Saved by the Highlander (16 page)

Lord Roderick gazed down at Alana’s face with a little smile as if it delighted him to see her so submissive. He stroked her cheek. Without taking his eyes from Alana’s worship, he said, “See the look on Alana’s face, little Mary? That is the look of a girl who knows her master, and wishes to worship him as she must.”

He does not deserve to have his cock worshipped,
Alice thought.
But I know a man who does.

Behind her, to Alice’s everlasting astonishment, that man’s voice said. “Good morning, my lord. I hope you will stand up and come quietly with me. Else it will go very ill with you.”

Chapter Nineteen

All the way up the glen to Lormoran, guiding the earl’s soldiers, knowing that everything truly depended on whether Fergus could raise the village against its laird, Niall told himself that the villain would not slay her, when he had her so neatly in his power. Still, he feared the very worst: the marring of every good thing he had thought might be within his grasp, if he could just let her go home to England, and follow in his full state as a clan chief and as possessor of the full noble lineage he had never cared about before. He feared finding Alice dead, or, worse if that were possible, hearing that the lord of Lormoran had in his lunacy done something so terrible that Niall would not even have a body to bury.

When Elisabeth Grant’s nephew, who was also Niall’s third cousin on his mother’s side, came over the hills nearly dead from the run, to say that Lady Alice was being held, and flogged, at Lormoran, Niall had wanted to head straight back over the same hills with twenty men in a desperate hope of surprising the laird’s guards and getting Alice away before the garrison in the village came to answer any alarm.

But Fergus had restrained him.

“Lad,” he said, “hear the truth. If Lady Alice is dead, it will not help to get yourself killed as well. If she is alive, she will be alive yet a day or two. Her father’s men must be near.”

Niall sent Callum back over the hills to Lormoran, to tell old Elisabeth that Niall would bring aid, and that if she could, she must raise the village against Lord Roderick. An hour later, a full troop of the earl of Mercester’s regiment, whose colonel was Jack Lourcy, the earl’s brother and Alice’s uncle, arrived in Kilmorin.

* * *

The only fighting that needed doing was against two of the castle guards, who ran to ring the alarm bell. It had been necessary to knock them down, and an arm got broken, but at the sight of the English soldiers the rest of the guard surrendered. It had been a long time indeed since the lords of Lormoran had commanded the true loyalty of their servants. When Niall promised that the wicked deeds in which they had involved themselves on Lord Roderick’s service would find mercy, they laid down their swords at the castle gate.

There Elisabeth Grant had met him and embraced him. There had been enmity between Niall’s father and her brother, so that she could well say that she could not have safely undone the evils of the Sperry family before such a crisis arose as this. Colonel Lourcy himself went with her to the village, taking half his troop, while the other half accompanied Niall into the castle itself. Niall’s claymore was in his hand, and his palm itched to swing it.

He saw poor, naked Alice, kneeling with the other girl at the feet of her vile tormenter, and he spoke to the tormenter. Alice turned to look at him, her eyes huge and bright. She had been sitting on her heels, and now she knelt up and he could see the terrible state of her backside, which seemed a solid mess of weals from a punishment cane. Rage burned hot in his chest, and he strode forward as Lord Roderick, caught with his gown open and his cock hard, looking almost ridiculous, rose and spluttered, “What is the meaning of this? MacAlpin, you shall pay for this armed intrusion with your life.”

“Girls,” Niall said calmly. “Get up and come and get behind me, please.”

“Do not obey him, you filthy sluts!” Lord Roderick shouted.

Alice rose and scurried toward Niall. He wished he could look into her eyes, but he could only assure himself that she had reached safety, out of the corner of his eye, and keep his watch on Lord Roderick.

Alana moved with much less certainty. She backed away from Lord Roderick, looking from his face to Niall’s and back again as if wondering whether the lord of Lormoran still had some cruel trick to play.

Niall kept his eyes locked on Lord Roderick’s, but he said, “It is all done with his lordship here, my girl. Depend upon it. Once Lady Alice’s uncle hears of the way life has been in the village and in the demesnes of this sorry excuse for a laird, he will be brought to Edinburgh and attainted. Things are going to change here at last, my girl, and you need not fear this poor creature any longer.”

