book JdM6x1406931-20978754 (6 page)

Angus said, “I don’t drink it very much. My Da did, and…”

Elisabeth grasped his forearm in her hand and looked up into his eyes, concern on her face. “And?”

“He would get angry,” Angus said, simply. “I like it, but only to celebrate.”

At that very appropriate moment, the first of the pipers to get his cup of whiskey in him winded his pipes and began to play. Elisabeth got a dreamy look in her eyes at the wheezing, sighing sound of the winding, and then she laughed as the tune began, her pure laughter the most enchanting sound Angus thought he had ever heard.

“Why do you laugh, wife?” he asked.

“It is a galliard!” she said. “I do not know how he came by the tune, and perhaps it is only the happy chance of one tune sounding like another, but I danced to this tune in Edinburgh.”

“I did ask him to play music worthy of you,” Angus said, smiling back at her. “Shall we dance, milady?”

“Can you dance the galliard, Angus MacGregor?” she asked with mirth in her voice, mocking him gently.

“No, milady, I cannot, but perhaps you will teach me.”

He led her into the light of one of the cooking fires, for the dusk had almost gone, and he watched her as she made the intricate pattern. Three times she did it, and on the third he did it with her, as she laughed and said, “No, no, you do the opposite. You are the gentleman, are you not?”

And he said, “No, milady, I am a Highlander,” and then it seemed to him she was at the point of coming to him for an embrace but stopped herself.

Then Calum called, “Enough of that! ‘Tis time we danced in earnest!”

It was Elisabeth’s turn to learn the dances of her new people. Indeed, they danced the Highland dances in Urquhart and in Edinburgh, but not as the true Highlanders did, so she was always missing steps and turning the wrong way, and he would smile at her, but her own face was set and firm. He could see she wished to learn and wished only to be let alone so that she might.

The mutton went round, and the pheasants, and Angus and his bride tasted of them both, and Elisabeth professed herself content with her wedding feast.

That was when Alan called out, “Is it not high time a maidenhead were taken?” Angus remembered all the times he had heard the like called out by a kinsman of the groom at other wedding feasts, and how lusty the phrase had made him feel, and how the blushes of the bride at it seemed to make all the men present merry and loud. Now, looking at the expression of resentment that seized his own bride’s face for a moment, before that same, false smile returned, he wished Alan MacGregor at the bottom of Loch Ness.

He remembered his resolution, though, and he recovered his good humor. Elisabeth’s maidenhead was his to take, and soon—very soon—he would take it. There was no other way forward; he would have his way in his bed sooner, or he would use the strap until he had it later. The thought of the strap brought back the memory of spanking her in the barn, and suddenly his yard was stirring hugely beneath his plaid, and he was no longer willing to waste a second.

He turned to Elisabeth, whose look of happiness at the dancing and the feast had turned to one of apprehension. That very fear fired Angus’ blood.

“Come, wife,” he said, letting his inmost desires play upon the surface of his tone and of his face. “We must to bed.”

“Oh, please, Angus,” she said, cowering away from him. “Only a few more minutes.”

“No, Elisabeth,” he replied. “It is time.” He caught her about her waist and pulled her close as she struggled feebly. He said into her ear, “Do not make me get the strap, lass.”

A cheer went up from the company at the sight of Angus holding his new bride close, and it continued as he pulled her, with dragging feet, to the door of the little croft-house and then inside it. When Angus slammed the door to the cheer, shouts of “Be gentle, Angus!” and “Don’t make a fuss, lass!” and “Ride the filly hard, MacGregor!” grew louder and then died away as the guests returned to the mutton, and the whiskey, and the dancing. The second, drunker piper was playing now while the first caught up in whiskey-drinking, so the piping was more haphazard, but the dancers did not mind.

Chapter Seven

“Tend the hearth, Elisabeth,” Angus said. “That is a wife’s first duty, and it is time you learned to do it.”

Elisabeth, her face still burning at the bawdy cries of the Highlanders, did not turn to look at her husband but went straight to the central hearth. The embers were very low, but the basket of peat was full. She had never tended a hearth before, but she had watched Angus put a slab of peat on the night before and again this morning, so she took a big one out of the basket and lowered it gently onto the embers, proud that she was not dropping it down and scattering ash into the air.

