Every last one of them, including the Sassunach champion.
Rhona stepped closer, nudged her. “Well?”
“Aye, they are impressive,” Caterine admitted, watching them.
She also noted which man’s clinging underhose revealed the largest and heaviest-looking bulge. And the sight of it filled the lowest part of her belly with a warm, pleasing tingle.
Uncomfortable to be so stirred, she sent a glance down the beach to where an equally shirtless James worked a rock pool. “Think you James would approve of your ogling?”
Rhona smiled. “There is no harm in looking. I suspect James Keith would lose all interest in me if he thought I couldn’t appreciate a man’s well-fleshed pleasure tools. Especially when they’re displayed so-”
“Pleasure tools?” Caterine almost choked on the term.
“Of course.” Rhona’s eyes twinkled. “That’s how I think of them, but there are other ways of calling them. Shall I-”
“Nae. How can you even think of such foolery when you know why we are here?” Caterine glanced again at the men with the nets.
No better than her friend, her attention sought and rested where it shouldn’t.
There was something irresistibly arousing about the way the thin cloth of the men’s braies hugged that part of them. The wet linen molded itself so perfectly to their flesh, not just the length of their shafts and the swell of their ballocks could be seen but also the thick hair sheltering their maleness.
At once, a weighty tension began pulsing deep in her belly, becoming even more insistent when her gaze settled on the thus-displayed male-parts of the man who raged heads above the others: her champion’s.
“He would pleasure you well, my lady,” her friend declared, low-voiced.
“I do not want to be pleasured,” Caterine denied, appalled by how stale the statement tasted.
How untrue.
At the moment, at least, her entire body ached to know pleasure.
“You should.” Rhona dropped her bag of limpets onto a growing pile of limpet-filled sacks. “I take my pleasure where and when I can find it,” she said, then strode down the beach toward James and the waiting rock pool.
Even then, she was ruled by her passions.
Unbidden, Sir Marmaduke’s description of his first wife popped into Caterine’s mind.
Taunted her, truth be told.
Indeed, her chest tightened with a disquieting sensation she couldn’t name. She did know that, like Arabella, Rhona was a woman of passion. One who lived for, and thrilled, to carnal desire.
She did not.
Not that she didn’t know what passion was – she did.
Especially sincehisarrival.
She’d just never reached out and seized it.
But maybe she should.
Her decision made, she scooped up another dripping handful of sea tangle and dropped it into the waiting creel. She’d buried two husbands – the first dying of cold English steel when he was but a few years older than James is now. The second died of old age – and she wasn’t getting any younger.
No one would fault her if she took advantage of her attraction to the Sassunach, let him teach her what it meant to be a woman ruled by passion.
So long as she kept her heart out of such intimate explorations, she wouldn’t fault herself either.
Chapter 24
