Page 13 of Highland Warlord
He released her, allowing her to stand in the chest-high water, and held her gaze as he reached for the weapon, a dark wrath swirling in his fathomless eyes.
And then the arrow was gone. She’d barely seen him move, barely even registered the sharp burn as he broke the protruding arrow and yanked it from her body.
Unable to withstand the excruciating pain, Morgana sank to her neck in the pond and closed her eyes, whispering the self-same spell she’d used to knit his wounds the evening before. The sensation of her flesh, connective tissue, and veins knitting together wasn’t pleasant in the least, but it was a relief, and after a few gasping moments, her shoulder was as good as new.
Gaining her bearings, she tried to ascertain their whereabouts. The Yorkshire hills no longer rose against the sky in dark green and black ribbons of sloping movement. Flat, wide squares of land dotted with tree-lined brooks and stone walls or wooden fences partitioned fields recently harvested. To the west, a dark forest bracketed the small loch in which they now stood. He’d had to have taken her fifty or so miles by her estimation. And that should afford them a luxuriant head start should King Harold send anyone after them.
“Thank you, warrior,” she sighed and stood, slicking her water-soaked hair away from her face.
He regarded her with a bestial astonishment, cocking his head to the side like an enormous Cerberus. Without warning, he seized upon her blood-soiled dress and ripped the bodice open to the navel causing her breasts to spill out.
“Do you mind?” she huffed, swatting at him ineffectually as he used those soulless eyes and strong hands to examine her newly mended shoulder with the thoroughness of an alchemist. “I told you it was healed, now unhand me if you please!”
He looked like he was about to, when the gentle bob of her breasts above the water arrested his unnatural attention.
Morgana fought a blush as his grip on her shoulders intensified and his features tightened with naked hunger. Those lush lips parted on a hushed, yearning moan. His eyes lifted hers, ensnaring her within the voids of black she’d thought were empty, but instead held a bottomless well of unfulfilled desire as his head lowered and his lips inched toward her in infinitesimal degrees.
If she’d read dominance, expectation, or superiority in his emotional signature, she would have frozen him in a block of ice and left him to melt. But the dichotomy of the soft emotions emanating from such a hard man reached past her defenses and touched her gentle soul.
His heart, wounded and broken and atrophied from disuse, ached with wanting. Her nearness caused him pain—no—fear. She could feel his need to touch, to connect. Could sense the desolate isolation lurking within such a primal creature. It was as unnatural for a Berserker to be alone as it was for any human. Every man lived in fear of rejection. Somehow Morgana could feel that for a Berserker, it was a sentence worse than death, something to be terrified of.
And this beast, this lethal, predatory killer, who’d slaughtered more than a hundred men in the last twenty four hours was afraid of her. And not her magic.
In that moment, surrounded by still, calm water and the vibrant colors of a fading day, Morgana surrendered to her impetuous nature. Tilting her head back, she opened her lips with invitation.
And it was all the beast needed to stake his claim.
Chapter 8
If Morgana lived through all this, she planned to encase those magical lips of his in bronze and display them as gloriously as she dare on her mantle. Words most men would eschew coalesced in her mind as she and her Berserker savior devoured each other in a kiss that should have set their cool lake aflame. Luscious. Uncomprehendingly sweet. Wet, warm, and seductive. All descriptions she would have pegged as feminine, and yet they applied to this warrior, butonlyto his unparalleled mouth.
Theirs was a kiss for the ages. Full of wordless promises and new, untried emotions. Morgana didn’t dare allow herself time to examine them; only let them wash over her like the incoming tide and pull her back toward their depths.
The hot stroke of his tongue destroyed all resistance. At the animal sound of pleasure he produced in his throat, she forgot all about things like magic, duty, and foreboding prophecies, replacing them with temptation, instinct, and lust. Crashing over her like a storm surge, Morgana couldn’t tell if the genesis for this overwhelming desire was him or her, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. All she wanted was his warm hands on her cool flesh. She wanted to finish what they’d started in that mossygrove in Yorkshire. Now that she’d had a taste of the pleasure his hands could provide, she wanted to experience all of him.
Most especially that sinful mouth.
A part of her knew that once he returned to himself, however that was possible, there would be consequences to this wanton behavior. But for now she was in the clutches of the beast, surrounded by her element, and entirely absorbed by the wicked impulses they created together.
She closed her eyes, focusing all her being on where they connected.
Their lips.
His hands, which finally ventured from her shoulders to explore the parts of her submerged in the crystalline water, were rough, yet careful.
She didn’t dare move, for fear she would break this spell not of her casting, but one woven by a force stronger than she could ever hope to be. Fate? Destiny? She didn’t believe in these things, did she? Though, as his fingertips spread wellsprings of desire wherever they endeavored, she somehow knew this connection was more than magic. More than a mating. Just…more.
She expected him to drag her against his hard body. To clutch and paw at her in accordance with the desperate surges of primal lust she could feel tearing through him. And, yet again, he surprised her.
When his hands encountered the ripped dress hanging off her elbows, he finally broke the contact of their mouths as he used the buoyancy of the water to gently relieve her of her soiled garments.
He didn’t let her sink into the obscuring depths of the lake again. Instead, he lifted her body so she floated on her back, her entire pale, wet length exposed to his demon-black stare.
The absolute worship she read on his face infused her with a current of desire and power and Morgana could swear that the water heated around them. His eyes devoured her as hungrily as his lips had, touching on the rivulets of water finding intimate crevices to escape back into the loch. The caverns beneath her breasts, the creases of her hips, the hollow of her neck. When his eyes found the nest of dark curls between her thighs, his tongue reached out to wet his full lower lip, and the motion sent slick desire rushing from her body.
Feeling mischievous, Morgana parted her legs and opened her arms, but only to prepare for a strong stroke through the water, surging her away from him.
But the beast was too fast. His hand lashed out and caught her ankle in an iron grip, dragging her through the water back toward where it lapped at the wide swells of his shoulders. Without preliminaries, he hooked her legs over his shoulders and imprisoned her thighs open with his big hands, utterly exposing her.
