Page 46 of A Virgin for the Icy Highlander
She frowned. “Are you angry with me or the lantern?”
“What?”
“You sound angry.” She hesitated. “And there are beautiful fireflies all around us. Yet, if I were to judge by your voice, I would think you were in a pit of horse manure.”
Another collective pulse of firefly light brought one of his hands into view. It was clenched into a fist.
“Youareangry with me,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
“Nay,” he replied thickly. “Aye. Perhaps. I dinnae ken.”
She laughed coolly. “Goodness, you really covered every possible reply.”
“I just ken that I wanted to punch a good friend in the face for lookin’ at ye!” he barked, his eyes gleaming in the dark, the heat of his fury radiating off him. “And I willnae mention what I wanted to do when he kissed yer hand.”
She blinked into the shadows, grateful that he couldn’t fully see her face. “What?”
“Was that nae the reply ye wanted to hear?” he said. “It took every bit of discipline I had to stay in me chair when his lips were on yer skin.”
A shiver of a different kind rippled through Grace, awakening things that had been dormant since what happened in his study.
There was something intoxicating about having that sort of power over a man like him, who towered over everyone, who could crush most people with his bare hands, who could fight a war and win. It pulsed through her veins like firefly flashes. Her desire for him caused a throbbing ache that refused to abate.
“I was wearing gloves,” she pointed out, her voice breathy.
“It wouldnae have mattered if ye were wearin’ gauntlets,” he replied in that low, rumbling growl that seemed to vibrate into the very core of her being. “He kissed what wasnae his.”
She fought against the fire in her lungs and the slow burn in her stomach. Embers cascaded down into the part of her where pleasure slept, stirring it awake.
“I haven’t yet said that I am yours either,” she said brazenly, hoping for a reaction. “What if I said that you did the same thing in your study by kissing what wasn’t yours?”
His breathing became a ragged susurration in the dark, as if she were in that meadow with a wolf instead of a man. Yet, she didn’t have the sense to be afraid; she knew what this wolf was capableof, and she wanted him to bite, nip, and devour her until she told him to stop.
“I’d tell you to whisper it in me ear, that ye’re nae mine to do with as I please,” he growled. “I’d tell ye to carve it into me back with yer nails as I show ye what more I can do. I’d tell ye to moan it in the same breath that ye moan me name.”
All at once, the darkness became solid. It became arms wrapped tight around her and rough hands sliding up the curve of her back as hungry lips crashed into hers in a fierce, breathtaking kiss.
This was a kiss she didn’t hesitate to return, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him closer, though she doubted she could ever get him close enough to satisfy the ache that burned within her.
19
I’ve lost me damned mind.
Hunter had. He knew it, and he didn’t care. The moment Grace taunted him by saying he’d kissed what wasn’t his, he’d lost all control. He’d known, deep down, that it was a test of sorts, and he hadn’t been able to stop himself.
He needed her in more ways than one.
The ravenous graze of her soft lips and the grip of her thighs around his waist as he carried her drove him to the brink of madness. His loins were set ablaze with a desire unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He didn’t believe in sorcery, but the passion she stirred inside him gave him a reason to doubt.
He carried her across the night-drenched meadow, where the fireflies were slowly fading out their dance, to where a huge, ancient stone protruded from the ground. Whether nature orman had put the obelisk there, no one knew, and, right now, it was where he meant to worship the intoxicating woman he planned to make his wife.
Grace gasped as he pressed her against the stone, his hand in her hair, loosening all those fiddly, annoying slides that held it back from her face. He had enough control to put them into the pouch of his kilt, so he wouldn’t have to hunt for them another time. Then, his senses were overwhelmed as her hair came tumbling down.
The scent of lavender and a subtle note of expensive citrus flooded his nostrils as he twisted a lock around his hand, pulling gently.
The first exquisite moan escaped her lips, and her neck arched back at his command. Cursing the moonlight for hiding behind a cloud instead of illuminating her expressions with its crisp, silver glow, he let his other senses take over.
“Oh, M’Laird,” she rasped as he kissed away from her mouth, his lips searing along her jaw and down the curve of her perfectly arched neck.
