The Campbell Trilogy (126 page)

For one moment she wanted to tell him. But she knew she could not take the chance. He would insist on claiming his son and Dougall would be the one to suffer for both their mistakes.

Duncan placed the blade flat in his hands and held it out for Dougall to examine. The enormous sword had to be at least a few inches taller than her son. “This belonged to my father and before that his father—passed down from father to son all the way back to my ancestor who fought alongside King Robert the Bruce at the great Battle of Bannockburn. It’s stained with the blood of freedom.” There was a deep, reverent tone in his voice that Jeannie had never heard before.

Dougall stared up at him, eyes wide with awe, hesitating.

“Go ahead,” Duncan said with a smile. “You can touch it.”

Dougall traced his finger over the bone carving. “What are these designs? It looks like a spider web.”

“It is,” Duncan said, but didn’t elaborate. “Maybe
one day, I’ll tell you about it. Would you care to hold it?”

Would a wolf like a juicy leg of lamb?

Dougall didn’t need to be asked twice. He reached out and grasped the horn handle in his small hands. When Duncan released it, the tip of the blade dropped almost to the ground before Dougall managed to get it under control. He tried to swing it around, but it was clear that the sword was too big for him. His cheeks mottled with color. “I hope my ancestors weren’t quite so tall.”

He meant it as a joke, but Duncan must have discerned the embarrassment behind the comment. “How old are you?”

Jeannie sucked in her breath so sharply, she was glad Duncan was focused on her son. “I was nine last Michaelmas.”

Only when Duncan nodded did she exhale. “I was smaller than the other boys at that age, too,” he said.

Her moment of relief vanished in the immediate jump of her pulse. There was no reason for him to make the connection. Her son had her features and the dark auburn hair of—

His uncle.
Dear God, why had she never noticed before? Dougall had the same color hair as Jamie Campbell. She felt the panic closing around her and forced herself to breathe evenly. There was no reason for him to suspect, she kept telling herself.

Then why was her heart racing as if she’d just run a marathon?

“You were?” Dougall asked, his eyes narrowing skeptically.

Jeannie didn’t blame him. She found it hard to picture Duncan as anything less than the rocky mountain of a man he was now herself.

“Aye. It made me work harder to prove myself. Find your strength here first,” he pointed to his head, “and
you will know how to use the other when it comes. There are other advantages to being small.”

“Like what?”

“I can show you if you’d like.”

No
! Jeannie thought with barely concealed horror.

“When?” Dougall asked, unable to hide his eagerness. He broke into a wide smile, the dimple in his cheek an exact mirror of the man standing before him. They looked nothing alike, but the signs were there if you looked closed enough. She prayed no one did.

Duncan chuckled. “You’d best check with Jam”—he stopped to correct himself—“the captain first.”

“I’ll do it right now,” Dougall said and ran off toward the keep. Jeannie opened her mouth to stop him, but snapped it shut again, deciding to let her son go. The way Duncan was looking at him made her uneasy.
He couldn’t guess.
But saying it over and over did not stop the panic from eating at her.

In Dougall’s eagerness, he’d neglected to return the bow and arrows he’d been practicing with to the armory. Jeannie walked toward them, but Duncan cut her off. “You don’t want me around your son, why?”

The suspicion in his voice chilled her blood. He was too damned observant. She forced her gaze to his, holding it steady and unflinching.
No reaction.
No emotion. “What good can come of it?” she said brusquely. “In a few days you will go your way and I will go mine. It is better that way.”

“A clean break, is that it?”

There was a dark edge to his voice that made the hair on her arms stand up straight. Jeannie didn’t think of herself as a coward, but her first instinct was to turn and run. That dangerous energy she’d sensed in him on their journey was right there, just under the surface, threatening to break free.

His fingers wrapped around her wrist and brought
her toward him. “Do you really think that is possible, Jeannie?”

She wrenched her arm away. “Yes.” It had to be. But her heart called her a liar. And he knew it.

Just leave me alone!
She picked up the bow and quiver and marched toward the armory. The small wooden building was cold and dark and smelled of damp. After replacing the weapons, she turned to leave, but Duncan blocked the door, his tall, well-muscled physique an imposing silhouette.

“I’m not finished.”

It had been a mistake to turn her back on him, to let him corner her. She didn’t trust herself. His being close like this always made her unable to think straight.

He closed the door behind him, making the room feel even smaller. The musty air of the armory darkened with his masculine scent and the cool air heated with the fire crackling between them. Thin rays of light streamed through the spaces between the wooden planks, providing barely enough light to see. But she could feel him; her senses honed on everything about him. Every inch of his tall, muscled frame. Every strand of silky black hair. Every thin line etched around his mouth.

He was using his size—his masculinity—against her, as if challenging her to ignore the desire taut between them. She wouldn’t let him intimidate her. But she felt a flash of sympathy for the men he’d faced on the battlefield.

“Well, I am,” Jeannie said, trying to push past him. But he wouldn’t let her go, catching her to him, their bodies brushing against one another, yet to her it felt as if she’d just caught fire. “There is nothing more to say.” Her voice shook, her nerves fluttering wildly.

“I think there is much more to say.” The deep brogue of his voice seeped into her bones. His jaw was pulled
taut and his piercing blue eyes seemed to tear away her secrets as he stared down into her face.

Her heart thudded with premonition. She sensed his curiosity about Dougall and knew she had to distract him.

Or maybe that was just her excuse for what she did next.

She did the only thing she could think of when he surrounded her like this. When her body hummed with sensation. When she looked up at his mouth and her body flooded with desire.

