The MacNaughton Bride (19 page)

“Which of your legs hurts
most?”

Kell
groaned as she probed gently, and it had nothing to do with pleasure,
unfortunately.
 
Here she was,
touching him voluntarily for the first time, and he was in agony with her every
poke.
 
“Both.
 
Rory managed to fall back and roll over
me.”

Aislinn
let another dramatic exclamation escape, and
Kell
felt heartened at the sound.
 
She
seemed to care whether or not he was hurt.
 
It wasn’t much, he supposed, but it was something, and he
was willing to take pretty much anything as a sign of a step in the right
direction.
 

Chapter
10

He relaxed and watched her
from between eyelids that were mere slits, until he saw her opening a bottle of
twelve year old Scotch that Jenny must’ve found in his office.
 
Kell
was in
the process of trying to sit up, figuring that she was going to pour him a dram
of sweet fortification, but instead she poured it liberally over the gash on
his head, and he almost screamed the house down.

“What in heaven’s name do
you think you’re
doin
’, woman?” he roared.

Aislinn
continued to dab at him as if he hadn’t just nearly deafened her with his unnecessary
outcry.
 
“Why I would think that it
would have been obvious to you – I’m cleaning your wound.”
 
She sounded as if she was speaking to
someone who had been discovered to be quite slow and a bit
tetched
.

“Not with the best liquor
in the county you don’t!
 
Are you
out of your mind?”
 
He made a grab
for the bottle she held in her far hand, but
Aislinn
easily kept it out of his reach, and every lunge made his head throb as if he’d
been on a five day pub crawl.
 

“Stay still.”

“Give me the bottle,
woman.”

“Stay still.”

“Give me the bottle woman.”

Neither of them was likely
to give in – they were both stubborn people.
 
But
Aislinn
knew she had the upper
hand, since he couldn’t go very far at this point without his brothers to help
him.
 
She didn’t even want him
trying, though, which she knew he would do if she didn’t comply.
 
So she took the easy way out, knowing
in her heart that she could easily have won the argument.
 
She surrendered the bottle to him and
got up, grabbing a different bottle and holding it up to him for his
approval.
 
“Is this sufficiently
cheap to use?”

He nodded, not missing a
swallow from the bottle he’d immediately raised to his lips.

Aislinn
wasn’t going to say anything to him about drinking.
 
She’d already recognized that, for a Scotsman, he didn’t
favor the drink anywhere near as much as she’d thought he would, so if he
wanted some medicinal alcohol to help him tolerate the pain he must have been
in, that was fine with her.
 
She
had a small supply of laudanum, but hesitated to use it if something else was
available.
 
Some people reacted
badly to laudanum, so she used it as sparingly as she could.

Once his head was cleaned
and dressed,
Aislinn
did what she really should have
addressed first, but she couldn’t quite make herself until now.
 
She raised his kilt to his hips so that
she had a clear view of the entirety of both of his legs, trying desperately to
be as detached as she could about what she was looking at, despite the fact
that she knew her skin was as red as it ever got from a sunburn.

Kell
had put the almost empty bottle on the nightstand and leaned back against the
headboard, anxious to see exactly what she was going to do with and about
him.
 
He loved to see her blush
like this.
 
It was incredibly
becoming and very endearing, reminding her of just how innocent she still
was.
 
She was his wife, and he had
barely made love to her.
 
Actually,
he had yet to make love with her.
 
He’d taken her virginity, but it was a clumsy drunken episode and not
indicative of the lover he could be – he desperately wanted to be –
for her.

He’d sworn to himself that
he’d let her get used to him, even come to him for affection and sex, rather
than forcing himself on her as he had their first time.

He hadn’t taken into
account the fact that she would end up doctoring him, though, staring down at
his naked legs after having pulled his kilt up to lie on his hips.
 
No doubt she could see what she did to
him with just a touch, not that she was bothering to look at him anywhere but
where she absolutely had to.
 
God,
she was running her soft hands up and down his legs, making him groan from
something distinctly other than the occasional pain she was causing.

Frowning in concentration,
lips twisted, she started again at the top of his right thigh, leaning over him
with that light lilac scent of hers, her hips pressing against the side of his
as she prodded him as gently as she could.
 
“
Hmmmmmm
.
 
You’re not groaning in the same place
twice.”

Kell
swallowed hard, realizing that he was going to have to try to keep his desire
under control as much as possible.

She poked and pushed,
hitting several truly tender areas.
 
But then she moved to the insides of his thighs, and he couldn’t resist
the urge to pull her across him, arranging her on top of him, with her body between
his legs, his prominent desire poking her at least as insistently as she had
been prodding him.
 
“What are you
doing?
 
I need to finish examining
you – “

Before she could finish her
sentence, he very, very carefully leaned down to melt his lips down onto
hers.
 
Considering how he felt, it
was an extremely non-demanding kiss.
 
He wanted to flip her over and drive into her.
 
He wanted to slant his mouth across hers and delve into her
with his tongue.
 
He wanted to rip
her shirtfront and chemise and gather those firm, soft mounds into his palms to
tweak her nipples into ripeness just before he claimed them with his hot, wet
mouth.

But he did none of
that.
 
He held her in place with
one arm across the small of her back, but didn’t try to force anything.
 
He just . . . kissed her.

