Page 57 of Blood of the Thistle

“Show me.”

Wanting to show him it really was nothing, she pulled up the right side of her skirt, exposing most of her leg and all of the long mark. “See? Just a scratch.”

Bram arrived and bent to inspect it, still wearing a heavy scowl.

“I didn’t want to bother you with it,” she told him.

He straightened to his full height, towering above her, and his countenance darkened yet more.

“It’s not half as bad as the slice in your shoulder,” she defended her decision not to mention it, “or any of the injuries you’ve suffered.”

Incredulous, he said, quite loudly, “Ye’re nae to measure yer wounds against mine.”

“But it’s not like it needs stitches or anything. It’s just a scratch.”

Bram’s face remained dark with exasperation, but as he looked at her, his expression changed so abruptly as his gaze arrested on her chest that Anna instinctively glanced down to discover what had captured his attention.

Her eyes widened dramatically as she saw what he saw. In her haste to dress, she’d not dried herself well, and while her jacket hung open, she appeared to have come straight from a wet t-shirt contest, her breasts and nipples outlined perfectly against the white fabric of her tee. She gasped and hastily closed the jacket over her chest. Heat flooded her face.

When she lifted her face to his again, he was no longer staring at her shirt and what she’d inadvertently shown him but met her gaze head on.

Something changed in his expression—the anger was still there, the concern too, yet beneath both lay something she’d seen only moments before across the water, something that made her heart begin to pound.

She became acutely aware of how close they stood—and what the ferocious look in his gaze signified. Her pulse beat insistently at the base of her throat, and she realized with startling clarity that she wanted him to kiss her.

With lightening speed, her brain calculated that she’d known him barely a week, and that he lived seven hundred years before she’d been born, and yet neither of those things stopped her from wanting him to kiss her.

“Bram...” she whispered, and knew she’d not said his name with caution or any intent to dissuade him from what she believed she saw in his eyes.

His eyes had darkened, the pale irises reduced to a narrow ring around suddenly wide pupils, and what she saw there was not soft or tentative—it was the look of a man who had already decided something, who was only waiting. The anger hadn’t left his face, but beneath it his expression had shed every layer of restraint, leaving only a directness so plain and unguarded it was almost difficult to hold.

Without a word, he reached for her. His hands settled gently upon her arms.

She wasn’t sure which of them moved first after that, only that the space between them vanished all at once. Their foreheads nearly touched, and she saw up close the uneven gold flecks in his deep blue eyes, the fine white scar splitting one eyebrow, the beads of water still caught in his beard. Bram’s gaze darted to her lips, then up again to meet her eyes, and for a moment, Anna thought he might stop, might pull away and leave her breathless with anticipation. But then, in a motion both swift and oddly reverent, he leaned down and kissed her.

His mouth was warm, warmer than she’d expected, and the contrast with the cool damp of his beard sent a shiver skittering down her spine. The kiss began softly, almost hesitantly—his lips brushing hers with a gentleness that belied the hunger she was certain she’d seen in his eyes. For a heartbeat, it was just that: a hungry question. Then his hands tightened at her waist, fingers pressing into the fabric of her jacket, and the kiss deepened.

For the first few heartbeats, it hardly felt real. Her mind struggled to catch up with her senses: the solid warmth of him, the weight of his arms, the faint rasp of his beard against her skin. This man from the fourteenth century, burdened with war and grief she could never comprehend—was kissing her. The reality of it crashed through her, not as a thought, but as a wave of pure sensation.

Anna’s breath caught as his mouth slanted over hers, no longer tentative but insistent, coaxing her lips apart with a slow, deliberate pressure. The taste of him filled her—clean water and something darker, something wild and untamed, she thought whimsically. His tongue traced the seam of her lips, and Anna opened instinctively to him, without hesitation. Then his hands slid from her waist to the small of her back, pulling her flush against him, and the kiss deepened. His mouth opened over hers again, and the heat of him flooded through her, as sharp and sweet as whisky. She made a small sound against his lips, something between a gasp and a sigh, and his fingers tightened against her spine, pressing her closer still. She curled her fingers into the damp linen of his shirt, clinging to him, answering his kiss with an abandon that felt both reckless and freeing, as if some bolder version of herself had taken over.

The kiss grew more demanding, and his tongue stroked hers while his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her hips before he slid one hand upward, his thumb brushing against the side of her breast.

“I want to touch ye,” he rasped against her lips, his beard tickling her chin.

“Yes, please,” she begged and curled her fingers into his shoulders.

His hands slid down along her sides and then, with a firm grip, he cupped the curve of her bottom, pulling her hard against the length of his body. The sensation robbed Anna of breath; there was no mistaking what pressed against her, or the urgency with which he wanted her. As he held her there and continued to kiss her, his other hand moved with a care that almost undid her, brushing the open edge of her jacket and finally covering her breast. The cotton between them did nothing to diminish the warmth of his hand, his hand large enough, his fingers long enough to span her fully, and something about the breadth of his palm under her breast made her feel, not small exactly, but somehow delicate.

His thumb traced slow, deliberate circles around her nipple, each pass dragging heat through her, tightening her until she was nearly trembling. Anna gasped into his mouth, her hands sliding up around his neck, her legs suddenly unsteady, and Bram made a low sound in his throat, a wordless groan she felt as much as heard. He broke the kiss only to press his face into the hollow of her neck, breathing her in, the bristle of his beard sending tiny electric shocks over her skin.

She threaded her fingers into his hair, marveling at how soft it felt, how utterly real. She arched into his touch, shameless, greedy for him in a way that made her cheeks burn with embarrassment even as she wanted more.

His lips returned to hers, the kiss rougher now, more urgent, and she answered in kind, teeth catching at his lower lip, tongue daring and searching. The hand that held her breast claimed her fully now, palm heavy, fingers kneading her through the thin fabric in a rhythm that left her lightheaded. His other hand gripped her hip with bruising hunger, and she was aware of nothing but the wash of sensations.

She knew she was lost, entirely lost and blissfully so, surrendering all the defenses she’d built up over years of caution and heartbreak. It was a strange thing to fall for someone who had been dead for seven hundred years before she arrived—someone who, by the cold logic of her own timeline, had already lived his whole life without her in it, and yet here she was, and here he was, and the arithmetic of it no longer troubled her the way it should.

He shifted his grip, sliding his hand from her bottom up along her back, sliding beneath her jacket and her shirt so that his palm found the bare skin above the waistband of her skirt, hot and possessive. She shivered and gasped into his mouth again, her own hands roaming with growing boldness over his chest, up the column of his neck, into his hair again, tugging him closer, and closer still, as if she could pull him all the way inside herself.