She kissed him. Not a chaste touch of the lips, but a full meeting of mouth and body. The rope holding them apart snapped and all the passion building between them over the past weeks exploded into fierce, drowning need.

They tore at one another, trying to get closer, trying to douse the flames that threatened to incinerate them both.

His heat enveloped her. His maleness. The seductive power of his rock-hard body. There was something primitively satisfying about a big, strong man taking you in his arms.

It felt too good. Too right. She wanted to cry out with the perfection of it. This was what she’d been missing, this was what had haunted her for all those years.

His mouth moved over hers, hungrily, passionately. Every touch a brand.

He groaned, opening her lips with his, devouring her with his mouth, with bold thrusts of his tongue, with his hand as he cupped her bottom and brought her against him. His erection rose hard between them, the thick steel column nudged erotically between her legs.

She felt his size. His power.

She quivered—softened—and felt the hot pulse between her legs. Her hips circled, rubbing against him as
she tried to ease the restlessness, the anxiousness, the urgency.

All she could think about was him inside her. Filling her. Making her his. Again.

Duncan was out of control. The hunger raged inside him, wild and ravenous. The taste of her passion was like ambrosia to a starving man.

He couldn’t get enough. He kissed her harder. Deeper. Drinking her in with his mouth and tongue. With every breath.

He’d forgotten how good she felt in his arms. How soft and feminine. How she smelled like some kind of exotic flower. The silky soft waves of her hair tumbled down her back over his hands. He remembered how it had felt spilled out over his chest and he groaned, sliding his tongue in her mouth with long, insistent strokes.

Her kiss had taken him by surprise, but the flare of passion that burst between them did not. For ten long years this primitive part of him had been repressed, but one taste of her and the chains of civility snapped like a silken thread.

His body raged as hot as a blacksmith’s fire. Control a distant memory. The feel of her lush curves pressed against him was too much to take. The sweet feminine surrender an aphrodisiac too powerful to deny.

Every barbarian instinct in him urged to take her. To lift her skirts, thrust inside her, and make her his. Again. But this time he would never let her go.

It had been too damned long. He cupped her bottom and lifted her against him. Blood rushed to his already rock-hard erection, pushing him to near bursting. When she rocked against him, he pulsed and nearly came. Her body told him what she wanted.

Knowing it was going too fast, that he was being too rough, that he could hurt her, he gathered every last
ounce of his control and tried to slow down. To tame the wildness.

But she wouldn’t let him, moaning her protest. She circled her hips against him insistently, rubbing, and kissing him with all the frenzy he’d tried to temper.

He growled, the last remnants of nobility ripped to shreds. His need for her drove him over the edge.

Breaking the kiss, he trailed his mouth down the long column of her throat. Tasting the warmth of her skin, inhaling her fresh scent. He loosened the ties of her cloak with one hand, and then opened the top buttons of her velvet doublet to kiss her chest. To slide his tongue below her sark along the edge of her stays.

She moaned when his tongue flicked the taut bead of her puckered flesh and gripped his shoulders as if her knees had just given out.

From the edge of consciousness he realized how dangerous this was—they could be discovered at any moment—but that only heightened the excitement, the urgency. Later, there would be time to strip her naked, to lick and suck every juicy inch of her, but right now they were both too ravenous.

His tongue circled the hard peak of her nipple, teasing, as his hand lifted her skirts and bunched them around her hips.

She sucked in her breath at the blast of cold air, but he didn’t give her time to protest. His hand found her heat.

His cock jerked at the erotic touch, at the soft silkiness sliding under his fingertips. He stroked her, a long gentle swipe along the slit of her womanhood.

“God, you are so wet,” he groaned.

She didn’t say anything, but made a soft sound in her throat and her body quivered.

He felt the dampness spread between her legs and couldn’t wait for her to come. For her body to contract
and shudder around him, for her to cry out with pleasure as she shattered.

He slid his finger inside her. A slow thrust first and then more insistently. Circling, teasing. Rubbing that sensitive little spot until her breath hitched in short, demanding gasps.

He loosed the ties of his breeches. His erection sprang free, the cold air a relief to his red-hot skin. A drop of anticipation glistened on the tip. Hooking one shapely leg over his arm, he bent his knees a little to find the angle …

His stomach muscles clenched as the heavy head of his cock nudged damp swollen flesh. The muscles in his neck and shoulders tightened, straining against the urge to drive up high inside her.

He held her there just like that—flesh to flesh—and forced her to look at him. To see him. To know that it was he who was pleasuring her. That it was he who could make her feel like this. That she belonged to him.

The mindless surrender of her body was not enough.

Her gaze met his, half-lidded, soft and hazy. Her beautiful features slack with desire. “Duncan,” she said, her voice pleading.

A pure shot of masculine satisfaction surged through him, but he needed more. He wanted all of her—body, heart, and soul. The need to hear her say it outweighed even the lust raging inside him. “Tell me you want this, Jeannie. Tell me you want me.”
Only me.

Her eyes widened, she appeared startled as if out of a dream. “I—”

She hesitated.

His body chilled, sensing the words before she spoke. The bite of disappointment snapped down on his chest like a spiked steel trap.

Jeannie fought to hold on to the passionate haze that dulled her senses—the shimmery effervescent wave, the tingling, the frantic quickening of her pulse—but it slipped through her fingers like water through a sieve. The moment was gone and unwanted lucidity forged a path of cool rationality in her mind.

Her body throbbed with complaint at the sharp curtailment of pleasure. It felt as if she’d been brought to the very edge of paradise only to be shoved forcefully back to earth.

An irrational burst of anger hit her. Why did he have to do this? Why did he have to force her to acknowledge what was happening? Why couldn’t they just forget about everything else and let desire take over?