“Open my mantle and put your hands inside,” Duncan said softly.
Amber hesitated.
“Do you not want to share my warmth?” he asked.
“I’m afraid to.”
Duncan’s eyelashes lowered. The sadness that went through him drew a low cry from Amber.
“You don’t trust me,” he said. “What did I do to you in the past that you so fear me now? Did I force myself on you?”
“Nay,” she whispered.
Then she whispered it again and again, torn by his uncertainty and grief, the wound to his self-esteem that she did not believe his vow that she was safe with him.
She couldn’t bear to hurt him so.
Unbidden, Amber’s hands slid into the opening of Duncan’s mantle. With a need she couldn’t conceal, she fought through clothing until she could feel once more the living heat of his naked skin against her own. The small consummation drew a low cry from the back of her throat.
Baffled, Duncan looked at Amber’s closed eyes and taut features as she experienced the textures of his body. When he realized that simply touching his naked skin was such a keen pleasure for her, he was both shaken and violently aroused.
“Amber?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It is myself I fear, not you.”
She lowered her head against Duncan until her breath could bathe what her fingers were caressing.
“It is myself…”
Her whisper merged with the heat of her mouth against Duncan’s throat. A current of fire ripped through him. The feel of Amber’s tongue caressing his skin was so sweet and unexpected that it made him groan.
“Every touch I give you, even the least…” Amber whispered.
Her tongue stroked Duncan as delicately as a cat’s. His whole body tightened in response.
“See?” she whispered. “I touch you and you burn. I feel you burning and I burn as well. Then I touch you again and the flames leap higher.”
“By God’s holy blood,” Duncan said hoarsely, finally understanding the source of Amber’s fear. “You want me as much as I want you.”
Her smile was bittersweet. She let out a ragged breath.
“Nay, Duncan. I want you more. Your desire and my own combined.”
“That’s why you’re afraid?”
“Yes. I fear…this.”
Again Amber touched Duncan’s flesh with the tip of her tongue, savoring the taste and warmth of his body, the smooth texture, and most of all the rapid, heavy beating of his blood just beneath his skin.
“Don’t fear it,” Duncan said, his voice low and almost rough. “Passion such as this is a gift from God.”
She laughed sadly. “Is it? Is it a gift to see Paradise from afar, and know that you must never enter?”
One of Duncan’s hands slid beneath Amber’s cowl. His fingers eased into her loosely braided hair until he held her securely. A steady pressure of his palm turned her head up so that he could look into her golden eyes.
“We can taste Paradise without breaching its coral gates,” Duncan said.
“Is that possible?”
“Aye.”
“How?”
“Follow me. I’ll show you.”
Duncan closed the scant distance between their mouths. Amber’s lips parted at the touch of his tongue. She felt again the delicious sensation as he skimmed the inside of her lips.
Then the touch of his tongue became firmer, more insistent, prowling the edges of her mouth, seeking entry to the warm darkness just beyond his reach.
“What do you…?” Amber began.
She never finished asking what Duncan wanted, for his tongue glided between her teeth, taking her words and giving her fire in return.
The rhythmic slide and retreat and return of his tongue made fire lick unexpectedly through her body. Yet almost as soon as the heat bloomed within her, it faded, for the firm, provocative warmth of his tongue had been withdrawn.
The small sound that escaped Amber’s throat flicked Duncan like a whip. The eager searching of her tongue for his was a stroke of pure flame in his loins. He laughed low in his chest and tightened his arms, drawing her even closer to the part of him that burned most hotly.
“Is this what you seek?” Duncan asked.
His tongue surged between Amber’s teeth even as he rocked her hips against his. Her answering hunger made his head spin. She uttered a low sound and pressed even closer to the hot pleasures of his body. When he would have moved to bank the wild flames rising between them, her arms wrapped around his neck and her tongue sought his in a sensual duel that neither could lose.
Without releasing her mouth, Duncan lifted Amber and eased her down into the grass. Beneath her mantle, one of his hands tugged laces free. Suddenly he turned his head just enough so that his teeth could catch her lips in a series of gentle, burning bites.
