Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] (18 page)

An all-consuming burn to soothe and caress him, to banish whate’er troubled him so profoundly.
She cleared her throat, dredged up her courage. “I . . . we—” she began, fully intending to share her own darkest secret, tell what she knew of his heart . . . and how. But he stilled her with a gentle flick of his tongue across her lower lip.
“Do not say it,” he whispered against her cheek, his golden voice tight with strain and sounding ragged.
He kneaded her shoulders with bliss-spending fingers, his touch distracting her. “Acknowledging what is between us would bring naught but pain,” he cautioned, holding her gaze. “Let it be enough to ken your sweetness could easily undo me, fair lady.”
Once more a flicker of sadness glimmered in his eyes. “Aye, precious lass, you could make me forget more than my tattered honor.” He traced a finger along her jaw. “Much more.”
Honor,
he’d said.
The saints knew he’d already made her forget her own.
Madeline almost cringed at the thought, shame spilling through her like sheets of eddying water.
Somewhere a shutter slammed against the wall, its loud banging an almost welcome reprieve from the accusatory grumble of the rolling thunder.
A loutish burst of laughter came from Silver Leg’s men, and Madeline shivered. Their debauchery chilled her more than the cold, moist air streaming through the rain-damp shutter slats.
Abhorrence at herself flooded her, too, for their lechery only underscored her own breathless need.
Trickling desire spiraled through her, and it pulsed just as urgent as the baseness firing the ruffian’s blood. ’Twas a keen awareness of him. A thrumming need, that deepened with each darting flick of Iain MacLean’s tongue against her lips.
The intimacy of his kiss, and his surprising tenderness, bound her physical body to him as soundly as his nightly visits to her dreams had endeared him to her heart.
She closed her eyes a moment, struggled against the urge to bury her face into his shoulder and inhale deeply. His scent intoxicated her and she drank it in greedily, reveling in its decidedly masculine blend of wet grass, old stone, and softened leather.
Damp leather seasoned with peat smoke and an elusive but utterly irresistible hint of pure, unadulterated male.
Sighing, Madeline combed her fingers through his hair, let the luxuriant black strands slide across the backs of her hands.
Aye, there could be no doubt he befuddled her.
Lulled and bespelled her.
She trembled, the mastery of his kiss, the soft warmth of his breath—the mere nearness of him—overwhelming her senses.
A few stolen kisses sought in a dire moment, and she’d come wholly undone.
Lost herself.
And her scruples.
Abandoning them so irrevocably, she continued to cling to him, molding herself to the solid warmth of his broad chest. Her arms snagged firmly around his neck, she buried her fingers in the cool silk of his hair, even though her every instinct screamed that Silver Leg’s hirelings had strayed from their purpose.
Her newly awakened passion banished all coherent thought as it rose to a piercing, mind-dulling degree. A weighty and heated throbbing began somewhere deep inside her, and she parted her lips, unconsciously bidding him to deepen their kiss.
He needed her—at least in that moment—she had no doubt.
Casting off all caution, she savored the astonishingly intense yearnings spooling through her body, willingly giving herself over to the sensations.
Let the storm-chased night send a bolt of lightning to fetch her straight to the gates of hell, but she didn’t want him to stop kissing her.
Couldn’t bear for him to stop.
Too sweet, too unaccustomed and rare, were the ripples of pleasure spreading through her with each gentle brush of his lips across her own, each velvety sweep of his tongue against hers.
Faith, she’d ne’er dreamed a man could kiss so softly. Or that the mere feel of his mouth lighting over hers could infuse the lowest part of her belly with such a deliciously heavy warmth.
A fine, pulsating heat she suspected no true lady ought feel, much less enjoy.
And gentle birth be damned, she didn’t care.
But she
did
care that Iain MacLean was not free.
That undeniable truth weighed heavily on her shoulders and cooled her burgeoning ardor as swiftly as if someone had emptied a bucket of icy water o’er her besotted head.
Her eyes flew wide, the reason she’d hurled herself at him once again foremost in her mind. Pulling away, she broke the kiss and slid a sidelong glance at the two miscreants whose raging letch filled her throat with choking, vile-tasting bile.
She followed their stares, her eyes straining to peer through the haze of bluish peat smoke hanging thickly above the crowded trestle tables.
Her pulse skittered, running hot and fast when her gaze lit on the focus of the men’s lust. Worldly-wise, and tolerant, as she thought herself, Madeline gasped in astonishment.
