Lachlan was bone tired by the time he settled into his bed. And what he did not expect was for the door between the rooms to open.
He had not tried to go to her room since the party. And he had missed talking to her. As much as he missed the scent of her. The feel of her softness beneath his hands. He’d got another taste of her and it had been fire.
He’d done his best to ignore it.
But now the door was open. And there stood Penny, wearing nothing but her nightdress, her hair loose and curling, falling down over her shoulders in great golden waves.
Other than that first night, they’d made love in the dark, so he had not seen her in such a state of undress often enough to be immune to it. There was a determined glint in her blue eyes, her full mouth set into a firm line.
‘What is it you’re doing, lass?’ The words came out rougher than he would’ve liked. ‘I’m tired. I’m not in the mood to demonstrate restraint. And I’m certainly not in the frame of mind to talk.’
‘I didn’t come to talk,’ she said.
And with a fluid motion she let her nightdress fall in a diaphanous puddle, away from her body. There she stood, naked, her body glowing in the candlelight. The flames licked and danced over her skin and he was transfixed.
‘I told you,’ he said, his voice rough, ‘to leave me.’
‘Yes. For the first time you came to me and then you sent me away when I faltered.’
‘It is not you who faltered,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She licked her lips and he felt the action in his cock. ‘I have spent some time in your father’s library. And I’ve found something…that I believe was meant to be hidden.’
She made her way towards the bed, each step decisive, her hips swaying with the motion. She was like one of the fae folk. Otherworldly and magical. Potentially dangerous to a foolish mortal. She was nothing like the prim English miss she’d been that first time he’d seen her in her father’s house. Except…
Even then, there had been a glint of something in her eyes. She’d always had spirit. The spirit that had carried her through their marriage, the trip to Scotland. That had seen her planning banquets for the entire village. Delivering bread to places she was not welcome.
She was a most unexpected woman. Certainly not the pale pawn he had imagined he was manoeuvring about the board when he had first met her.
She had proven herself to be not a pawn, but an ally. She saw manoeuvres he did not. She was quick and warm, and had an ease with people that he had certainly never had.
She was something quite a bit more than he’d anticipated.
She came to the foot of the bed and he went tense. It was against his every instinct to lie there still. He was naked beneath the bedclothes and what he wanted to do was reach out and take hold of her, bring her down over his body and impale her with his aching stiffness. He had been denied for far too long and for the life of him he couldn’t say why he had allowed it.
Except something inside him whispered, For this.
Because it had been a challenge and one he had been determined not to lose.
He was not a slave to this Englishwoman whom he had brought with him to Scotland. He was not his father. And it would’ve been a blow to his pride to be unable to keep away from her when she was not willing.
Any man would have a woman who came naked into his bedchamber.
She did not control him.
So he lay still and allowed her to spin her plan out and see where it might take them both. ‘I understand now,’ she said softly. ‘I understand what you intended me to do when you asked me to get down on my knees. I didn’t.’ She licked her lips again.
Provocative tart.
‘I spent the afternoon looking at pictures. They made me feel so very strange.’
She was a lady. And he could imagine her feeling nothing beyond disgust for the kinds of things she would have found in a book of that nature.
‘Here,’ she said, pressing her hand low against her stomach. ‘And lower still.’ Her gaze was earnest and forthright, and he found himself wondering why it was he’d thought this lady would do anything but face the challenge head on.
This lady who had asked him what his cock was called. Who had asked for the frank names of all they’d done and who had dared to defy him whenever he laid out an expectation.
Her eager innocence meant that she did not play games when it came to matters of intimacy. Though, withholding had been a game in and of itself. But when it came to the actual act her curiosity overrode any sort of coquettishness.
‘Often when I was alone at my father’s house, there was only my imagination for company. And I realise now there was such a gap in my education that my imagination suffered. Realising what I could have occupied myself with… If I would’ve known to dream of a man’s body… I would have. If I would have known to think of a kiss as deep and wonderful as the ones I’ve had from you… I would have thought of nothing more.’ She reached out and drew back the blanket that was covering him at his waist. She revealed his aroused state and her eyes went round. ‘If I would have known…’
‘What?’ he asked, his voice rough. ‘Would you have lain in your bed and put your hand between your legs? Would you have tried to do something to satisfy the restless need that you found there?’
Colour flooded her cheeks. ‘I’m sure that’s a very wicked sin.’
