The MacNaughton Bride (20 page)

But parts of her were
craving even more of him – she wanted to touch him.
 
All of him.
 
She wanted to feel all of his skin against all of hers, with
no clothing as a barrier.
 
It was
an entirely sinful wish, she knew, but also one she intended on fulfilling.

Her husband pulled a little
away from her to sprinkle butterfly kisses all over her face.
 
“I just want to say something to
you.
 
This is our bed.
 
We are alone in this room.
 
What goes on between us is entirely
between the two of us – and whatever happens, as long as we both want it
– will be glorious, I can tell.”
 
Kell
caught her eyes and stared into them
seriously.
 
“There’s nothing you
could do to me that would hurt me.
 
I adore your touch, and you can touch me anywhere you like.”
 
He rolled onto his back and stretched,
then finished with, “I am yours to do with as you wish.”

Aislinn’s
eyes grew round, and he almost burst when she innocently licked her lips, looking
him up and down eagerly.
 
“Would it
hurt you to take your clothes off?”
 
Aislinn
, always curious about things regarding
the human body, had wondered just exactly what the thing looked like that he’d
used to stab up into her when he’d taken her virginity.
 
If he was going to let her do as she
pleased with him, then she was going to take full advantage.
 
If he thought that she was unladylike
for it, then so be it.
 

Kell
was only too happy to disrobe for her.
 
It was a question he’d wanted to hear from her for a long time.

When he lay stretched out
on the bed before her as she sat tailor fashioned,
Aislinn
knew immediately exactly what weapon he’d used – and what a weapon it
was.
 
That part of him – that
Jenny had said was a penis – was humongous, and stood out from his body
as if it was an entity in and of itself.
 
It was slightly curved, veined in blue but overall reddish at the same
time, with a big, bulbous end that looked like there were very few places it was
likely to go comfortably.

And well she knew
that.
 
But still, it was
fascinating.
 
She reached out
tentatively towards it, then glanced up at him.
 
“Is it okay if I touch it?”
 

Kell
swallowed hard, hoping it was.
 
“Yes.”
 
He wasn’t hesitant
in his response, because he didn’t want her to think that he didn’t want her to
touch him.
 
He did.
 
He just wasn’t sure that he would live
through it, was all.
 
His body was
just about as tense as it had ever been in his life, and he waited patiently
for the moment when her small fingers would close around him, and send him
straight to heaven.

But they didn’t wrap around
him at first.
 
Instead, having
gotten permission from him to touch that part in which she was most interested,
Aislinn
started at his forehead, and asked a question
she’d been dying to ask since Jenny had given her that little talk about
husbands and wives and what they did in the privacy of their own bedroom.
 
“Are – are there any other ways
that men and women are made differently besides this?” She waved her spare hand
towards his huge erection while the fingertips of the other hand ran gently
down his face, as if she was trying to learn every crag and dimple.

He wasn’t sure he whether
or not he could give her a coherent answer, but he tried.
 
He was already breathing heavily, as if
he’d already impaled himself on her, which was his most fervent wish right
now.
 
“No, lass, I – I don’t
think so.”

Aislinn
nodded and continued to touch him – everywhere.
 
Those tiny fingers ignited fires over his broad shoulders
and down to his own fingertips, then across his collarbone and down the other
arm.
 
Aislinn
adjusted herself a little, and leaned over him, putting her palms on his chest,
sliding them down and over his nipples.

Kell
couldn’t help it.
 
He jumped as if
she’d hit him with a whip.
 
Aislinn
noted his reaction, almost clinically, then did it
again, carefully watching him.
 
He
groaned loudest when she touched his nipples, so she settled there for a while,
enjoying the fact that there was a second way that she could elicit cries of
pleasure from him.

She carefully plucked at
his nipples, which made him arch and moan, writhing beneath her touch.

Suddenly,
Kell
abandoned his passive role and reached up to the
collar of
Aislinn’s
dress, and with one sure tug he
ripped it down the front. Her chemise was worn and frayed and even more easily
dispatched with.
 
