“The hell I’m no’,” he said with a low laugh and slipped his tongue between the folds of her sex.
Her protests died on her lips with a gasp for air, and Mared’s head fell back against the post. He held her firmly with his hands and casually tended her, his tongue dipping in and out languidly at first, carefully tasting her, exploring each crevice, moving up to the core of her desire, then down again, to where her body throbbed for him.
Mared groaned, lost on a sea of pure physical sensation. The lap of his tongue took on new urgency. The stroke of his tongue was coming harder, his mouth covering her.
She couldn’t help the way she moved against him; she had no conscious thought. She gripped the post above her head—it was as if her body wanted to escape him and press into him all at once, and she writhed shamelessly against his mouth. Payton was undaunted; he gripped her legs, holding her firmly as he stroked and licked, suckled and nibbled her into a frenzy of delicious torment, until Mared was gasping for breath. When the world around her erupted into brilliant light, she felt as if she were falling and soaring all at once, aloft on a cloud of pure pleasure, sailing away from everything and everyone except Payton.
Payton. She loved him. She knew it in that moment, knew it completely and unequivocally—it was love that had been burning in her heart these long months, love that exploded within her now.
As the aftermath of that eruption whispered through her, he drew up to his full height and lifted her; she heard a groan of wood as Payton lowered them onto the bed. His hand skimmed her breast and her belly; his fingers skated up her legs to the spring of curls at their apex.
Free of all her clothing, gloriously naked and fantastically sated, Mared smiled as he pressed his lips against the hollow of her throat and pulled the pins from her hair, setting her tresses free. She reached for him as he moved lower, pushing her hands into his hair as he laved her nipples.
She reveled in the feel of him against her body, the power and reverence in his hands, the tender pressure of his mouth. All the many times she had imagined what lovemaking would be like, she could not have imagined such pleasure.
“Ye’re beautiful, Mared,” he said. “Bòidheach.”
Hearing the ragged edge of his voice made her feel beautiful. And she felt not a glimmer of self-consciousness when he lifted up from her; she felt gloriously wicked and desirable.
She came up on her elbows, her legs stretched out in front of her, to watch him disrobe, to watch the linen slide over corded muscles. His health had definitely returned, and gloriously so—his was a magnificently robust body, utterly virile, from the breadth of his muscled shoulders to the taper of his lean waist, and as he unbound the plaid at his waist, to his muscular thighs and hips.
And of course there was the most masculine part of him, standing erect in a thatch of darkly golden hair, long and thick and sleek.
Standing naked before her, Payton openly admired her as she admired him. She coyly put her hand to her breast and smiled up at him. “It would seem ye have recovered yer good health, milord.”
Payton laughed low, and with a wolfish smile, he came over her, settling lightly atop her as he stroked her hair. “Do ye know, then, that I love ye?”
“I’ve suspected it, aye,” she said, smiling.
“Aye, I love ye,” he said earnestly. “I’ve loved ye since we were bairns, and I’ve never stopped loving ye.”
Those words enchanted her, made her glow. When he playfully bit her neck, she laughed. When he kissed her throat, she sighed. And when he whispered “Bòidheach” again, her eyes fluttered shut, and she felt the burgeoning of her heart, felt it beating in time to his.
Payton slipped his hand around her waist and moved her fully onto the bed. “I’ve longed to hold ye, Mared, to love ye,” he said, as he moved between her legs and spread them wider, so that the tip of his hard cock was touching her, moving lightly against her. “Ye’ve made me a happy man this night…but we can end it now if ye choose.”
With a throaty giggle, she abruptly rose up, grabbed his jaw with one hand, and kissed him with as much passion as he’d just shown her. Instinctively, she lifted her knees. “Donna stop.”
“Mi Diah.” His voice was raging with emotion, and he held himself above her, his arms taut with his restraint. Slowly, respectfully, he moved so that he was pressed against her, and Mared gasped with gleeful exhilaration.
“There will be pain,” he said, wincing.
She stroked his face, his brow. “Do it, then.”
He sighed, lowered his head, and eased the tip of him inside her, stretching her, moving his hips in small circles to help her body open to him. And then he pressed a little farther, and Mared gasped again, this time at the discomfort.