‘Aye. But I’m a wicked sinner. It’s far too late for my soul. So I wouldn’t have wanted you to abstain from such things on my account.’
‘I would have,’ she said, her voice soft.
‘Have you done so at night? When you thought of me.’
He didn’t know why it might matter, not in ways beyond the physical. But it did. For this moment brought together all that time spent talking at their bedroom doors, rather than screwing. And all the times he’d desired her, too. It all bled into this moment.
Made it sharper. Keener somehow.
‘I didn’t know you could do such a thing. I squeezed my thighs together tight when I felt restless.’
‘A lesson to you, then. You can find pleasure from your own hand. But you can be sure it will never be as keen as the pleasure you find with me.’
‘I see.’
She looked obscenely intrigued by the idea. She curled her fingers around his length. ‘I did see that men could find satisfaction from a woman putting her hand on him.’
‘Aye,’ he said, his voice rough.
‘You feel… You’re so hot.’
‘You put a fire in my blood,’ he said.
‘Good. Because there’s a fire in mine as well.’
‘And why have you not come to me these last nights? Why have you closed your door to me?’
‘Why did you not walk through it?’
An impasse. Perhaps they were both too stubborn to allow the other to see any sort of weakness. Weakness in the form of wanting.
‘There was one act in the book that I was curious about above all others,’ she said.
But she didn’t tell him. Rather she lowered herself over his body, pressing her lips lightly to his shaft.
His hips bucked upwards and she startled. He put his hand on the back of her head and urged her back to him.
‘Take me in your mouth,’ he growled.
He had thought this a bad idea only days ago, but he had lost sight of why with her naked and soft and glorious above him. With her on her knees ready to worship in this way, why should he stop her, why should he not take what she was offering?
He was a man of battle. A man who sought to control all that was around him. A man who’d failed to change the tide when it counted. A man who felt awash at times in those failures. And this…this was like a baptism.
He needed it. He could not turn her away.
Her pink lips parted and she took in the head of him slowly, working her mouth up and down over his shaft. He moved his fingers deep into that thick, silky hair and guided her as she tried to take him deeper, and deeper still.
This was far beyond what he had ever envisioned. An angel, fallen to her knees, fallen from heaven, taking part in pagan delights here in his bed.
And this was why he had not been able to bring himself to lay down with a doxy. Because this was what he wanted. Penny. On her knees before him. Pleasuring him, not with skill, but with all the bright-eyed determination she put into everything that she did.
The slick heat of her mouth took him nearly to the brink. It had been far too long since he’d been inside her and his hold on his control was tenuous. She created magic with her tongue and set fire to his reason. There was nothing except for the wet, deep suction of her mouth. There was nothing but them. He had been a man of base needs for as long as he could remember. When he was hungry, he wanted food. When his lust was inflamed, he wanted sex. When his anger was stoked, he wanted satisfaction. When wrong was done to him, he wanted revenge.
He did not care about the manner in which he received those things. But she created in him an appetite that could only be filled by her.
And she created in him a yawning ache for more. But as quickly as she created that need, she fulfilled it, the glide of her tongue over his body a sort of witchcraft.
Pleasure built behind his eyes, his whole body tensed. While he wouldn’t mind spending himself down her lovely throat, he felt that was a step too advanced in her education.
And he wanted to be inside her. Properly.
He pulled her away from him, then lay down on his back, bringing her over the top of him, her slick entrance resting against his hard shaft.
‘Now, lass,’ he said. ‘You wanted control? It’s your turn to ride me.’
* * *
Penny was trembling, both with arousal and with shock over what she was doing.
She had done it. She had steeled up her resolve and gone into his room. She had done exactly what Isla and the others had described.
And it had been wonderful. She had never, ever once thought that perhaps the act might disgust her. No. She had known that everything about his body was pleasing to her. Absolutely everything. And if it made her a wanton, then so be it.
Now, as she sat astride him, his big, hard body pulsing beneath hers, she had different thoughts about ruination.
She was not going to be ruined in this bed. She was being remade. Reclaimed.
Or perhaps claimed for the first time.
For all of her life she had been an oversight. A creature that no one much cared about except what she might do for them. Her isolation and her position in society as a gently bred lady meant that she was not only ignorant of the world around her, but of her own body. Of the magic that it contained. Of the true beauty of being a woman. Heat bloomed low in her belly and in that place where she was slick and hollow, waiting for him.
