Sing Me Home (23 page)

Chapter Eighteen

T
he answer was in his kiss.

He thrust his hand through her hair. Warmth seeped through her body at the feel of his cheek brushing hers. When he turned his head she offered her lips to him without hesitation. She clasped his shoulders so tightly that she felt the bite of the chain mail in the skin of her palms. His kiss was deep and hungry.

He loved her, she was sure of it. She felt it in the gentleness of his fingers against her head, in the way he drew her body against his, in how he couldn’t stop kissing her.
This
is what she wanted, maybe from the very moment she’d stepped out of the convent in Killeigh. She hadn’t known it then—she hadn’t known
anything
then—she hadn’t understood that such a love existed.

No, she thought.

Colin wouldn’t send her back.

Then she pushed away all her doubts and tilted her head at his urging, loving the wet merging of mouth and teeth and tongue. He dragged his hand down to the hollow of her lower back, pressing her up against the root of him swelling through the cut-out of his hauberk. Memories of that day by the riverbank flooded through her mind, and other, hotter ones of the upper gallery of Caddell’s castle, sweet promises of the pleasure soon to come.

He broke away long enough to shout something over his shoulder. She glimpsed a spear of sunlight as someone came through the outer door, but only for a moment, for Colin was walking her backwards. She followed his urging as if they were dancing under the eaves of an alehouse. She felt the boards of a door give behind her, heard it slam shut behind Colin, and then they were swept into a twilight darkness, the only light coming from some arrow-slit on high.

She stumbled back against a post. She opened her eyes long enough to realize they were in a bedchamber. The hardness lodged in the middle of her back was a post belonging to the canopy. She buried her hands in his hair as he kissed his way down her neck. She closed her eyes, thinking of what it was going to be like to spend an entire night lying in his arms, uninterrupted.

He kissed the pulse throbbing in her throat, then the hollow of her cheek, then her temple, while she breathed in the scent of his hair. She curled her fingers into the mail on his shoulders and wished she had the strength to pluck it off him.

He pulled away from her and cupped her face in his hands. “I’m not doing this standing up again.”

She managed a shaky laugh. “You did a fine enough job of it before.”

“I blame that on you, for being so tempting as to make a man mad.”

“It’s good that I’m not the only one half mad.”

He kneed her thighs open to make more room for him, and he spoke in a hoarse voice. “I’ve waited a lifetime to stretch you out on a bed, Maura.”

“There’s a fine noble bed behind me.” She plucked at the links of his chain mail. “But unless you shed this, you’ll crush me beneath you.”

His sideways grin caused a delicate rippling sensation between her legs. He stepped back to unbuckle his sword belt and toss it upon the floor. He reached behind his head and hauled his surcoat off his back. He tossed the cloth into the dimness. Scraping it out of the way with his foot, he worked on the buckles of his hauberk with one hand, hasty, fumbling, his gaze fixed on her, until she couldn’t bear it anymore and she moved to help him. She flipped the leather straps out of the metal tongues, one after another until he shrugged off the mail. The links slipped like cool water across her palms to settle into a pool of dull silver on the floor.

Then the padding, so many ties. His chest rose and fell beneath her hands as she worked this strange clothing free. She wanted to see him in simple linen—she wanted to see the poet beneath the warrior again. She felt a hurried tug and realized he was unlacing her kirtle at the same time. The world went dark for a moment as he lifted it over her head, and when she blinked anew he was shrugging out of his padding so he stood before her only in his linens.

He reached down to pull off a boot, hopped on one foot to pull off the other, but his eyes never left hers.

“Take everything off,” she heard herself whisper. “I want to see you.”

She blushed at her audacity, but she didn’t take the words back. He was beautiful, standing so tall before her like this. He gave her that sideways smile. Her body thrummed with excitement. He hefted his shirt over his shoulders and made short work of his braies so that the linen fell in a heap upon the chain mail.

There he was, long and tall and lean and full of muscles that swelled in his shoulders and arms and tapered down his abdomen to the root of him. Her hands itched to run over his skin, to feel the swell of those muscles beneath her palms. Her eye was drawn to the narrow protrusions that edged his hips on either side and led to the darkness between his legs, and the powerful cock that thrust away from it.

Her body went liquid, her knees weak, and she felt a yearning to feel his hips sliding between her legs, to feel him filling her up, stretching her until she couldn’t take in any more of him.

Then, suddenly, she was holding it. She curled her fingers around its thickness. She sensed the shock that shot through him and felt a rush of power for having caused it. His cock hardened even more, pulsing in the grip of her hand.

Oh, there weren’t enough Hail Marys in the world to save her from this sin, if it were a sin at all.

Then with a groan he uncurled her hand from his root and tugged her neckline down. She shrugged her shoulders close so he could pull the linen off them. She wriggled, helping him slide it down her arms along with her chemise, rolling her shoulders as he tugged, until her tightening nipples sprung free of the constriction. He paused in his tugging to suck a nipple deep into his mouth.

His hot mouth was a shock. The scrape of the edge of his teeth made her squeeze her eyes shut. She pressed her head back against the bedpost at the swirl of pleasure. She couldn’t touch him—her arms were pinned to her sides by the constriction of the bunched-up linen. He released one nipple to suck the other one into his hot mouth, and the sensation of one nipple cooling, tightening, while the other felt the rough lave of his tongue made the blood rush out of her head until black spots threatened before her eyes.

