Highland Heiress - By Margaret Moore Page 0,60
more soft-spoken, timid woman like Catriona McNare.
As if to confirm his thoughts, she parted her lips and his tongue slid between them into her warm, willing mouth. With a low, eager moan, she slid her hands up his back.
He moved to bring himself even closer, ignoring the growing pain in his side from his wound. It was healing, after all. He wouldn’t bleed again. Not now, when he had Moira in his arms. Beautiful, determined, passionate Moira.
Warm, wonderful, softly curved Moira.
His hand slowly glided up her side and around to her breast. He could feel the taut tip beneath his fingers and her growing excitement as he brushed the pad of his thumb across it, a match for his own burgeoning need. He shifted and moved her backward, until she was reclining on the sofa and he was half-atop her.
With more of their bodies closer, their kisses grew less tender and more ardent, less gentle and more passionate, as their need increased. He was hard and anxious, his body urging him to take her then and there.
She would let him, he was sure. She wanted him as much as he wanted her, his physical instincts argued. Yet another part of him, the one that was well aware of society’s rules, held him in check.
That restraining conscience grew weaker and weaker the more she held and kissed him. The more she moved and arched, as if her body was ordering him to make love with her.
And oh, how much he wanted to! Never had he wanted a woman as much as Moira.
But not like this. Not like some lascivious Casanova, without words of promise and commitment, no matter how difficult it was to stop. To move back. To look down at her flushed face, her desire-darkened eyes, her breasts rising and falling with her rapid breathing, and let go.
She sat up at once, dread in her lovely eyes. “Are you bleeding again?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s not that. This isn’t…right,” he said, the words so difficult to say, but necessary.
Her brows contracting with a frown, she straightened and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I realize this sort of thing is highly inappropriate.”
Oh, God, he’d offended her, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. He reached out and took hold of her hand. “Moira, I’m not sorry I kissed you, here or any other time. And I want to be with you, intimately and every other way. But we have to stop, or we are going to make love right here on this sofa. As delightful as making love with you would be, I won’t take you like some lascivious Lothario, the way Robbie—”
“He didn’t.”
The words burst out of her like cannon fire as she swiftly rose. “We didn’t. Never. I’ve never behaved like this with any man. I don’t know what comes over me when I’m with you!”
She was upset, and yet she had no reason to be. Putting a hand on the back of the sofa, he hoisted himself to his feet. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything. As for what comes over you when we’re together, it’s the same thing that comes over me, because I assure you, Moira, I have never been so presumptuous in my life.”
“Presumptuous?” she repeated, and he was glad to see the spark of anger shift to a sparkle of amusement. “Is that what you call it?”
He put his arms about her waist and smiled. “I suppose I could call it brazen desire. Audacious need. Bold passion.”
She raised herself on her toes and lightly touched her lips to his. “I call it daring. Passionate. Exciting.”
“Quite the last words one expects to hear used to describe a solicitor.”
“Yet appropriate in this case.” She ran her fingertip along the bandage that covered the gash over his eye. “Mrs. McAlvey thinks you’re going to have a scar. You’ll look even more daring then. I daresay you’ll have widows flocking to your office.”
“There’s only one person I want anxious to see me,” he murmured as he bent his head to kiss her again. “The same woman who would climb on a rooftop to watch a prizefight.”
“You saw me?”
“Aye. I was quite astonished.”
“You weren’t distracted?”
“Only for a moment—and I’m not sorry a bit. However did you get up there?”
“I told you—I used to climb in my father’s warehouses. I wanted to watch, but of course a lady shouldn’t, so…”
“So you found a way, despite society’s conventions.”
“The way I disobey society’s conventions