Page 54 of A Highland Healer Captured
She rose onto her toes and pressed closer. He answered with a low noise he likely hadn’t meant to let her hear, and let his hands map the line of her back, the curve of her waist. Everywhere his palm passed, sensation bloomed, bright and insistent, like sparks landing in dry grass.
When his mouth left hers and found the hinge of her jaw, the delicate slope below her ear, she discovered how easy it could be to forget the world. He kissed there with intent, slow and knowing, and a shiver arrowed down her spine.
He learned her by listening to how she tilted when he reached the spot beneath her ear, and how her breath hitched when he lingered at the hollow of her throat. He followed those tells like a man tracking in snow.
“Do ye—” he began, as he gathered her skirts in his hand.
“Aye,” she whispered, gripping his shoulders for balance.
When he trailed kisses along the line of her collarbone, when his hands curved her waist and drew her nearer, when his mouth returned to claim hers at the moment she needed him to. And she was not altogether sure that she stood on the same floor.
His hand slid deliciously up her thigh as the other held her steadily against his chest.
Skylar sucked in a sharp breath as his large fingers started to caress her core gently, dipping in and out of her slowly, until her slick arousal started to drip down her leg.
She took as much as he gave greedily. She had never felt anything similar to it before, and she wanted so much more. It startled a rough laugh out of him, when she let the word slip from her lips, and he answered by giving more.
“More, lass?”
“More…” she moaned, and he pulsed another finger inside of her, the rhythm gathering more and more speed and depth.
The world narrowed to pulse and breath and the drag of his mouth where she was most sensitive, to the rhythm he found and kept, to the way her body learned that rhythm like a song and sang it back to him in the small, helpless sounds she tried and failed to swallow.
Her fingers curled in his hair, then gentled, then curled again just as his curled inside of her.
Heat gathered, coiled, brightened. She felt the slow climb and an impossible tightening as he said, “I have ye, lass. Let go,”
The relief that was already a promise as she let the earth slip from under her feet.
“Zander—” she breathed, half warning, half plea.
The crest came like a wave she hadn’t seen until she was already riding it. It was as powerful as tide, and yet gentle as a puddle as it spent itself through her.
She rode it shaking, breath catching, one hand covering her own mouth to keep from making a sound loud enough to summon saints or gossip. He held her tightly through it, his grip never faltering as he supported her weight in full.
Zander pressed a soft kiss against her lips, and then the base of her neck before he pulled her in, an arm secure at her back, his mouth soft against her temple while she knit herself back together. Her heart hammered. His was steadier, a drum she found herself matching.
“This is madness,” she whispered at last, though there was no heat in it now, only awe and a thin thread of fear.
“Aye,” he said, and she felt the smile against her hair.
He eased back just enough to see her face, and his expression made something warm settle beneath her ribs.
But Skylar felt the sense of duty thread back through her desire then, as it must. She drew a long breath, and another, and then found the ground again.
“We should stay with him tonight,” she said, voice low. “Wake Katie by turns. I’ll go to the surgery and finish what the bread couldnae. In the morning, we start the watching.”
He brushed a stray curl back behind her ear with a tenderness that felt indecent after the way they’d kissed.
“Go, healer,” he said quietly. “I’ll keep the world off ye as long as I can.”
She nodded, lifted her mouth to his once more because she could, because it was the kind of kiss that didn’t steal anything from the day to come, and then slipped away, gathering her apron, her sense, her purpose.
Outside in the corridor, the keep had gone to that hour when secrets travel light. Skylar moved through it with the taste of him still on her lips and the vow she’d made to a small boy steadying her steps.
18
Grayson lay propped high on pillows, hair mussed like a rook’s nest, eyes too bright for the hour. He’d tried to be brave in his sleep, if the way his fist was still curled said anything about a boy’s heart. Zander eased onto the edge of the bed and smoothed the blanket as if that could make the world lie flatter.
