Page 37 of The Scot Beds His Wife
He couldn’t afford to cede his wits. Not to her. She’d throw them in the tall grass and set them ablaze only to spite him. Yet here he was, hard as a diamond and uncertain as an untried whelp.
They stood there beneath the dripping oak, damp and frozen in more ways than one. Lips locked and still but for shared tremors that weren’t entirely produced by the unrelenting cold.
Her eyes were closed, he noticed, squeezed shut in what he hoped wasn’t a grimace, and her breath carried sweet notes of port wine and promises of wild, artless passion.
It was that promise that mystified him into stillness.
Life as the second son of Hamish Mackenzie, as brother to the Demon Highlander… as someone who’d loved and lost as profoundly as he had, had taught him a very important lesson.
Passion, in all its forms, was a man’s undoing. Lust and hunger were permitted, of course, as these were functions of the body and instincts primordial.
Butpassion.
Passion was consuming. It painted everything with a pall of red, the only thing identifiable with any sort of clarity the object of the obsession. It was an ardent, zeal-provoking, violent mania, and it had no place in his heart, or in his life.
Best he feel nothing. That he remained composed. That he control all desire so that it didn’t control him. Best hefeed his hungers and lusts so that his passions remained eternally banked and his heart perpetually cold.
Like any muscle, the heart atrophied with disuse, and it was upon that fact he heavily relied. That he’d survived all this time. If one did not love, then one could not hate. For each emotion was equally consuming.
Equally passionate.
And, some-fucking-how, Gavin recognized that the woman in his arms was comprised mostly of untamed, unspent passion. Her very matter flooded with it. She tasted of it. Rich and spiced with exotic enticements. She would respond to his every maneuver with it. She would use it as a battering ram against the ramparts of the walls he’d fortified with cavalier mirth and selfish wickedness.
What if… what if passion was contagious?
With a stunned gasp, she turned her head, tearing her lips from his.
In the time it took for her to form the indignant words “What the fuck do you think—” Gavin’s decision was made, and it no longer paralyzed him.
His fingers released her wrist and anchored in her hair, where they’d previously itched to be. His next kiss was so fierce, it drove her head against his palm, and the back of his hand against the tree.
Her lips were already parted, and he pressed them wider.
This wasn’t a kiss, but a claiming.
The first stroke with his tongue tasted of rain and salt. The second, deeper plunge was flavored of fine, syrupy port and the hint of that uncultivated passion he both craved and feared.
His body followed close, aching for contact. Though her hands lifted, pressing feebly against the swells of his chest in weak resistance, he drove his other arm between herbody and the tree, and pushed his weight against her, craving her nearness. Her vitality. The fire that always seemed to lick at him from behind her eyes.
She kissed him back, but not with the trained skill of a jaded noblewoman, or the unpracticed vehemence of a virgin. Her kiss resembled all his other interactions with her.
A battle.
One she had no intention of allowing him to win.
Her hands bunched in his lapels with aggression, her wee fists pulling him closer, into her. Though her muscles went rigid, her tongue sparred with his, as he might have guessed it would. Each lick and swirl, each plunge and retreat became a point counted for or against.
Gavin had never enjoyed a woman’s mouth so much in his entire life.
And that was a powerful fact, as he’d tasted more than his share.
He knew the moment she’d stepped off the train that she was unlike his other conquests, but until he’d actually had her in his arms, he’d not known exactlyhowsingular she was.
He’d thought, erroneously, that it was merely her unique imperfections that lent him a sense of fascination. Though he’d had just about every different flavor of woman imaginable, he’d begun to remember them with the exact same disillusioned ennui.His reminiscence of them became a forest where all the trees were the same size, shape, and color. All the husky moans and screams of pleasure the exact same melody. Perfect in their pitch and percussion.
And, as everyone who chased excellence came to eventually agree, perfection wasboring. It was both predictable and insipid.
Generally, where women were concerned, it came at a great cost, one way or the other.
