Page 87 of The Scot Beds His Wife

He ran the soap along the arm that covered her breasts. “Experience should have taught ye by now that denying me what I want only makes me more relentless.”

Lord, she might not know much about her new husband, but she certainly could attest to that.

“Give in to me, lass,” he purred. “I promise ye willna regret it.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to. She just was seized by last-minute nerves. Suddenly all she could hear was Locryn and Calybrid telling her how unimpressive her breasts were. And the buxom Mena asking about her nonexistent accomplishments. And the myriad other voices back through the years. The ones who’d mistaken her for a boy when she was little. The others who’d made her feel small, skinny, weak, awkward, and ungainly…

“You don’t have to do this,” she reiterated, hating that her lip had started to quiver. “I’m your wife now. I’m kind of a sure wager.”

His other hand joined the first, gently prying her arm away from herself. “Something else ye’ll learn about me, wife. I rarely do anything I doona want to.”

Samantha swallowed loudly, but relaxed her arms to her sides.

With a triumphant rumble deep in his chest, he glided the soap first over one breast, then the other. His free hand followed, slipping playfully over the soap-slicked flesh. Caressing the small mound of her breast before sliding beneath to cradle first one, then the other. Gently, he touched her nipple with his thumb, sliding over and over it until it created a budded peak.

“I’m going to taste these,” he vowed, eliciting another swallow. This one infinitely more difficult.

The soap slid lower, over the ridges of her ribs and across the plane of her belly. Her womb quivered when he reached it, but he didn’t linger.

Why would he? He knew nothing of the secret she held inside.

His destination lay just below.

True to form, Gavin did what she least expected. His soap passed by the softness between her legs completely, sliding down her thigh, her knees, and her calf, washing every bit of her leg and foot with infuriating thoroughness.

Samantha narrowed her eyes at him, but he didn’t look up at her once, though a sly little smirk toyed with the corners of his mouth.

Damned arrogant man.He knew exactly what he was doing to her. It was futile to hide it.

He lingered at her feet for a while, even washing the one left out of the tub. By the time he’d finished, she’d rested her neck against the ledge, gazing up at the rhythmic drops of the rain against the skylight and enjoying the capricious crackles of the thunder.

She’d relaxed so thoroughly that when the soap returned to caress her open inner thigh, she nearly jumped. His touch suddenly became liquid fire, sliding up and up and up until it seemingly wandered into the soft hairs between her legs, and then to the bare, delicate place past it.

Samantha tensed, but she remained passive, staring stubbornly up at the skylight, reminding herself to blink. To breathe.

He was her husband, this was his right.

And, she realized with astonishment, she wasn’t the only one struggling to breathe.

The soap slipped and slid over her open sex, a hard but not unpleasant surface. It pressed against the throbbing little peak bared by her split legs in a way that caused her inner muscles to pulse and clench around emptiness.

Then the soap was gone, replaced by a wandering fingertip searching through the cushiony softness until he found slick, warm flesh.

Each of them made very soft, very different inarticulate sounds.

“Ye’re wet,” he groaned.

“I’m underwater,” she told the skylight, more than a little anxiously.

“I ken that, bonny.” He chuckled, his clever, elegant finger parting her inner folds to probe at the entrance of her body. “But this dampness has nothing to do with that.”

She knew that. She felt it, even underwater. His fingercircled her opening, aided by a rush of desire somehow impossibly wetter than the water surrounding her.

“My dirty wife,” he crooned darkly. “Let me wash ye. Let me clean the memory of any other man from this flesh, because after tonight, no other man will touch ye. After tonight, ye’ll never want anyone else to.”

That wasn’t what they’d agreed to, was it?

His ruthless fingers drew upward, delicately brushing the little peak throbbing beneath the vulnerable hood of her sex.