She had felt conquered by him on their wedding night, and every night after. But she saw it differently now all of a sudden. After the way that he had trembled as she taken him into her mouth. After the way that she had found her own power as she lavished pleasure upon him.
He was not taking from her by being inside her. Rather, he was demolishing walls built up high and thick inside her, around all that she was and all that she expected to be. She felt strong, because she knew these things now. Because she knew of her own power. And men—men like him, gentlemen, even—they already knew. They knew what it was to have the sort of passion between men and women, and they deliberately kept it from ladies. Deliberately kept secrets about their own bodies from them. And by laying with Lachlan, she had discovered truths. By being with a man who shared and shared freely, she had found that there could be more.
Not for wives, Lachlan had said. No, for some mythical class of woman, prostitutes, harlots. Women who were disdained in fine circles, but valued in the bedroom, by men who desired acts that they could never teach the women they married, because then they might understand, fully, the power that they wielded.
But she understood. She understood it now.
And she had meant to come back together with him so that she might find closeness with this man, but she had found a closeness with her own self that she had not anticipated.
She had been locked in a prison for weeping when she’d been a girl. She’d been locked in herself for years since. Expectation and carefully concealed knowledge, and the weight of the fact she had no true control over her destiny.
But here…
She felt free.
She manoeuvred herself so that the head of his cock was pressing against the entrance of her body, then she lowered herself over him, inch by tantalising inch. She looked down at him, at her brawny captive, who filled her with his hardness to the hilt. He was so handsome it made her ache. And that was the other side of this power.
She was not unaffected.
For he was utterly and incredibly captivating. The hard lines of his face, the sculpted angles and planes of his chest. The cords in his neck stood out, his biceps straining as he moved his hands to grip her hips and hold her down over his pulsing manhood.
She could feel how much he wanted her and that drove her on. Made her feel a power unlike anything else. But it also heightened her own need. Made her slick and desperate for satisfaction.
It had been so long for her.
She didn’t know if it had been for him.
Her stomach soured at the thought of him laying with a prostitute.
And whatever other women there might have been, they weren’t here now.
It was something that ladies were supposed to accept. That their husbands would seek entertainment elsewhere.
She did not share. And after tonight she would make that clear.
He had taught her what it was to feel pleasure in that first week of their marriage. And now she would teach him what it was to be hers.
She began to move, arching her hips up and down, shuddering with satisfaction as she felt the length of him sliding inside her.
She had missed him. She had missed this.
Yet it had never been like this. Because here, with the candles flickering over his face, she could see that he was in the grips of a pleasure that looked nearly like pain. That he was utterly hers. In this moment.
Inside her.
She rode him until waves of need made her internal muscles pulse, until ripples of desire radiated out from low in her stomach further down. Until her head fell back and she cried out her pleasure, crashing down over her. In her. Then on a growl she found their positions reversed, found herself lying on her back, her great warrior looming over her.
He was fierce and he was strong, and was terrifying in the most thrilling of ways.
He had told her that a show of strength was always necessary. That it always benefited a man for those around him to know he was strong.
Tonight she thrilled in that. In his strength. And how very much a man he was.
It had been so foreign to her at first. But now suddenly she understood. She was soft. She was female. And her body had the power to make him shake. He was man. He had killed countless men in battle, hadn’t he told her so?
He could easily kill her. With one large hand wrapped around her throat, he could end her before she ever had the chance to scream. But he chose instead to give pleasure with those hands. To hold her in all of that strength and not crush her with it. The strength of a woman. The tenderness in a man.
Though he was not tender now, his powerful thrusts pushing her back against the headboard, making her cry out in pleasure. The ridges of wood bit into her skull. She didn’t care. She was so desperate for all that he could give her. For what she wanted. She was desperate for everything.
And suddenly she understood. She understood that great well of emptiness that had opened up inside her after the other times they had come together. For their bodies had connected, but this time their souls had entwined.
This was unleashed. And it was what she wanted. The warrior. The man. The one who was frightening and beautiful all at once.
She wanted to see not only what his lovers had seen, but what men on the battlefield had seen before them at the end of their life. She wanted every piece of Lachlan.
She didn’t understand it. Didn’t think she ever could.
