Page 52 of Highlander's Sinless Nymph
And then, as their exertions reached a frenzied pitch, Charlotte felt her passion and lust and contentment crystallize inside into one pure and perfect moment, and then overflow. With a great, shuddering gasp she felt her entire body somehow glow white-hot and ice-cold. There was an immeasurable moment, where she felt herself sat on a tipping point, and then she was falling, falling into a red abyss. Her back arched and she cried out, feeling Edward’s arms clench around her.
She floated, both in the water and adrift in her own mind. She clung to Edward––as he clung to her, breathing as if he had just run a mile uphill––whilst the sensation of ultimate bliss ebbed slowly away.
Somehow, even in the middle of that little Scottish lake in the late evening, Charlotte must have slipped into a doze. The next thing she knew she was being carried out of the lake, the sound of the water cascading off of her and Edward’s naked bodies sounding like little bells in the quiet of the dusk.
Edward carried her as easily as he might have done a piece of luggage. Charlotte was curled, naked as a baby and dripping wet, over to where Edward had unpacked the horse. He knelt with her, laid her on his own cloak––which he had spread out with typical Highland practicality on a grass bank, ready for him––and wrapped her snuggly in it.
“What will you do?” Charlotte murmured sleepily. The sight of the Highlander standing naked in the gloaming was perhaps, she thought, one of the singularly most masculine and seductive things she had ever seen. To her considerable surprise, Charlotte felt the warm glow in her loins flare up again at this vision of the male form.
“Do not worry about me, Sassenach,” Edward said. He shook his long blonde hair vigorously. “I’ve had to let the air dry me on nights a fair bit colder than this one, I’ll tell ye.”
I could offer him this cloak and go and fetch mine from further up the bank, but that would mean I would have to stop looking at him…
Then, the usually timid and proper Charlotte Bolton had an idea.
I feel like a person unencumbered by any past, by any expectations as to how she should behave, look like or think.
With a boldness that she would not have believed possible only that morning, Charlotte opened wide Edward’s cloak to reveal her curvy naked body, gleaming a little with undried lake water in the very last light of the dying day.
“You’re welcome to share this blanket with me, though I fear it size might mean we have to get rather…close,” she said innocently.
Edward looked down at her. It was a new and pleasing experience for Charlotte to see a man look at her with genuine admiration. More than a few times she had surprised or caught soldiers within her father’s camp casting covetous or lustful looks in her direction. However, such was the fear that Captain Bolton instilled in his men, Charlotte had never received so much as an inappropriate or lascivious comment in her direction.
The way that the breathtaking Scotsman was looking at her now though…
He is looking at me with an openness and frankness that I have never been subjected to, but it does not seem wanton in the least.
Charlotte realized that Edward, with those honest eyes of his, was making her feel more beautiful than she had ever felt in all her life.
“We should nae tarry, Miss Bolton,” the Scotsman said to her. Over his shoulders the stars had begun to blossom in the evening sky.
It suddenly struck Charlotte just how little human beings knew about what their lives meant, or in which direction that they were going. In the space of a few days, her entire life had changed. She was reclining now, under a soft Scottish sky with the last remnants of the days clutching at the horizon. The grass, crushed under the cloak on which she had been laying, smelled sweet and fresh.
I think that I might just be experiencing the very best day of my entire life.
Charlotte smiled mischievously up at Edward, as comfortable in just her skin in front of him as she might have been wearing her favorite dress.
“Surely we can linger for just a little while?” she asked coyly.
Edward shook his shaggy blonde head and snorted in amusement. Then he came and lay down beside her. His hand slipped down her side, moving from breast to hip to––
Charlotte groaned and lay her head back in the grass. She felt drops of water tickling her skin, falling from Edward’s damp hair, as he ducked his head and kissed his way down her belly. Her back arched.
“Aye,” Edward said, “perhaps we can tarry a wee while.”
18
Edward awoke suddenly, though he did not immediately open his eyes. He knew that he and Charlotte had fallen asleep and that they had slept overlong––the dim red of a newly risen sun came dully through his closed eyelids. His outdoorsman’s instincts also told him that there was something amiss.
Edward’s eyes snapped open, but he kept his body as still as if he had still been asleep. As his vision came into focus, he saw that it was a good thing that he had not leapt to his feet as many other people would have done.
There was a knife laid across his neck. A very thin,verysharp knife pressing lightly to the main vein in his throat.
These men are good. I did nae hear a thing. These are the men sent by Captain Bolton, I am sure of it.
It was useless running through all the names that his father would have called him for allowing English soldiers to sneak up on him unawares. He and Charlotte had been caught, and there was an end to it. All that mattered now was what was going to happen next.
They will nae hurt a hair on the lass’s head o’ course, but what they will do wi’ me remains to be seen.
