A Maid for the Grieving Highlander Page 7

  He shifted and stumbled in the darkness. She gave a start and a little cry as he grasped her upper arm to steady himself. The hand immediately withdrew, and she found herself strangely regretting its absence.

  They stood in silence, each trying to control their breathing. A trickle of rainwater scurried down Catriona’s brow and along the length of her nose. Then the hand returned, to rest gently on her upper arm, midway between shoulder and elbow, and remained there.

  “Sir…” she said.

  “Catriona,” he whispered.

  He drew her onto his chest, and an arm came across her shoulders. She turned her cheek to his chest and snuggled into his tentative embrace. A face nuzzled her hair and dropped a light kiss on the top of her head. She wrapped her arms around Eoin’s waist and held fast to the safety and security of him.

  His hand left her arm and fingertips began to lightly stroke her cheek. She closed her eyes and moved her cheek against them. The butterflies in her tummy fluttered down into her groin, and she shifted her legs. This was a new and strange sensation for her, and it felt to her a little like it did when a warm summer breeze passed over her skin and stirred her skirts against her legs.

  Eoin pulled her down to the floor and pushed her back against one of the wooden smoking racks. The room smelled of burnt peat, rich and aromatic. His hands began to hunch her skirt upward.

  “No, sir!” she whimpered, feeling at the same time both desire and revulsion, anticipation and fear.

  Images of Sorcha, weeping and bleeding over the fallen log in the clearing of the White Stag Wood, while the wild-eyed Ruairi mounted her roughly from behind and plunged his cock into her over and over and over again, flashed before her in the darkness. At the same time, however, she felt an irresistible craving for… what, she could not tell.

  “Catriona,” Eoin implored softly.

  Tears sprang to Catriona’s eyes.

  “I’m fearful, sir,”

  He ran the back of his fingers along her cheek, gently sweeping her tears away.

  “There is no cause to be scared, lass. I’ll be gentle.”

  He lifted her higher onto the sloping rack, eased her skirt down over her slight hips and let it slip from her legs to the floor. He lifted her legs onto his shoulders, and she felt his lips in the hollow behind her knee. Her tension melted, and she felt a warm wave ripple through her flesh. His tongue ran up the inside of her thigh, and she shivered as his lips settled like a honeybee on the petals of her rose.

  She ran her fingers through his hair as his lips nibbled gently at the delicate folds of her flesh and his tongue began to probe between them. His fingers raked the short, thick reddish-brown hair of her pubes and swept across the flatness of her stomach. A delicious yearning grew in her tummy, like a hunger that was about to be satiated.

  Eoin rose from between her legs.

  “Do you trust me, lassie?”

  “Yes!” Catriona breathed out after a moment’s pause.

  “Do you want this?”

  There was another hesitation, then…

  “Yes,” Catriona replied.

  He began to unlace the front of her bodice. Her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and she could see, by the thin sliver of light that seeped in from beneath the door, his ghostly head and shoulders moving in the gloom. She reached up with both hands and grasped the topmost spar of the timber rack on which she was lying as the bodice fell away. He drew her sark over her head and arms, and she lay naked in front of him.

  By the dim light, he could see the slim, willowy shape of her body and the dark scatter of her long tresses where they fell across the timber slats. The paleness of her skin was broken only by the dark areolae of her small breasts and the narrow slash of hair between her legs.

  He quickly discarded his own clothing and stood over her. Catriona’s body flooded with desire at the sight of his broad hairless chest, the well-defined muscles of his arms and shoulders, and the ripple of his flat stomach. But she recoiled at the sight of the long rigid cock protruding from between his legs.

  He saw her anxiety.

  “It’s alright, lass. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

  He reached down and cupped one of her breasts in his palm, lightly flicking his soft thumb over its nipple. She shuddered as the thumb of his other hand began stroking the slit of her vagina. He leaned over her and took her other nipple into his mouth, suckling on it gently and running his tongue around the puckered skin. Pulses of pleasure lapped through her body and flooded her vagina with wetness.

