Page 10 of To Wed a Highlander (A Highland Magic Collection #3)

Chapter 10

B ael’s kiss quickly deepened from possessive to frantic. Though her body tensed in shock, her mouth melted against his.

Her words had released something more frightening than a beast inside him. More like a devil. He twisted his mouth over hers, claiming entrance with his tongue from every angle he could possibly devise. Before crushing her to him, he yanked her dress from her shoulders and followed it down the curves of her lush body until it fell from her hips.

Though her fingers trembled as they clung to the nape of his neck, her mouth yielded to his demands, meeting his possession with sweetness and his dominance with a moan of submission. The kiss didn’t sate his growing desire for a taste of her, as he’d hoped, but ignited a fury of desperate lust.

She’d submit to more than his tongue before he was through with her.

“Yes,” she hissed against the cavern of his open mouth, as though she’d heard his dark thoughts.

That one word broke any chain that held him in check. Bael ripped his mouth away from her long enough to have her on her back, his eyes raking over her passion-flushed skin. “Remember you wanted this,” he felt compelled to warn her again.

Or was it a threat?

“I do want this,” she reached for him. “I want you .”

Couldn’t be. She wanted the gentle, worshiping Berserker who’d made love to her in the lake. She didn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend that she now faced a killer who would fuck her into the dirt.

Bael almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

With a growl, he settled his bulk atop her and kissed her again, pouring fifty years of deprivation into her open mouth. He knew his lips were rough, demanding, and agitated. That his beard abraded her tender skin. But she made soft little mewling sounds of pleasure into his mouth that nearly drove him over the edge before he even took off his trews.

He’d never wanted anything like he craved the pale body glowing beneath him in the firelight. He couldn’t remember a time he’d been so hard. So out of his mind with need. So fucking insatiable with lust.

Reaching between them, without parting their fused lips, he undid his belt and freed himself. Mounting her—heart thundering with the strength of his desire—he positioned the blunt head of his cock against her vulnerable opening.

Her sex was a moist cleft hidden by soft cinnamon curls, and she drew her knee up his waist to grant him easier entrance.

“Take me,” she whispered. “I am yours.”

Mine. His beast rejoiced.

“Nie,” he growled between clenched teeth. “Take me .” He surged forward until his entire length was buried in the succulent flesh of her body. “Take all of me.”

Though her body reflexively clamped down on his intrusion, a rush of moisture eased his way as her hands threaded through his hair at the temples, tightening the tattooed skin there.

“I will,” she gasped, lifting her hips to meet his. “I do.”

He couldn’t stop to consider the full extent of the meaning in his words to her. Take me. Take my cock. Take my seed. Take my heart, my soul, my needs, my emptiness.

Take all of me .

It was too much for any one woman to hold.

But she did. She held him so sweetly in the cradle of her thighs he thought he might expire from the bliss of it.

And wasn’t that what he wanted?

“Nie,” he said again.

Bael forced his mind to be dark and quiet, to focus on the tight sheath of her flesh already pulling little tremors of pleasure from the base of his spine.

With a savage groan he slid his hand beneath her ass and set a punishing rhythm, pulling back to watch her breasts bounce with each brutal stroke.

His mate’s lips were parted, teeth bared like a lioness in a face glowing with an answering lust that shocked him.

“ Yes ,” she countered with a hiss, and thrust her hips up to meet his with such force that she nearly lifted his heavy body.

The contact was like the bolt of lightning that touched down in the distance. Sensations exploded within him that he had no name for and had never before encountered in his long life. Instead of holding her down and fucking her into oblivion as he’d planned to do, Bael burrowed his arms beneath her and pulled her to him, falling back onto his knees and holding her against him as he plowed her again and again.

She wrapped her arms around his back anchoring herself to him as his every powerful thrust jolted her upward. Their hips connected with starting force, and she made a sound of such wicked encouragement each time that drove him out of his mind.

She screamed her pleasure with astonishing quickness, her body clenched in an endless shudder of ecstatic release. The sublime contractions of her gripping sex pulled a violent answer from his own. He crested on a spiraling cataclysm of sensation, undulating outward like the ripples of a pool until his entire body was locked by crippling pleasure.

