“So you find you want to touch me, do you?” he asked, sinful heat in his eyes.

Juliana had felt him wonderfully inside her, had seen his hardness dark and beautiful, but she’d not touched it until now. She daringly dipped her hand to his warm balls, which became tight against her palm.

Elliot lay rigidly, as though he forced himself to remain still, his hands tucked firmly behind his head. He made a noise of pleasure as Juliana drew her fingers up either side of his shaft, liking the satin smoothness of his skin. In the dying light, he was dark with wanting, heavy in her hand.

She closed her fingers around him and squeezed, and a louder groan escaped Elliot’s lips. The tip reddened as she drew her hand to it. The head was different from the shaft, she found as she traced it, more giving, but at the same time stiff and warm.

Juliana wondered what he tasted like. Her thoughts shot back to Elliot licking and drinking her on the path in the woods. She’d never felt anything like that in her life. The heat of his mouth, the friction of his tongue…she squirmed to remember.

She leaned down and licked his tip.

“God, Juliana, you’ll kill me.” The words were soft, tight.

Juliana brushed her tongue over him again, liking the warm salt taste of his skin. She enjoyed the various textures of him too, the slight sponginess of the tip, the edge of the head, the straight sides of the shaft. The coarse hair at the base tickled her tongue, his balls like warm velvet.

Elliot’s abdomen rose and fell with his breath, and she couldn’t resist moving upward to lick his navel. Her hair fell forward, pooling around him.

His breath went out in a grating sigh. One hand found her hair, bunching it in his fist. “No, they couldn’t take you away from me.”

The words were so soft Juliana wasn’t certain she heard them. She circled his navel with her tongue then traced down the line of hair that led back to his staff.

She began tasting him again, moving her tongue up and down the sides of his shaft, dropping little kisses all the way up to the tip. Then she raised her head and smiled at him, thinking he’d laugh at how silly she was.

The look on Elliot’s face made her stop. His eyes held pure carnality, raw need. He was a beautiful man, naked on his back, his tanned body spread for her on the sheets.

She had time for only one delicious glance before Elliot seized her under her arms and dragged her up his body. His mouth opened over hers, and his hands parted her legs.

Elliot lifted her hips a little, then sank her down onto him, his hardness entering her and rising high inside her. Juliana gasped, the position opening her, her body arching as more of him went into her.

Elliot’s hips were moving then, his hands strong on her waist. Juliana felt joy build within her, the tight spiraling where nothing was real but Elliot inside her and the feelings in her heart.

As cries escaped her lips, Elliot rolled her over, the mattress crackling, and drove down into her. His eyes were fixed with a determined, almost mad light as their bodies came together.

Juliana remembered crying out, then Elliot shouting, then both of them collapsing onto cool sheets.

Elliot landed next to her, pulling her back into his embrace. Lassitude and peace struck her, and Juliana fell into a pit of sleep.



Elliot jumped awake.

Nothing had moved. Nothing had changed. And yet…

Moonlight mixed with lingering twilight outside the window, keeping darkness at bay. The half-light made Juliana’s already pale skin white as marble.

Her quiet breathing hadn’t woken him. Nor had any shout in the corridor—not McGregor and Komal in one of their English-Punjabi arguments, not Hamish bellowing something down the hall. The house was silent, the frogs, crickets, and night birds outside filling the dusk with soothing music.

A clock in the hall, which Juliana had insisted be cleaned, wound, and set, chimed twelve times. Midnight. An enchanted hour.

Elliot rose noiselessly from the bed. He could move like a ghost, skills learned as a tracker and hunter settling on him without him having to think about it.

Juliana slept on, undisturbed. Elliot pulled on his shirt, wrapped his kilt around his waist, grabbed his boots, and went into the hall.

He donned his boots at the bottom of the stairs then walked quietly along the flagstones to the kitchen. He found the shotgun Mahindar had hidden in the butler’s pantry, and shells in a drawer high in a kitchen cupboard.

Mahindar was nowhere in sight, the family taking a well-deserved sleep. The likeliest person Elliot would encounter was McGregor, who sometimes wandered the house at night, but even he remained upstairs and quiet.

A cool breeze met Elliot when he stepped out the back door, but he didn’t bother fetching a coat. He could wrap up in his kilt if need be.

A fox called in the distance, followed by the noise of small animals scurrying for cover. At the end of the garden, just outside the gate, Elliot stopped and loaded the gun, tucking spare shells into his sporran, along with the tin of biscuits he’d found in the cupboard next to the shells. He kept the gun open, slung over his arm.

He started along the path that would take him to the footbridge that led over the river to Rossmoran land. He and Juliana had used this route to return to the house that evening.

As Elliot walked, he relived the tactile sensations of being with Juliana—he inside her, she squeezing down without knowing she did it, the cushion of her breasts against his chest. He also remembered the delicious feeling of her tongue on his cock. Her hesitant little licks and kisses, growing bolder by the second, had him nearly crazed with need.

She was too innocent yet for the things he wanted to do with her. Her well-meaning stepmother had taught her that a man bedded his wife using one position, did his business quickly, and disappeared back to his club and his mistresses. Elliot would have to teach her that this was not necessarily so. Besides, he had no intention of spending days at a stifling club with hidebound men, nor did he intend taking a mistress. What idiot would, when he had Juliana?

Elliot reached the footbridge and the path that led to the steep hill where he and Juliana had climbed from the tunnels. He picked his way along, the moonlight giving him no need for a lantern.

The hill curved around into the fold of the valley, another hill rising beyond it. Elliot knew there must be more entrances to the tunnels—the McGregors of old would not have allowed themselves to be bottled inside if their enemies found and blocked one. He walked to the next hill, where trees began to rise around him again.

The woods went quiet, the watcher back.

Elliot snapped the shotgun closed and cocked it. “Come on out and face me,” he said, voice loud in the still air. “If I like what you say, I might not shoot you.”

Chapter 15