  He removed his hand from between her legs, and she felt the head of his cock nuzzling her entrance. She tensed and let out a frightened whimper.

  “Relax, lassie, relax,” Eoin crooned as he began to push gently but firmly against her maidenhead.

  She clenched her eyes shut in anticipation of the searing pain and gripped the smoke rack tightly. But the agony never came. There was a small ‘nip’ as he slowly slipped inside her, no worse than the nick of a thistle on a bare ankle.

  She opened her eyes in wonderment. She felt his hardness fill her and a swirl of warm pleasure radiating through her body from its focus. She reached forward and clung to his narrow hips, drawing him deeper into her.

  “Is that alright, lass?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she hissed out in reply. “Yes!”

  He began to move slowly inside her, looping his arms beneath her legs to clutch her hips to him with his hands.

  “Oh, faster!” she sobbed, thrusting her own hips against his in frantic impatience.

  He increased the rhythm, bending his knees to angle his cock deeper. She shook with pleasure as his hips crashed against hers. He brought his hand back to her pubes and raked the hair with his fingers while his thumb pressed and massaged her clitoris. Catriona bucked and screamed. He felt the head of his cock swell and tingle and start to explode. At the last moment, he slipped from her, and his cock jerked spasmodically in the air as he spurted his seed all over her stomach.

  Catriona grasped his penis and held it possessively to her pubes, as the aftermath of her own climax flooded over her. She lay back on the spars of the smoke rack, utterly spent, her breath coming in deep, rapid gasps. Sweat from Eoin’s brow dripped onto her stomach and breasts.

  “Was that good?” he panted out.

  “It was awful, unbearable,” she sobbed. “But in a nice way. A very nice way.”

  He knelt and embraced her. She clung to him and rested her head in the crook of his neck.

  “I think the rain has stopped,” he observed.

  She listened.

  “Aye! You can hear the birds complaining about how drenched they got!”

  “So you can.” He laughed, then added ruefully, “We really should be getting back. Peigi will be fretting.”

  “That we should, sir,” Catriona agreed.

  She slid from the smoke rack and began to gather up her clothes in the semi-darkness.

  “And you can stop calling me ‘sir’,” Eoin told her.

  Catriona considered this for a moment.

  “I think I should keep calling you that, for appearances’ sake,” she concluded. “Otherwise, what would people say, me just a wee tink lass from the clachan and you so recently widowed and all?”

  Eoin frowned but said nothing.

  * * *

  Catriona lingered by the smokehouse after Eoin left to return to the castle so that they would not be seen returning together.

  The sward was damp after the squall, with drops of rainwater beading the gray-green tufts of marram grass that fringed the sandy cove.

  Catriona wrapped her arms around her middle, closed her eyes and lifted her face to the deepening sky. She felt… just right, she decided. For the past few weeks, she had felt adrift, cut loose from the certainties of her old life, no longer the Catriona of the clachan and not sure where she was going or what would become of her. Now, she felt as if she had drifted into a safe haven.

  She remembered Eo
in’s embrace following their lovemaking. He had not just used her then cast her aside like an old clout or rag when he was done with her. He had drawn her to him, and she had felt warm and safe in his arms. And the lovemaking itself had not been as forced and brutish as she had feared it would, as Ruairi’s lovemaking had been with Sorcha; it had been sweet and gentle and had made her soul, as well as her flesh, soar like a laverock singing its wee heart out in the heavens.

  Wanting to savor the bliss of the moment for a little longer, Catriona turned and began to walk along the southern landward shore of Eilean Tioram towards the sandbar. She skirted the ruined chapel, its gray tumbledown walls streaked with plumes of wet from the earlier rain. An owl flew out from its broken tower, its white face a specter in the twilight.

