Page 117 of The Laird's Masked Passion

She felt him stretch her, fill her, pleasure her. Her release moved through her in a long, trembling wave. Colin held her steady, his mouth covering hers as her body tightened around him. Only when she had begun to soften did his restraint finally break.

He buried his face against her neck, his body shuddering as he followed her. Even in surrender, one arm remained braced beside her, the other curved beneath her wounded side, holding her securely against him.

Afterward, he shifted them carefully. He drew the blankets over them, then again placed his palm lightly beside the healing wound. His heartbeat slowed beneath her ear.

Elspeth traced one of the scars across his chest while his fingers moved lazily through her hair. The darkness gathered around the bed, softened by firelight and the warmth of his arms.

Colin kept holding her long after desire had quieted, as though care was not merely something that followed passion.

It was the deepest part of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Skye knew something had happened even before Elspeth spoke. This was partly because she possessed the instincts of a suspicious hound and partly because Elspeth had spent the better part of breakfast staring into a cup she had forgotten to drink.

“Well?” Skye demanded.

Elspeth looked up. “Well what?”

“Ye have smiled at that tea three times.”

“I have done nay such thing.”

“Four, now.”

Elspeth set the cup down with dignity. It was difficult to appear dignified when her face had become unreasonably warm.

Skye was seated opposite her near the chamber fire, folded her hands, and waited. Elspeth endured the silence for nearly ten seconds.

“Colin told me about his maither,” she revealed.

Skye’s expression softened at once. The words came slowly at first. Elspeth explained how she had found Colin in the dungeon, how he had asked whether she feared him, and how astonished he had looked when she had said no.

She told Skye about the blood upon his hands and the way he permitted her to wash it away, though receiving kindness seemed to cause him greater discomfort than any wound.

Then she told her about his father.

“He was only a boy,” Elspeth whispered. “He saw what was done tae her, and all his life people have looked at him as though cruelty might be inherited like land.”

Skye’s eyes filled with sorrow. “Poor man.”

“Aye.”

Elspeth looked toward the bed. The curtains remained half drawn. The linen had been changed, but the room still seemed altered by what had passed there. She remembered Colin’s face when he finally spoke of his pain. The coldness had not vanished. It merely opened enough to show her what it guarded.

“He is different when he allows himself tae feel,” Elspeth continued. “Nae softer, precisely. Colin MacKenzie could make tenderness sound like a military order. But there was something in him…”

She stopped.

Skye tilted her head. “Something?”

Elspeth folded her hands in her lap.

She told Skye the rest in a voice that grew quieter with every sentence. She admitted that she had asked Colin to make hertruly his wife. She spoke of his patience, his care, and the way he watched her as though her trust were more precious than anything he possessed.

Skye’s mouth slowly opened. “Ye asked him?”

“Aye.”