“No, girl, not like that!” she heard her husband say angrily behind her. “Do you want to put the embers out?” He stooped at her side and took the big piece of peat off the embers. He put it back into the basket with a crash that seemed to betoken disbelief that anyone could be so foolish as to put it on the hearth.

Ashamed, Elisabeth, on her knees by the stones of the hearth, looked at her hands clasped in her lap. He was going to use the strap on her; she knew it. He was that unfair, was he not? She knew nothing about living in a croft-house, and he had said he would spank her whenever she needed it.

But he said, gently, “You have never tended a fire at all, have you?”

“No… Angus. I am sorry.” A tear trickled down her cheek.

“Don’t worry, dearling,” he said. “I’ll show you. Look, here’s the basket with the little pieces, for the kindling.”

“You’ll not use the strap on me?” Why did she feel that same strange twinge of regret she had felt when he had not kissed her again at the church?

He laughed. “No, dearling, not for something you have no notion of! Do you think me a brute?”

“Oh, Angus,” she said. “I…” She turned to him, suddenly desperate to be held, but when he put his arms around her, she felt herself begin to yield again, and once again, she refused the warmth and tensed herself against him, and he let her go with another of his puzzled looks.

He showed her how to put the little pieces of peat on the fire and how to blow upon the embers to set the little pieces aflame. They watched the kindling burn, in silence, looking only at the dancing flames. She thought of the flames going up from Castle Urquhart, and of the barn, and of his huge hands, and shivered, hoping he would not see it.

When the kindling flame rose high, he showed her how to put the slabs upon the fire, so as to make it hot and burn them up most evenly.

She watched him timidly and thanked him over and over, but as the flames leapt higher on the peat, he seemed to grow more foreboding and to withdraw into himself again, until at last, when the fire was fully ablaze, he turned to her and said, “Take off all your clothes and get into the bed.”

“Where?” she asked. There seemed no place where she might disrobe modestly.

“Right here, Elisabeth, while I watch.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “No… I can’t, Angus, please.”

“Is this how you obey your husband, Elisabeth?”

“But… I… you cannot ask that—they never said…”

“Do you think I care, wife, what they said in Edinburgh or in Urquhart? What your royal kin and your governesses said about a man’s bed and the duties of his bride upon it?”

She looked into his eyes and read a fierce determination there, and with it a wolfish hunger. The terrible yielding began in her again. To her dismay, it always seemed to come when he showed her that he intended to bend her to his will and to use her for his pleasure. Her secret place grew hot, just as it had when he had held her face and kissed her mouth, and just as it had when he had spanked her in the barn.

“I won’t, Angus,” she said. “You stay here and turn away, and I will go to the bed and remove my arisaid and shift, and then you may come to me.” She tried to say it with quiet determination, but as she listened to herself and saw the look in her bridegroom’s eyes, she realized that she was defying him, just as she had promised herself she would not do.

He regarded her with the same hungry stare, now made fiercer by the way his handsome brow set itself even harder, and with more authority in the gesture by which he leaned in towards her.

“I advise you, Elisabeth, to do as I have asked. You know what will befall your bottom if you do not.”

Trembling, she stood, feeling herself overmastered by him and hating it because she craved it so. Did she want to feel the strap across her backside? Was that, somehow, what all this strange melting in her soul and in her loins was all about? Confusion reigned supreme, but now she was pulling off the simple pewter pin that he had given her to fasten the arisaid, and she was dropping the plaid to the ground around her feet so that she stood before him in only the silk chemise that was that night all that she had left of her life as a noblewoman, the Lady of Urquhart.

“Stay a moment,” Angus said, and stood, towering over her. “Lift your hands above your head, lass,” he growled in a voice thick with some sort of emotion that frightened Elisabeth even as it thrilled her.

Angus stooped again, but only for a moment and only slightly, for he had caught the hem of the chemise in his right hand and he was lifting it, and then he had his arm around her naked waist, pulling her into him. His left hand was in her hair, cradling her head as he had when he had kissed her for the first time outside the church, and he was kissing her upon the mouth, and she was lost beyond escape or rescue. She wanted to be his, his alone. She wanted to be taken; she wanted to be possessed in every shameful part of her body.