Aislinn
tried to back away from him, but he held her in
place until he’d left her top half nude and exposed to his lustful gaze.

Then he took her stiff arms
and put her palms over his own nipples, and did the same thing to her, cupping
those delightful breasts and flicking his finger over her nipples, coaxing them
out as gently as possible.
 
Aislinn
finally got what he was trying to do, and as she
began to want to writhe and moan from his ministrations, she started to do the
same things he was doing to her, to him.
  
He was showing her that their pleasure in each other
was mutual.
 
That what she did to
him that felt good, would feel just as good to her.

They stayed that way for a
long time, fondling each other, plucking nipples, moaning and groaning and
playing a sensual follow the leader that had them both breathing heavily by the
end.

Kell
couldn’t take any more.
 
He removed
his hands from
Aislinn’s
breasts, and removed her
hands from him, saying, “Stretch out beside me,
Aislinn
.
 
I want to feel you against me.”
 
But he stopped her from moving first,
and removed the rest of her clothes.

Aislinn
began to shiver as the remainder of her clothing fell to the floor –
partly from nerves, and partly just from the discomfort of the situation.
 
Despite his rules about not wearing
clothes to bed, she wasn’t used to being nude, especially not in front of a man
– not even him.

Kell
held his arms up to her, and she came into them somewhat reluctantly, but
Kell
didn’t give her time to wallow in feeling
uncomfortable.
 
He took her hand
and placed it where he’d been wanting it desperately for an hour or more,
closing her fingers around his throbbing self and trying not to pump in and out
of them.

Aislinn
looked down at the way he filled her hand, felt how solid he was, how much
power was there – no wonder it had hurt her when he’d invaded her
body!
 
He was practically as thick
around as her wrist, and completely solid and unyielding.
 
Yet his skin there was soft – not
rough and callused as she pictured in her head from her previous experience
with it.
 
The tip was like velvet,
and she began to concentrate her attentions there, enclosing him and pressing
him through her fist, twisting slowly, loving the feel of him in her hand.

Kell
jerked his hips away from her, making
Aislinn
look up
at him, startled out of her reverie.
 
“Whoa there, milady, or this’ll be over before it’s started.”

Of course, she had no idea
what his statement meant.
 
She only
knew that he was pressing her onto her back, his hand feathering lightly over
her lower stomach before it settled to cup her mound.
 
Aislinn
twitched, trying not to,
but not succeeding.
 
The last time
he’d been down there, he’d hurt her, and the response was natural.
 

“
Shahh
shahhhh
shahhhhh
,” he
murmured, slipping his middle finger between those plump, moist lips, dipping
down to see if any evidence of her arousal greeted his fingertip – and it
did. He was bathed in her moisture, which he crooked onto his fingertip and
brought forward a little, to that tiny bud of hers that lay in wait for him to
teach it the miracles of her body.

As he stroked the broad,
flat pad of his finger over and around and up and over her nub, he began to
slowly slide himself in and out of her lightly curled fingers.
 
They each groaned at the same time, and
Kell
leaned down to swallow that sound of hers into
his own mouth.
 
“Dear Lord, woman,
you’re going to kill me with the way you make me feel.”

Aislinn
didn’t know why, but his words made what his finger was doing to her feel that
much more intense.
 
She liked that
he responded to her – it made her feel powerful, when she’d had little of
that familiar feeling since she’d been under his protection.
 
He’d been the one in charge, the one in
control, the one who confined her to her room and the one who had forced
himself on her and hurt her with his body, not to mention taking her over his
lap like a naughty little schoolgirl whenever he saw fit.

But here, now, she held a
part of him in her hand that meant something to him, that affected him
incredibly, that could make him cry out and jerk his hips and cry out to
God.
 
Power.

And something more.

Something she didn’t want
to consider too closely.
 
She was
beginning to like him – this gruff, autocratic Lord of all he surveyed.
 
Worse than that, she thought she was
beginning to love him, and that was the last thing she needed.

