Page 52 of Highland Fire

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.” He crossed one booted foot negligently across the other. “That was the trouble with the Scots. They were courageous, I’ll give you that. But they were foolhardy. They never would admit it when the odds were stacked against them. Unlike you.”

Her eyes heated. “Remind me, if you would be so kind,” she said pleasantly, “exactly what the nature of this wager is.”

Equally pleasant, he replied, “That I can seduce you without so much as laying a finger on you.”

She wasn’t being reckless, she told herself. A quick inventory had convinced her that she was as close to succumbing to his seductiveness as a wise old hedgehog to a ravenous fox. Let him do his worst. Her defenses were in place. Hedgehog, she told herself. Think ‘hedgehog.’

“Sassenach,” she said, “you’re on,” and she relaxed against the squabs, twiddling her thumbs in a manner that was designed to convey her supreme indifference to his empty boasts.

The carriage rumbled along. She tensed for she knew not what. Nothing happened. Rand simply stared at her, and she stared back at him. This was going to be easier than she had thought.

Presently, he said, “I’m hot.”

“Yes, it is warm in here,” she agreed. “That’s one thing I’ll say for England. It’s warmer than Scotland. I couldn’t help noticing the daffodils and hyacinths along your hedgerows. It will be another month at least before…What are you doing?”

“I told you. I’m hot. I’m making myself comfortable.”

Before her startled eyes, Rand removed first his neckcloth and then his waistcoat and his blue superfine.

It wasn’t the first time she had seen him disrobe, but not like this.

There was a mesmerizing quality to each languid movement that brought her spine right off the squabs.

He was down to his shirt and black pantaloons.

Her eyes grazed his groin, then quickly lifted.

“Yes. Hot,” he said, “and hard for you. A man can’t hide what he is feeling from the woman he wants, especially in these skintight pantaloons. At least they stretch. If I were wearing my breeches, I don’t mind telling you, I would be in agony by now.”

Though his words were teasing, his eyes gave her a different message. Passion blazed out at her, invading, scorching, heating her iron resolve to make it pliable.

Bathing her in his burning gaze, he said coaxingly, “Help me remove my shirt?”

She shook her head vigorously. Hedgehog!

an inner voice screamed. An image of a round ball with hard, impenetrable spines floated into her mind, but she couldn’t hold it.

Her eyes were trained on long fingers that slowly, sensuously, from throat to waistband, slipped each small pearl button from its buttonhole in his shirt.

His movements were as graceful and controlled as those of a ballet dancer when he shrugged one arm out of his shirt, then brushed the soft material slowly, slowly, from the other shoulder and down over his wrist. When he flexed his muscles, Caitlin could feel her palms being to itch.

She loved the way his muscles clenched and unclenched when her hands moved over him.

“Hedgehog!” she said.

He looked questioningly at her, and she mumbled indistinctly, then shook her head.

“Your breathing is audible, did you know?”

She stopped breathing, and he smiled knowingly. He was removing his Hessians, slipping them from his feet, stretching and bending like a graceful acrobat. Powerful muscles tensed in his things.

He was doing it to her on purpose, she reminded herself, assaulting her senses with his damnable virility.

She managed a hoarse laugh. “You look like a blasted dancer. All you lack is an orchestra.” She was trying to make light of it, hoping he wouldn’t remark on the odd hiatus that had developed in her breathing.

He smiled in that drowsy way of his. “Listen and you’ll hear what has been driving me to take you since we left our lodgings this morning.”

Caitlin listened, but she could hear only the creak of the springs as the coach swayed, the muffled pounding of the horses’ hoofbeats.

She did not know when her own pulse began to beat in rhythm, but suddenly the coach’s swaying and jogging became unbearably erotic.

The heat in her loins seemed to spread, flooding her with delicious sensations. She was melting with pleasure.

In the golden filtered light of the shaded interior, their eyes met and held.

Unspoken messages as old as time passed between them.

She could smell the faint tang of his cologne, and something darker and more primitive—the musky scent of the aroused male.

She knew he was as aware of her as she was of him.

“There’s an ache inside you, isn’t there?” His voice was hushed and careful. “Your body is readying itself to take mine. If I lifted your skirts and slipped my fingers inside you, now, this minute, I know what I would find. I want to. Oh God, I want to.”

She moaned and turned her head away, gritting her teeth, clamping her legs together.

“And if I put my mouth to your nipples, they would swell and harden even before I could put my tongue to them. Are they hard now?”

Yes, damn him! Hard and sore and desperate for his mouth on them. She shifted uncomfortably.

“I want to come into you. Do you want me to? Don’t lie to me, Caitlin. Tell me!”

His words were blotting out the defenses she was trying to muster. She was trying to think of something, if only she could remember it. Something to do with a hedge, or was it a pig?

“Tell me!”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes!” and she opened her eyes to glare at him.

Naked and unashamed, he was sprawled against the opposite banquette, his powerful arms stretched along the edge of the backrest. His arms were not the only powerful part of his anatomy that her eyes were drawn to.

“Rand,” she said faintly, “Oh, Rand.”

His chest was rising and falling as he labored to regulate his breathing, and a fine sweat had broken out on his forehead. “I’ve let it go too far,” he said. “I’m losing control. If you don’t get over here fast, and take me into you, I’m going to disgrace myself.”