A honeyed fire burst within Amber, dragging a moan from her. Duncan’s teeth tenderly stinging her neck sent more heat through her flushed skin. When she felt him pulling her arms from around his neck, she protested.
“I know we must stop,” Amber said, “but not yet.”
“No, not yet,” Duncan agreed. “We have much farther to go before we turn back at the final gate.”
His mouth closed over hers once more. Gently, steadily, while his tongue teased and tormented her with promises of Paradise, he pulled her arms away from his neck and pressed them against her own body.
Amber didn’t realize what Duncan wanted until she felt cool air wash over her breasts. Her mantle had been pushed to either side of her body, she was bare to the waist, and her arms were bound against her hips by half-shed clothing.
Duncan was no longer touching her. He was simply looking at her with eyes that blazed. She was beautifully formed, neither too full nor too small, warm and taut, with nipples the pink of wild rosebuds. He ached to hold each bud in his mouth, to caress it with his tongue, to test the creamy softness of her breasts with his teeth.
Between her breasts golden light pooled, caught within timeless amber. The pendant shimmered and rippled with radiance as though it were infused with Amber’s very life.
He touched the pendant in silent greeting. Then he lifted his fingers and simply looked at the beauty that had lain hidden beneath heavy folds of clothing.
“Duncan?” Amber whispered.
She looked into his eyes and trembled at what she saw.
“Are you cold?” Duncan asked, seeing her shiver.
Amber trembled again, for his voice was like the rasp of a cat’s tongue. She tried to answer his question, but her mouth was dry and her heart was beating frantically. Without Duncan’s touch pouring his hunger into her, her own desire was being quenched by unease.
“Dinna worry, golden witch,” Duncan said thickly, bending down to Amber. “I will warm you.”
The searing heat of Duncan’s hands and mouth on her breasts was both unexpected and fiercely arousing to Amber. As he kissed first one pink tip and then the other, they hardened magically. His mustache caressed the sensitive flesh while his tongue licked slowly, hotly.
Fire lanced through the center of Amber’s body, setting aflame places that had been secret even from her.
Until Duncan touched her and she burned.
When he finally lifted his head, the breeze found Amber’s heated skin. He smiled to see her nipples tighten even more. His fingertips closed over the flushed pink tips of her breasts. He rolled the velvet flesh lightly, pressed sensuously. When heat bloomed just beneath her creamy skin, he felt as though he were being stretched upon a rack of fire.
“How could I have forgotten your response to me?” Duncan asked wonderingly. “God must feel like this when he causes the sun to rise.”
“We’ve never before—”
“Nay,” he interrupted softly. “You would not fly so high, so quickly, unless you knew the lure of the hunt as surely as I.”
Amber shook her head, the only answer she could make, for passion had stolen
her voice.
“Don’t be shy of the truth, precious Amber. Your response is a greater gift than any maidenly restraint.”
She tried to answer, but all that came from her lips was a ragged cry. The passion she felt should have frightened her. But when he touched her, whatever virginal wariness and Learned caution she had were burned away in the overwhelming heat of Duncan’s desire.
And her own. Duncan’s desire and hers combined.
When he bent once more to draw one of her aching nipples into his mouth, Amber’s breath came out in another low cry. When he shaped her with slow rhythms of his tongue, tender lightning burned from her breasts to her hips. Her back arched in abandoned response until she strained against the bonds of cloth holding her elbows to her sides.
Reluctantly Duncan lifted his head, wondering if the hungry intimacy of the caress had alarmed Amber.
“Don’t struggle,” he said gently. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I know. But I can’t—”
She made a sound of frustration and jerked her arms. All she managed to do was tangle them more closely to her body.
“What can’t you do?” Duncan asked.
The sweet swaying of Amber’s breasts made sensual heat flush Duncan’s body. The thought of her arching like that against his chest while he lay naked between her legs brought him to the edge of bursting.
“I can’t touch you while I’m tangled in clothes this way,” Amber said.
Duncan set his jaw against the temptation she was offering.
“I think that’s just as well,” he said raggedly.
“Don’t you want me to touch you?”
He smiled at the confusion in Amber’s eyes, even though the thought of feeling her hands on his body brought a leap of need so great that it was indistinguishable from pain.
