Page 73 of A Highland Healer Captured
He pressed her back onto the bed as if she were both precious and inevitable. Their mouths found each other again, deeper this time, a clash of longing and surrender. She arched into him, her body pleading for more. His weight pressed her down, solid and anchoring, yet the tenderness in his touch betrayed how careful he was not to break her.
“Tell me,” he rasped, brushing her hair from her face.
“Take me, Zander. I’m yers,” Her voice broke, but her hands told him the rest, guiding him, urging him.
Clothes gave way slowly, piece by piece, the air growing thick with the sound of skin brushing skin, of sighs and murmured names. She traced the long scar across his shoulder with trembling fingers before pressing her lips to it like a vow. His breath shuddered, his forehead dropping to hers.
“Ye undo me, lass,” he whispered, voice frayed.
“And ye undo me,” she answered, surprised at the honesty spilling from her lips.
When he entered her, it was not with haste but with reverence. A rhythm formed, unspoken yet perfectly matched, their bodies moving in accord. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, his namefalling from her lips like a plea. He answered with a low growl, each thrust steady, claiming, but also giving.
The crest built between them, their breaths mingling, the heat mounting until she shattered, her cry swallowed by his kiss. He followed her over, holding her so tightly she thought she might vanish into him.
The aftermath was quiet, breathless. Their bodies tangled, the air still humming with the echo of what they’d shared. He pressed his forehead to hers, eyes closed, as though words would lessen it.
Skylar let herself drift into the safety of his arms, her heart thudding with equal parts fear and longing. Outside, the Kirn fires blazed bright, but inside, the two of them surrendered to the dark, falling asleep wrapped around each other, the world forgotten.
Escaping, forgotten.
23
Skylar woke to warmth and the steady weight of an arm bracketing her waist. For a blinking breath she did not move; the room was soft with after dark, the lamplight long gone, only a spill of pale morning at the shutter to tell her the world was still there.
His breath stirred the wisps at her neck, uneven, catching now and again like a man who forgot he wasn’t on guard. His hand lay heavy across her middle, not promise, just flesh and weight, and still her ribs ached.
“Ye awake?” he murmured, voice ragged with night.
“Aye,” she whispered, and the word went through both of them.
His arm drew her closer by the quietest degree. “Good mornin’, Skylar.”
The way he said it threatened to undo her. She swallowed and rolled to face him. His hair was a dark, untidy halo; a beard-shadow roughened his jaw. He looked like a sin she did not regret.
He searched her eyes, not pushing, not pleading. “Are ye well?”
“I am,” she said, and found it true in a way that frightened her.
They lay a moment longer, wrapped in the hush before the keep found its clatter. He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss into the heel of her palm. It wasn’t a claim. It felt like thanks.
“Kirn,” he said, almost wry. “The fools’ll set the yard on fire twice before noon if I don’t walk through it.”
“They’d only try,” she murmured. “I’ll fetch water.”
“Ye’ll do no’ such thing,” he said, thumb stroking absent-mindedly along her wrist as if learning her pulse by fingertip. “I’ll send a lad. Stay a moment. Let me have the sight of ye lookin’ soft before ye turn back into my worst scold.”
She should have bristled. She smiled instead, foolish as any girl. “I am a terror.”
“Aye,” he said contentedly. “And I’m fond of terrors.”
They rose when the keep did. Skylar smoothed her hair with water from the ewer and bound it back with a ribbon the color of barley. She tied her gown briskly, stealing glances at him as he shrugged into his shirt, tugged the laces, rolled his shoulders until the fabric learned his breadth.
He caught her looking and sent a quick heat through her with nothing but a lifted brow. Saints. She busied herself with fastening her bodice as if it were a knot a surgeon might admire.
Down in the yard, Kirn had begun in earnest. The air smelled of peat and apples and smoke. Girls plaited long lengths of rope with scraps of color, laughing when boys tried to steal the ends.
A fiddler tuned, earnestly wrong until he wasn’t. A pair of pipers answered like hills talking to each other. Trenchers were set; the first pies were cut; a barrel was coaxed onto a trestle and tapped with much advice shouted and none taken.
