Page 85 of Bonetide

He goes very still and lets out a slow, rough exhale.

“Did you walk into my house wearing nothing under this skirt?”

I bite back a grin. “Sure did.”

“All through the dinner.”

“Yup.”

A long beat.

“Iris.” He meets my gaze. “You’re going to ruin me.”

“That’s the idea.”

He laughs, a short, rough sound and tugs the skirt down the rest of my legs, then helps me step out of it. He gazes at me with the firelight on the side of his face and his mouth slightly parted, and the look on his face is the look of pure carnal desire, barely leashed.

Then he undresses himself.

He pulls the sweater and shirt off over his head in one motion. Of course, I’ve seen him shirtless before, felt him shirtless before—last night, the swims in the bay—but right now he looks different. He’s allowing me to look, wanting me to take him all in.

So I do.

He has the build of a man who has come from hardy stock, lean, hard, the muscles long, the skin pale, with a faint dusting of chest hair. There are small scars I had not seen before, faint, white, scattered across his shoulders and ribs the way a body collects scars across decades. I wonder where they’re from, wondering if he’ll ever tell me or if he’ll evade like he often does.

He unbuckles his belt, then unbuttons his trousers. He pushes them down and steps out of them.

He is fully bare.

I have seen him through binoculars, and I have had my hand on him in the loch and for three strokes in the dark, and I saw him last night after he came. I have not seen him like this, within touching distance, in firelight, fully and openly hard for me, his cock long and thick and standing flat against his stomach.

I forget to breathe.

He is terribly beautiful. He is terribly beautiful in a way that should not be possible for an actual man standing in an actual room, and the part of my brain that keeps trying to put rational frames around him is having a hard time tonight.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s a terror built into him. His beauty is something sublime, but not that of a god, least not a benevolent one. He reminds of that statue of Lucifer, Le Genie du Mal, that sculptor Jozef Geefs made in 1842 that the church deemed too sexy for Satan, so they hired Jozef’s brother Guillaume to remake the statue, only his version was even hotter.

Yeah, that even hotter second statue of Lucifer is on par with what I’m staring at right now.

And I’m this close to telling Alasdair that, but he wisely closes the distance between us and pulls me to him. He kisses me deeply as he lays me down on the bed slowly, the linen cool against my back. The room smells of beeswax and woodsmoke and him. He stands at the foot of the bed for one more second and looks at me bare and waiting on his sheets.

Then he’s on me.

He kisses me hard, far harder than before, deep and with punishing strokes of his tongue. He kisses my throat. He kisses my breasts again, longer this time, until I am whimpering. He works his way down my body. He runs his tongue over my stomach and my hips and the soft skin at the inside of my thighs, and his hands are everywhere, sliding under me, lifting me to him, holding me open.

I expect his mouth again, there, but I don’t get it.

Instead, he kisses the inside of my thigh, and then he comes back up. He settles his body over mine. He braces himself on one forearm above me and uses the other hand between us. Two of his fingers find me wet and ready. He slides them in.

“Christ, foxglove. You are soaking.”

“I have been since you opened your door.”

“Have you now?”

“I’ve been soaking since I got in the car,” I add.

“Aye, you’re killing me.” He groans.