Lord Roderick’s response was exactly as Niall had hoped it might be. With his eyes full of fury, he bellowed, “No MacAlpin shall ever call the lord of Lormoran a poor creature!” With his gown still open he charged at Niall, his now-flaccid cock swinging ridiculously as he came. When Niall had decided to beard him with his taunts, he had been sure in his wrath at the terrible state of his intended bride’s bottom that he would simply strike Lord Roderick’s head from his shoulders with his claymore. But the sight of the man in his impotent rage, and the thought of how much more Alice deserved to have this rescue unsullied by bloodshed than Lord Roderick deserved death at Niall’s hand, made him stay his blade. As Roderick tried to close with Niall, he merely fetched the lord a blow with the pommel of his claymore and laid him out upon the floor. At that point, the detachment of soldiers Colonel Lourcy had left with him entered the room and stood over Lord Roderick.

Then at last Niall turned to Alice. “Did I not tell you I would find you, my lady?” he said, smiling despite the tears he saw in her eyes, and hoping that his joy would communicate itself to her.

“I never doubted, Mr. MacAlpin,” she said, smiling herself now through those tears.

Now Niall gathered her carefully into his arms, still holding the claymore in his right hand, but unwilling to take even the time needed to sheathe it before he felt his beautiful, noble girl inside his embrace. Alice nestled her cheek against his shirt and kissed his plaid. “Would you have strapped me?” she asked. “If I had doubted?”

“Hush, lass,” Niall said, a little shocked that Alice would think of the strap at a time like this. “Of course I wouldn’t.”

“Oh,” Alice said. Did she sound disappointed?

* * *

Of course Alice had to go home to England before she could return to the highlands. Many more arrangements needed making than would have attended the little marriage ceremony Niall had planned on bribing the minister into performing. Among other things, Lormoran had to be granted with a new charter, by letters patent, to the chief of Clan Alpin.

In the end, too, Alice must be wed at Mowton, in the same chapel where her ancestor Anne of Mowton, countess of Mercester, had been twice wed. The story went that the first of those marriages had to been to a man even more wicked than Lord Roderick.

After the little ceremony and the grand banquet, with the bed blessed by a bishop, Niall and Alice stood next to that bed, holding one another’s hands and gazing into one another’s eyes. Six months had passed, and with them Alice’s nineteenth birthday, since the last time Niall had held her, there in the library of Lormoran Castle. Since he had arrived in Mowton he had seen almost nothing of her, as the strictures of courtly society provided terribly little time for a noble bride to meet her bridegroom.

At last, with the words of the bishop, that had all changed. The months seemed to fall away, and it was as if they were back in Niall’s croft house in Kilmorin, after she had told him about what the outlaws had done and said to her on the road. Throughout their wedding day, Alice had seemed very shy with him, though she gave him many a blushing smile—especially throughout the banquet, when the talk turned, as it occasionally did, to bawdier matters.

* * *

Niall said gently, “Do you remember what we were about to do, when the soldiers arrived, these six months past in the highlands?”

Alice felt the redness suffuse her cheeks. “Yes, my lord,” she replied quietly, at the same time endeavoring to keep her lips from twitching.

“Shall we continue with that now, my love?”

Alice nodded quickly, but then she said, “I left so soon with my uncle, my lord, that I did not have a chance to tell you about what that vile madman did to me. I think, as my husband, you should know, just as I told you about the outlaws.”

She looked up at Niall, so handsome in his great kilt. She could not believe now that she had ever thought the garment barbaric. She only hoped that he found her green velvet gown as pleasing as he might an arisaid of MacAlpin tartan.

“Hush, my lady,” he said. “The man is fast in prison now, and likely to be hanged. There is no need to remember such painful things.”

“But there is,” Alice said urgently. “For the things that he made me feel, terrible though the fashion of it was, are things that you, too, must make me feel.”

Niall shook his head gently, as if in confusion. “What do you mean, my lady?”

“I mean,” she said, “that you must claim back from his awful touch those parts of me that a husband takes special charge of.” Now she felt that her eyes, as they looked up into his, must seem to grow a little desperate. But her heart swelled with joy as Niall pulled her close to him and held her tightly. “Tell me then,” he said.