But it didn’t matter, because there was no room for thought now. She was a creature made entirely of sensation, when for most of her life she had been stitched together by too many thoughts and a great hollow pit of loneliness.
But not now.
Now, she was bursting with sensation. With pleasure like she had never known.
She had come to seduce him and had been thoroughly seduced in return.
And she was glad.
‘Lachlan,’ she whispered his name.
‘Penny.’
Her name on his lips made her soar.
She hadn’t imagined that she might find her peak again after she had already done that so quickly before. But when she did, it was earthy. Deeper. Her second climax shaking her, rocking the very centre of what she was. Then he growled and did not withdraw from her body. Instead, he poured himself into her as he shuddered out his own orgasm.
Little aftershocks of pleasure made her quake and she clung to those brawny shoulders.
When she fell asleep, she tangled her body around his. And she did not allow for distance.
* * *
In the morning, Penny was woken up by, not Isla, but Lachlan.
The night before came flooding back to her in great, colourful images.
Her face burned.
He was standing there at the centre of the room, gloriously naked. His broad chest bare, chiselled and covered with hair. His waist was lean, his hips narrow. And his manhood…was very definitely interested in exploring yet more pleasure between them.
It took her a moment to realise he was holding a tray. With a tea service, and a plate that seemed to have…
A piece of toast.
‘I had thought you might wish to take breakfast in bed.’
He set the tray down in front of her.
‘Did you fetch that naked?’ She was trying to imagine the kitchen maids handling all that rampant virility in their midst.
And while she was only teasing, even in her own thoughts, she found that the idea made her burn with jealousy. Because she didn’t want to share the glorious sight of Lachlan’s body. It was hers. Hers alone.
She picked up the piece of toast and bit into it fiercely.
‘I don’t get thanks for that?’
‘Oh, of course you do. But you didn’t go into the kitchen naked, did you?’
‘I did not. It might surprise you to learn that I do possess some manners.’
‘Good. I feel that it has not been established between us, but I would like it very much if you did not go to see whores.’
She successfully shocked him into making a sound somewhere between a laugh and choking. ‘You would appreciate that?’
‘I find I don’t relish the idea of sharing your body.’
‘Well now, lass, you denied me your body.’
‘I did,’ she said. ‘Though I sort of expected you to take your husbandly rights without my leave.’
‘Is that what you would have preferred?’
‘No,’ she said, her face feeling hot, her throat scratchy.
‘And so now you’re concerned about my taste for doxies?’
‘It is a concern.’
‘There haven’t been any,’ he said.
She blinked. ‘None?’
‘Oh, no, lass, many. But all before you.’
‘Oh.’
‘I found I didn’t have the taste for it.’
‘Why not?’
‘The hell if I know. All I know is that when craving the touch of my innocent wife, it did not appeal to me to go to a lightskirt to find my pleasure.’
‘Well, I would like for that to be… I would like for you to not.’
‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I vow. Only you.’
She hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t expected for him to promise, to vow. And he had. Easily.
‘Good. And if there any more…tricks that you wish for me to learn that are not becoming of a lady… I find that I quite enjoyed learning those others.’
‘Vixen.’
‘Perhaps I am. I would’ve done quite well as a duke’s wife. The peerage are notoriously unfaithful to one another. Perhaps I would’ve enjoyed exploring my many options.’
‘You have one option.’
‘And that is?’
‘My cock. And with it, you may unveil the mysteries of the universe.’
‘That is quite a lot of confidence in one cock.’
‘Confidence has never been my issue.’
‘Thank you,’ she said finally. ‘For the toast.’
‘You’re welcome.’
A warmth spread in her chest. This was what had been missing. This. He held her all night long, then he had brought her toast. In that, he had shown just a small bit of caring. And she found that she had desperately needed it. Just something to show that he was…changed.
Because she was changed. And there was no denying it.
‘And thank you for the fidelity.’
‘There is a cost to that,’ he said.
‘What is that?’
‘You no longer have your own bedchamber.’
A delicious, forbidden shiver raced through her. ‘If I can have toast, then it will be a small price to pay.’
‘I believe you’ve just sold your body for toast.’
‘And yet I find myself unashamed.’
It was true. With him, there was no shame.
She had made friends here and they were a balm for her loneliness. But this was something more. The fulfilment of a need she hadn’t realised she’d had.
Such a strange thing to have moved into a life so far away from the one she had imagined, only to find exactly what she had been searching for.