“Anything else?”
She nodded an affirmative. “I liked the way your skin felt beneath my fingers.”
“And?” he encouraged.
“I liked the way ye kissed me.” She blushed a bright pink.
He smiled again, and this time, his smile reached his eyes. “That’s a starting point,” he promised as he leaned over, tangled his fingers in her hair and pulling her close, covered her lips with his own.
Chapter Fifteen
Jessalyn sighed. It hadn’t changed. His kiss was as warm and wonderful and welcoming as she remembered from their wedding night. Kissing him was the perfect antidote to being the MacInnes from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning until she closed them late in the night. She couldn’t worry about the myriad problems that plagued her when his lips were working their magic on her. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t form a coherent thought. All she could do was feel. And kissing him made her feel more than she’d ever imagined.
It was impossible to keep her distance. Every instinct she possessed urged her closer and Jessalyn obeyed her instincts. She took a step forward and found herself held firmly against his bare chest. This time, the earl of Derrowford didn’t disappoint her. He was grace personified and his timing was perfect. He caught her at the exact moment her legs refused to support her any longer. He deepened his kiss and tightened his embrace around her waist in a fluid motion that sent her senses spiraling. His kiss was everything she’d ever dreamed about, everything she’d ever hoped for in a kiss. It was soft and gentle and tender and sweet and enticing and hungry and hot and wet and deep and persuasive all at once. It coaxed and demanded, asked and expected a like response and Jessalyn obliged. She parted her lips when he asked entrance into the warm recesses of her mouth. She shivered with delight at the first tentative, exploratory thrust of his tongue against hers. She met his tongue with her own, returning each stroke, practicing everything she had learned in her first lesson in kissing him and began a devastatingly thorough exploration of her own. She pressed her palms against the warm, solid wall of his chest.
Neil bit back a groan of frustration when he felt the MacInnes’s hands against his chest. This time, he promised himself, he wasn’t going to rush her. This time he was going to be a considerate lover and allow her to set the pace of their lovemaking—even if it killed him. With that thought in mind, he let his arms fall to his sides and abruptly broke contact with her lips.
“No,” she murmured, her breath soft and warm against his.
“All right,” he managed, sucking in a ragged breath as he raised his hands in a gesture meant to prove to her that he hadn’t lost all of his control and that he could still behave like a gentleman in her presence.
Jessalyn felt his labored breathing, felt the rapid rise and fall of his chest beneath her palms and the shudders rippling his muscles as he struggled to regain control. “No,” she whispered once again.
Neil rested his forehead against the top of her head for a moment then tried to step back out of her embrace.
But Jessalyn refused to let him go. She wrapped both of her arms around his waist and pulled him to her. She breathed in the masculine scent of him, then closed her eyes and tilted her face up, anticipating the feel of his lips on hers. “Dinna.”
Neil exhaled slowly and mentally counted to ten before he could speak. “You placed your hands against me,” he said. “I thought you wanted me to stop.”
“No.” She opened her eyes and stared up at him. “I dinna mean for ye to stop. I only wanted to touch ye, to feel the hair upon yer chest and the beating of yer heart.”
He smiled down at her and reaching around behind his back, he took hold of her hands and guided them back to his chest. He positioned her palms against his chest, covering her hands with his own as he leaned forward and brushed his lips against her brow. “Be my guest,” he invited, moving her hands over his chest.
A blush heated her face and Jessalyn pressed herself against their hands and buried her face against his shoulder.
“You said you wanted to touch me.”
“I do.” Her words were muffled. “But …”
“But?”
“I canna do it in the daylight. I canna do it unless yer … unless we’re …” She looked up at him, begging him to understand.
“Making love?” There was a hopeful, optimistic note in his voice.
She shook her head. “Nay.”
Neil swallowed his disappointment and tried again. “Unless we’re kissing?”
She nodded.
“Then kiss me again, Jessalyn.”
Her name sounded like a prayer on his lips and Jessalyn eagerly complied with his gentle command.
She kissed him senseless. Or he kissed her senseless. He couldn’t tell which. And it really didn’t matter. What mattered was that suddenly kissing didn’t seem to be enough for either one of them. He unlaced her bodice and buried his face in the cleft between her breasts before nuzzling aside the edges of her garment and laying claim to one pink-tipped, pear-shaped breast and then the other. He breathed in the heady wildflower and woman scent of her as he laved her breasts, using his mouth and teeth and tongue to tease and tempt her. And he succeeded. The MacInnes writhed in his arms, shamelessly rubbing herself against him, working feverishly at the knot that held his plaid tied around his waist. He felt the fabric give and moments later, the tartan slipped down his thighs and lay pooled on the floor around his feet. He kissed his way back up her chest, over the pulse that beat a rapid tattoo in her throat, behind her ear, and across her cheek to her lips. He kissed her deeply, thoroughly, cupping a breast with one hand as he slid his other hand beneath her skirts and up her inner thigh, across the soft curls of her woman’s triangle and down into the warm, moist valley hidden beneath it.