  The tide was out, and the gleaming sand stretched away on either side of the causeway. Silver ribbons of water twisted through the marshy mudflat that fringed the mainland. Catriona reflected that there was nothing to stop her from leaving the island, from simply walking across the sandbar and disappearing into the big wide world beyond. But she knew she would stay; although her head told her otherwise, her heart told her that Eilean Tioram was where she belonged at that moment, where her destiny lay. She also knew that destiny was still uncertain.

  As she gazed across the sandbar to the opposite shore, she saw a flash of white flit at the edge of the woodland. She peered into the dusk and then suddenly drew in a gasp. A white stag had emerged from the trees and now stood on the shingle, with its proud head raised and staring straight at her.

  The old superstitions came tumbling into Catriona’s head. It was an auspicious moment, there was no doubt about it, but what it portended was by no means clear or unambiguous to her. What message did Flidais bring from the otherworld? Was it a sign that she had transgressed a taboo? Or did it signal that the time had come for her to pursue what might prove an elusive destiny?

  What should she do, now that she had tasted of the forbidden fruit?

  Chapter Thirteen

  The following morning, Tamhas came into the kitchen and announced that Catriona had to gather her gear and move to a room in ‘the maister’s apartments’, to be closer to Donald who was still having occasional nightmares.

  Tamhas delivered his errand shortly and impassively, but his dour tone was laced with an almost imperceptible hint of disapproval. As soon as his duty had been discharged, he turned on his heel and walked briskly from the room.

  Peigi said nothing, but her silence spoke volumes to Catriona, whose ears burned as she moved around below stairs to gather her few possessions together.

  Thereafter, Catriona spent less and less time with Peigi in the kitchen and more and more with Eoin and Donald in the hall and the private apartments above. Catriona began taking her meals with Eoin and Donald at the great table in the hall, though she was mortified by having Peigi and Tamhas serve her. She acknowledged this to Peigi soon after the new dining arrangements had begun, but Peigi just dismissed Catriona’s concerns with a flap of her large hand.

  “It is how the maister wants things,” she said. “And it is not like ye ‘lady’ it over us with airs and graces. Ye have the good grace to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and ye have yet to snap yer fingers at us as if we were a pair o’ wee dogs.” She leveled a warning look at Catriona. “But if ye ever do, I shall clatter the head from those bonnie shoulders of yers.”

  However, the arrangement clearly rankled both Peigi and Tamhas. Their disapproval of their master’s behavior hung like a dark cloud in the air. Catriona had no doubt that they muttered about it between the two of them when they were alone.

  Eoin had also taken to going to Catriona in her room at nights. During these visits, the pretense they had to publicly maintain as master and servant for the sake of appearances could be cast aside. Their lovemaking became ever more equal and adventurous. Catriona explored and experimented with their bodies, discovering new joys and sensations. She was particularly fascinated by Eoin’s cock, which she stroked and tasted and clutched like a little girl who had been given a new toy. She loved to slide the foreskin back to reveal its smooth rounded head, and to dab the tip of her pinkie finger and her tongue into its little eye. She would giggle when her explorations resulted in him ejaculating a jet of warm white semen over her hand and wrist or into her hair and face. And when he took her, he took her gentle and tender. And when she took him, she rode him lithely like an elven queen, until he bucked and kicked like a foal turned loose in the spring pasture.

  On the nights that he did not visit, Catriona hungered for him and thrilled at the risk they were taking. She still dreaded the ruin that could befall her. They were careful not to spill his seed inside her, but it occasionally happened, especially when she lost herself in the frenzied pleasure she took in him. She knew that they could have no future together, that his destiny as the prospective Clanranald precluded a lasting happiness for her, but she lived for the moment that her loins erupted in ecstasy and she melted into the forgetfulness of her climax. Such moments became the culmination of her life, and she cared not what lay beyond those moments.

