Sins of the Highlander (A Highland Erotic Romance) (6 page)

She was the laird’s sister. She was a Mackenzie.

Niall was a MacRae, who’d sworn a blood oath of fealty to the laird. He’d vowed to protect the laird—and all the Mackenzies—to the death.

Her lips, her soft, pink, plump lips, parted as she stared up at him.

“So bonny.” Gently, he smoothed her riotous hair back from her face. He ran a finger across her mouth, perfect for kissing…or for wrapping around his shaft.

Later.

To know her completely, to understand her body, how it felt, tasted, moved beneath him—those were the things that mattered most. He wanted to brand them into his memory.

He traced the dark slashes of her eyebrows with his fingertips. Bending down, he feathered kisses across her forehead. No part of her would remain untouched, no area unexplored.

“Niall.” A breath, a plea against his ear.

“Lie still, Aileen.”

She obeyed his gentle command as he swiped his fingers down her hairline. When he licked the shell of her ear, she squirmed, but he held her firm.

Her neck was long and pale, like a swan’s. Arching her head back, she bared it for him.

For a long moment, Niall stared at the display of skin so pale that even in the darkness, he could see the blue pulse threading through her jugular vein. In a clear message of trust, Aileen offered herself.

He ran his hands over the delicate skin, then followed with his lips, alternating between sucks and soft bites down the smooth column and across her shoulders.

“Aye.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Make me remember you, Niall. Never let me forget.”

Chapter Five

Her thought was uncannily similar to his own. He wanted to brand this moment—this night—into his memory. Later, when he’s alone in battle, surrounded by violence and death, he’ll have the memory of her smooth skin, her sweet scent, her tender softness.

He paused, breathing heavily against her neck. The compulsion to gather her into his arms and carry her away from this place nearly overwhelmed him. They’d ride somewhere safe, far from the Highlands, from Scotland, even from England, and the vows that must keep them apart.

It was an impossible fantasy. Niall had sworn an oath of fealty to the laird, and honor demanded he keep that oath. No matter what his feelings were for the man’s beautiful half sister.

He traced her collarbones with his fingers, then his lips, tasting tall Highland grasses.

“I can’t get enough of you,” he said, swallowing down a groan. He was hungry for her. No, he was ravenous. He wanted to devour every inch of her. But he must take his time. He must savor every sweet taste and brand each one into his memory.

Moving lower, he licked the soft, curved mound of her breast.

She gave a ragged sigh.

Straightening, he gazed at her face. Shadows darkened her skin as she raised her arms to stretch them overhead.

A look of wonder was etched on her face. “The way you touch me with your hands and mouth…it is so…so
decadent
.” Her eyes glittered as they met his. She reached up and pressed her palm against his chest.

He slid his hands from her collarbones to her breasts, cupping them in his hands and weighing gently. Small and pert, they molded to his rounded palms. Smoothing his fingertips over her nipples, he watched with profound appreciation as they grew into hard pink nubs. He bent to capture one of them between his lips.

Gasping in pleasure, she slipped her thigh between his legs, rubbing against his cock until it grew full to bursting and throbbed with impatience. Ignoring his body’s demand to claim her fast and hard, Niall moved to the other breast and worked it with his mouth, kneading the flesh of both globes with his hands until the nipples puckered taut.

He trailed kisses down the underswell, stroking his hand over her belly. His hand looked massive against her tiny waist. “You are so small,” he said in surprise.

Then he realized it was her presence that filled a room, that made her seem regal and tall, not her physical size.

She didn’t speak, just arched her body into his hands, against his mouth.

He swiped his tongue around the circle of her bellybutton, then lower, skirting the top of the triangle of hair that hid her womanhood.

She gasped in shock. Her body squirmed away in an instinctual response to the surprise.

“What are…?” She let the question hang, and something akin to relief flooded through Niall. Certain pleasures were still new to her. When her body had gone rigid in her study, it was because she had never experienced a man’s fingers stroking between her legs, not because she didn’t want them there.

Niall looked up to scrutinize her face. Her violet eyes were wide with shock, wonder…and curiosity.

