Page 54 of How to Heal a Highland Heart
He held her gaze, willing her to believe what he saw. “Ye are perfection.” He meant it. “Yer breasts are exquisitely formed.” He moved both her wrists to one of his hands and trailed the other hand between her breasts. She shivered, and he smiled. He roamed his fingers to her buds, rosy and hard, straining to be touched. He grazed his fingers over one, and she whimpered, her body arching up toward him. “Yer buds are the loveliest shade, like the sun at dusk, and yer skin is the perfect complement.” As he spoke, he circled her bud with his fingers, watching her body for guidance on what she liked. And she liked this. Her head moved back and forth, and he knew it was from the new feelings he was introducing to her. “The smallest touch,” he said, leaning down and taking her nipple in his mouth to suckle it for a long, hard moment before releasing it, “when done right, can spark the most intense pleasure.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
Oh my God, was right. Desire had him in an unyielding grip. “Ye have the prettiest neck,” he continued, tracing his tongue down the long, elegant column before he slid a hand under her back to lift her while his other hand deftly pulled her gown the rest of the way down her body until he tossed it aside.
“Brodee!” She started to cover herself again, but he caught her wrists once more.
“Dunnae,” he said, bending down to plant kisses along her stomach. Gooseflesh instantly covered her skin. “I love the way yer body dips and curves. The shadows. The smoothness. The slender, willowed make of ye.”
“What of the scars?” she asked, her eyes searching his face.
“What scars?” he asked, meaning it. Oh, he knew they were there on some level. He’d felt them when he’d run his fingers over her skin, but when he looked at her, he truly saw perfection. “All I see is a beautiful, braw woman whom I want to possess.”
The way Brodee looked at her with such awe, such yearning, gave her such hope and set her more at ease. “Then possess me,” she whispered to him, praying her body would respond, praying it was pleasurable and not painful.
Complete and utter triumph flittered across his face, and then he stood and yanked off his plaid and his braies. She stared unabashedly at him. Even if she had wanted to turn away, which she didn’t, she wasn’t sure she could have. She was drawn to this man like Eve to the apple.
Please God let him not destroy me.
She had never truly looked at a man. With both husbands before him, she’d either squeezed her eyes shut or stared at the ceiling or the wall, depending on the situation. But with Brodee, she drank him in. Everything about him bespoke of power, from his broad shoulders to his Viking legs to his thick arms. And the scars. He had a few of his own. Jagged marks where she could imagine his flesh had met with the sword of his enemy.
His body was perfectly, beautifully proportioned, cut and chiseled by God’s master hand, and in his face, looking reverently at her, held an inherent strength. Her heart squeezed painfully, even as her belly fluttered. He knelt before her and set his hands to her legs as he’d done previously, and as he spread her thighs, his gaze held hers. When she was bared to him, a devilish gleam came to his eyes.
“Dunnae be fearful,” he whispered before his head dipped.
Then, to her utter astonishment, he parted her at her core and his tongue trailed up to graze her where at a spot, she had not known existed. She jerked, her heartbeat escalating with the unknown, but when he slid his tongue down her center, the trepidation melted away under a deluge of hot wanting. His tongue swirled deliciously over the throbbing spot, building something in her she’d never felt before. His hand splayed over her belly as his tongue moved faster, circling as his mouth sucked. Passion pounded her blood through her heart, chest, and head, and the room around her disappeared, leaving just her and Brodee, and a desperation she thought might splinter her.
She heard her moans and whimpers, unable to stop them, only able to grip his shoulders to try to ground herself, connect herself with touch to this man who was doing such wicked, wonderful, unmentionable things to her. The faster his tongue worked, the higher her level of pleasure rose. As did her impatience, which grew to an explosive proportion. She needed something. Now. But heaven help her, she did not know what.
“I need,” she cried out. “Please, I, I—”
Suddenly, a finger slipped inside her, and she gasped, her body clenching around him, and just as she was growing accustomed to him, his thumb pressed on that same spot as before and then worked a magic that had to be bad because it wassogood. Everything coiled, then let loose as wave after wave of ecstasy crashed into her and then left her feeling utterly spent, utterly languid. She could barely raise her hand, but she forced herself to do so. Their eyes met, and the pleasure she saw in his gaze, the joy that he’d been able to give her such a gift, nearly undid her. She was falling in love with him.
