Chapter Fourteen
In which Lucas pays the price.
Lucas…
Three years ago…
My heart’s a stone in my chest. I’m facing hellfire now.
It’s worth it.
This night with Cat - finally being able to touch her, be inside her, hear her moan through her orgasms - it’s worth everything I’m about to face. But not yet.
Her glossy black hair is tangled, her cheeks flushed and her eyes drooping. For four years, for fourteen hundred and sixty-one days, I have wanted this moment, holding Cat in my arms. I pull a blanket folded over the back of the couch, settling it over her.
“So,” she says drowsily, “what is this place? Is this the infamous Stewart Love Nest?”
I hear the jealousy she’s trying to hide and it gives me more satisfaction than it should. “There’s been no other women here.”
“Naw, are ye daft?”
“Well, my Mum’s borrowed it a couple of times, and my sisters bring the bairns here when it’s warm.”
“Ainsley and Emily, aye? A boy and a girl each?” She slides her leg over my thigh and I can feel my chapped, overworked cock rise hopefully.
“Aye. Their husbands are good men.”
Laughing, she says, “I canna imagine how their dating habits went with a protective brother like ye.”
Putting my arm under my head, I smile at the ceiling. “When some lad was brave enough to show up to take them out, I’d be chopping wood in the front yard,”
She frowns. “Did ye have a fireplace?”
“No.”
That sets her off into another round of laughter. I’ve always loved watching her laugh, head thrown back, joyously and unapologetically loud.
“What do ye do here?” she manages, settling back on my chest.
“I fish.”
“Ye dinnae fish,” she scoffs.
“Aye, I do. What do ye think I do when I’m not guarding your pampered arse?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. “Maybe pull tractors across fields for fun?”
Now that makesmelaugh, and all that laughing makes her rub against me in a very enticing way and I’m inside her again, carefully holding the small of her back to make sure I dinnae hurt her in this position.
After putting her back together in the great room, I carry her up to my bedroom and we start all over again. Desperate, then slow. Bracing my arms on either side of her head, watching every subtle change on her beautiful face. Her green MacTavish eyes wide, awed as she watches me too. Two perfect tears spill down her cheeks as she comes for me again.
I build a little blaze in the stone fireplace to warm up the room and let her doze on my chest for a while. I touch her everywhere, mapping her skin and the curves of her until I know every inch. The long scar at the base of her spine. The five freckles on her left shoulder, how her hip curves so gracefully.
When the night sky is edging toward dawn, regretful, I wake her up. “I have to bring ye home,sweetness.”
“It’s not like I have a curfew,” she groans, rubbing her nose on my chest. Right over my heart.
“Aye.” I run my hand through her curls, silky and thick. When she rode me, she’d bent forward, kissing me, her hair dropping like a curtain around us, sealing out the world. “Come now, it’s time,” I check my watch. “I’ll help ye get dressed.”
