Redeemed (Heroes of the Highlands) - By Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,43

his again. “Or behind me, as the case has most recently been.”

He stared at her, still as stone but for the flare of his nostrils.

And then he was on her. Mouth fused to hers and wild-hewn body taut with every imaginable sort of strain, he reached down and seized her thighs in his large, strong hands and lifted her against his turgid erection.

Kylah closed her eyes and let his tongue force its way into her mouth. She wrapped her legs around his lean waist and ground herself against him, sharing her heat and coating him in slick desire.

With a growl he sank to his knees with her clamped around his body, never breaking the contact of their lips. Only when he’d laid her beneath him did he pull back.

Kylah arched her hips in shameless invitation.

“Look at me,” he ordered darkly.

Blinking her eyes open in shock, she met a stare so hot and intense it should have scorched the flesh from her bones.

Again.

He thrust forward then, and she gasped at the power of his invasion. Her untried body was swollen and sensitive and she felt every thick inch that filled her.

He cursed in a language unfamiliar to her and the word was dark with such ragged lust it stabbed at the core of her just as powerfully as he did. His broad body pushed her knees farther apart as he pressed her into the furs and he shuddered as though experiencing a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.

But Daroch’s eyes never left hers. Something had been breached within him. Some wall or fortress erected so tall and strong that the collapse was brutal and devastating. Any sign of restraint evaporated as he pounded into her with deep, insistent thrusts.

Kylah felt her body respond in kind. Opening to him, her hips leaving the earth to meet his in a grinding climb toward a peak that she now knew and desired with a wanton, wicked hunger.

But she did look at him. It was why she’d built a dreaded fire. She wanted to watch his magnificent body surge and retract. To note every sinew and cord bunch and release. To find individual beads of sweat as they formed and rolled down into deep grooves between his muscles. She gloried at the intent in his savage eyes, at being the focus of something so rare and exacting.

Her climax didn’t build with waves of pleasure, but rocketed her into bliss before she was prepared and ripped a banshee scream from her lips.

Daroch smothered it with a kiss as his thrusts became impossibly faster, stronger, and he grew within her before tearing his mouth from hers to unleash a ragged cry of his own.

Chapter Fifteen

Daroch stood at the edge of Cape Wrath and let the sea winds lift the jagged edges of his long vest and flow through his sheared hair. He leaned against his staff, the end having been sharpened to a spear point and the whole thing coated with the Arborlatix. He’d even blunted the top into a rounded carving of the ancient tree of life. Closing his eyes, Daroch connected with each of the guardians he’d called upon to aid him against the Fae.

The pack of wolves paced a wide perimeter around the cape, lending strength, unity, and a predatory ferocity that surged around and through him with feral intensity.

A pair of black polecats tangled with each other nearby, leaping almost imperceptibly from rock to borough and gifting him with supernatural speed and unmatched, observant reflexes.

A conspiracy of ravens circled above calling eerily down to them. They lent a certain darkness to his intent. A fortitude of will and wisdom. Theirs was a sight and perspective that differed from all other creation. A potent understanding of the need for adversity and finality. They were the harbingers of death and the arbiters of new beginnings. Their portent declared that this ended here.

One way or the other.

He sensed Kylah’s approach, but did not acknowledge her as she drew beside him. Despite everything, the strength he gained from her presence was more potent than what he’d derived from any creature in the past. It was as though he overflowed with it, and it unsettled him more than he cared to admit.

“Kamdyn is safe within the protection of your cave behind the runes,” she informed him.

He nodded, though his gaze remained fixed on the sea. If he looked at her now, he might say things he couldn’t take back. Things she could use against him. He might