The MacInnes gasped as he explored her with his fingers. She shuddered, an unmistakable sign of pleasure, moaned deep in her throat and clamped her thighs together to keep his hand in place. He acknowledged her request by continuing his intimate caresses. She seemed unaware of her arousal, her actions or of his state of undress, but Neil was acutely aware of her fingers caressing his naked flesh, acutely aware that while he was caressing her, she was leisurely tracing patterns of tiny half-circles on his bare buttock with the fingertips of her left hand and encircling the base of his male appendage with her right. He gritted his teeth against the incredible rush of pleasure he felt as the head of him brushed against the worn fabric covering her stomach. He jerked at the contact, feeling a painful, almost overwhelming need to lay her on a bed and taste every inch of her, then lie beneath her while she did the same to him. Neil marveled at the fact that his knees continued to support his weight and wondered how much longer he would be able to retain his tenuous control over the desire racing through him.
He was perilously close to taking her against the rough stone wall of the tunnel when there was a room designed for lovemaking somewhere nearby. He needed to locate the room while he could still think. Dipping his finger into the bodice of her dress, Neil carefully coaxed the silver key she wore on the chain around her neck from its resting place between her breasts. He eased the necklace over her head and held it up for her to see. “You have a key and I have a key,” he whispered. “And a room made for trysting. Shall we put them to use?”
The Machines stared up at him. Her blue eyes were wide open and dark with passion. Her lips were plump, swollen from his kisses and the soft skin of her face had been abraded by the stubble on his jaw. Her gaze was focused on the silver key dangling from the chain in his hand. She looked dazed and Neil was inordinately pleased to discover that she was as affected by their passionate kisses as he was. “We’ve discovered that you still like my kisses,” he murmured. “And you appear to enjoy touching me. Why don’t we see if you still like the way I look at you when you’re lying on the bed?” Praying the Laird’s Trysting Room had a bed, Neil gave her a hard, urgent kiss and reluctantly withdrew his fingers from her secret recesses.
He grasped her wrist to halt the slow erotic wandering of her right hand, then carefully disengaged himself, slipping out of her arms just long enough to insert her key into the second lock on the heavy iron door. The tumblers rolled into place and Neil swung the door back on its hinges. He swallowed a groan of disappointment as he found himself staring down another dark corridor instead of the room he expected. Reaching up, he grabbed a candle from one of the niches and stepped through the opening into the passageway. He held out his hand to her. “I propose that we locate the whereabouts of this trysting room together.” He smiled at her. “How about it, sweetheart?”
The endearment that rolled off his tongue as naturally as the morning mist rolled off the heather captured Jessalyn’s attention. She stared up at him, at his green eyes and handsome face and the perfectly shaped lips that kissed her to distraction and called her “sweetheart,” at his broad shoulders and bare chest. He held out a hand to her and Jessalyn placed her hand in his and stepped forward, right into a puddle of soft wool. She glanced down at her feet, frowning mightily as the softly flickering glow of the candle illuminated the length of MacInnes tartan that should have been wrapped around his waist.
He was naked. Widening her eyes in surprise at the sight of him unclothed and unashamed in the open doorway of the secret corridor, Jessalyn gasped. When she had watched him undress on their wedding night she hadn’t realized that that part of him was too large for her or that allowing him entrance into her secret woman’s place would hurt so much. She hadn’t known what to expect then, but she did now and as she watched, that male part of him grew larger and more prominent. She averted her gaze in an effort to stop it. Not that she was a coward. She wasn’t afraid of suffering further pain in the marriage bed. The pain was of no consequence. If only her dilemma was as simple as that. But it wasn’t. What she feared more than the physical pain was further disappointment. Jessalyn was very much afraid that she might lose her heart to him. And how could she love a man she couldn’t respect and admire? And how could she respect and admire a man who disappointed her so? Although she wanted to give him another chance, the idea that her handsome, Sassenach husband was a failure as a lover was almost more than she could bear to contemplate. She focused her attention on the pool of light behind his shoulder. Beyond that pool of light, at the end of the tunnel was the door that led to the Laird’s Trysting Room. She couldn’t allow him to take her to the room her father had held so dear in his memory. She couldn’t risk it. Not yet.
“No.” She pulled her hand out of his.
Neil frowned as he let go of her hand. “I thought you enjoyed kissing.”
“I do.”
“And touching.”
“I do.” She lowered her gaze to the floor. “It’s the part that comes after that I dinna like.”
“My mistake.” Neil inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly several times. He struggled to rein in his passion, but he couldn’t rein in his tongue. “Forgive me for misinterpreting your level of desire, my dear. But when you untied my kilt and started to caress me, I naturally assumed you enjoyed it enough to want the part that comes after the kissing and the touching.”