And she wasn’t
struggling.
 
In fact, her left hand
came up to cup the side of his cheek.
 
She pulled away first, but not far, just enough to look down at him.
 
“I was very afraid when you were so
late,” she admitted.

Kell
drank that in.
 
It was a balm to
his savaged ego.
 
It was the first
thing she’d said to him that indicated any sort of feeling for him beyond anger
and or annoyance.
 
He squeezed his
arm a little, and kissed her cheek.
 
“I’m fine, really.
 
My legs
hurt, but then anyone’s legs would hurt if a big behemoth like Rory had his way
with them.
 
I’m lucky to be alive,”
he said, then continued in a whisper, “and I’m very lucky to have you as my
wife, Lady
MacNaughton
.”

Aislinn’s
eyes grew very large and to her horror her tears began to splat down onto his
chest.
 
“I – I wish you
wouldn’t say things like that.”

Kell
hugged her tight to his chest, amazed that she would allow him to do so,
running his fingers up and down her back.
 
“Why not?
 
It’s the truth.
 
You’re a wonderful wife – you’ve
organized the house, gotten a much better cook, doctored everyone in the
county, I swear!
 
I’m very proud to
have you as my wife.”

Instead of getting better,
her tears increased until she was sobbing on his chest as if he’d just taken
the
tawse
to her naughty little bottom.
 
Gingerly, so as to hurt either of them
the least, he leaned over so that they were both on their sides.
 
His legs were moving much better than
they had been.
 
There was some
swelling around his knees, but he could bend them and
Kell
figured that a few days in bed should make him right as rain.

But his wife was bawling as
if she hadn’t a friend in the world, and he didn’t like it.
 
She wasn’t the crying type –
unless he’d given her something obvious to cry about.
 
Her sobs were the only thing he’d found so far that could
completely eliminate his desire.
 
Kell
found himself in a quandary.
 
He’d never really had to deal with a crying woman
before.
 
Certainly not a crying
wife.
 
And he wasn’t used to not
knowing what to do.
 
He was the one
with all the answers, the one who was always in control.

This was new territory for
him, and he didn’t like it at all.
 
He didn’t know why she was crying, and he had no idea at all how to get
her to stop.
 
So he did what he
wanted to do – he put his arms around her and pulled her to him, rocking
slightly, as if she was a cranky
bairn
.
 
Surprisingly, it seemed to work.
 
She relaxed and settled into his arms,
and her crying died away as if it was never there.
 
Kell
pulled back experimentally,
looking down into her face.
 
Aislinn
looked back at him, her eyes cloudy with shed tears
but clearer than he’d ever seen them.
 
There was no fear, no loathing, no anticipation of pain at his
hands.
 
She was just looking at him
as if seeing him for the first time.

And then she did something
that brought every part of him to full attention:
 
she leaned over and kissed him, full on the mouth, even
going so far as to slant her lips over his and touch his teeth tentatively with
her tongue.
 

He resisted the urge to squeeze
the stuffing out of her, and just let his arms settle naturally around her, not
too loose, not too tight.
 
It had
never occurred to him that she might take things into her own hands, as it
were, but he wasn’t about to object.
 

Aislinn
pulled back to see him considering her with an almost amusingly hopeful
look.
 
She knew what he wanted, but
hadn’t been able to face the idea of a repeat of what had happened the first
time they had had marital relations.
 
It had hurt.
 
Granted, he
had been drunk and thought that she wasn’t a virgin, so he was far from careful
with her, but it was still a scar on her soul and her heart.
 
She had so wanted to think that they
were a good match, and could make a reasonable go of it, perhaps even be
happy.
 

Other than there terrible
misunderstanding, he seemed to be a pretty good man – he didn’t drink to
excess, usually – and he obviously loved his brothers a great deal.
 
She wondered if he would spread some of
that love over to her if she let him do what he wanted . . . but then, he
seemed content to let her set the pace this time.

She bit her lip, though,
and asked the question that was on her mind.
 
“Are you – are you hurting too much . . . “ she would
never be able to say what she was hinting at.
 
Never.

Touched at her concern,
Kell
flicked the tip of her nose.
 
“I would rise from my grave to be with you,
Aislinn
,” he breathed, and the words came from the very
bottom of his heart.

She looked at him, as if
weighing the truth of what he’d said, then leaned forward to kiss him again,
starting out tentatively then deepening it slowly, slightly, carefully enough
that he was sure that he was going to die, that his heart was going to pound
its way out of his chest and into hers.
 
When her tongue first touched his, he nearly lost control of himself,
thrusting automatically and making her start a little away from him, but he
clamped down as much as he could on his instincts and intentions and remained
still, enticing her back to him with his nonthreatening quietness.

The kissing went on
forever, and
Kell
knew he had never indulged in such
an orgy of mouths and tongues in all his life.
 
It was incredible, but he wanted more – much, much
more.
 
Yet he didn’t want to
pressure her.
 
So he suffered, but
not quite in silence.
 
He relaxed
his usual tight rein and moaned softly against her mouth.

Aislinn’s
heart swelled at the sounds he was making – it sounded like he was truly
enjoying what she was doing – and, to her surprise, she was also.
 
She would never have thought that
kissing would be so enjoyable.
 
She’d been kissing people all her life, and it had never felt like this!