Only For A Knight by Sue-Ellen Welfonder Page B

need.”
     
Euphemia almost refused, but the strong musk of his potent male scent rose up between them, its earthy headiness intoxicating her and weighting her most tender parts with a hot-throbbing need all her own. She stifled a groan, tiredness and resentment warring within her—but also giddy, carnal excitement.
     
“Come, lass, touch your tongue to me . . . give me ease.”
     
This time she did moan. No longer holding back, she met his gaze, wished the intensity of his deep-seeing blue eyes didn’t have such power to melt her. If he had needs . . . hers were surely greater.
     
And she had promised.
     
But her sundry ailings were plaguing her this night, making her chest so tight and achy each breath pained her. Especially the deep ones she’d needed to becalm herself.
     
“Lick me.”
     
Capitulating, she began to tremble, the two hungrily-spoken words and her own tingling lust pushing her over the precipice.
     
With a sobbing cry of want, she knelt before him, nuzzling her face against his groin, then pressing her nose deep into the springy cinnamon-colored curls that held his musky scent, but her joints cracked loudly as she positioned herself. The pitiable sound came overloud in the closeness of the stair tower, even echoing off the dank walls, damning her and calling attention to her lacking.
     
“I—I cannot . . . not this night,” she stammered, pushing awkwardly to her feet. “On the morrow, mayhap.”
     
“Then I shall lick you,” Big Red vowed, already dropping to his knees, shifting their positions before she could naysay him. “You should have told me you were feeling more poorly than usual,” he added, his deep voice going a shade lower, more intimate.
     
Too infinitely sweet for her to resist.
     
“As you wish,” she acquiesced with a sigh, her assent rippling through her as he raised her skirts and began stroking his fingers over the puffy flesh of her nigh hairless woman’s parts—a fault of her femininity she’d e’er detested but that he claimed to relish, insisting her scant covering of nether hair made her appear . . . virginal.
     
Feeling anything but, Euphemia opened her legs wider, giving him better access as he brought his auburn head closer to the exposed vee of her thighs. He blew gently on the sparse tufts of soft dark hair, tugged lightly on a few damp curls.
     
He looked up as he rubbed her, catching and holding her gaze. “I will lick you now, Phemie. ’Tis my wish to lap at you until you are better,” he promised, touching his tongue to the fleshiest part of her womanhood, swirling it again and again over her quivering heat, finding the hard little nub of her pleasure and—suckling.
     
Nibbling and drawing on her until her entire body went taut and her innermost heat clenched tight, then shattered. “ This is what you need,” he murmured, rubbing his face back and fore against her hot pulsing flesh as her release washed over her and a low sob tore from her throat.
     
“You need me—not yon high-born spawn of the devil,” he vowed, his hot breath searing the words onto the naked skin of her exposed belly. “You are mine, Phemie. Do not say me otherwise.”
     
And she did not.
     
Not when he’d spent her so thoroughly she could scarce draw breath much less gainsay his illusions.
     
And illusions they were.
     
As he would know if he possessed wits to match his brawn, his incomparable skill at . . . pleasuring a woman.
     
Big Red MacAlister was sorely mistaken.
     
Lady Euphemia MacLeod belonged to no man.
     
Not her golden giant of a most-favored lover, nor her fool-preening rogue of a betrothed.
     
Neither man possessed her, but she needed them both.
     
Needed them badly.
     
And for her own good purposes.
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Five
     
     
     
“W HAT FOOL PURPOSE WOULD I HAVE for lying to you?”
     
Duncan MacKenzie, the redoubtable Black Stag of Kintail, proud laird of the great Clan MacKenzie, and irrefutably one of the most feared and respected men in all the West