His sarcastic revelation appalled her. She couldn’t have untied his kilt. She would have remembered it. And she couldn’t have touched him so intimately. Not when she wanted no part of the mating that came afterwards. Jessalyn squeezed her eyes shut, trying to blot out the truth, but the persistent memory of the pleasure she had felt at discovering the velvety softness of the flesh hidden beneath his kilt plagued her. She chewed at her bottom lip and watched from beneath her eyelashes as the earl set the candle back in its niche, retrieved his tartan from the floor and without making any effort to disguise his state of arousal, leisurely knotted it around his waist. “I dinna,” she whispered, sadly. “Not yet.”
“Then we’ve a problem, my dear Laird MacInnes,” he said. “Because there’s a limit to my patience and my restraint. I’m a man. I’m not made of stone and I cannot—will not—continue the touching and the kissing without the part that comes after.”
Jessalyn sighed. Having been thoroughly and cleverly introduced to them, she craved his kisses. And now that he had shown her the magic that could be found at the touch of his fingers, she craved that touch just as much as his kisses. She didn’t want to mate with him again, but she didn’t want to lose the other pleasures he could offer her either. Perhaps another compromise was in order. She moved closer, angled her face toward his and said, “With the kissin’, I could be persuaded to show ye how to pleat yer kilt so ye won’t be droppin’ it at yer feet again.”
Neil ignored the way she tilted her face up for his kiss and the provocative way she puckered her lips in anticipation and glanced down at the tartan tied about his waist. “Why worry with all those bothersome pleats,” he asked, “when this way suits me just fine?”
“But …”
She looked so frustrated and so crestfallen that Neil almost relented and allowed her to have her way. But to do so might eliminate all hope of ever hearing her agree to make love with him again. Oh, he had no doubt that he could seduce her into it, but he didn’t want to seduce her into it. He wanted her to want it—and him—as much as he wanted her. Neil had vowed to let her set the pace of their lovemaking, not to do away with it altogether. He wanted to be patient, but he couldn’t allow her to dictate to him on a matter as important as this one—on a matter she knew almost nothing about. “I didn’t drop my kilt. You untied it. And the only way I’ll be interested in kissing and touching you or having you pleat my kilt for me is if you agree to untie it first and do the part that comes after the kissing and the touching.”
She didn’t like the idea of his issuing an ultimatum to her. After all, she was the MacInnes and the countess of Derrowford. She was his wife and if she wanted to kiss him and touch him and have him kiss and touch her in return, he should be more than willing to oblige. Standing up with him in church and repeating her vows ought to count for something. “You promised,” she accused.
“So did you,” he shot back. “To love, honor, obey and worship with your body. And so far, you’ve failed on all accounts.”
She tried again. “I like the kissing.”
“So do I,” he murmured. “Very much.”
“Then ye agree to continue kissing me if I pleat your kilt for ye?”
Neil shook his head. “Not at all.”
“I dinna understand.”
“You have my terms, Laird MacInnes,” he said. “I won’t agree to anything less.” He deliberately turned his back on her, then pulled the yett closed and used both keys to lock it.
Jessalyn lifted her chin a notch. “Verra well,” she replied haughtily. “I lived without yer kisses before. I will learn to do so once again.”
“If you think you must,” he responded, shrugging his shoulders in a nonchalant gesture. He opened his fist and stared at the silver key suspended from its chain, then guided the chain over the MacInnes’s head, watching as the key settled into the hollow between her breasts. “I’m free most mornings if you change your mind. You know where to find me. The door will be locked,” he reminded her, “but I believe you have a key.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Are ye goin’ to stand there admirin’ yer husband all day or are ye goin’ to help us with the thatch?” Magda asked.
The question was followed by the knowing laughter of a dozen or so of her kinswomen. Jessalyn felt a blush flame in her cheeks. She glanced down at her feet, shoving her bundle of thatch over into Magda’s arms with a force that rocked her kinswoman back on her heels. “I’m not admiring him,” Jessalyn replied. “Because there’s nothing to admire.”
“Och, yes ye are,” Magda answered. “Not that I blame ye, Jessie, ’cause I feel the same way about Artie.” She nodded toward the opposite side of the bailey where Neil and Corporal Stanhope were re-thatching the roof of the cottage Magda and her husband planned to occupy.
Jessalyn followed Magda’s gaze
and found herself transfixed by the view. She stood watching, barely daring to breathe as Neil balanced high above her on the exposed rough wooden beams of the cottage. The late afternoon sun glistened off his body and he shimmered in the afternoon sunlight like a god come down from the heavens. A gust of wind whistled through the glen and Jessalyn caught an enticing whiff of salty man and dried heather as he braced himself against the stiff breeze. Her heart began to pound. She swallowed hard, inhaling the scent of him. It made no sense. She had watched the men in the village thatch cottages all of her life and the sight of their labor had never made her feel breathless and achy or filled her with such a sense of longing and belonging until now.