She heard the sound of something tearing, felt the linen loosen around her arms. She shucked it off and grasped his hair in her hands, torn between the need to press her nipple deeper into his mouth and the urge to drag his head up so she could feel the pressure of his kiss.

Then the whole world tilted and his hands were wrapped around her backside. The softness of the bedclothes sank under her, and she felt the warmth and weight of Colin’s naked body atop her.

“Maura.” Light fell from the arrow-slit to make a halo around his head. “Maura.”

She opened her mouth for his kiss, a kiss unlike any other they’d shared, though she couldn’t explain why. All she knew was that during this kiss she felt a breeze sift through the arrow-slit, a breeze that smelled like summer grass, a breeze that whorled around them and caught in the folds of the draperies, a breeze she felt herself caught up in, that seemed to bring, from afar, the piping of Padraig’s pipe, rising and falling and seeping into her blood until she found herself so breathless she had to pull away.

“Colin.”

He ran his fingers across her lips and then slid down her body, palming her breasts in his hands, stopping to lay another kiss on the tips. His hands roved lower then, rubbing down her ribs and then the curve of her hip. She watched as he kissed his way down to her navel, as his tongue flickered out to wash circles in the indentation. All sensation poured through her to focus on a pinpoint place throbbing in the folds between her legs.

“Colin,” she whispered, breathless, as he slid lower, his hair tickling her side. “What … what are you doing?”

He looked up at her with those blue eyes as he grasped the underside of one thigh and raised it above his shoulder. “The French,” he said, sliding lower, “have a different way of loving.”

A new flush tingled over her. “I like the Irish way, you know.”

“We’ll get around to that, too,” he said, as his chin trailed over the slight rise at the junction between her legs. “Eventually.”

Then, watching her face, he slipped his hot tongue into her cleft.

She arched up, her fists full of bedding. She arched up as her whole world centered on the trail of his tongue. She let her knees drop wide. She cried out as his hands slid up her sides to grasp her breasts. She gasped for breath, aching for the suck and tug of his mouth between her legs. She lifted her hips to meet this new kiss, moving against him and making noises she didn’t know she could make. She glanced down past his hands kneading her aching breasts and saw him tonguing her. She watched breathlessly as he licked her cleft from back to front, watched as she dared to reach down and run her hand over his dark head lodged between her legs.

In the most sinful of her fleshy dreams, she’d never imagined opening herself so widely to the touch and kiss of a man. With each probe of his hungry tongue, her body tightened and tightened and tightened until, finally—blissfully—spasms shuddered through her as she shattered into a thousand pieces under his touch.

***

With the taste of her sweet in his mouth, Colin slid up beside her to watch her face. Her lips were swollen, and on them was a streak of angry pink from where she’d bitten the lower one. A flush lay upon her cheeks, as did her long lashes, closed over her eyes as if she were dreaming. He wanted to touch those lashes, trace her cheek, but he did not want to rouse her from the pleasure that still throbbed through her body. It made his cock pulse to remember how fiercely she’d responded.

He wanted to bury himself in her tightness, lose himself as he’d lost himself in so many women over so many lost years. How easy it would be to seize that moment of exquisite forgetfulness and the freedom from anxiety that always followed, at least for a night. But he couldn’t do that to Maura, not to this sweet woman who deserved better. He would take himself in hand, if that’s what he had to do.

“Colin.”

Hazel eyes upon him, wide and dewy. He traced a strand of hair off her brow and took pleasure basking in the glow of her smile.

He murmured, “You like the French way.”

She slipped her lower lip between her teeth. At the sight, his scrotum tightened.

She must have sensed the twitch of his cock, for she glanced down between them and then back up. “But you …”

“I wanted to watch you.”

Her color deepened.

He said, “You’re beautiful. All of you.”

“You’ve certainly seen more of me than anyone else.”

“Yes.”

He spoke the word like a possession, felt a rush of pride that he—and only he—had brought her this kind of pleasure. She turned onto her side to face him. She traced her finger over his collarbone as she pressed closer. Then she leaned up for a kiss, but he cupped her cheek in his hand, stopping her.

“What’s wrong?”

“We can’t risk it, Maura.”

“Risk what?”

He rubbed a thumb across her cheekbone. “A child.”

Her lashes fluttered and that little line deepened between her brows. “But … before, when we were—”

“We were fortunate.” He pressed his lips against her brow, then rubbed her nose with his own. “I was unwise.”

He would not risk siring a MacEgan son. He would not burden a child of his with bloodied histories and a destiny no man should inherit. And certainly, he would not burden the woman he loved with a child from a man who’d likely die a violent death, like all the MacEgans before him.

She stilled for a while, her face against his, long enough for him to know that she understood what he was saying. He was making her no promises of any real future. He wished the world were different. He wished he didn’t have to lie here and feel what little honor he’d gathered around him weaken.

She pressed her lips against his, a kiss full of hope and fear and passion. He tried very hard not to open his mouth, not to welcome more, even as he felt his cock throb against her thigh.