A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,50

glittered gem-bright in the golden glow of the lantern.

But it was the twin rubies he found that suffused him with a lightning bolt of sensation.

“Vanessa. The ring.”

With trembling fingers, she plucked it out and held it up so they could both gawk at its magnificence.

He could feel it pulsing with a magnetism no inanimate object should possess. The lion stared at him from hot ruby eyes.

Claiming him. Calling to him.

He thrust his hand between them, splaying his fingers. “Put it on.”

Her forehead crimped. “What if it doesn’t work?”

“Vanessa.”

She nodded, lowering her hand to slide it onto his finger.

His boots hit the earth with a heavy thud. He had weight. He had mass. The air bit at his cheeks and filled his lungs with a cold incredible breath. His heart threw itself against wide ribs and his muscles corded with strength. Veins pulsed with blood.

With need.

His hand gripped hers. Slim, cold fingers trembled against his flesh. His skin.

Her eyes were wide and watery as she stared at him without blinking.

“John?” she whispered.

He was almost sorry.

Almost sorry that a strangled groan was all the warning she had before he crushed her to him and captured her already open mouth.

Chapter Six

His kiss was a sweet violence. Both a conquest and a claiming.

Vanessa welcomed the assault on her senses as this man, this solid, starving, sexual man clamped her entire body to his and devoured her mouth as if her kiss could restore his very life.

The sensation of his lips—his skin—was more than a tingling suggestion now. He was tactile. Warm. Almost as if fed by lifeblood.

Almost.

She still detected that the feel of his flesh was imperfect. A vibration persisted where the smooth whorls of his fingerprints should be. It was at once more than an ordinary touch, and not enough.

It didn’t matter. She’d take whatever she could get.

He had a scent now, cedar and leather and the faintest trace of gunpowder.

It tantalized her endlessly.

Her hands clutched the lapels of his crimson wool coat, reveling in the coarse fibers abrading her fingertips because it meant he was real. Tangible. She suddenly wanted to explore everything. Everywhere. Every hot, smooth and strong inch of him.

He kissed like a man denied a hundred and fifty years of pleasure. Of pain. Of desire and release. There was a savage wildness in it, an untamed urgency that sent little thrills of anxiety and anticipation pouring down her spine and spreading into the deep, empty recesses of her womb.

With a strong, hot lick, his tongue parted the seam of her mouth and dipped inside to sample her flavor.

He tasted like a wicked sin. Like every drink too masculine for her to sip and every dessert to decadent to be indulged.

His arms felt like iron shackles around her, and she became his willing prisoner there in the Chamber of Sorrows. Surrendering to the inevitability of what he was about to do to her. Of what demands he would make of her body.

The very thought made her legs puddle beneath her until she feared she couldn’t remain standing.

When she went all but limp against him with a sibilant sigh into his mouth, his kiss unexpectedly gentled, his lips sweeping across hers in featherlight drags. The contrast was her undoing as she lifted onto her tiptoes to seek more.

His large, rough hands drew up her arms and shoulders until he bracketed her jaw in his palms and tilted her face up, pulling back to look down at her with agonizing tenderness.

“My God, you are so pure and perfect,” he marveled in a harsh, breathless tone.

His words evoked a hot blush that spread up her chest and heated the cheeks he cradled so reverently in his hands.

Vanessa’s lashes swept down over eyes pricked with tears, as a familiar shame swamped her, dousing the flames of her ardor a few degrees. “You know I am not so pure. Not in the sense of the word that seems to matter to most people. I’m no virgin. No ingenue. But neither am I a whore. Do you understand that?” She worried the knowledge he had made her seem more accessible to him, and another part of her fretted that he would think less of her.

“Woman,” he growled, his breath coming in agonized pants, his azure eyes smoldering down at her like the core of a flame burning too hot to be contained. “I’m about to do things to you that would make a virgin faint. I’m going to worship you in ways that would offend a