Heat stained Gabrielle's cheeks a bright shade of pink when she realized the soft, plaintive sound had come from herself. It sounded oddly high, breathless and throaty.
Her moan echoed in his ears like the sigh of waves lapping at rocks. Connor shivered. His arms coiling around her waist, he hauled her hard against him.
She went willingly; her only struggle was to squirm, trying to get closer. It wasn't possible, although he found himself doing the same thing.
Feeling her against him wasn't enough. Connor wanted, nay needed, to be closer to her still.
Her arms wrapped around his neck, her fingers linking. Her breasts, so wonderfully full and firm, prodded against his chest as she returned his kiss with a voracious hunger that astonished him.
Trapping a groan in the back of his throat, Connor stroked and probed the sweet inner recesses of her mouth with his tongue. Milk and honey... aye, that was what she tasted like. His hands caressed her back in quick, restless strokes. His palms itched to peel away the barrier of cloth, to feel her skin beneath his fingertips. Restraining the urge wasn't easy, but surrendering would risk frightening her and having her pull away.
Such was a risk Connor was not willing to take.
Truly, he had kept his promise. He'd but kissed her once... och! all right, twice. But only to satisfy his curiosity. No matter how badly he might have wanted to, he would not have kissed her again.
And he hadn't.
She had kissed him.
Oh, how that changed everything!
The gesture was so unexpected it knocked the breath from his lungs and at the same time toppled what little self-control he'd been able to maintain.
Without realizing what he was doing, Connor scooped her body close and, bending, gently eased both of them to the ground. She made a hot, soft, heavenly bed upon which he cushioned himself. He lay half on her, half on the damp, moss-strewn ground.
His mouth left hers. Trailing tiny nibbles along the line of her jaw, he shifted slightly to the side and bent his right knee, nudging her legs apart.
Slowly, slowly, his leg lifted.
The top of his thigh rubbed intimately against her.
Her hips thrust upward, and she moaned. The sound was cut short by her sharp, quivering gasp.
Gabrielle's eyes were scrunched closed. Behind the velvet black of her lids, a burst of color exploded as her legs clamped tightly around the granite hardness of his thigh. Like the colors on an artist's pallet being washed away by a heavy rain, electrifying streaks of blues and reds and purples trickled together and merged.
"Do ye like that, lass?" he asked.
The moss pillowing the back of her head crunched when she nodded. "Oh, aye. Please, m'lord, do it again."
Connor gritted his teeth. The lass was a constant source of surprise. Her unexpectedly enthusiastic response was going to be the death of him! Feeling her body beneath his, feeling her squirming against the shelf of his thigh, created a sensation
in him that burned like liquid fire. A sensation more intense than anything he'd ever known.
"Ne'er let it be said that The Black Douglas refused a lady," he growled... and did it again.
And again.
And yet again.
The muscles in Gabrielle's stomach tightened as she clung to him, moved her hips in tune to the strokes of his thigh. Ah, Sweet Jesus, she didn't know exactly what it was Connor was doing, or why it made her breathing accelerate and her nerve endings tingle, and at that moment she did not particularly care. All she wanted was for him not to stop!
Her hands strayed to the collar of his jack, her fingers slipping beneath. The cloth of the tunic felt scratchy against her fingertips as she slipped the jack, with its protective lining of heavily padded steel, over his shoulders and down his arms. He helped by shifting his weight from one arm to the other. All the while, his mouth, which had discovered the sensitive length of her neck, and reveled in the way she shivered and moaned, never left the heavenly taste of her skin.
In the past, Connor had always considered the loveplay before bedding a wench something to tolerate and provide as a courtesy to the lass. Oddly, as hard as his body was driving him to take this woman, he felt no rush. It was most strange, yet he had to admit that he could have continued to kiss and stroke and caress her until the sun came up... and not be bored with it or grow tired of it.
His right hand had been splayed over her waist; it now roamed over her in slow but fevered strokes. Her reaction to his touch was magnificently eager. When his fingertips grazed the temptingly full undercurve of her breasts, her shiver was as ardent as it was unrestrained. His mouth surrendered the salty-sweet taste of her skin for a moment before he groaned and reluctantly lifted his head to look down at her.
Gabrielle's eyes, which had been tightly closed, flickered open. Thick black lashes framed eyes that were dark green and passion-glazed.