Her whole body convulsed when the hard, thick head of his cock prodded her with insistent, delicious friction. He rubbed back and forth in her creamy heat, spreading the erotic slickness on him, on her. She twitched, desperate for him to push inside her, to soothe her, to release the unbearable tension in her body. He kicked back against the jeans taut at her ankles, stilling her.
“Please,” she gasped, trying to press back with her bottom, but she was unable to move even that much, the way he was holding her.
“Is this what you want?” he purred, his voice dark and rich, guiding himself between her sleek, swollen labia. Torturing her, stopping, poised at her entrance.
“Yes, please, Cian,” she wailed.
He began to feed himself into her slowly. She clenched the edge of the desk, gripping it so hard she felt like she was gouging nail scores into the glossy wood. He was so big, so thick. Her body had never yielded for this before and her inner female muscles tensed, trying to resist the steely male intrusion, even as she was aching for it. She squirmed what little she could, desperate to accommodate him.
He hissed long and low between clenched teeth. “Bloody hell, Jessica, you’re tight!”
“Probably because I’ve never . . . ah! . . . done this before!” she managed to force out, swamped by raw, intense sensation.
He went still behind her, barely in her. “Tell me you jest,” he said tightly after a long moment.
“Cian,” she cried, “don’t you dare stop now!”
“You are maiden? At your age?”
“I’m not that old. Move, damn it!”
“By my time’s standards, ’tis unfathomable!”
“By mine, too,” she gritted. “So now that I’ve decided not to be a virgin anymore, is it too much to ask for a little h—elp!” He pushed forward, piercing her hymen in a smooth, even thrust.
He gave her but a moment of stillness to recover, to adjust. The brief stinging sensation passed quickly and once more she was burning with feverish need.
Gripping her hips with his big hands, he began to impale her slowly, inch by mind-blowingly delicious inch. Relentlessly he usurped every nook and cranny her body ceded.
“Can you take more, Jessica? I’m not yet half in, lass. Am I hurting you?”
“No! I mean, yes! I mean, yes and then no! Yes. More!”
He pushed yet more of himself in, stretching her, filling her, long and thick and hard.
She whimpered, clinging to the desk. It was unlike anything she’d imagined. She was certain there was no way she could take more of him inside her, but then her sleek inner heat would not only yield but thrill to him, both stretch and embrace, ease yet tighten hungrily around him. She was a velvet glove, custom-crafted for him. She’d been made for this man, she marveled, designed to sheathe him.
With one final, strong push, he thrust himself in to the hilt, the silky hair on his muscular thighs rasping against her silky bottom, and she cried out from the fullness of it. It was pain yet pleasure, it was too much, yet just exactly right. She was full of him, part of him, her body melting around him, adhering to him, making them one. It was raw, it was fierce, it was incredible.
Then he began moving! Easing out, inch by incredible inch, leaving her hot and empty and aching.
Filling her back up just as slowly. Driving himself into her sleek heat.
Cian stared down at Jessica’s pretty, silken ass as he worked himself in and out of her. Bloody hell, she was tight and hot and slick.
And virgin. He couldn’t believe it. He was stunned that this incredibly passionate, beautiful, smart woman had never lain with another man. He’d never have guessed it. He’d thought her an experienced woman.
But not Jessica. She’d come to him untouched by any other. And though it wouldn’t have mattered to him how she’d come, the fact that he was her first man, that he was the only one she’d chosen to accept, with the countless men who had undoubtedly tried to get where he was right now, filled him with an intense possessiveness, gave him a primal, masculine thrill.
The need to spill his seed in her had been riding him merciless as a Harpy since he’d pumped that first inch inside. He’d damn near exploded when he’d pushed through her maidenhead.
He stared down at her, bent over the desk, her delicate spine arched, the paler skin of her full breasts crushed to the desk, the generous plump mounds spilling out the sides, her small, dainty hands stretched above her head, fingers clutching the wood, her lush, sweet ass thrusting up to meet him, he watched himself pump into her. It was the most exquisite, sensual sight he’d ever seen.