“I want to kiss you, Aileen,” he murmured. “Everywhere.”

“Are you…are you sure?”

“Aye.”

Fear tinged her expression. She searched his face with her gaze. “You…it won’t hurt, will it?” she breathed.

He clenched his jaw. This woman had never been properly loved.

He placed a heavy hand on her thigh. “Open to me.”

Tension hummed beneath her skin as if she were a frightened bird. But she gazed at him in the eye and nodded.

This was an altogether different side of the take-charge, confident lady he knew. The lady who ran her castle efficiently, who endured the abusive husband, ultimately using her own sharp intelligence to control their relationship.

Aileen Munro was inexperienced. Frightened by the intensity of what she was feeling, frightened of what he could make her feel.

“Don’t be afraid, Aileen,” he murmured. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

In a way, that was a lie. They both had so much to fear. He could be killed for touching her, and she could be banished.

Yet he could not stop. Neither, it seemed, could she.

Spreading her legs wide, he moved down and eased himself between them. Her slit opened before him.

The breath caught in his throat. “Have you ever seen yourself as I am seeing you now?”

“Nay,” came the throaty answer from above.

“You are open to me and shining pink.”

As if she needed some contact with him, her foot stroked along the length of his hip.

He inhaled a deep breath through his nose. When he spoke, his voice was gruff. “You smell like woman, like desire. You smell like you want me.”

“I do, Niall. I want you.”

His cock throbbed, pulsing in demand.

Opening her wider with his thumbs, he swiped the tip of his tongue in a straight line from the top of her glistening slit downward. She bucked, but he held her firm. He trailed little kisses against the inside of her pale thigh. “Your cream tastes like heaven,” he murmured. “I want to devour you. Drown in you.”

Consumed by her heat and her smooth flavor, he slipped one finger deep into her sheath.

Her hips rose off the bed and she cried out, a thin sound filled with desperate need.

She grew hotter against his mouth as the blood rushed between her legs, plumping her slick lips. Her channel throbbed around his finger, pulsing in time to her heart. The rasping sounds of her breaths grew louder above him. He circled his tongue around her hardening nub, coaxing it from its protective cowl.

Slowly, he drew his finger out of her and then, just as slowly, pushed two back in. She was so tight. He groaned against her slick flesh, thinking of replacing his fingers with his stiff cock, of her core clenching around him, drawing him out, bringing him to completion.

Do it, Aileen,
he commanded in his mind.
Come for me.

He thrust his fingers into her wet heat. Her hands threaded in his hair and pressed his mouth against her.

She grew tighter, hotter. Her taste surrounded him, enveloped him. Her body twisted and writhed, but he held her firmly with his free hand, grazing his fingertips over the taut bud of her nipple. Gently, he sucked her nub between his lips.

Her whimpering noises stopped, her body arched and froze. Her hands fell from his head. From his fingertips, Niall felt her shudder. Deep pulses rolled down his fingers, up to his lips. Niall closed his eyes and let her pleasure flow into him.

When it subsided, he kissed her gently one last time then moved back. Her plump lips glowed, now a deep, lush blood-red in color. Slowly, he withdrew his fingers, stroking softly up her slit before he crawled up her body, rubbing his cock against her silky skin all the way.

Her eyes were closed. A small smile curled the corners of her lips. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was asleep, dreaming pleasant dreams.

“I’m not finished yet,” he said, his voice husky.

“Mmm.” Her smile grew, but she didn’t open her eyes.

Gently, Niall rolled her onto her stomach.

What he saw on her back made him hiss in a breath. Slender, raised silvery lines marred her perfect ivory skin. They crisscrossed from her shoulder blades down to the swell of her bottom.

Walter’s work.

“Aye,” she murmured, and he realized he’d hissed the words aloud.

A murderous rage flooded through him. With shaking fingers, he traced one of the lines. How could he have left her under that man’s thumb? How could he have been so selfish, so cowardly?

Again Niall regretted Walter not being alive so he could kill him himself.

