Aye, aye, aye.Sparks crossed her vision. Their bodies strained against each other and yet they were as one.
“You’re mine,” he said, holding her face between his hands as he moved inside her.
She could no longer tell where he ended and she began.
She cried out as spasms of pleasure pulsed through her body.
“Alison,” he called her name.
His body answered hers, thrusting more deeply still, and she fell into a liquid fire with him.
As the storm of sensations subsided, she held on to David as if he were all that kept her afloat in an endless sea. She surreptitiously wiped away the tears streaming down her face. Her emotions were raw and jumbled and far too strong to contain.
When he started to move off her, she resisted.
“I’m too heavy,” he said, though he held most of his weight on his elbows. “I fear I’ll crush ye.”
“Not yet.” She wanted to keep him inside her, to stay as one with him as long as she could.
He brushed her hair back from her face and looked at her with an expression she could not read. Had he felt the same wonder, the extraordinary closeness that she had?
“You’re mine now,” he said again, his green eyes intent on hers. “Now and always.”
“I am,” she said.
But are ye mine, David Hume?
***
David stared up into the darkness and tried to make sense of what had happened to him.
He listened to Alison’s soft breathing as she slept in his arms, amazed at how it felt as if she had always belonged there. When she sighed in her sleep, a rush of tenderness overwhelmed him.
She washis wife. He was caught by surprise by the feelings that stirred in him. He wanted to protect her from every harm, to keep her beside him no matter what came, to see her belly grow with his child. He knew to the depths of his soul that so long as he could have her he would never want another woman.
He had believed that making love to Alison would slacken the lust that had tortured him from the moment he met her, but nothing more. They had given each other sexual release in other ways before. Why had this been so different?
When he was inside her, he felt as if he had found a home for his lost soul, an answer to his longing.
And that worried the hell out of him.
***
“I was this close to catching Wedderburn and his brother,” Patrick Blackadder said, holding his finger and thumb an inch apart for his father to see.
Time and time again, he caught their trail, despite the black, rainy night, and despite all the tricks his prey employed, from crisscrossing burns to backtracking. But always, Patrick was one step behind Wedderburn and missed him.
All night long he had imagined dumping the bodies of Wedderburn and his brother before the gates of Blackadder Castle and demanding entry. If he had succeeded, he would have possession of the castle and Alison this very night. He’d be bedding her now.
“Wedderburn led ye on a merry chase, did he?” Patrick’s father said with that smug look on his face. “And there were only three of them to your thirty?”
“If he’d had more, I would have caught him,” Patrick said. “’Tis easier to hide with three.”
His father snorted. “If I were a younger man—”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Patrick said. “Wedderburn would have lost ye in the first hour.”
“Mind how ye speak to me,” his father said, slamming down his cup. “You’ve much to learn. ’Tis fortunate I’ll be laird for a good long while yet.”