He thought of his prison, to maintain control. He needed her to find her pleasure before he took his.
Gritting his teeth, he began mentally reciting the parameters of his hell. Fifty-two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-seven stones.
He wanted to give her so much pleasure that each time she looked at him, her body would remember what he could make her feel, and begin hungering for it. Twenty-seven thousand two hundred and sixteen of them paler gray than the rest.
He wanted to be her every sexual fantasy, as well as her man and her rock and her best friend. Thirty-six thousand and four more rectangular than square.
He slipped one hand in front of her, between her woman’s mound and the desk, found her silken nub with his thumb and began playing it, rolling his pad over it, lightly, gently. Nine hundred and eighteen stones have a vaguely hexagonal shape. Then faster and more firmly. Then backing off again, lightly, gently, rubbing slow circles all around her clitoris, without actually grazing it.
“Oooh—Cian, that feels so good!”
He eased out of her slowly, thrust back in powerfully. Teasing her nub with alternately slow and gentle, then frantic friction, he slid two fingers over her slick, swollen mound, pushing between her lips, to feel where they joined, where the thick, rock-hard shaft of his cock was entering her. Where they became one. Ninety-two stones have a vein of bronze running through the face. Three are cracked.
Jessi writhed deliriously beneath Cian’s sensual assault. One of his big hands was on her behind, firmly cupping a cheek, holding her still; the other was between her legs from the front, delicately, expertly working her clit, backing off until she was ready to scream, resuming again just when and how she needed it. She gripped the edge of the desk, quivering uncontrollably, as if being shocked by little sizzling erotic pulses.
Her orgasm ripped through her so suddenly and intensely that she cried out, a long, wild half-sob, half-scream. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and lay whimpering helplessly beneath him, shuddering with wave after wave of pleasure, taking all he was giving her, convulsing as he milked every last ripple of climax from her with his pounding, with his clever, relentless hand.
Her hot, sleek warmth quivering around him was too much! He couldn’t hold it and stopped trying. Dropping forward, Cian covered her, gathering her back against his hard, muscled chest, and growled close to her ear, “You’re mine, Jessica. Do you ken that? Mine.” He gave her two more powerful pumps of his cock and exploded in hot intense spurts inside her.
The inexplicable feeling of the rightness of him coming inside her, coupled with the pad of his thumb deliciously abrading her orgasm-sensitive clit and his possessive words, kicked Jessi right back into another orgasm. You’re mine, too, Highlander was her last fierce thought, before they slipped down to the floor and dozed for a time beneath the desk in a sated, entwined stupor.
Cian sat on the floor near the fire, leaning his shoulders back against an ottoman, watching Jessica, entranced.
She was sitting cross-legged on a plush lambskin rug before the briskly crackling fire he’d just topped with sheaves of fragrant heather. Her jade eyes were sparkling, her short dark curls were softly tousled, and she had a velvet crimson throw tucked about her hips. She was talking animatedly, gesturing with her hands. And he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, he couldn’t hear a bloody damned word.
S
he was naked from the waist up and her pretty, high, round breasts quivered and bobbled with each gesture, her rosy nipples gently swayed.
The warm glow of the firelight highlighted chestnut strands in her raven curls he’d not seen before, and kissed her creamy skin with a brush of gold.
It was all he could do to keep his hands off her, but he knew that if he pushed her too far this night, he’d not be able to have her on the morrow, and the next and the next. He had to pace himself with her, though it was killing him. His palms itched with the need to caress her lush, sweet curves, to take her beneath him again and again.
He stretched out his legs and leaned back on his hands, keeping them well behind him, forcing himself to be contented for a time just savoring the exquisite vision before him.
Jessica St. James: half-nude, all woman, and glowing from his bedplay.