A buxom joy woman lounged in the shadowy entrance to the darkened sleeping dormitory, her heavy-lidded expression and slow toying at the folds of her skirts just where her thighs met, a clear invitation for any man eager to partake of her proffered charms.
Large-boned and coarse, but with an extraordinarily lustrous wealth of rich-gleaming auburn curls tumbling to her waist, the bawd’s generous breasts near burst from the lowest-cut gown Madeline had e’er seen.
The top halves of the whore’s nipples, rouged and tightly ruched, peeped provocatively above the edge of her plunging bodice. Madeline swallowed hard, uncomfortably aware of the hardened peaks of her own overly full breasts.
And how exposed they’d be without the borrowed plaid draped about her shoulders.
Aware of an audience, the bawd arched her back. The deliberately sensual stretch caused both her nipples to spring free and their thrusting tips popped into full view for any who cared to admire them.
And many did.
Hoots, hearty shouts of masculine glee, and a few poorly veiled sniggers rose above the general din.
Heat inched up the back of Madeline’s neck, and she tightened her grip on Iain’s shoulders.
She risked a glance at him.
He, too, stared, but unlike the thick cloud of miasmic lust she could almost see swirling around Silver Leg’s slack-jawed henchmen, her shadow man’s granite-set features revealed naught but cold indifference.
Your breasts are more fetching by far,
she thought she heard him murmur, but the words were smothered beneath a burst of tawdriest ribaldry as every man present and not too deep in his cups to notice praised the joy woman’s bountiful wares.
A largish man at the next table leaned forward, his eyes near bugging from his ale-flushed face. “’Fore God, if those teats wouldn’t harden a dead man’s lance!”
“Mine already
is
hard,” another declared, his proclamation eliciting a chorus of guffaws.
“And I mean to wrap those curling tresses all around my hardness,” one of Silver Leg’s men cried, making for the whore.
Madeline stared in horrified fascination. Almost forgetting to breathe, she was only vaguely aware of Iain MacLean’s pulling her close again. He eased her head to his shoulder, holding her there, the flat of his hand pressed firmly over her ear.
The beat of his heart pounded hard and steady beneath her cheek, and she didn’t need her gift to sense his rising anger . . . the mounting fury inside him.
’Twas a simmering displeasure he strove hard to master.
A vexation that warmed her despite its ferocity, for her feminine instincts told her the reason for his ire was seeing her exposed to such a rife display of sordid carnality.
But depraved or nay, she couldn’t tear away her gaze.
As if cast of stone, she looked on as the second of Silver Leg’s men, the older one, hitched his loose-fitting trews to accommodate the tentlike protrusion of his arousal.
“You can have
that
hair,” he called to his friend’s back, starting after him. “’Tis her other hair I’m a-wanting to see. Her
lower
hair.”
“Oh, aye, now that’d be a fine sight!” a slurred voice agreed from somewhere in a back corner.
The bawd’s painted lips curved in a lascivious smile.
Giving a throaty laugh, she caught hold of her skirts with both hands and slowly pulled apart a hitherto hidden split in the fabric to offer the men a glimpse at the lush nest of dark red curls springing betwixt her fleshy thighs.
Madeline gasped.
Iain MacLean swore.
He shot to his feet, dragging her with him. “I knew that was the style of this place!” he fumed, swallowing back a harsher retort lest he truly shock the lass.
His temper a beetling threat beneath thinnest restraint, he tossed a glance at the door arch to the kitchen. “Where has the aledraper betaken himself?” he demanded, raising his voice above the cacophony.
Ever careful to keep a shrewd eye on the two men pawing the whore’s breasts.
Craven dastards he meant to question Madeline Drummond about at first opportunity.
His malcontent a palpable, living thing inside him, he raked the other carousers with a blazing-eyed glare but harvested little more than one or two owlish stares.
All other buffoons lining the trestles ignored him, their drooling gazes fixed on the whore as she deftly unfastened the lacings of her bodice to fully expose the heavy white globes of her breasts.
“A plaguey stewhouse,” Iain muttered, turning away in disgust.
And hoping he’d done so swiftly enough to prevent
her
from seeing the whore’s garish performance.
His jaw clenching, he tightened his arm about Madeline’s shoulders and kept scanning the smoke-hazed murk for the ale-keeper.
On impulse, Madeline gripped his hand, squeezed it. “I shan’t swoon on you, sir. I’ve heard all alehouses are frequented by one or two such women,” she said, glancing at him. “Even fine inns.”