  Eoin, on the other hand, was more pragmatic. While Catriona spent her days in trembling anticipation of their next bout of lovemaking, Eoin schemed about how he might contrive a life for them – he, she, and little Donald. He felt guilty at his ‘betrayal’ of his sweet Isbeil, not long in her grave, but he reasoned that she would want both he and her son to be happy rather than miserable in a lasting grief. He did not care what the world might think of him, taking a servant girl and clachan ‘tink’ to his bed for his mate; he was, after all, Muideart, heir to Clanranald and future Lord of the Isles – he rose in his nobility far above the judgment and criticism of the lave. The only thing he feared was the wrath of the Clanranald, his father, who had his own designs on Eoin’s future and who would no doubt disown him if Eoin did anything that would thwart those designs. The nub of Eoin’s problem was the Clanranald and how he could win his father’s consent to his making a future with Catriona, or else make a life with Catriona outside the clan.

  Whatever the solution, he was determined to make a life with her, however.

  “I do love you, Catriona,” he assured her one morning, as the light seeped into a murky October morning sky beyond the window and she lay languid in the crook of his arm in the bed in her chamber, stroking the smooth skin that stretched across the firm muscles of his chest. “Even if it means giving up my birthright and forsaking my family. You, Donald and I are all the family I desire.”

  “Wheesht, Eoin,” Catriona crooned sleepily. “The Clanranald shall never allow it. Let us just enjoy the present we have. Let us not spoil it by worrying about the future.”

  Eoin twirled a tress of her long brown hair around his finger.

  “Aye, lass, but the future will soon be upon us,” he replied. “It will not take long for word of us to travel back to the Clanranald and for him to be riding down to Castle Tioram in a fury. On that day, I must either win him around or quit the country for good.”

  Catriona rested her brow against his neck and frowned.

  “That can never be,” she whispered. “You must take your rightful place at the head of the clan. If you must give me up, so be it… Though it shall break my heart, my love.”

  Eoin’s hand clasped her shoulder, and he drew her to him with a strong arm.

  “Is that what you want?” he asked rhetorically. “I know it isn’t. And it is not what I want either.”

  “But it cannot be!” Catriona sobbed, like a rabbit trapped in a cruel snare

  Eoin fell silent for a few moments, a pensive look furrowing his brow.

  “I have been thinking,” he began. “I have a friend in Glaschu, Archibald Ingram, who has begun trading in tobacco in the Americas. He has recently begun his own plantations in Virginia and Maryland and is looking for factors to run these estates. I could speak to him and perhaps secure a position in his company; then we might begin a new l
ife in the colonies.”

  “America!” Catriona sat up in alarm. “But that is a wild place, full of bears and wolves and savages.”

  “Not much different from Muideart, then,” he quipped. “We would feel at home.”

  Catriona’s eyes were wide with wonder.

  “But… America! ‘Tis the ends of the Earth!”

  “And Ath Tharracail is the center of the universe, you are telling me?” Eoin laughed.

  Catriona looked at him seriously.

  “It is the center of my world,” she told him. “Coming to Castle Tioram took me right out of myself. I would lose myself completely in America!”

  Eoin crushed her in his embrace, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

  “Am I not your world, then, Catriona, my love? For I know that you are mine. You and Donald.”

  He was quickly warming to the idea.

  “Just think,” he continued with growing enthusiasm. “In America, there would be none of yon ‘laird this’ and ‘servant that’; there would just be ‘Eoin and Catriona’, ‘Mister and Mistress MacDonald’.”

  “‘MacPherson’,” Catriona insisted. “I would yet be Catriona MacPherson.”

  Eoin raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  “Lassie, you could be Mistress Mac-Coo-in-the-Midden, for all I care, as long as you were my wife.”

  Catriona suddenly became conscious of their nakedness; they really were no different, just flesh and blood, just a man and a woman in love.

  “But… the Lord of the Isles… Chief of the Clanranald…” she whispered in a low, frightened voice. “Would you really give all that up for me?”

  “Gladly!” He hugged her. “And for myself, and for wee Donald. Our happiness is all that matters.”

  “And you will tell all this to the Clanranald?” she enquired with skepticism.

  “If he does not consent to our marrying, then – aye – I will!”

  Catriona considered him as if she were looking at a madman.