He’d known the moment he’d first glimpsed her that it would come to this. That he would have her this way. As certain as his vengeance, she’d been his destiny.
After they’d slipped beneath the desk and drowsed for a time, he’d stirred, roused her, and scooped her into his arms. He’d carried her here, before the fire, laid her back on the plush creamy sheepskin, and made love to her. Slowly, gently, showing her that he was more than a great big territorial brute, that there was tenderness in him too. He wanted her to know all the facets of him: ninth-century war-laird and sorcerer, and simple man and Druid.
They’d drowsed again, then stirred again, and begun talking lazily of small things, lover’s things: favorite colors and seasons, foods, and places and people.
But suddenly her gaze turned serious and she leaned forward. “How did it happen, Cian? How did you end up in the mirror?”
He leaned forward, too, unable to resist the full, soft breasts swaying toward him with her movement. He ran the pad of his finger beneath the lush curve of one beautiful, silken-skinned mound. “Och, woman,” he said softly, “you show me Heaven and ask me to revisit Hell? Not now, sweet Jessica. Now is for us. No grim thoughts. Only us.”
Cupping her breasts with his big hands, he ducked his head and slicked his tongue across one of those rosy nipples before catching it in his mouth with a husky, sensual purr. It hardened instantly against his tongue. He teased it lightly with his teeth, scraping it across the edge, then pressed it with his tongue against his palate, suckling deeply.
“Us,” she repeated breathlessly, clutching his dark head to her.
It was the most incredible night of Jessi’s life. It surpassed all she’d ever imagined that special night would be. It was searing. It was intimate. It was filled with sounds of passion that she was sure must have rung out from the stone walls, echoing sharply down the winding corridors of the vast, ancient castle. It was hushed and conspiratorial. It was raw. It was tender. It was perfection.
He’d taken her wildly, roughly on the desk, calling out to and laying claim upon the kindred wildness within her.
He’d made sweet, painstakingly slow love to her before the fire, cupping her face with his hands, staring into her eyes, caressing her so tenderly and seemingly reverently that she’d had to turn her face away from him to hide an inexplicable burn of tears. As he’d moved, sure and deep inside her, she’d felt as if he’d been making love to her soul.
He’d rolled over onto his back and raised her high above him, muscles bunching and rippling in those powerful, tattooed arms, then lowered her, inch by delicious inch, onto his hard, straining erection.
He was a phenomenal lover! He never went completely soft. Even after he came he was still hard. Once she’d rued his being Terminator-tough. But she wasn’t about to waste a single breath complaining about him being an unstoppable sexual machine. (Though, come morning, she might waste a few breaths complaining if, as she suspected was going to be the case, she could hardly walk!)
After their third intense, erotic bout, stretched on a velvety chaise, with her riding both of them to a brain-melting, panting orgasm, he bundled them up in soft woolen throws collected from various chairs, and they slipped out through the French doors of the library and onto a stone terrace beneath the pearly radiance of a half-full moon.
He stood behind her and pulled her back into his embrace, resting his chin on the top of her head. She was cocooned by the spicy, erotic man-scent of him. Mixed with that scent was a subtler one: the smell they made together. It was intoxicating to her—the scent of their lovemaking—sweat and kisses and come.
He held her like that in silence for a long time, staring out at the night, gazing at the mountains beyond.
And she watched the sky, brilliantly splashed with sparkling stars, marveling.
College was a lifetime away.
She could no longer remember the Jessi who’d so tightly scheduled her entire life. The one who had a coffee cup stuffed way in the back of her cupboard that said: Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.
She’d finally stopped making other plans.
And this was Life.
Here and now.
She realized then, much to her astonishment, standing there beneath that wide-open Highland sky in the arms of her sexy Highlander, that she was no longer in such a hurry to finish her PhD. In fact, hanging out in Scotland and doing a bit of casual, unstructured digging around these mountains could probably keep her happy for a long time. Especially if Cian MacKeltar was around to carry her tools and keep her company.