She nestled her face against the fine linen of the shirt he must have had made new for his wedding. The plaid he wore today, in which to be married, seemed similarly new-made, its colors much more vibrant than those of the kilts he had worn in which to rescue her first upon the road and then in the castle. The tartan, though, was just the same, just as she knew Niall himself would be the same whether she called him my lord or Mr. MacAlpin, or simply Niall.

Softly Alice said to his shirt, “He made me watch him with Alana.”

“Watch him doing what?” Niall asked gently.

“Fucking her,” Alice breathed. “In her… In her bottom.”

Little Alana had returned home to her family, they had told her, and Niall had pledged to her parents to give her a dowry large enough that her bridegroom could easily dispense with the ill thoughts that Alana’s time as Lord Roderick’s special maid might occasion.

“The blackguard,” Niall said, though something in his voice made Alice wonder if he could not help also growing a little hard at the shameful thought.

“My lord,” Alice whispered, “I want you to do it to me. I have not been able to stop thinking about it. He told me he would do it to me, and all I could think was that if it were you, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

Alice felt the wetness begin the flow between her thighs, and she felt her face grow all the hotter at the lovely, wanton sensation.

“I suppose,” her new husband said. “I must give you your wish then.”

Alice giggled. Just to be held in his arms, and to hear that he wanted to possess her so utterly, made every terrible thing that had happened to her seem like a trifle. “And…” she said, suddenly sliding out of his embrace, feeling like a wriggling little fish, “just before you burst in, he made me watch something else.” Hoping she would astonish him, Alice fell to her knees in front of him and began to raise his kilt.

“What are you doing, sweetling?” he gasped, as she boldly raised the plaid and the shirt together, revealing his hard manhood, only a scant inch from her face. Knowing her face to be utterly scarlet, she dropped the fabric and looked up at him.

“I forgot to ask permission,” she said. “I am sorry, my lord.” She tried to put on a penitent look. “Must I be spanked?”

The hopefulness in her voice must have made him laugh, but she thought she could hear in his mirth also simple, pure joy. “I suppose you must,” he said. “But not now. Now, I give you permission to…” Words seemed to fail him then, as Alice, very reverently this time, began again to lift his plaid.

“To worship your cock?” she whispered, looking upon his loins again and not taking her eyes away.

“Yes,” Niall said. “You may worship my cock, my lady.”

“Like this?” Alice asked, and opened her mouth and took him inside.

Niall groaned. “Yes, sweetling. Just like that.”

Alice could not answer, unless the tender way she tried to suckle his prick, and the submissive down-turning of her eyes to her shameful task, could be considered a reply. Niall, to her joyful surprise, put his right hand down to clutch her golden hair, and force her mouth further down upon him, just a little, as if it felt to him much, much too good to have his noble bride on her knees before him, her mouth full of cock. She pictured him gazing down in rapture, and hearing gladly the wet, submissive sounds of her worship, and the fancy made her cunny seem to flow more greatly than it ever had before.

So moving must he have found the sight that he seemed to have come close to spending already. Much as Alice wished to swallow his seed—and she hoped she would, someday soon—she knew he must think it would not do, on their wedding night. She was not surprised then, when Niall lifted her up, kissed her passionately, and whispered, “It is time for us to be naked, one with the other.”

Alice felt herself smile and she twined her arms around his back. “Naked,” she sighed. “Naked with my barbarian, at last.”

“Barbarian, my lady?” Niall asked with mock severity.

“Did you not know, my lord? It is like a fairy story, with me. I would never give my maidenhead to any but a barbarian nobleman.” She pulled her head back a bit and looked up at him. “Thank heaven a true savage tried to have me slain in the road.”

When they were naked one with the other at last, they lay upon the bed, the coverlet thrown back. It was so different from any wedding night she had ever heard of: something about her strange nature, whether it was born in her or it had come out with the exceedingly unusual events of six months before, when nakedness had become a part of Alice’s life, first in the road, and then in Niall’s croft house, and finally in Lormoran Castle, made her revel ecstatically and even wantonly in the lewd caresses Niall bestowed upon her young body, She could not help lying back and welcoming his fingers, his tongue, and even his cock as he explored her sweet charms for the first time, while she cried out with need for more—for everything.