Torn Between Two Highlanders by Laurel Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

shaft, wrapping her fingers around it underneath his own. She gasped, both in surprise and exhilaration at the feel of engorged flesh. She delighted in the velvety skin and the way his cock pulse beneath her fingers. Every thought but her own arousal fled when he began to move her hand up and down, teaching her how to stroke him in a way that gave him pleasure.
    “ Oh ,” she whispered, sliding up beside him so that her arm had more room to move. They came nose to nose, breath to breath, his stare so intense that she was lost in the black depths of his eyes, and scarcely knew what was happening.
    “Is that what you wanted, lass?”
    She nodded, loving the way his hand felt so strong around hers. How the size of his palm covered her hand completely, making her feel small and delicate as a true lady, even if the act she was performing was anything but ladylike. “Yes, this is what I want.”
    “Then don’t ever do that again,” he growled. “Don’t use what I told you about my dead wife to get your way.”
    These words shamed her, but this time, she knew she deserved it. She’d used his deepest pain to wound him and she wasn’t proud of it. Not entirely anyway. What she’d learned in the past day or so about herself was that when someone hurt Arabella, she tried to hurt them back. And while she’d have been a better person if she could turn the other cheek, she wouldn’t have survived if she did.
    “He thought I was sullied,” Arabella murmured.
    Malcolm stopped stroking. “Who?”
    “Conall. The man I was to marry. This is his cottage. I ran straight to him from the hell of my capture. And he never once asked me if I was hurt. Never asked if my family was safe.” Arabella swallowed down a sudden rush of bile in her throat, felt a stab of pain in her heart that she’d been too numb to feel before. “He never kissed me nor held me in his arms to offer comfort. No. All Conall wanted to know was whether or not I’d been violated.”
    “Don’t marry him,” was all Malcolm had to say.
    “As if a woman has a choice.”
    “A smart woman can always find a way to have a choice. Don’t marry him.”
    “I won’t. I’d rather be a whore.”
    She spit the words. And she meant them.
    “Is that why you wanted to touch me?”
    “No,” she whispered, emboldened. “T’was because you wanted me .”
    His eyes softened. “How could I not want you, lass? You saved my life.”
    “Because you nearly died trying to save mine.”
    He kissed her. It wasn’t warm and sweet and boyishly tender like Davy’s kiss had been. But smoldering in some way, even though his lips were cool against hers. Seeming to savor her kiss, he took a shuddering breath. “You make me lightheaded, lass.”
    It’s the blood loss , she thought. He wasn’t a well man. He ought not be using his strength to kiss her. But kiss her he did, in a way that was not at all playful. In a way that spoke of a promise to do more. Much more…if he was restored to his strength.
    She never heard Davy come in.
    Not until he announced himself from the doorway with a clearing of his throat. “Good to see you’re on the mend, Malcolm.”
    Arabella tore herself away from Malcolm’s kiss, rising so swiftly from the bed that she nearly stumbled, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. After her encounter last night with Davy—no matter what he’d said about staking no claim to her—what must he now think to find her kissing another man?
    What was she to think of herself?
    “It’s a dreich morning,” Davy blethered on, as if nothing was amiss, a pail of what looked to be milk dangling from one hand. “Cold, drizzly and miserable even for late autumn. But I see you two found a way to make the most of it.”
    He said this with a smile, but Davy said almost everything with a smile. And if he was angry with her, she wasn’t sure he’d let himself show it. There was nothing to do but address it straight on. “That kiss just happened,” she sputtered,