But still, that unfamiliar
feeling was there, mixed up with the sensations he was conjuring in that dark,
mysterious area between her legs, pleasuring her almost beyond endurance,
making her blush and writhe and jerk her hips in much the same rhythm she’d
seen him use as she stroked his length up and down.

Kell
kissed her breasts and face as he pleasured her, taking her mouth when he
deliberately wandered a little further down her crevasse, tickling her about
the very opening that was weeping its tribute to him and what he was doing to
her.
 
Aislinn
was trying to wiggle away but wasn’t getting very far.
 
Kell
held her
fast but made sure he caused her no pain.
 
Slowly, very slowly, he eased his finger up inside her, despite her
protestations.

Aislinn
fully expected that what he was doing would hurt her as much as it had before
when he’d used that other part of himself, but it didn’t.
 
He slid right into her, much to her
surprise, and it felt . . . good.
 
Almost too good.
 
And then
he started to move it – wiggling it just a bit inside her, making her
buck within his hard arms, then plunging in and out of her, slowly at first,
then faster until he was being less gentle and careful and it was just what she
wanted – she wanted him hard and fast within her, her hips lifting to
greet each thrust.
 

“
Ahhh
,
lassie, you’re so damned beautiful like this,”
Kell
sighed, aching to join them together in a more natural way, but not wanting to
upset her and fall on her like he wanted to.

“Please,”
Aislinn
breathed, hating that she sounded like she was
begging, and she didn’t even know for what.
 
She sounded uncomfortably like she was begging him to stop
spanking her, and yet it was pleasure he was subjecting her to now –
unbelievable, aching, throbbing pleasure that was going to drive her out of her
mind if he didn’t stop.
 
But if he
stopped, she was sure she would wither away and die from the lack of him.

Kell
thought the time was right, finally.
 
He’d begun to wonder if he’d live until this point, but apparently he
had.
 
None the worse for the wear,
but not if you asked his privates.
 
He was as tender, as careful as he could be in that state, parting her
legs a little more, then a little more, until he could fit himself between
them, lying down atop her, watching her face all the while, trying to gauge
just how she was taking what he was doing.

Chapter
11

She just seemed to be
watching him, apprehension creeping into the back of her eyes, and she was
sawing on her lip fit to make it bleed, but she wasn’t trying to get away.
 
There was just a wariness about her
that he didn’t like – he wanted her to want him, to want what he was
going to do to her.
 
But that first
bad experience was still in her mind – until he replaced it, millions of
times over – with a great one, which was just want he intended to do.

Kell
held
Aislinn’s
face between his hands and caught her
eye.
 
“Just like my finger didn’t
hurt you when it was inside you, the rest of me won’t either now.
 
I promise.
 
You’ll be stretched a little, but it won’t hurt,” he said
the latter with a lot of conviction, and hoped to hell it was true, positioning
himself at her nearly virgin entrance, feeling the warm moistness of her
christening him, and feeling better about what he was going to do because he
knew what that wetness meant – she wanted him.
 
She wanted him!

He took it as carefully and
slowly as he could, more gently rocking himself into her than thrusting or plunging
violently, as his genitals wanted him to do.
 
All the wanted – all he wanted as a result – was
to be completely surrounded by her marvelous feminine warmth, and the
incremental, tedious method he was using to achieve that result was going to
put him over the edge.
 
His clamp
on his control was slipping as surely as he was seating himself within her.

Suddenly, he felt a hand on
his buttocks that was quickly moved higher, to his lower back, and then, all at
once, he found himself completely inside her, as far as he could go.
 
Both of them heaved an audible sigh of
relief.
 
Then
Kell
pulled back a little and started an inexorable rhythm, that
Aislinn
joined, wrapping her arms around his broad back and holding on for dear
life.
 
Mid stride,
Kell
reached down between them to put his index finger on
that very pleasant spot of hers, and continued to rock back and forth, in and
out of her.

“
Kell
– stop – no – “ she breathed, sounding scared.

He was of a mind that she
was close to her own end for the first time, and it was frightening her.
 