His right hand traveled from her waist, frantically seeking out her bottom. He took both of her little bottom cheeks upon his huge palm and squeezed. She cried out, into his mouth as his tongue sought hers. Her arms were still lifted; she did not want to lower them because Angus had told her to raise them, and now it felt perfect to do only what Angus told her to do, because she belonged to him. But to hold them there, above her head, was a torment, for she wanted them around her wedded husband, her wedded lord. She wanted to feel his strength and the muscles that rippled beneath his skin like the rising hills that marched away from Loch Ness until they were lost in the Highland sky.

Now his right hand left her bottom, and he used it to pull the silk chemise up her body at last, and he broke the kiss, and his left hand was on the chemise as well, and he had lifted it off and away. She was naked before her bridegroom, with her arms still raised above her head. She looked him in the face, but he did not meet her eyes at once, for he was looking at her charms, which no man had ever seen uncovered before: the little breasts with their pink buds, and the tender triangle with its modest thatch of golden curls that revealed only the tiniest peep of her maiden sex, the little hint of the slit that she had been told a thousand times must never be seen even by Elisabeth herself in a looking glass.

She felt her blush begin anew as her husband took his fill of his bride’s beauty. “Sir,” she asked hesitantly, “do you find me comely?”

At last, his eyes returned to hers, and he smiled with a kind of childish delight that seemed to make her heart melt. “Yes, my dearling… you are the fairest thing these eyes have ever beheld.”

He took a step forward and gently put his left arm around her. The linen of his shirt felt rough against her skin, but she felt the strength in that arm that she had craved, and she trembled.

“Do not fear, dearling,” Angus said softly, clearly mistaking the nature of her trembling. “I will teach you how to please me.”

As if in an enchantment, she watched his big right hand move downward and come between his hips and hers until it vanished from her view. Then she felt his fingers, gently, upon her tender cleft, and she knew that soon he would discover how shamefully wet she was there, just a tiny bit further down.

The fingers were moving gently, and she looked into his dark eyes and loved him for that gentleness, but she must not let him know how wicked she was—how she was neither fit to be a lady at all, nor to be a modest bride to an honorable Highlander like Angus MacGregor. That strange, delicious fire must be denied and pushed away.

“Sir,” she said as coldly as she could, “you dishonor me. Do not touch me there.”

The fingers continued their gentle quest, delving and pushing at her inner thighs, seeking to make her spread her legs the way a lady never, ever spread her legs.

“Hush, Elisabeth,” Angus said. “I can tell that your loins are afire as mine are, dearling.”

“You are mistaken!” Elisabeth said, more sharply than she had intended, and did everything in her power to squeeze her thighs shut and to pull away from the questing hand.

The confusion returned to Angus’ face, and then a new element—frustration and the beginning of anger. She could see that his patience with her was soon going to come to an end, and when she realized that the flash of ire in his dark eyes had made her moisture come and even to begin to trickle down her thigh, she felt she might go mad. Surely she was lost now. But Angus pulled his right hand back, even as he gripped her more tightly with the left—so tightly that she was suddenly truly afraid that he would hurt her. To her even worse shame, the fearful thought made her whimper up at him as she regarded his dark brow.

“Elisabeth MacGregor, you are my wife now, and my hand will go where it likes. Spread your legs, girl, or feel the strap across your backside now, and have me spread them for you after.”

But the thought of it, of being strapped on her wedding night, did Angus’ work for him, and when his right hand returned to touch there again, more roughly now, she moaned and felt her left knee travel outward, towards the hearth, letting his long fingers in and down.

“There, dearling,” Angus murmured. “Was that so hard?”

She moaned again and closed her eyes. How could it be right for him to move his fingers like that, up and down along the furrow that she herself was never to touch? How could something so wicked feel so wonderful? But the loveliness of the feeling did not make it any less wicked, and she must never say and never show any more than she could help that he had broken her pride so thoroughly with a mere touch.