Page 125 of A Highland Bride Disciplined
“Tell me,” she breathed.
He knew exactly what she was asking him for, and finally he felt the the weight of the world melt from his shoulders as he leaned into her lips and whispered, “I love ye, Scarlett Murray.”
“I love ye, too,” she whispered back, voice breaking on it like a wave.
Heat and relief and something older than both broke him open. “God help us,” he said, and the words didn’t undo him, they made him right.
He kissed her like a starved man.
Her fingers found the tie at his hip and the towel slid away without either of them minding. He pulled her close and felt the shiver that answered him. He did not rush. He was done with rushing where this woman was concerned.
They reached the bed by a path that had only the sense of touch and breath to mark it. The brush of her knee against his thigh, the catch of her sigh as he found the tender hollow beneath her ear, and then her head fell back when his mouth trailed lower, tasting the clean heat of her skin.
He worshiped to the pace of her breathing, to the subtle arch of her spine, to the small sounds she tried and failed to swallow.
What came after was not tidy.
He pulled her to his mouth, and his tongue lapped at her with relentless pursuit of her climax. His hands slid up her torso and the pads of his fingers teased both of her nipples, each hand rolling at a different pace, searching for the right rhythm.
Her hands gripped his arms tightly, pulling him closer and then pushing against him, but he didn’t stop. Not until her legs started to shake and her moans grew louder to cries of pleasure, and then finally she broke. His name hot on her lips, and hers on his as he slowed his pace through her arousal and kneeled in between her thighs.
“Are we well, lass?”
She laughed and nodded her head, and it was a sensual and addicting sound that sent a shiver down his spine. He crawled up her body, planting soft kisses against her hot, pebbling skin.
He hovered over her, just for a moment, just long enough for her eyes to assess the situation and widen with excitement and need. And then he buried himself inside of her. A cry of need filled the space around them, and drove Kian absolutely crazy.
He needed to go deeper. He needed to feel her arousal dripping around him. Needed to hear his name on her lips again. His rhythm intensified, hips digging into hers as they both climbed, and climbed until finally she crumbled around him.
A fitful, raging shock that raged through both of them and stole the air from the room.
When they finally came to rest, breath tangling in the hush between their mouths, he felt something settle in his bones that no oath or victory or ledger had ever given him.Home.
They did not speak for a long time. Words weren’t needed. He smoothed damp tendrils from her temple and kissed the spot. She touched his jaw as if learning it by heart and laid her cheek to his chest as though there had never been a world where she didn’t.
When sleep came, it came like a kindness. They slid under the coverlet and into each other’s arms without ceremony. He tugged her closer with a drowsy insistence, and she went without hesitation, tucking her hand beneath his heart as if it belonged there.
Love had changed its shape. Control had loosened its hold. And just beyond this room, down the hall, behind a closed door, atiny breath rose and fell in a cradle, safe. And in the quiet of Crawford Keep, beneath stone and timber and stars, a family had been forged. Not by duty. Not by command. But by love, fierce and unyielding, that would outlast them all.
EPILOGUE
Crawford Keep breathed easy again.
The scaffolds had come down that morning, and the patched stone over the gatehouse looked almost smug in the sun. The singe on the east wall had been scrubbed to a pale ghost of a mark.
In the yard, convalescent guards leaned on the low wall and argued amiably about who’d felled more men, each story growing taller with every retelling. Fresh rushes sweetened the halls. The smith’s hammer had returned to its everyday rhythm. It was no longer a battle drum, just the honest music of work.
Kian stood at his study window and let it all soak through him. He should have gone straight to the ledgers. But there was a different hum in the keep today. It was a low, steady current that had nothing to do with control and everything to do with life. Somewhere down the corridor, a baby laughed, and the sound ran a clean line through his chest.
A knock. Two raps, deliberate.
“Enter,” he said.
Tam shouldered in, wind-chapped and smelling of peat and horse. “Messenger out o’ Glen Tulla,” he reported, holding up a leather satchel. “Rode under the banner o’ truce. Wore McTavish colors clear as the day is bright.”
Kian’s gaze caught on the wax seal pressed in black — a stag rampant over crossed fir boughs. Mourning ribbon, too. He took the packet, thumbed the weight of it.
“Ye want me t’ linger?” Tam asked, already dragging a chair with his boot.
