No other man had charted this path—until Culross. It would only ever be Culross.
Take. Take. Take. It was what he did.
From her. The sea.
She had been the prize hiding in plain sight, there the whole while.
Culross palmed her breast in his other hand. Crying out, Meghan twisted her exploring fingers into his hair. “August!”
And giving.
He buried another smile in her mouth.
Occasionally, he gave.
Meghan moaned and pressed herself against him, rubbing and arching. He teased the pebbled tip through her gown.
“I dreamed of your mouth,” he rasped with each joining. “I wondered at the taste of you.”
He felt her smile. Felt it move through him.
“We are even, August, because I have dreamed of you far longer than was appropriate.”
Culross nestled his mouth in the curve of her shoulder. “My dreams did not begin just now, Meghan.”
She loosed a dreamy sigh and he swept in, drifting his tongue around hers in a slow dance.
Kissing had been the bow or curtsy to lovemaking. A precursor and nothing more. This… This felt like nothing he had ever known.
He slid his tongue along the long, slender column of her neck.
His throat burned with the ache of wanting her. Culross glided his hands over her lithe, wondrous form, in the same sense of discovery she did his.
“You would marry your family’s enemy.” His voice was rough with want.
It should be shame.
“I would,” she breathed.
He kissed her again.
“Why?”
She glided her fingers over his neck. “Because he is not my enemy.”
Culross made to lay his next siege.
But her words pierced a place he didn’t think could be pierced—his hungering for her.
He is not my enemy…
Passion blazed from eyes that could pierce his very soul. “And even though I see him as a friend, he does not see me as one,” she whispered softly, returning every hurt he’d ever leveled at her.
Their hearts raced to the same beat.
“If I loved him,” she said quietly, “I would most certainly do so.” Meghan lifted tentative fingers and brushed them along his lips.
Culross caught her wrist. “That is it there exactly, Meghan,” he breathed, pressing a kiss against the pounding beat there. “Then…why?”
