Page 90 of The Merciless Laird
His fingers found her clit, rubbing in tight, frantic circles. The dual sensation was too much. His manhood filling her, stretching her, his thumb pressing against her. Pleasure coiled tight in her belly, her thighs trembling, her breath a broken litany of his name.
“Ivar. Ivar, I’m?—”
“Now, Matilda,” he snarled, his hands gripping her arse, holding her down as he thrust up, burying himself to the root. “Come fer me.”
The orgasm crashed over her, her body locking around him as wave after wave of pleasure wrung her out.
She cried out, her nails raking down his chest, her folds pulsing around his manhood, milking him. Ivar groaned, his hips stuttering as he followed her over the edge, his seed spilling inside her in hot, thick pulses.
Matilda collapsed against his chest, her skin slick with sweat, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. Ivar’sarms wrapped around her, his breath coming in ragged gasps as he pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
“There ye go,” he murmured, his voice rough. “We’re daein’ that again. Soon.”
Matilda laughed breathlessly, her body still humming with the aftershocks of her climax.
“Aye,” she agreed, tilting her head to meet his gaze. “Soon.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
She woke before him.
The chamber was a hollow of grey stillness, the air smelling of cooling wax and the faint, sweet scent of peat. The fire had burned down to a bed of glowing embers.
Ivar lay on his back beside her, one arm loose and heavy at his side, breathing in a slow, even rhythm. The tension he carried in his broad shoulders, the rigid armor he wore even in sleep, had eased somewhat. Not entirely, she suspected that entirely was a setting he simply did not possess. But his face had a quality she hadn't seen in it before.
Not soft, exactly. Unguarded.
She looked at him for a moment longer than she intended to, watching the steady, deep rise of his chest.
Then, she slipped out from under the heavy covers. The floor was bone-chilling, the stone biting at her soles, but she dressed quietly in the grey light and left him to the rest he’d earned.
The corridor was a cold, empty vault, the keep not yet fully awake. She could hear the distant, hollow sounds of the kitchen fires being built and the first of the household moving through the lower passages like ghosts. She followed the scent of woodsmoke down the back stairs.
She had been thinking about the oatcakes since the second day in Oswin’s room.
She was aware it was a strange, mundane thing to fixate on while a man’s life hung by a thread, but her mind had needed a place to be that wasn't the wound, the fever, or the suffocating helplessness of watching him bleed.
It had settled, with a stubborn insistence, on the fact that she did not know how to make oatcakes, and that Ivar ate them every morning without comment.
She wanted to make them for him. She understood this was not a rational response to four days of terror, but she intended to do it anyway.
The kitchen was a warm cavern, low-ceilinged and heavy with the scent of yesterday’s bread and the fresh char of the morning fire. Three of the kitchen women were already at the long table. Beira at the far end, her forearms dusted white as she kneadeddough, and two younger lasses sorting dried herbs near the window.
All three of them looked up, their eyes widening when she walked in.
"Lady Matilda." Beira’s voice went careful, the tone used when Matilda departed from the expected pattern of a laird’s wife.
"Ladies, I will be happy tae make the oatcakes this morn," Matilda said, her voice level. "I just need tae ken where everythin’ is."
A heavy pause hung in the air.
"I can show ye how."
"I ken how." She didn't, not truly, but she had watched Beira’s hands move twice, and she had the general shape of it in her mind. "I just need to ken where the supplies are kept."
Beira studied her for a moment with the look of a woman deciding whether to argue and concluding that the energy required wasn't worth the result. She pointed at the shelf. The oats. The salt. The flat iron pan already sitting on the hearthstone, and the wooden press on the peg above it.
"The griddle needs tae be properly heated before?—"