Jessalyn exhaled slowly and chastised herself for her foolish behavior. She should have bitten off her tongue rather than let her pride goad her into promising him that she could do without his kisses. She didn’t want to do without his kisses. She wanted more of them—as many of them as he was willing to give. And she wanted them until she tasted her fill. Jessalyn fingered the silver key on the chain about her neck.
“I’m free most mornings if you change your mind. You know where to find me. The door will be locked. But I believe you have a key.”
She couldn’t get his words out of her mind. In the hours since he’d uttered them, she had heard them echoed in her brain a thousand times. The idea he’d planted had taken root. She definitely knew where to find him because she’d barely let him out of her sight. She found herself watching him all afternoon. Jessalyn sighed. She thought she was being clever and discreet, watching him when no one else was looking, but now she realized she had been fooling herself. Everyone knew. While she’d been watching her husband, everyone else had been watching her. And still she couldn’t seem to keep from looking at him.
She supposed Magda was right. There was much she could admire in him other than his extraordinary good looks and his money. In the weeks since he’d arrived at Glenaonghais, she’d been pleased to discover that he worked hard. Once he fully understood the clan’s desperate situation, the English earl of Derrowford had pitched in to help. The idea that an English lord and a soldier in German George’s army would join the old men and boys of the clan in the making of the spears and the traps and snares needed for hunting and fishing and the fact that he had spent days perfecting their use filled her with pride. A sennight ago, Neil had successfully snared two rabbits and a grouse. He’d gone hunting with Tam and Alisdair near the Sutherland boundary and had been the only one of the hunters to return with game. The whole clan had watched as Alisdair deftly taught Neil how to dress his catch. The two rabbits had gone into the stew pot along with a handful of barley and a few turnips and the grouse had been placed on a spit and roasted. The earl had grinned with the pride of a ten-year-old boy as he’d presented Davina with his contribution to supper. And when he’d learned from Ian MacCurran that the Munros had chickens, Neil and Auld Tam and Andrew and Ian MacCurran had organized a stealthy raid upon the Munros’ hen house, returning with a dozen fat hens and a fine healthy rooster. It had taken a day or two for the hens to settle in and begin laying again, but now the clan had eggs and milk to see them through until the supplies she had ordered arrived from Edinburgh. And later when he thought he was alone, Jessalyn had seen Neil wading along the edge of the loch, washing chicken dung and feathers from his feet and legs, laughing aloud, proclaiming himself “the mighty barefooted earl of Chicken Thieves.” She smiled at the memory. ’Twas a rare Sassenach lord who could poke fun at his situation and himself. When she thought about it, she realized there were hundreds of ways the earl had sought to make himself useful. Just yesterday, he and Sergeant Marsden had gathered stone to rebuild Andrew MacCurran’s forge and the crumbling wall around the bailey, then repaired the wall of one of the empty cottages so Flora and the sergeant could have a home of their own. And today, he was helping to re-thatch all the cottage roofs and she’d heard him promise Davina that he would begin work on the cleaning and repair of the castle garderobes. Like the hens he had stolen, the earl appeared to be settling in quite nicely. He had done his best to make himself useful and managed to befriend many of her kinsmen and women. The Ancient Gentlemen liked him and boys Ian’s age were amused by his ignorance of highland ways and awed by his determination to learn them. And she couldn’t help but be awed by his determination as well. Jessalyn might not like to admit it, but she was certain he was having more success adapting to the highland ways than she would have had adapting to life in London. In truth, Neil Claremont was a success at nearly everything. She couldn’t even find fault with him for trying to usurp her role as the MacInnes. He regarded her kinsmen with respect. He didn’t treat them as enemies or as inferiors, but as individuals. Nor did he point out the error of their ways in remaining loyal to a weak Stewart king. Their loyalty seemed to be one of the things he admired most about them, and when he became aware that there were a few members of her clan who would have been happier with a male laird, Neil didn’t attempt to encourage them or try to court their favor. He made it perfectly clear to every member of the clan that she was the MacInnes and that he was her loyal husband. Except for his lack of prowess in the bedchamber, she couldn’t have asked for a better husband—Sassenach or not. She chided herself for continuing to believe in foolish romantic dreams. She was a woman grown and the leader of her clan. She had no reason to be so unhappy and dissatisfied with her father’s choice of husband for her. Jessalyn sighed again. It was harder to give up on her dreams than she’d imagined. If only he had proven himself to be less of a braggart and more of a lover everything would be perfect … If only she knew how to help him … If only her prickly pride hadn’t made her deny him … If only she could learn to guard her sharp tongue around him …