Her own secret parts were clenching in anticipation of the final consummation. Teetering in the balance was which of them would disgrace himself or herself first? Still, she had her pride.

“You won’t crow about your victory afterward?”

“I promise!”

“And no snide remarks about Highlanders and lowlanders or the War of Scottish Independence?”

“You have my word on it.”

“And—”

“Caitlin!” he roared. “I haven’t got time for this.”

It was all the encouragement she needed. Though she was somewhat at a loss, he showed her how it could be contrived. Astride his lap, holding her skirts out of the way, she came slowly down on him.

“Now ride me,” he said.

It was an intoxicating experience. Rand was holding to his promise not to touch her, and his arms were firmly welded to the backrest of the banquette.

She was the one who, by default, had freedom of movement.

She was the one who could determine the pace.

She became a snail, exulting in his tortured entreaties and the stifled groans of agony which her slow punishment elicited.

And then the coach hit a pothole, sending him deep into the recesses of her body, and the game came to an explosive end.

Caitlin gasped, then cried out, and her body took over.

Sobbing his name over and over, she became a wild thing, bucking, twisting, writhing, until the last wave of pleasure left her weak and spent.

She was slumped against him in languorous repletion. It was some time before she realized he was still inside her, and still very virile. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was enormous.

Groaning, she lifted her head from his shoulder and looked down at him, ready to pounce at the first wrong word.

His eyes were bright with laughter. “After that little bout, I’d say I deserve to be mentioned in dispatches for my heroism.

I did not know I possessed such control.

No, my darling Kate, I am not gloating. I’m not even going to mention the War of You-know-what.

All I wish to point out is that you lost our wager, and now it’s time to pay your forfeit. ”

“You cheated! You know you did.”

“Now that is simply untrue. I was close to disgracing myself. But I am a more experienced duelist than you. While you writhed in the throes of your passion, I gritted my teeth and concentrated on ways of draining the south pasture.”

Her head drooped to its comfortable rest in the crook of his shoulder. “Damn all hedgehogs to perdition,” she said, and closed her eyes.

He shook her awake. “You’re forgetting your forfeit.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, my pet, that I can have my wicked way with you, and we shall begin by removing all your clothes.”

She hadn’t the energy to argue with him.

She was so completely spent that she just wished she could go to sleep.

She almost did fall asleep when he began to disrobe her.

But when he stretched her out on the banquette with her knees raised, and he pushed into her, she didn’t feel like sleeping at all.

When it was all over, she said, drowsily, “ Mo gaol orist . What time is it?”

“Hush. Go to sleep. I’ll wake you in good time.”

“The carriage has stopped! We’ve arrived!”

“What?” Caitlin roused herself from her husband’s arms and the pink pelisse which covered her nakedness slipped from her shoulders to pool on the floor beside her abandoned gown.

“Quick! Lock the doors.” Even as he spoke, Rand heaved himself up, dislodging Caitlin from his lap, and he quickly secured both carriage doors.

Impatient now. “Don’t just kneel there like a postulant taking holy orders.

Dress yourself!” Already he was skimming into black pantaloons and reaching for his shirt.

“Do you hear that?” He jerked his head, indicating the buzz of voices outside the coach.

“That’s my family waiting to welcome us.

If they catch a glimpse of you in that dishabille , they’ll think I’ve brought one of my doxies home with me. ”

With dawning horror, Caitlin stared up at her husband.

“Hurry!” he barked.

She moved with the urgency of a wild thing caught in a forest fire, and all the while, the doors were ratting and the voices outside the coach were raised stridently, demanding to know why there was a delay.

“Just one more time,” she quoted savagely under her breath, wriggling into her lace-edged drawers, dragging her chemise over her head. “Just one more time and then we shall call it quits! I could murder you for this. I wanted to make an impression on your family.”

“You’ll make an impression all right, but not the one you were hoping for.

” The humor in the situation was beginning to act on him.

In nothing but her frilly underthings, she looked so adorably tragic as she surveyed the crushed bonnet with its limp and broken ostrich feathers—a casualty of the combat which had occupied them so pleasurably for the last hour or two—he couldn’t resist dropping a quick kiss on the nape of her neck.

“I’ll buy you a dozen bonnets. Here, let me help you with your hair.”

There was nothing for it but to comb his fingers through it, dislodging as many hairpins and ribbons as he could manage. “I prefer it loose anyway,” he told her soothingly when he noticed that her bottom lip was beginning to tremble.

When she finally hobbled from the coach at Rand’s back, she wanted to weep her eyes out.

It was just as she had known it would be.

Her garments were crushed beyond redemption; her bonnet was ruined; her elegant coiffure had the look of an abandoned robin’s nest; and she was blushing like a guilty schoolgirl.

She had to blink her eyes against the sudden glare. A figure stepped forward in a swish of skirts, and Caitlin was conscious of the fragrance of a garden in full flower after a shower of summer rain. A voice to match the fragrance addressed her husband.

“Rand, darling, if you could only see the look on your face!” Then, with a backward glance at the interested spectators, “I think we surprised him!”

In a voice that Caitlin had never heard before, Rand said, “Lady Margaret! What are you doing here?”

The mist lifted from Caitlin’s eyes the instant before a blond vision in white gauze stepped into Rand’s arms and laughingly pulled his head down for an intimate, open-mouthed kiss.