He arched a brow at her. “Say you?”
She nodded, her gaze seeking the bawd.
The woman had hooked arms with her newly lured customers and was drawing them into the shadowy realm of the common sleeping room, where Madeline suspected she relinquished a portion of her profits for a well-stuffed pallet in a dark and private corner.
“Whether such women are welcomed in an establishment or nay, a lady ought not be confronted by them . . . or be troubled by the knowledge of their existence.”
“I know of much that weighs on my heart, sir,” Madeline admitted, pushing away her own troubles before they could seize and crush her. “Greater cares than one joy
woman and her night’s trade.”
She sighed.
And wished for the hundred thousandth time that she
wasn’t
privy to all she knew.
Iain MacLean eyed her sharply, his dark eyes brimming with silent questions. A muscle twitched in his jaw, and she touched two fingers to the spot, pressing gently until the jerking ceased.
“As I just banished the twitch in your jaw so, too, does the joy woman serve a need,” she said, quiet-voiced . . . and thinking of Nella.
She drew the
arisaid
tighter about her shoulders, repressed a shudder. Not that her common-born friend had e’er trod as lamentable path as an alehouse whore.
But Nella had known her own sorrows, fetched as she’d been at the first bloom of her womanhood to bear sons for a landed man whose barren wife couldn’t produce heirs.
A faint echo of Nella’s long-ago anguish rippled through Madeline. She shuddered and hugged her waist, grateful the years had changed Nella’s pain to numb resignation.
But Madeline’s indignation o’er her friend’s past had ne’er lessened.
Straight teeth, clear eyes, and a robust condition had decided Nella’s fate, thrusting her into a life she’d come to accept and even to joy in . . . until she’d made the grave error of showing too much affection to the young boys she could ne’er claim as her own.
And falling in love with the wellborn man whom she still refused to name.
Her admiration for Nella steeling her own backbone, Madeline cast another glance toward the sleeping dorm. Its low-arched entry loomed empty, but muffled grunts and the ragged rasp of heavy breathing drifted from within its shadowy depths.
She turned back to Iain. “If anything,” she said into the hush stretching between them, “such women are to be pitied.”
Greatly pitied, but ne’er scorned.
Nor could she condemn a single one amongst their ranks.
Hadn’t she, mere moments before, strained against Iain MacLean’s chest? Known wonder at the hard-slabbed contours of his muscles, evident even beneath his leather hauberk and the folds of his plaid?
Indeed, she had reveled in the solidness and warmth of his masculine strength, breathed deeply of the essence of him—and still ached for more.
She’d gloried in his kisses, all but begging him to deepen each one. And she’d ached for him to slip his tongue between her lips and let it tangle with her own far more often than he had!
Truth be told, she was nigh onto begging him to kiss her again.
There and then.
Forthwith.
And fully heedless of the flustered-looking ale-keeper hurrying toward them.
The man’s half-anxious, half-bursting-with-pride countenance gave him away. Their quarters were ready at last.
Madeline’s stomach dropped to her feet, her bravura evaporating. “Oh, dear saints,” she got out, sudden panic surging inside her.
Jerking free of her shadow man’s grasp, she looked down, made a bit of a show at smoothing her rumpled skirts . . . anything to keep him from seeing her cheeks flame.
Or noting the desire still skipping along her nerve endings.
Her true feelings for him.
“Aye, most dear,” he agreed, his earlier anger gone from his voice. He hooked a finger beneath her chin, lifted her face. “Dear, and far too sweet.”
“Too sweet?”
He nodded. “Too dear and sweet for the likes of me, fair lass,” he said, his husky tone doing strange things to her knees. “And much too desirable to suffer a life of abstinence and fasting behind convent walls . . . no matter how many bumbling poltroons are after you.”
Madeline’s gasped. “You knew?”
“My great lacking is my inability to hold my temper, lass. There is not and ne’er has been aught amiss with my wits, I assure you.” He gave her one of his lopsided would-be smiles, its very imperfection splitting her heart wide open.
Lowering his head, he dropped a kiss on her cheek. “Or dare I hope you find me so irresistible you couldn’t help but throw yourself into my arms?”
“I—I . . .” Madeline stumbled over her tongue. She’d grown too light-headed to think clearly.
“Your pardon,” the ale-keeper addressed them, from behind, and cleared his throat.
Iain MacLean whirled to face him. “Our room is prepared?”