She set it down anyway, deliberately, the way she set down everything she had decided to stop carrying.
“Aye,” she said. “Walk with me, then.”
She walked with him beyond the edge of the firelight, past the last booths, down along the dark singing river to where the alders formed a black roof against the stars. The music grew faint and distant behind them until they seemed like the only souls left breathing in the glen.
He stopped, turned, and looked at her in the starlight, and the fine speech he had meant to make flew clean out of his head.
“I cannae do this anymore,” he said. “Ye wanted an answer? There ye have it. I cannae do it, Olivia. For a month I’ve tried. I drove ye away to keep ye safe, and I’ve been half a man every day since. I told meself it was duty, and I told meself it was fear, and I told meself a hundred fine things, and every one of them was a lie. The truth is, I cannae stop wantin’ ye. I’ve never wanted to stop.”
His chest was heaving. “So tell me to stop now. Tell me, and I will walk ye back to that fire and never speak of it again, and keep me word till I die of it. But daenae look at me the way ye are doin’ now and say nothin’, lassie, for I am only a man, and I’ve come to the end of what a man can bear.”
“Ragnall… I missed ye,” Olivia said.
It came out of her cracked and furious, as if the words were dragged up against her will, which he thought perhaps they were.
“A month in me faither’s castle, in me own bed, and I couldnae sleep for missin’ a man I swore black and blue that I hated. Thebairn. The daft dog. Kate. Yer grandmaither. I missed all of it. But mostly ye.” Her eyes were wet and blazing in the starlight. “So, nay, I willnae tell ye to stop. I am tired of tellin’ both of us to stop.”
He kissed her then, and it was nothing like the careful kiss in the kirk and nothing like the furious kiss in the nursery. It was a month of pent-up desire poured into the one act, and she gave it back to him every bit as hungry, her hands fisting in his plaid.
When he finally tore his mouth from hers, it was only to put it where he had been dreaming of putting it far longer than he would ever confess.
He kissed the line of her jaw and the wild pulse in her throat. He drew the plaid from his shoulders and spread it out on the soft grass and laid her down on it in the starlight, and then he knelt over her, and this time, he let himself touch her.
“That whole night,” he murmured against her collarbone, working the laces of her bodice loose with hands unsteady as a green lad’s, “I lay next to ye and talked ye through it and never laid one finger on ye, and it almost undid me, and the single thought in me head the whole while was this: how I’d do it for ye meself, if ye ever let me near.”
He bared her to the cool night air and the wet heat of his mouth, closing his lips over one hard nipple while his hand rose to cup the other, and felt her arch off the plaid and gasp his name into the dark.
He drew on her slowly, rolling the stiff bud with the flat of his tongue, finding the exact pressure that made her breath stutter, and when her hands fisted hard in his hair, he gave her the gentle edge of his teeth and swallowed down the broken sound she made.
He moved to the other nipple and gave it the same patient ruin, until both were tight and glistening in the starlight, and she was writhing under him with her spine bowed up off the ground.
“Let me, Olivia.” His voice had gone to gravel against her skin. “Let me show ye what I couldnae that night. For a month I’ve thought about nothin’ else.”
And she, who had sworn a month of oaths that she never would, slid her fingers deeper into his loose black hair and held him to her and breathed, “Aye.”
He took his time with her. He had a month of dreaming to make good, and he meant to make it good, meant to leave her with no breath to call this gratitude or duty or anything but exactly what it was.
He kissed his way down her body, over the soft weight of her breasts and the faint flutter of her pulse beneath her ribs and the flat of her belly, pausing to graze his teeth lightly over the swell of her hip until she writhed and swore.
He dragged her skirts up over her knees and her thighs as he went, baring her to the gloaming inch by pale inch, and the sightof her laid open in the crushed grass nearly undid him where he kneeled.
He learned her by the catch of her breath and the restless lift of her hips, every separate place that wrecked her. The crease where her thigh met her hip. Her soft inner thigh, where the skin quivered and warmed under his open mouth.
He spread her legs wider with his broad hands and felt her tremble beneath them, half pure want and half the old fear of being looked at so, and he pressed his mouth to the tremor and kissed it slowly out of her until her knees fell open of their own accord.
“Easy, lassie.” The words ghosted warm over her. “I have ye. I willnae stop until ye are undone, and then I will start again. Look at me while I do it. I want yer eyes on me.”
She lifted her head, her hair a wild red tangle in the grass, her eyes dark and dazed, and he held her stare as he settled his shoulders between her thighs and licked into her at last, one long, slow stroke of his tongue through the slick heat of her, entrance to peak. Her head fell back. A cry tore out of her into the night, raw and astonished, and her hand flew to her mouth to muffle it.
“Nay,” he said, catching her wrist and drawing it back down to his hair. “Let me hear it. There’s nay one on this earth but me to hear ye now.”
Then he stopped his thinking altogether and gave himself over to it. He worked her open with his mouth, slow and thorough and shameless, learning the rhythm that made her hips chase him and the angle that made her thighs clamp tight around his ears.
He circled her tight, aching bud with the tip of his tongue until she sobbed his name, then soothed her with the flat of his tongue and drew back to lazily lap at her wetness until she cursed him as a black-hearted devil and ground herself against his mouth.
He could have kept doing this until dawn broke over the hills. He told her so, the words rough against her skin, and felt her shudder at them.
He slid one thick finger inside her, feeling her tighten around him, slick and eager. When she pressed down greedily to take more, he curled his fingers deep, stroking a spot inside her that made her whole body shudder, and a string of broken Gaelic slipped past her lips—something she would have blushed to hear in daylight.
