“Ye mind the other thing?” he murmured against her skin, moving lower, his beard rough against the flat of her belly. “That first night I made ye lie in me bed and touch yerself for me, with me hands fisted at me sides, sworn nae to help ye? I watched ye come apart in the dark and thought I’d go mad with nae bein’ allowed to be the one who did it. I lay awake after and cursed meself for a fool that I’d agreed to a rule I’d have to keep.”
His breath ghosted warm over the crease of her hip, and she felt him smile against her.
“There’s nay rule tonight, lassie. Tonight, me hands are me own to give ye. And I mean to give ye every last thing I couldnae then, till ye’ve forgotten ye ever kept a handsbreadth from me.”
He settled his shoulders between her thighs, spreading her open with his broad hands, then pressed his mouth to hers with purpose.
She felt a rush of heat as she realized he was finally about to finish what the feud had interrupted during the festival. There was no metal on the wind this time—only the candle, the river, and his mouth. She surrendered to it with a broken sound, both her hands finding their way into his hair.
She came undone on his tongue almost immediately, too tense from the confession and the long month of resisting him, crying out his name into the dark of the tower with her fingers tangled in his hair and her heels digging into his back. He worked her through every last shudder and didn’t stop.
He drew it out long past where she thought she could bear it, lazy and merciless by turns, learning the sounds she made and chasing each one down, until she was sobbing his name and half-pleading, boneless and burning at once, sure she had nothing left to give and finding him patient enough to prove her wrong.
Then he slid one thick finger into her, and a second, crooking them deep while his tongue kept its slow, relentless work, and she felt herself climbing all over again, writhing and desperate, her whole body strung tight as a bow.
He murmured against her, rough and low, that she was bonnie like this, that he’d dreamed of her like this during the long, empty month she was gone, that he could spend the night between her thighs and count it the best night of his life, and the wicked burr of the words drove her as surely as his clever hands did.
“Ragnall.” She hardly recognized her own voice. “I want ye. I want all of ye. Now, please. I cannae wait. I will die of the waitin’—”
“Ye willnae die.”
He crawled back up the length of her, unhurried even now, pressing his mouth to her belly, her breasts, the wild flutter of her pulse at her throat, and she felt him shed the last of his clothes, felt the hard, bare heat of him settle against her at last with nothing left between them and no rule in the world to keep them apart.
He braced himself above her on his forearms, not caring for his injury, his black hair falling loose around both of them like a curtain drawn to shut out the world. For a moment, he only looked down at her, and she saw the old fear still lingering beneath the desire—the terrified thing that had lived behind his door for ten years. She reached up, drew him down, and kissed that fear right out of him.
“I have ye,” she whispered against his mouth. “Whatever ye are afraid of. I have ye now, and I willnae throw ye from any window, ye stubborn man. I am nae goin’ anywhere at all.”
It was the right thing and the wrong thing at once, and she felt the laugh break out of him, ragged and helpless against her lips, and felt some last knot of dread loosen with it.
He reached down between them, notched himself against her entrance, and pushed into her slowly, watching her face the entire time, giving her the chance to take him.
The stretch, the fullness, and the overwhelming feel of him drew out a sound from her she had never made before, and he caught it with his mouth, returning a groan that she could feel in her bones.
He stilled when he was seated deep, his forehead dropping to hers, both of them breathing hard, joined at last after a month of held breaths and locked doors and careful, cruel distance.
“There’s me hellion,” he breathed, shaking with the effort of holding still for her. “There’s me wife. Are ye with me, Olivia?”
“Aye.” She hooked her leg over the back of his thigh and drew him impossibly deeper and felt him groan against her throat. “Move, ye great fool. I willnae break.”
He moved slowly at first, deliberate and confident, as he learned the rhythm that made her breath catch and her nails dig into his shoulders. He pulled back almost entirely and then sank forward again, until she was gasping with each thrust and rising to meet him.
He pressed his forehead against hers and maintained that slow, deep rhythm long after it should have been easy, his large frame trembling with restraint, until she was the one to break it, until she bucked her hips against his, dug her heels in, and begged him, in words and then beyond words, to stop being so gentle with her.
God forgive me, I cannae hold it. Ten years I kept it locked, and she has undone the lot of it with her heels in me back and her sharp tongue gone soft in me ear. Let it break, then. Let the door come off its hinges and rot where it falls. I willnae be a locked man for her. Never again.
Whatever careful control he had maintained since the day they got married snapped. He took her the way he had longed to and never allowed himself—deep, fierce, and thorough—one hand fisting in the wild red spill of her hair, the other hooking beneath her knee to open her further. He murmured rough, broken Gaelic into her skin, calling her name again and again like it was the only word he had left in his mouth.
The bed frame knocked against the wall, but neither of them paid it any mind. Olivia matched him stroke for stroke, fierce as she was in everything else, giving as good as she got and demanding more.
He thought faintly through the roar of his blood that of course she did, that she would never in her life lie still and be passive, that he had married a hellion and thanked God on his knees for it.
He lifted her leg higher over his hip, adjusting the angle until he found a spot inside her that made her cry out and grip him, and he stayed there, working her mercilessly through it as she broke apart beneath him a second time, trembling and clenching tightly around him, gasping his name.
He gentled only long enough to let her ride it down, then set his teeth and built her back up again, for he found he was greedy for it now, greedy for every sound and every shiver, ten years of famine come due all in one night.
He moved a hand between them and found her aching bud and worked it in slow circles in time with his driving hips, and felt her wind tight and tighter beneath him, her breath sawing, her cries rising, her whole body gone taut as a bowstring drawn to its full.
“That’s it,” he groaned against her ear. “Once more, lassie. Come apart on me. I have ye. Let go and let me feel all of it.”
