Free The Highlander's Harlot (Sword and Thistle Book 1) by Laurel Adams

to defend me. And I wished there was something—anything—that I could do to help.
    Dressed in a simple shift, fastened with a blue bow, I found him before supper in his library, which he had turned into war room, with writings of defense strategies strewn across the tables. But he was sitting there alone, simply staring at nothing, so I dared to interrupt. “I want to give myself to you tonight,” I said.
    He squeezed his eyes shut. “Now isn’t the time.”
    “It is. I remember what you said about how it makes you feel to take a woman the way you please You said it gives you strength. It makes you feel as if you have the power you need to protect this castle and this clan. That it gives you the confidence to fend off rivals and be the laird. It feeds something in you that’s always hungry without it. I think that’s why you asked me to cook for you. I think you are hungry. But it isn’t food that is going to sate you.”
    “Heather!” he said, harshly. “We’ve discussed this.”
    “No, we haven’t. You’ve told me that I should be afraid of you. You told me that how you would treat me if you were to let yourself loose. And you told me that I didn’t want it; that I shouldn’t want it. But you never asked for my consent, and I am giving it.”
    “You don’t know—”
    “I want to be your whore,” I said, the word echoing off the walls. “If that’s what I must be to touch you. To be on my knees for you, swallowing your seed. To enjoy your body. To be enjoyed. Then that’s what I want. I can be brave. I can be shameless. I can be anything you want me to be.”
    “The last time you provoked me this way, you came away from it with welts upon your pretty ass!”
    “Aye,” I said. “And then, just after waking, I looked at them in the mirror. Saw your mark upon my body. Felt within myself such a quivering, such a need, that I had to touch myself. Not that I knew how to give myself pleasure—I needed you for that. But you keep awakening this need in me, this hunger of my own, and then refusing to satisfy it! Which is why I’m not scared of you or your belt, only scared that you will never accept everything I want to give you. Even my shame. Especially that.”
    He went red, as if I’d put a torch to him. And that torch was desire. Sexual hunger. He nearly leapt up from the table to grab me. But somehow he restrained himself, his fingers grasping the edge. His teeth clenching. “I’ll grab you roughly.”
    I lifted my chin at the challenge. “And I’ll whimper with pleasure.”
    “I’ll demand your complete obedience.”
    “I’ll give it.”
    “I’ll call you names,” he added, narrowing his eyes.
    “I will treasure each one.”
    Rising from the table, he put his palms flat on it. “I’ll let my men watch.”
    I swallowed, remembering how it had been the first time, when he tore my dress to bare my breasts to his warriors. But this time, this time, it wouldn’t be for show. This time it would be real. But instead of revulsion, I felt a surge of aroused pride at the thought of anyone seeing me under my laird, where I longed to be. “Let them watch.”
    His eyebrows went up. “And if I want to share you with them?”
    My heart thumped dully in my chest as I considered that. I didn’t want anyone but him. But if I had to endure the hands of other men in order to have him, to strengthen him, to be for him what he was for me…a safe harbor…then I would do it. “I am yours to take, or to give away, my laird.”
    ~~~
    Ian Macrae.
    Why did it have to be the scowling, surly, Ian that the laird summoned to witness my surrender to him that night? My only consolation was that the wounded warrior seemed to wish he was just about anywhere but in his laird’s bedchambers. Holding his bandaged ribs, Ian lowered into a chair, as sour as I’d ever seen him.
    “You think I’m the devil with women?” the laird asked, confronting his cousin while I stood there. “And aye, I might be, Ian.