And although she knew she would probably never be able to comprehend her mother’s lack of matrimonial staying power no matter how hard she tried, she suddenly completely understood Lilly’s desire for babies, and her unceasing, constant love for all her children: halves, steps, and wholes alike.
It was a complex emotion Jessi’d never felt before, because she’d never met a man whose children she’d wanted and whose last name she’d tried on for size:
Jessica MacKeltar.
For the first time in her life she wondered what kind of babies she would make with a man. What kind of children they could bring into the world together, she and this big, fierce, handful of a man. They would be something—that was for sure!
Jessi knew what was happening to her.
It terrified her even as it elated her. She suspected she was glowing every bit as luminescent as the moon above her.
Falling in love could do that to a woman.
22
“We’re coming in now,” the deep Scottish burr of one of the MacKeltar twins warned through the double doors of the library.
Jessi flashed Cian a cheeky grin. “Guess they got tired of waiting.”
“Aye, ’twould seem so, lass,” he replied, running a finger down the inside of the silvery glass. She mated the pad of her index to his.
She would be so glad when he was finally free of that damned glass!
It had reclaimed him directly from the shower. In the early hours of the morning, they’d finally ventured from the library and wandered down corridor after corridor, peeking into various chambers, looking for a bathroom.
They’d found one befitting castle and king, with a fabulous shower sporting multiple pulsing heads and a reclining bench. They’d made love yet again, soaping each other slippery, sliding and bumping and grinding beneath the steamy spray. Then the powerful, muscled dark Highlander had dropped to his knees, pressed her back against the wall with his hands on her thighs, and, at a time when she would have sworn herself incapable of more pleasure, had kissed and licked and nibbled her to another shuddering orgasm.
She’d learned over the long, sizzling night that the forbidding man Cian MacKeltar showed the world wasn’t the same one that took a woman to bed.
That man—the lover—dropped barriers, opened himself, gave in small ways she’d never have suspected. That man watched every flicker of her eyelash, learning what pleased her, what made her smile. That man teased with the playfulness of a man who’d had seven sisters he’d obviously adored.
That man had disa
ppeared while she’d been kissing him, leaving her alone in the shower, bereft and kissing air.
She’d fisted her hands with a fierce, hurt scowl.
It had been a bad moment, eased only by the thought that in fifteen more days he would be free of the stupid glass forever.
She’d decided, as she’d finished rinsing off and stepped from the stall, that in retrospect, they were lucky Dageus had taken their SUV. Things couldn’t have worked out better.
They were now in the highly secure castle of Cian’s descendants, and she was pretty sure that—although his descendants seemed as bristly and testosterone-laden as he was—they would nonetheless do all in their power to keep him safe from Lucan until after the tithe was due. (And when it was all over, she was getting a sledgehammer and smashing that damned mirror into a thousand tiny silvery pieces. Who cared that it was a relic? It had held Cian captive for eleven centuries and she wanted it dead.)
Not once during her harrowing day yesterday had she imagined she might be starting this day—a gloriously sunny Highland morning, at that—having made hot, passionate love all night with the man of her dreams, in pretty much the safest place they could hope to be, with two other Druids present to stand additional guard between her and Cian, and any threat that might come to pass.
“Are you decent?” a woman’s voice called, pushing the door cautiously ajar.
“Nay, but we’re clothed,” Cian purred.
Jessi laughed. He certainly wasn’t decent. The man was shamelessly indecent. He was an animal in bed. And out. A great, big, hungry, uninhibited animal.
And she adored it.
Gwen hurried into the library first, trailed by Chloe. Their sexy husbands brought up the rear. Jessi studied the twins with interest this morning. She’d been too tense and worried about Cian last night to look at them much. Now she examined them at a sexually-induced-endorphin-drugged leisure.
They were magnificent men, with identical, chiseled Celtic features, golden skin, strong noses, and chiseled jaws dusted by the same dark shadow-beards.