The ceiling was low, accentuating his massive height and the breadth of his shoulders. Goodness, but he waslarge. Far larger than she. In the vast halls of Hawkridge Manor, the difference wasn’t as obvious. But here, in this little room with its single bed and dresser, she couldn’t help but wonder how they were possibly going to fit together. For an instant, her gaze centered on his loins, and then jerked guiltily back to his countenance as her blush deepened.
“What…what do we do first?” Her fingers curled inward, nails pressing into palms that were already slicked with perspiration.
The wooden floorboards creaked beneath Lachlan’s weight as he crossed to her; a small sound compared to the pounding of her heart. He clasped her hands, raised them to his mouth, and placed a kiss on every single knuckle before staring into her eyes.
“First, we make ye comfortable. This isna something tae be rushed, or endured. It’s meant tae be enjoyed, every bit of it, from the first moment tae the last. I willna lie and say there willna be an awkward moment or two, as surely there is with any new thing. But it doesna have tae be as serious as ye would have some people believe. Nor nearly as fast. Lovemaking is intended tae be a celebration. A feast for the senses, and the souls, for all involved.” While he spoke, he began to undress her. Slowly. Gradually. A tied string here. A button there. As if it were the most natural thing in the world when no one else had ever taken off her clothes except for herself and her lady’s maid.
Her dress was the first garment to fall. It pooled at her feet, was followed by her petticoat, a swath of fabric that tied at the waist to give shape to her skirt, and then her boned corset. Her drawers were next and, finally, her chemise, leaving her clothed in nothing but air and shadows and the weight of Lachlan’s gaze.
“Ye have a beauty that outshines the moon on its fullest night.” Lowering his head, he pressed his mouth to her shoulder, his breath warm against her ivory flesh. “A thousand stars would bow before ye, and it’s a blessed man that I am tae be able tae claim ye as my own.”
A poet, she thought dazedly as he kissed a path across her collarbone and up her neck. She hadn’t known he was a poet. With his words as much as his hands.
She trembled when he traced the shell of her ear. Quivered when his hands skimmed down her back to cup her buttocks, and who knew there so many nerve endings inthatparticular part of her anatomy?
He kissed her lightly. A teasing brush of his lips across hers. A little nip. A husky sigh. Then he stepped away and began to undress himself, his countenance somber save for the faintest tilt of his mouth.
With half the amount of clothing to remove, he was naked within a matter of seconds, and her breath caught as she studied the rugged planes and valleys of his chest and abdomen, his sculptured muscles carved from a land that made men out of boys and warriors out of men.
“You’re so…big,” she ventured, and that was evenbeforeher gaze traveled below his waist.
“Thank ye,” he said solemnly, as if she were the queen with a scepter in her hand and she’d just placed it upon his shoulder to award a knighthood or other valor of honor. “Surely the greatest compliment I’ve ever received from the lips of the bonny lass whose opinion matters the most.”
Her brows jutted in bemusement…until she happened to glance lower, and then with a sharp gasp she met his twinkling eyes. “You’re…you’re…”
As comfortable with his nudity as she was self-conscious of hers, he rested his hands on the edges of his hips. “Big is as fine a word as any, and the perfect way tae stroke a man’s ego if ye were after such a thing.”
Big?
He wasenormous.
And if she’d questioned whether they were going to fit before, she was convinced they wouldn’t now.
“Lachlan,” she said hesitantly, “I–I don’t think this is going to work.”
“Aye, and I’m sure that’s what they said about the Great Pyramids when they started laying the first row of stone.”
“We are not the Great Pyramids.”
He grinned. Glanced down. “Speak for yerself.”
If his intention was to make her laugh and thus loosen the coil of tension wrapping her body in thin, invisible string, he succeeded. Her fingers relaxed. Her shoulders eased. The knot in the middle of her temple unraveled.
His toes bumped into hers as he cupped her jaw with one hand while the other plucked the pins from her hair and scattered them across the floor. Undone, her pale tresses tumbled all the way to the small of her back where he gathered a fistful of curls and gazed at them with the reverence of a pirate king admiring his chest of golden treasure.
“Blessed,” he repeated, letting the tendrils slide through his fingers before he brought his mouth to hers and slid his tongue between her lips in a kiss that was neither light nor teasing.
She tasted his hunger. His need. His raw, aching desire to possess. To take. To conquer. All tempered with an exquisite level of self-control that far exceeded her own.
As lust smoldered and flames licked, she wound her arms around his neck, nipples tingling where they rubbed against the soft mat of curls spread across the top of his chest. She tentatively probed his mouth with her own tongue, and when he growled and hitched her against his body in a taut embrace that brought her belly in direct contact with the hardest, hottest part of him, her exploration grew bolder.
They went to the bed, the back of her knees pressing against the wooden foot rail before Lachlan picked her up and placed her on the mattress, her head cocooned on a pillow stuffed with goose down, her arms never loosening from those broad shoulders.
He knelt over her, bracing his weight in his thighs. Cords of muscle rippled and stretched beneath her fingertips as he kissed the sensitive space right beneath the curve of her jaw, and then the base of her neck, and then her breasts, suckling the tender buds one at a time while those large, callused hands spanned her ribcage before beginning a perilous descent that had her arching off the bed, first in surprise…and then pleasure.
When he touched herthere, gliding a single fingertip along the velvety wet seam of her most intimate place where even she hadn’t dared venture for fear of committing some ungodly sin, it was as if a new color had been added to the rainbow. A shimmer of light that she never knew existed before Lachlan opened her eyes and allowed her to see it.
It was stunning.