The scars ended just above the swell of her buttocks. She was trembling now, just a slight vibration of her body. Whether it was a reawakening fear or arousal, he didn’t know.

He pressed his fingers into the flesh of her arse and brushed his lips against her rounded cheek, breathing in the musky scent of her lust. Sliding his hand down her cleft, he felt her, slick and hot, her arousal dribbling down the inside of her thigh.

His fingers skated back through her drenched folds to circle her tightly clenched hole, and the desire to claim her that way skittered down his spine and through his ballocks, making his cock jump.

He rubbed her gently, pushing the merest tip of his finger inside. She gasped.

No, not tonight. Tonight was for gentle pleasures. When she was completely comfortable, when she trusted him, when she knew without a doubt he would never hurt her like Walter had hurt her. In a month or two, maybe…

Reality slammed into him like a punch in the gut. In a month she would be promised to someone else. Not him.

Never him.

Niall couldn’t stop the low growl that emerged from his throat.

“Niall?”

He forcibly relaxed his fingers, which had clenched and dug into her flesh.

“I must stop thinking of you with someone else,” he bit out.

“There isn’t anyone else. There never has been.”

“But there will be.”

“Nay. Never.”

With those simple words, spoken with complete confidence, he relaxed. The future didn’t matter. The past didn’t matter. Not right now. For now, she was his. Completely.

He kissed the pink fingerprint on her bottom where he had gripped her so tightly. She wiggled into his lips, groaning. Smiling, he rubbed his thumb over the taut flesh, down to the soft crease where it met her thigh. His lips followed the path of his fingertips, reveling in the petal-like softness of her skin.

Her thighs were equally soft. He rubbed and explored them, moving lower to the backs of her knees, brushing them gently with his lips until she gasped.

Niall loved the little sounds she made. She was his water nymph, small, sinuous, and smooth.

He moved back up her body, kissing the rounded curve of her arse cheek, but he couldn’t avoid the scars. God, there were so many of them. Who had cared for her wounds? Who had held her through her pain? It killed him that he wasn’t there. That he hadn’t helped her.

Mistaking his silent fury for disgust, she twisted underneath him. “I’m sorry, Niall. I know they’re ugly. Repugnant. Please—”

He pressed his hand over her back, not allowing her to move.

“Nothing about you is ugly or repugnant, do you hear me? Nothing.” His voice was harsher than he’d intended.

She stilled, and Niall swallowed hard. “What he did to you…”

God, he’d let it happen. If only he’d found a way to stop it. But he’d been ineffective. Useless. Because of him, she’d suffered.

Closing his eyes, Niall imagined the beatings. He imagined her back covered with blood, open wounds.

“I’m so sorry,” he choked out. “It’s my fault.”

“What?” she gasped. “It isn’t your fault!”

“I should have stopped him.”

“You couldn’t have.” She twisted again beneath him. “Please. Let me see you.”

He released her, and she flipped over, half rising to wrap her arms around him as she looked into his face.

“Understand this, Niall MacRae. Walter was a violent man. He punished me as he saw fit, and, aye, I hated him for it. But the guilt for my scars rests on no man’s conscience except for Walter Munro’s, do you understand? It was his doing, his sin. No one else’s.”

“If I’d stopped him—”

Reaching up, she cupped his face in her hands. “You were half his age. A warrior already, but still young and untrained. I knew you hated him too. I knew you wanted to challenge him, to make him stop. But there is no way you could have. You were bound to him, to this castle, and you did what any smart lad should have done. You waited for the right moment, and you left.”

“I left you alone,” he said, his voice rough with self-derision.

Her fingers tightened over his cheeks, her eyes shining as she gazed up at him. “I was shackled to him by a sacred oath, until death. Nothing could break that, not even an honorable young warrior. If you’d asked me to run away with you, I wouldn’t have gone. If you’d asked me to conspire against him, I wouldn’t have done it. You knew that, and you had too much intrinsic honor to even imagine such schemes.

“You were not bound to him by unbreakable ties as I was, Niall. I was so happy you found a way to escape from under his thumb. I know that you suffered as much in your training as I did in my marriage.”