But he didn’t really have a manner to
soothe her – his entire body was occupied.
 
So he used his voice, low and soothing.
 
“That’s it,
Aislinn
.
That’s it.
 
Relax.
 
I’m right here.
 
I won’t let anything bad happen to
you.
 
It’s a wondrous thing between
you and I, it is.
 
It’s a gift
you’d be giving me, and that I’ll get in a minute or two, too.
 
Let go.
 
Let it come to you, lass.
 
Let go – “

And she did.
 
To her embarrassment, she did.
 
Loudly.
 
She screamed with it, unable to control the volume of her
voice, the pleasure was much too intense for any sort of reins to be put on
it.
 
It flowed through her,
convulsing in that one sweet spot but spreading out from there to every
molecule in her body, and out through her fingertips, she swore, and right into
him, the man who had brought such infinite paradise to her.

Her husband.

As she convulsed around
him,
Kell
let go of himself and found his own ecstasy
within a few short strokes, grunting gutturally over her, pressing himself as far
into her as he could possibly manage, trying to merge the two of them
completely together, and nearly passing out with the effort.

The two of them couldn’t
move for the longest time, not that they wanted to.
 
Kell
laid his head on
Aislinn’s
heaving breast and just lay there, trying to get
his senses back, and they didn’t seem like they were any particular hurry to
return, not that he really cared.
 
He didn’t have anything to do tonight except love his woman, and he
intended on doing that several times to cement their physical
relationship.
 
She responded to him
with an abandon that was something he’d never seen before in any woman –
tentative at first, but near the end – he’d watched her explode at his
own behest, to fly apart in his arms, and heard her scream from the joy of it.

It was just what he’d
always wanted – to have a woman – his wife – who enjoyed his
embrace, who reveled in the closeness of their bodies, rather than disparaging
it or finding it distasteful.
 
Kell
knew that in that one encounter, he’d lost his heart
to her, completely. She was a handful, his wife, but she was already much
beloved by people he’d known all his life.
 
His brothers thought she was a saint, and she’d put up with
the way he’d jumped to awful conclusions about her.
 
She was just what he wanted, what he needed.

And she was his.

Kell
turned to
Aislinn
several times that night, driving
the both of them to holler their profound pleasure at the merger of their
bodies.
 
He stopped himself the
fourth time he reached for her though, having noticed that she was wincing just
a bit.
 
He could have enjoyed her
several more times over – despite the fact that he was no longer a randy
youth – but he didn’t want her to associate their lovemaking with
anything but pleasure.
 

She was still asleep, her
face pale and a little wan from being up all night.
 
He tugged her to him for a little while longer, then decided
to see if he could stand, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and groaning
about it as quietly as he could.
 
His knees were killing him – they were quite swollen, above and
below as well.
 
But he managed to
stand, and walked around a little, and the more he used and bent the joints,
the better they felt. His head was hurting pretty badly – and he wasn’t
the least surprised that he hadn’t felt it at all during the night –
there was too much else going on.

He stood for the longest
time, grinning brainlessly down at her, until she stirred and looked up at him,
sleepy eyed, blinking owlishly.
 
“What are you doing up?
 
You
should be in bed!”
Aislinn
got up quickly and stood
beside him, her hands on his hips to help steady him.

“I’m fine, woman, I’m
fine,”
Kell
hugged her to him tightly.
 
“My head hurts a little, but it’s hard
as a rock – it’d take more than that to break it open.
 
My legs are a better since I’ve been up
and walking.
 
If I stay in bed,
they’ll just stiffen up.”

“Sit down, sit down,” she
fussed, ignoring what he was saying and using the pull to summon some one from
the kitchen.

Jenny knocked on the door
and came in to curtsey to the both of them prettily, taking in the condition of
the bed and grinning broadly.

“Please bring me a cup of
hot water, Jenny.
 
I want to make
his Lordship some willow bark tea for his aches and pains this morning.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Jenny was off
immediately.

