Free Starry Knight by Nina Mason

have you closed your heart?”
    Defiance bubbled in her heart like hot tar. Damn him for trying to get past the battlements she’d spent years erecting hurt by hurt and brick by brick. If anything, she should build her walls higher where this bedeviling baron was concerned, not let him wear them down like rain.
    “Did you bring me in here to psychoanalyze me?”
    “No,” he whispered, the heat of his breath caressing, soothing. His hand glided purposefully down her body and pushed between her legs. As he stimulated her through her knickers, she threw back her head and expelled a soft sigh—of pleasure and relief. A rapacious lover, she was equal to. A probing one, not so much.
    As he stroked her through the satin crotch of her knickers, desire fluttered in her abdomen like an injured bird. He’d struck too close to home. She’d didn’t feel loveable because she’d never felt loved. Not for one single, solitary moment of her entire privileged life. She’d had a chain of nannies who believed children should be seen but not heard before being packed off to boarding school where she was treated with equal detachment. Her parents, in short, had hired others to raise her—no, make that train her. In their eyes, she was a hunk of clay to be molded, not a human being to be nurtured. How disappointed they must have been when they got an outspoken nonconformist in place of the pretty marionette they’d paid for.
    Callum’s finger came inside her knickers and began to circle her clitoris, smothering her bitterness in the syrup of pleasure. The orgasm charged and retreated, charged and retreated, and then finally exploded in a heavenly cascade.
    Setting his hands on the wall on either side of her head, he docked his forehead against hers and said, “I’d rather chase the mirage than die alone without hope in the desert.”
     

Chapter 4
     
    As Callum navigated the winding, fog-shrouded road out to Easter Head, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, he entertained a strange and selfish thought. What if he should miss a turn and go over the cliff? The drop was steep and the landing rocky. If he didn’t turn her, she would die.
    He’d never turned anyone before, never even been tempted. Belphoebe had told him how, in case he found someone someday he wanted to keep as his mate. Strangely, he never had. In the hundreds of years he’d been alive, he’d never once fallen in love. He wanted to love, loved the idea of being in love, but, for whatever reason, the seeds of affection never took root. And oh, how he’d tortured himself over what those reasons might be.
    As a breeding drone, it was in his nature to seduce, to draw women to himself to satisfy his physical needs. He enjoyed those trysts, enjoyed the chase and the conquest, enjoyed the power he wielded and the erotic gratification their bodies afforded. What man wouldn’t? What he didn’t enjoy was their pursuit of him. Or the lengths he had to go to sometimes to get rid of them.
    Thus, he preferred Madam Pennick’s faery whores to human women. He relished his privacy and his solitude. Having unwelcome company foisted on him upended his sense of wellbeing. It was that simple. He wanted a woman when he wanted her. When he didn’t, she could go hang herself.
    Those feelings didn’t stem from a general disrespect for women. Oh, no. Quite the opposite, in fact. He adored women, adored their soft bodies and giving them mind-blowing orgasms. Sadly, that was all he’d ever been able to give them. Except Sorcha, of course, who wouldn’t even let him give her that much.
    She’d bristled under his touch and laid stiffly beneath him while he “did his business,” as she called it, much to his consternation. Other things fell away, but not the memory of poor Sorcha sobbing under him as he exercised his rights as a husband. Taking and never giving back because she wouldn’t allow him to please her.
    For two centuries, he’d suffered the ghost’s presence without