“So, I kiss ye awake.” She found his face in the dark with her hands and kissed his lips with her fingers still next to his mouth. “And I say to ye that I heard a sound.”
“Yes, and I say ‘What sound was that, Helen?’”
“Thunder?”
“Oh, a storm is coming? I like that. A storm with my countess. But maybe I better shield your body with mine.” He got on top of her.
“Aye, Jack. Ye better do that.”
“Is the rain coming down, Helen?”
“Nae yet, just far-off rolling thunder.”
He moved against her. Pressing his hardness into her maidenhair. She trembled and ran her hands up and down his back. She knew this skin and these muscles now by feel.
“Do you want to go back to sleep, Helen?” He was still pretending they had woken up together. His warm breath on her face.
“Nae. I wantdàireadh. Can I say that?”
“You can say anything you like. But I especially don’t mind that. Because that’s what I want, too.”
And then he was inside her, stroking in and out of her, his mouth either on her breasts or on her own mouth. She came to her peak as he was kissing her and she felt her moans reverberate in his throat as she put her hand blindly around his neck. Soon after that, he was releasing outside of her. He lay on top of her afterward.
“You don’t mind, do you, Helen?”
“Nae. Ye must shield me from the rain.”
“Yes.”
“I dinnae miss the lamp, Jack. I thought I would.”
“You didn’t miss seeing my handsome face?”
She put her hand to where his head was turned into the angle of her neck and shoulder and felt his cheek, his jaw. “Always,mo luran. But yer cock provides ample compensation.”
The glorious Jack Pike laugh. Not as full-throated as usual since it was night.
It had been strange what he wanted. To pretend to wake up from sleep together. As if they had some domestic arrangement. As if they were husband and wife. It had added to the tenderness of their coupling, she thought. But now it twisted at her heart.
“Helen?”
“Aye?”
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“The worst?”
“Yes.”
“I froze my grandfather.”
She felt him lift his head from her shoulder. “What?”
“He died three weeks before I was to be one and twenty. I was frightened. I know ye think that impossible, but I was. I was nae of age and widnae have my own sovereignty. I dinnae know who would be in charge of me for those three weeks. And I quaked at what might happen. So I talked to those I knew best in the castle, and we took his body out to a shed and left him there until the day after my birthday. It was January. The body dinnae spoil in the cold. Then we brought him in and thawed him and made his death known. I was made Countess of Kinmarloch, and I left the castle and moved into the keep.”
“You moved into the keep in January?”
“Aye. It dinnae leak as badly back then. And I stayed warm shoveling out the sheep dung.”
