such revelatory sensual enlightenment and amid this torrent of emotions.

I wished I could even the score. I wished I could make him so mindless with need that he had no choice.

At the present moment, however, he seemed fully possessed of his self-discipline. Annoyingly so.

“I would welcome any devotion of yours,” I said. I turned to look at his face and he was watching me intently. I heard myself admit: “I would, in fact,
invite
your complete and uninhibited devotion right here and right now.”

I was almost getting used to his smile and the accompanying dart of pleasure it pierced my gut with each time he granted me the privilege. “I have just explained to you why I cannot accept your invitation, milady, despite the fact that doing so would give me more joy than I have experienced in...well, I could even go so far as to say ever. There is something so intensely delightful about you that I can hardly draw even a shred of comparison to this night and any other night of my entire life.”

I could see why he was king of his kingdom, throwing around phenomenally persuasive flattery like
that.

“Which is why I would, respectfully,” he continued, “request that you accompany me to the manor at once so I may deliver you to your private bedchambers, where I would recommend you securely lock the door before I lose my mind and my self-control completely and divest you of your virtue with such enthusiastic and thorough dedication that you might very well weep or faint or see God, or possibly all three.”

I was mildly taken aback by his candor.

With that, he climbed from the boat. I climbed out after him, but I did not accept the touch of his hand. That could quite possibly be disastrous. Touching him now would likely lead to severe embarrassment involving begging of some description. I could and would accept his impassioned dictate. With as much grace as I could muster. Which, admittedly, wasn’t all that much.

We walked in silence for a time.

“You’ll thank me tomorrow,” he said, grinning casually. In a distinct turnabout from my earlier intrigue, I now wished he would
stop
smiling. His infernal entertainment over the subject at hand was beginning to rile me.