She giggled as he pushed her back against the door, nuzzling his face into her neck and breathing deeply. All through the day, he had found his gaze drawn to the milky softness of her skin, how delicate it looked. It had taken everything he had in him not to make a move upon her right then and there.
“Ye’re relentless, man!” she teased him, but she wrapped her arms around him as he pulled back, brushing his nose against hers for a moment and pausing to simply drink her in.
Her green eyes glittered in the dim light of the moon that poured through the window beyond, a passion in them that drove her to bring his lips to hers once more.
The kiss was soft, sweet, and exploratory.
She’d had a long day, and he knew that she must have been tired, and he was testing her pace, her energy, to see what she’d be able to keep up with. And, when he pulled back, he noticed that her expression had changed slightly. Furrowing his brow, he eased away from her, confused.
“What is it, lass?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, now,” he murmured, sliding a hand along her waist and pulling her against him. “There’s something bothering ye. Ye cannae hide it from me.”
She nibbled on her bottom lip for a moment, examining his expression, trying to parse whether or not she should tell him.
“I just… It’s just that ye’re different than how I had imagined ye would be. When it comes to… when it comes to matters of the bedroom.”
He frowned at her, more than a little confused.
“What do ye mean by that?”
“Nothing bad,” she assured him. “I had just imagined… I had thought that ye would be rougher when it came to our marital bed. That’s all.”
He paused for a moment, taken aback. In all the times that they had been together, this was the first she had expressed such a thing, and he wasn’t sure whether it was meant as a good thing or a bad one.
“Why so?”
“Ye told me that ye would make me beg for ye,” she reminded him. “It’s hardly what I had expected to hear from a lover as… as attentive as ye.”
He grinned, brushing her hair out of her face.
“Aye, I said that I’d make ye beg fer me,” he conceded. “But I didnae mean that I would force ye. More that I would make it so you would have done anything to feel my hands on ye…”
He squeezed her waist demonstratively, and he saw gooseflesh appearing on the tops of her bare arms. Her cheeks darkened, and a smile curled the corners of her lips.
“And I have seen that through, have I not?”
She laughed as he reached up to tilt her chin in his hand.
“Aye, I suppose ye have,” she agreed.
He softened his tone at once, sensing that she needed his comfort.
“I never intended to hurt ye, Ailsa,” he murmured to her. “I’d never want something like that.”
“So why did you say it?”
“Because I thought there might be no other way you’d want me,” he admitted. “That’s how every other woman I’ve been with has preferred me. Like an animal, like a beast. But ye…”
He brushed his nose against hers.
“Ye see the man beneath it all, Ailsa.”
And, with that, he planted his lips to hers once more and lifted her off the ground, keeping her pinned to the door between them.
She let out the sweetest sigh against his mouth, as though a weight she hardly knew she had been carrying had lifted all at once from her shoulders. There was still so much he had to undo; about the way he had talked to her, the way he had tried to lay his claim on her before she was ready…
