you learned nothing of maidenly decorum?”
“I am Mairi of Shiels,” she said with quiet dignity. “I have no need for decorum.”
Her hand on his cheek undid him. He turned toward her touch to find her gaze upon him. Searching her face for the smallest sign of regret, he found none. “God help you, my heart,” he murmured. “May He forgive me for the sin I would willingly commit.”
“I’ll warrant it will not be your first,” she teased him.
He did not smile. “Lass,” he whispered hoarsely, “you cannot do this.”
Her expression grew serious and the cool, light-struck eyes widened until they seemed to fill her entire face. “I know not what brought you here, m’lord, but from the first I knew how it would be between us.”
“Sweet Jesu.” He damned the emotions within him that demanded honesty at such a price. “I am not who you think.”
“Hush.” She laid her finger across his lips, down his chin and throat into the crisply curling hair escaping from the top of his shirt. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Mairi,” he groaned, throwing out his final and most damning argument. “I have never known another woman like you. I would wed you if I could, but I am not free.”
Her exploring fingers had unlaced his shirt and were making shockingly intimate forays down his chest. Her question was a whisper against his ear. “You are betrothed?”
“Nay, lass,” he confessed, cursing the hunger surging through him. “I am married.”
Her hand was on his rib cage, her touch more sensuous than any courtesan he had ever known. She could not have heard him for she did not draw away.
“Mairi,” he began and stopped. Her face was close to his own. Her hair smelled like roses and her skin, bathed in afternoon sunlight, was flawless. Her lips parted ever so slightly, and he heard his own harsh intake of breath. Of their own volition, his hands reached out to caress her throat, her cheeks, and finally to thread the silken strands of her hair between his fingers while he gently cradled her head. She closed her eyes. Her lashes rested like dark half-moons against her cheeks. Her mouth quivered in silent invitation.
“I am a man, not a saint,” he murmured. “By all that is holy, I swear you shall not regret this.” With that he lowered his head and touched his mouth to hers.
Whatever Mairi had expected, it wasn’t this piercing sweetness, this exquisite, aching fire that started in the pit of her stomach and traveled through every nerve until she hummed like a branch struck by lightning. Who would have guessed that a man as tall and hard as a mountain had lips softer than angel’s wings, whose sheltering arms held magic in their touch, whose words of love muffled against her throat could heat her blood to fevered heights? Her hands slid up his back, reveling in the hard strength and hot male flesh stretched so tightly across the bunched muscles. She raked him lightly with her nails.
“My God, Mairi,” he groaned, lifting his head to look down at her passion-flushed face. “Tell me you want this. Let me hear your words before ’tis too late to stop.”
Something deep and elemental blazed to life in her eyes. When she spoke, her voice sounded nothing like herself. “I shan’t stop you, Edward. I want it too, more than anything.”
His hands trembled as he molded them over the sweet rise of her breasts and stroked their tips with his thumbs. When he felt her response, he untied her kirtle and pushed aside the bodice of her tightly fitting tunic. Her arms were bare and the thin linen of her shift revealed the outline of her nipples and the darkness between her thighs. Edward’s breathing altered. He was no longer in control. Even if she wanted him to stop, he couldn’t. She was too lovely and he’d thought of nothing but burying himself inside her warmth for a seemingly endless length of days and nights.
He tore his gaze from the enticing roundness of her breasts to look at her face. She was staring at him, unembarrassed and unafraid. There was hunger in her eyes and something else, something that reached out and touched him with a longing that left him shaken and wanting. When his mouth took hers in a searing kiss, her lips opened, and her tongue eagerly sought his. White heat flamed through him. He moved over her, pressing himself into the triangle of her thighs. He had never