The thought froze her. She was falling in love with her husband. A tender man. A caring man, a man who’d just admitted he did not want to feel love again.
He was merely fulfilling a physical need with her, but with the gentle way he was doing it, he was taking her soul. If she was not careful, he could hurt her more than any hit, any cruel word ever had. Still, she had to take that chance. Fear had ruled her life for too long; she could not live that way knowing now what could await her without it.
“It was nae ye,” he said, finally speaking as he climbed between her thighs, slid his hand under her buttocks, and lifted her hips to meet his straining body. “It was them.” His voice was a velvet whisper. He slid into her then, a long, full stroke that filled her completely and left no room for past memories, no room for anything but him and her and this moment they shared.
“Ye are passionate,” he told her, his voice low, as he withdrew almost to his tip, only to slide all the way back in until his pelvis pressed against the spot at her core he’d brought to life mere moments before.
Her body melted against his, and her world narrowed to only him. His whispers of her passion, his strokes in and out of her, his large hands gripping her bottom firmly to move her just so to spark her core to life once more. Again, the need consumed her, greater than even before. Her body hummed with it. Her blood rushed with it. Her veins felt as though they would burst with it.
She slid her hands from his shoulders to his hips, marveling at the way he knew precisely how to move his body to give her such pleasure. Emboldened when he grunted his own bliss, she trailed her fingers to his taut bottom, allowing them to roam over the hard muscle and then up to his back to explore the wide plane of muscle. His body was slick with sweat, and when she flattened her palms against his back, it was as if she absorbed the rhythm he had set. Together, they found a tempo that bound them as one until, once again, she felt she would splinter.
Yet she wanted him to have the same feeling. “Brodee?”
“Wrap yer legs around me,” he answered immediately, his voice thick. She knew then that he’d been waiting for a cue from her, so she quickly complied. She secured her legs around his middle, and he lifted her up, plunging deep into her, touching something in her she’d never imagined existed.
Fiery sensations poured through her as involuntary tremors coursed, and the degree to which she responded stunned her. She arched toward him, clawing at his back, demanding he enter her harder and faster, and her words unleashed something he’d obviously been keeping restrained. He hoisted her up off the bed, and before she knew what was happening, her back was against the wall and Brodee was driving into her like a man bent on complete and utter possession. She wanted to be possessed by him. And with a scream that mingled with a bellow from Brodee, she yielded to the searing need that seemed to have been building for years. A hot tide of passion raged through them both, sweeping them away and fragmenting her thoughts as she abandoned herself to the whirl of sensations, to his masterful seduction, to him.
She could not say when she’d drifted to sleep, but she awoke to a darkness broken only by a slash of moonlight through the window. Brodee’s hand lay protectively against her stomach, his leg over hers. His even breathing filled the room, a soft rise and fall of a man in the throes of exhausted sleep.
She’d worn out her warrior husband because she was so passionate. She grinned to herself at the thought as she stared at him, memorizing his face. He had such long, thick lashes for a man. She loved them. She loved his strong jaw, too. And the flecks of gold and brown in his red stubble. She loved how he held her, how he was wrapped around her, though his leg was heavy over hers. She felt safe, and she knew without a doubt that he’d wanted her to feel exactly that way.
She’d never awoken with a man beside her before, and she was desperately glad in that moment that despite the suffering she’d endured, neither of her other husbands had ever slept the night with her. It would never have been like this. Utter contentment. Complete peace. She stared at Brodee as she recalled every moment of what they had done together, of the pleasure he had made her feel.
Things she’d never allowed herself to dream of began to fill her mind. Long walks holding hands. Talks by the fire wrapped in each other’s arms. Him combing her hair. Them dancing. Her bathing him and him bathing her. Sitting before the clan together resolving problems. Moonlight swims in the loch. Romps in the daylight in the forest. Their children surrounding them, God willing.
A dazzling future was dangling before them. She wanted to grab it. And she would—for both of them. She had to make him see he could love her, and when he did, she’d be free to love him in return. It needed to happen carefully, slowly, so he would not back away and close her out of his heart, because that, she felt certain, would be the greatest pain she could ever experience, a pain she did not think she could survive.
