“Nay, ’tis not,” he told her, smiling. “Nor, I am told, is it the same with every man. Or so says Agnes Carr, who has known more than her share of the lads.” The laird kissed Adair’s lips lightly.
“Oh.” So with each man it was different, or it was supposed to be. Andrew had promised her pleasure after their wedding night, but Adair had never really felt any. She had lied to him, of course, and told him she had, because the fault was surely hers and not his.
Perhaps if she had been able to give him a child it would have been different. She had not found his husbandly attentions unpleasant, but she had felt nothing like he obviously felt as he labored and groaned over her body. And each time when he had finished he would kiss her, roll over, and sleep while Adair lay in the darkness and wondered why there was no pleasure.
She had been afraid to ask him.
Now suddenly this rough Scotsman was touching her body with his big hands, and Adair was being assailed by feelings such as she had never before known. His mouth pressed into the hollow of her throat, and the sound he made sounded very much like a beast growling. He licked the graceful column of her neck with a wet, hot tongue, and Adair felt a quivering beginning deep within her. The greedy mouth closed over a nipple, suckling hard, while his fingers kneaded her other breast.
She whimpered with a growing need she didn’t even understand. The burning tongue began a slow exploration of her torso, and her breath came in short, quick bursts as his tongue pushed into the cavity of her navel.
The softness of her skin, the faint fragrance rising from her warm body set his senses awhirl with his growing desire. Her plump mons was pink and devoid of hair. The faintly shadowed slit dividing it excited him.
He ran his tongue along it, dipping between the flesh to taste her rising juices. He moved himself so he might part the two halves, and there nestled amid the moist-ness was her love bud. He began a delicate exploration of it with the pointed tip of his tongue.
Adair cried out with her surprise. Andrew had never done that, and yet she didn’t want the laird to cease his actions, which were exciting her more than she had ever before been excited. “Oh, yes!” she heard herself say, and she blushed.
He lifted his dark head. “It pleases you, my honey love?”
“Yes!”she managed to gasp as her head began to spin.
For a little while longer he flicked his tongue overand around the sensitive nub, but then, his own need rising, he stopped, kissing her mouth to still her protest as he mounted her body beneath him and drove himself into the hot moisture of her sheath. She was tight at first, but then her body yielded to his manhood.
Adair caught her breath sharply as she felt his entry.
He was bigger than Andrew had been, and she was surprised at how easily she took him in. He stopped when he was fully sheathed, and she could sense him looking down into her face.
“Open your eyes, Adair,” he growled. “I want to see the pleasure rising in your beautiful violet eyes, my honey love.”
“Nay,” she half whispered. “I have never known the pleasure men speak of, my lord. If I disappoint you, you will surely send me back to Douglas. I would kill myself first!” All thought of Stanton had suddenly fled from her mind.
“Your husband gave no pleasure? Was he cruel?” the laird wanted to know.
“Nay, never! Andrew was gentle and kind. I pretended for him because I could not bear for him to know,” she confessed.
“Ah, my honey love, I have already given you a little pleasure adoring your little love bud. Your juices began to flow, which eased my passage within you. Trust me, and I will give you real pleasure,” Conal Bruce promised her.
“I am afraid,” Adair said.
He laughed. “Nay, not you. You’re a lass who does not know fear, Adair Radcliffe. You are anxious, but afraid?
Nay! Now open your eyes and trust me.”
Slowly she opened her eyes, and his own locked upon her as he began to move slowly at first, and then with in-creasing rapidity within her. Unbidden she wrapped her legs about his torso. It seemed as if her body was suddenly acutely attuned to his. She sensed the length and thickness of him. She savored the heaviness of his seedsac as it slapped against her bottom. And then suddenly something was happening to her. Adair felt as if she were about to burst into flames with the heat that suffused both her body and mind. Her head spun, and then the wave overtook her. She cried out as the intense pleasure rose up to take control of her body and soul.
She heard him groan. His body stiffened, and then through the sweet haze surrounding her she felt his juices filling her. And somewhere in their passion her eyes had closed once again.
For some minutes only the sound of exhaustedbreathing could be heard within the bedchamber. His weight on her was heavy, but she was so worn with their exertions that she could not move. Finally he rolled off of her, but then he gathered her back into his arms so that she lay atop him. Her heart-shaped face was pressed into the curve between his shoulder and his neck. He felt the soft puffs of her breath on his skin. He did not have to ask. He knew that she had felt her first real pleasure in the arms of a man. And Conal Bruce had to admit to himself that he had felt the kind of pleasure with Adair that he had never before known in the arms of any woman. “I’ll not be sending you back to Willie Douglas,” he told her softly. “From this day forward I am the only man you will ever know, my sweet honey love. And you’ll not sleep in the kitchens any longer, Adair. You will sleep in my bed, because you belong in it—and to me.”
“You have had your way with me,” she replied, her voice shaking slightly. “Let me go now, my lord.”
“Nay,” he said. “You are mine.”
“Nay,” she told him. “Your silver cannot buy my heart. Only I can give you that.”
“I don’t want your heart,” he told her cruelly. “I want all of your body, and my silver has bought me that, Adair. You are mine. I will never let you go!”
“I am just a body to you then?” she cried. Well, what else had she expected? Adair asked herself. Love? Shehad seen little of that between a man and a woman in her lifetime. Of all those she had known, only Richard of Gloucester had had a deep and abiding love for his wife, Anne. There had been no others, and she was a fool, she decided, to bring love into the picture. She was the laird’s new mistress now. Naught else. He had made her the whore she had sworn never to be.
