Page 58 of The Scot Beds His Wife

She lay positioned on her left side, and Thorne had curled his body against hers from behind, fitting himself into every curve and bend.

Jesus Jehosephat Christ.She’d not been safe inthe least. In fact, other than the clutches of Boyd Masters, himself, she couldn’t think of a more perilous place to be thanthisbed withthisparticular Highlander.

Instinctively, she reached for her pistol at her side, and only found her bare hip.

That fact was enough to lance whatever had drugged her wits with a lightning bolt of sobriety. But it didn’t last. Her muscles remained weighted down like wool cast into a loch. Full and slow and heavy.

Crisp hairs tickled her shoulder blades each time the swells of his chest rose and fell with even, cavernous breaths. The rippled definition of his stomach rolled against her spine.

Thethingpressing against her backside with hot, insistent flexes was, in fact,nota thorn, but could prick her just as easily.

Could wound her much more seriously.

Because, she realized, he was as naked as she beneath the heavy covers.

He’d lifted onto his elbow and now smiled indulgently down at her. His arm, which had been casually draped over her middle, belonged to the gentle fingers wiping at the tears still leaking from eyes peeled wide with astonished panic.

“Doona worry, bonny,” he soothed, though a gleam of something dangerous shone beneath the concern in his verdant eyes. “Ye’ve nothing to fear from me. Though, I’ll warn ye that ye’re not leaving this bed until ye’ve revealed to me yer dangerous secrets… beginning with just who is after ye, and why they burned Erradale to the ground.”

CHAPTERTHIRTEEN

Sometimes Gavin would take someone,anyone,to bed and pleasure them into oblivion for the sole purpose of having a person to press his body against in the night. It was a raison d’être he never admitted or expressed. At the end of any given night, form and feature held little sway over his decision, and he didn’t especially pick a woman whom he might want to invite back or form an attachment to.

Because he didn’t want them to guess his motives. He didn’t want them to recognize him for what he truly was.

A boy who’d spent too many nights hiding in a closet, or huddled in the hollowed-out tree trunk of the ancient oak he and Callum had claimed as their own domain next to Bryneloch Bog.

On those nights, he’d crafted his hatred very carefully. He’d covered his bruises, his lashes, and his pain with the balm of cold calculation. Until he’d nearly forgotten what it was to feel.

What it was to live.

It wasn’t until he’d met Colleen as a boy on the cusp ofmanhood that he’d realized what would keep him human. The primal and instinctive necessity of physical contact. Of pleasure, or pain. It was both a palliative and a compulsion. When his thoughts would race, when his gorge would rise, when his mind seemed to want to disconnect from his body and lose itself into the vast emptiness that yawned inside of him, only the touch of another would anchor him to reality. He’d reach for someone in the night, whoever it was, and offer pleasure, his only intention to hide the endless, cavernous need inside of him.

It had made him a legend, this fiction, which had not been his initial intention. The women he’d taken assumed that his voracious need had been more erotic than emotional.

And he’d let them.

Because life had taught him, with few exceptions, that once a person discovered your true desire, it was in their nature to deny you. It’s not that he blamed anyone, exactly. Power was a heady thing, and having your fingers clenched around the pulse of someone else’s greatest ambitions, or their driving force, meant you owned them.

Body and soul.

He’d never allow someone that sort of power over him.

Never again.

Now, pressed against his petite nemesis, he was stunned to discover that his motives had somewhat realigned from their usual arrangement. Certainly the obvious difference had been she was no lover or companion.

Indeed, neither was she even a willing occupant of his bed.

The slim, fragile body against his offered him nothing, and yet provided what others could not, despite their best efforts.

He’d like to call it distraction, but in reality it wassomething else. Something that felt like purpose. Something akin to contentment. Relief. Peace.

But… that couldn’t be right, could it? Not with Alison Ross. The lass was anything but peaceful. Indeed, she was chaos personified. Since her appearance in his life, she’d been a disruption at best. A nuisance, more like.

An obstacle.

One he was beginning to enjoy coming up against.