“I don’t need any tea, Mrs.
MacNaughton
,”
Kell
started,
but she was completely ignoring him in her doctoring frenzy.
 
She peeked under his bandage while
Kell’s
hands roamed freely over her more private
places.
 
She slapped his hands away
with little conviction.
 
Her body
had become much more accustomed to his touch, and she was doing her best not to
pay any attention to him at all, although that wasn’t quite working.
 
“I think you’re all right today, but
this evening I’m going to change this bandage and put some more salve on
it.
 
Just please take it easy today
and don’t do a lot.
 
Don’t jostle
yourself – don’t ride for a few days.
 
Please.”

She was asking so prettily,
how could he refuse her anything?
 
“Yes, Ma’am.
 
I’ll be
careful, I promise.”

He answered, standing
slowly to give her a hard hug.
 
“I
don’t know about you, but I’m famished.
 
Something about last night worked up a considerable appetite . . . “ he
winked at her rakishly.
 
”Shall we breakfast together, milady?”

“I’ll be down in just a
minute.
 
If you see Jenny would you
send her back in to help me dress, please?”

That made him turn mid
stride.
 
“No need to bother Jenny
with that, lassie.
 
I’d be more
than happy to play ladies made to you.”

She was amazed she could
still blush after some of the things he’d done to her last night.
 
Parts of her were still tingling from
it, kind of like the ones that still stung after a spanking.
 
“You don’t have to do that . . .”

He came forward and tilted
her chin up to him with his index finger.
 
“I know I don’t.
 
I like to.”

So he did, and actually was
pretty darned good at it.
 
Aislinn
decided not to question him too carefully about
where he’d acquired such skills . . . she figured she really didn’t want to
find out.
 
When she was fully
clothed, and having been thoroughly groped by her licentious husband, they went
downstairs to breakfast together, and the brothers nearly broke out in
applause.
 
It was the first time
they’d done that, and Grant and Burke somehow recognized that things were going
well between the two of them.

Somehow at breakfast talk
turned to them having some sort of a ball or soiree.
 
The brothers somehow decided that a celebration was in
order, for some reason, and so a ball was planned right there at the breakfast
table, for two weeks from that day.

During the next two weeks,
in addition to her usual round of seeing patients and overseeing the running of
the household, which was running much more smoothly than it ever had been,
according to the brothers,
Aislinn
also made time to
discuss with
Sile
what should be on the menu for the
dance.
 
She was extremely busy, and
fell into bed each night near exhaustion.
 
But her husband wasn’t any help in that area, since as soon as he
wrapped his arms around her they were both lost, and often made love until
dawn, then had to get up and do it all again.

Aislinn
was running down quickly, and just before the dance,
Kell
took a good look at her as she struggled to get out of bed, and pushed her back
down.
 

“
Kell
,”
she wailed, “we can’t!
 
I have to
get up!”

“No, you don’t,
Aislinn
lass.
 
I wasn’t going to have a roll with
 
you – not that I wouldn’t like to, you understand – but I
want you to stay in bed today and rest.
 
You’ll be all up in arms tomorrow with the preparations and people
arriving, and I want you to take some time today to sleep.
 
You look like I’ve been working you
hard from dawn to dusk – “

Aislinn
cut into his speech.
 
“It’s the
dusk to dawn that you’ve been driving me hard, milord,” she interrupted
cheekily, rolling over despite her protestations and nearly falling back to
sleep immediately.

Kell
patted her bottom possessively.
 
“Watch yourself, woman.
 
I
haven’t heard you complaining, although I should have.
 
You’re worn out.
 
You are not to get out of bed today for
anything other than to use the necessary.
 
If I find you have, you’ll be sitting on a very sore derriere all day
tomorrow, and I’d hate to have you have to explain just why to our guests.”

She turned back to give him
a nasty look, but knew he was as good as his word.
 
He used the bell pull in the corner to summon Jenny, who
enlisted in the cause as soon as he explained it to her.
 
Aislinn
huffed from the bed, but she really wasn’t putting up too much of a fuss.

At least not until her
husband left, anyway.