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He let go of her laces. He stepped back. Then he went down on his knees on the warm stone at her feet.

Iona’s mouth fell open. She stared down at his black head and the broad shoulders under the damp shirt, and she could not find a single word.

He took her right hand in both of his. He turned it over and studied it, and then he lifted it to his mouth and kissed her knuckles.

His lips were warm. She felt that small touch at the back of her neck, and all the way down her spine.

“Is this how ye want me, my lady?” he asked against her hand.

“It’ll do,” Iona said, and her voice came out thin. “To begin.”

He kissed her palm. He kissed the inside of her wrist and stayed there, and she knew he could feel her pulse racing under his mouth, because she could feel it herself. Then he pushed her loosened sleeve up out of his road and found the thin white seam the burned village had left on her forearm. He kissed it from end to end.

His lips found the warm crook of her elbow. She felt it in the pit of her belly, and had to catch at his shoulder with her free hand.

“I wanted my mouth here,” he said, “the night I bound yer arm.”

“Ye never said,” Iona said.

“Ye’d have hit me with the basin,” Alasdair said.

He rose up on his knees to follow it. His mother’s silk slid from her shoulders and he let it go, down past her hips to the floor in a pale heap. He did not stop to fold it. She stood in her shift in the steam with her arm in his hands. He kissed the curve of her shoulder where the linen had slipped. He kissed the side of her throat and the hollow under her ear, and every place he touched went hot and then cool as the steam reached it. She shut her eyes. Her fingers knotted in his shirt.

Then he was on his feet, and his hand was fisted in her hair, and he took her mouth.

He kissed her hard and deep, as if the kneeling had cost him more than he would ever say, and she rose on her toes into it with a sound in her throat she would never have owned to by daylight. Her breasts ached against his chest through the thin linen. When he drew back at last she was gasping and could not have said her own name.

“I told ye to kneel,” she said unsteadily.

“I knelt,” Alasdair said.

“Ye got up,” Iona said.

“I ran out of you to climb.” He brushed her lower lip with his thumb. “So I’ll start again lower down.”

He turned her by the waist and set her in the big chair by the hearth. The warm cloth was at her back and the heat of the fire was on her bare shins. He went down on his knees again between her feet.

She laughed, high and unsteady, and stopped when he looked up at her.

He did not go slowly now. He took the hem of her shift in both fists and dragged it up to her hips, and set his hands on her knees and opened them, and looked at her in the firelight as if he meant to remember it. Then he kissed the inside of her thigh, open-mouthed, and the rasp of his unshaven jaw went up the soft skin after it, and every inch he gained drew the heat down through her to meet him.

Iona gripped the arms of the chair.

He stopped a breath away from where she wanted him and looked up at her over the bunched linen, wicked and very pleased with himself.

“Have I leave to go on, my lady?” he asked.

“Aye,” Iona said. “Go on. Yer Lady commands it.”

He grinned, and lowered his head, and set his mouth on her.

Her head went back against the chair. He was slow about it, wickedly slow, his tongue moving in long strokes and then circling and then still, until she pushed her hips toward him to make him move again. His hands spread under her and held her where he wanted her. When he slid a finger into her, and then another, she heard herself make a sound, and then another, and could not stop them. She fisted her hands in his hair. She thought of the hall below them at its ale, and what any of them would say to see the laird on his knees before the Dunmore bride, and the thought only drove the heat higher.

He knew exactly what she wanted, and he made her wait for it. When she tugged at his hair he hummed against her, deep in his chest, and that undid her more than all the rest.

It broke over her hard. Her back arched off the chair and her heels dug into his shoulders, and she cried his name to the rafters with no thought at all for who was below to hear it. It went on and on, wave after wave, until she lay limp in the chair with her hand still tangled in his hair and her heart thundering against her ribs.

He did not move at once. He laid his cheek on her thigh and stayed there, breathing hard, and she felt him smile against her skin.