Page 92 of Highlanders for the Holidays
Nor a man she would rather do it with.
Roderick reached out and cupped her face with his hand. His touch was gentle, yet the effect on her was so powerful that she felt it to her toes. She already felt over her head and drowning. Perhaps she should wait and do this with some quiet, unassuming merchant who did not make her heart race and her limbs feel weak.
“Tell me more about your grandmother, the healer,” she said to buy time to calm herself.
“I can’t do that now.” He took the bowl of salve Lily still had gripped in her hands without realizing it and set it by the fire.
“Why not?” she asked in a whisper.
“Because I may not survive,” Roderick said, resting his hand on the small of her back, “if I wait any longer to kiss ye.”
As he leaned toward her, her pulse skittered, and she could not get enough air. She recognized these as signs of a woman losing her wits over a man. She had often prepared soothing drinks for women who came to her breathless and agitated.
“Tell me ye want to kiss me,” he said in a husky voice that vibrated inside her.
“I do,” she said, desire overwhelming her good sense.
Mercy!The moment their lips touched, she was glad she was sitting, for her limbs went weak as she melted into his first soft, warm kiss.
Of course, she had been kissed before—by the stonemason’s apprentice who nearly broke her tooth, the butcher’s son who slobbered, and the occasional customer who managed to grab her before she kneed his groin. But none of those kisses bore any resemblance to this.
When Roderick ran his tongue along her bottom lip, she opened her mouth with a sigh. His tongue was slow and sensuous as he explored her mouth, but before long their kisses grew so heated that she had to pull away to catch her breath.
When she did, he covered her face in kisses—her cheeks, her brow, her eyelids, her hair.Heavens, it felt wondrous. He rested his hand on her ribs, where it touched the underside of her breast—oh my—while his lips traced a burning trail down the side of her throat. She did not remember lying down, but she was on her back.
While his kisses were gentle, coaxing, his shaft was hard against her belly. This Highlander was danger and mystery beneath a beguiling surface.
“I want ye so badly, lass,” he said, his breath hot on her skin. “Say ye want me too.”
When she did not answer, he leaned back and fixed his gaze on her face. She had to turn her head to the side to give herself a chance to think.
Since they soon would be parted forever, she need not worry about suffering through the deceit and lies, the other women, the endless demands, and all the other abuses men heaped upon women. She could enjoy one magical night that she could remember for the rest of her life, with none of the bad memories that usually followed.
And even more than that, she did not want her only time with a man to be that once when she had not been quick enough to get away from a man in her shop. He’d left with a long gash from her knife down his face that she hoped festered and killed him. When the old herbalist found her afterward, she gave Lily a tincture to prevent the rapist’s seed from taking hold in her womb.
Lily had the herbs in her bag she would need to make that same tincture in the morning.
“We don’t have to do this,” Roderick said, but he kept his hands on her. “I’ll leave ye alone if that’s what ye want.”
“I don’t want you to leave me alone,” she said, meeting his gaze. “I want this.”
“Good.”
She thought he would free the essential parts from their clothing, and be about the business of it quickly, as she’d often seen couples do against the wall in the backstreets of the city at night—and sometimes in the day. Instead, he got up on his knees.
He was so beautiful that she found herself staring at him, as she had when he first took off his shirt and tunic. Of course, she had known from riding with him for two days and watching him fight that he had a muscular frame, but that was not the same as seeing the hard, rippling muscles of his bared torso in the glow of the firelight.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asked.
“Cold?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Nay.”
With that hunger in his eyes, she thought he would surely fall upon her now like the men who trapped her in corners and pawed at her until she jabbed her knee into their groin or pulled her knife. But he surprised her again by crouching at her feet.
She rose up on her elbows and watched him remove her boots. After the boots, he pulled off one of her wool stockings, and then he grinned at her as he cradled her bare foot in his hand.
“I knew I’d find a lass under here.” He kissed the bottom of her foot with soft lips, and the scratch of his unshaven beard tickled and sent a thrill of tingles up her leg.
“I’m going to freeze without them,” she said, when he pulled off her other stocking.