He bit down on the delicate sinew where her shoulder met her neck, marking her. Claiming her. Sending her over the edge once more with a feminine cry of surprise and delight as she pulled at his hair in pulsating fistfuls.

Thunder rumbled in answer to their cries, and the electric build of the storm that accumulated over the sea held the whisper of danger on the wind. Though as Bael watched the siren he’d mated come apart in his arms, he could think of nothing as dangerous as her.

* * *

Bael woke to the sound of a scream. Not a scream of fear, nor one of surprise. This scream carried with it a particular note of gleeful, victorious evil. Bolting upright, he reached for his mate, and barely held her from where she tried to jump out of his arms toward the water.

“Let me go,” she hissed. “The Wyrd Sisters. They found us!”

A specter rose from the water in the shape of a voluptuous woman, she threw out her hand, flinging lethally sharp shards of ice at his mate.

Morgana leapt away, slicing through the water with her own blades of ice conjured with a flick of her wrist. But it only had a momentary effect, each projectile shattering against the other’s with supernatural precision. The specter’s shards seemed to be garnering help and velocity from a gathering tornado reaching down to the Loch from dark and angry clouds.

The women spoke in a Gaelic tongue he didn’t understand. Incantations, threats, spells, or vows of retribution. It didn’t matter; all that mattered was getting Morgana out of danger.

Bael grabbed for his axe, which was never out of reach, and hissed as his hand came away singed.

In the pit of fire he’d built, standing on the bones of their supper, another specter dominated the flames. A slight girl. Her eyes glowed with an even brighter light than the flames comprising her body. She held his axe in her fiery grip, heating the metal to a molten orange. “Touch it,” she taunted in the voice of a child. “Take it from me, I dare you.”

Snarling, Bael gritted his teeth in preparation for his torment, then he roared as he plucked his weapon from the ground and leapt for Morgana.

Though he gripped the leather-wrapped part of his axe, the heat of the metal bled through, blistering his hands. He didn’t care. He’d survived worse. All he felt was his blood pounding to reach his mate. His entire being focused on her.

Just as a sickle of ice flew toward her heart, Bael swung his axe with all the speed he could muster and scattering shards to the gathering wind. But he didn’t stop there. Thrusting Morgana behind him, he flailed at the specter of water with such whirring speed, he turned her to steam with his glowing blade.

The wind screamed that bone-chilling evil sound and the brewing storm unleashed its rage upon them.

Scooping Morgana into his arms, Bael ignored the intense burning in his palms and the stinging lash of the deluge as he bolted into the trees. Never in his life has he run from a battle, but these spectral witches had no blood with which to spill. No bones to break. No hearts to stop.

Just elements.

And blood magick. The darkest and most potent kind.

We’re coming for you. A crone’s whisper drifted through the scream of the wind, kissing his spine with ice and dread, though he knew the threat was directed less at him and more at the precious woman he carried in his arms. We’re coming for the Grimoire.

Prepare for the end.

The last word fractured against dying branches and echoed about the forest with eerie force as though coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Babd,” Morgana’s frightened exclamation vibrated against his skin. “She’s air. There’s no escaping her!”

“She won’t get to you,” Bael vowed, and doubled his speed, careful to keep his mate’s limbs from finding an errant branch as he plowed through the forest, desperately forming a plan of action.

A tree root nearly tripped him, and Bael could have sworn he’d seen it lift. Taking more care with his footing, he noticed the ground beneath his boots growing softer as the wind began to die away. More roots and tree limbs conspired to steal his footing, though the ground seemed to want to hold him into one place.

What fresh sorcery was this?

In three more steps Bael struggled against roots, vines and branches. For each one he broke, two took their place, latching to his limbs and locking them down. His axe was stolen from his back, his neck lashed with willow cords.

He fought them, clenching his little mate tighter, his enraged roars drowning her protestations.

A blade nicked the nape of his neck from behind, all flora tightening enough to choke his very bones.

The dark voice that pierced the forest resembled nothing of the three Wyrd sisters from which they fled, but was masculine and heavily accented even though every word was annunciated with lethal clarity.

“Take. Yer filthy. Viking hands. Off my sister.”