“Aye,” Duncan groaned, brushing his mustache over one taut nipple. “And aye”—he brushed again—” and aye, and aye one thousand times more!”
The sound Amber made could have been pleasure or fear. Even she couldn’t have said which. She had never felt anything as powerful as the combination of her own untried sensuality, Duncan’s torrential need, and the fierce restraint he exercised on his passion.
“But if you touch me…” he said hoarsely.
The words became lost in the ripple of sound Duncan drew from Amber as his teeth raked with exquisite delicacy over her nipple. Smiling darkly, he turned to her other breast and repeated the primitive caress.
“If you touch me,” Duncan whispered, savoring Amber’s unbridled response to him, “I shall be much less certain of my own control.”
Beneath the words was Duncan’s own growing doubt that his restraint was equal to Amber’s sweet and abandoned response. He had never known a woman could want him so much, so deeply, without coyness or calculation.
“Dark warrior,” Amber said, “you would never break your vow to me.”
The certainty in Amber’s voice was repeated in the clarity of her eyes watching him. Duncan saw himself reflected darkly in her luminous depths and at the same time he saw her absolute trust in him.
“You humble me,” Duncan said.
“Then don’t raise me so high,” she whispered, smiling.
“Shall I free your arms?”
Though Amber knew she could free herself if she had the patience, she wanted it to be Duncan who released her. She wanted him to understand the completeness of her trust, as she understood the intensity of his promise not to take her.
He was a man of honor. Honor was the very core of his pride and strength. Honor was what had made him the man he was.
“Yes,” Amber whispered. “Free me.”
Yet still Duncan hesitated.
“I promise I won’t be too forward,” Amber said, trying and failing to hide her smile.
The smile Duncan gave Amber then was the one that called meadowlarks from a midnight sky.
“That would be very disappointing, sweet witch.”
Slowly Duncan lowered his head to Amber’s breasts, tantalizing her with the warmth of his breath while he teased her with silky touches of his mustache and tongue. His reward was a series of broken sighs and tiny sounds as she twisted against the cloth binding her elbows.
“You tempt me,” Duncan said.
“And you torment me.”
“A sweet torment?”
He cupped his hand around one of Amber’s breasts, lifting and caressing, testing the tight peak.
“Aye,” she said. “Very sweet.”
“Not as sweet as these pink buds.”
Amber drew her breath in swiftly. She could feel the passion sweeping through Duncan in hot pulses as he looked at his fingers on her breasts.
“Nor as sweet as making you moan beneath my mouth,” Duncan added, bending down to Amber once more.
“My arms,” she said.
And it was all Amber could say, for Duncan’s powerful forearm was beneath her shoulder blades, arching her back, and his mouth was on her naked breasts. With a ragged sound of pleasure, she gave herself to his caresses, hiding nothing of her own response.
It wasn’t until Duncan lifted his head that Amber realized he had unfastened her clothes completely. He sat up and pulled the long sleeves down over her wrists one at a time. Then he eased her clothing farther down her body, revealing more creamy skin and the long, inward curving lines of her torso.
Though Duncan wanted to keep undressing Amber more than he wanted air itself, he forced his hands to stop at her waist. He kneaded her resilient flesh lightly, hungrily.
It wasn’t enough for either of them. With a quick, graceful movement, Amber sat up. The rush of cool air made her shiver. Instinctively she shrugged the folds of her mantle forward, covering her shoulders even as she reached for the laces at the front of Duncan’s shirt.
“Be as I am,” Amber said, pulling laces free. “Naked but for the mantle.”
“And if I take chill?” he asked, smiling slightly.
“Why, I will warm you, of course.”
Duncan’s smile widened. He threw off his mantle. His shirt soon followed. With a slow care that was both torment and pleasure, Amber drew the mantle back around Duncan’s shoulders and fastened it at the side.
The amber talisman he wore shimmered with an uncanny light, as though infused with Duncan’s own immense vitality. Amber bent her head and brushed her lips over the ancient talisman in silent greeting.
Only then did she give in to the temptation that haunted her, running her fingers through the cloud of dark hair on his chest. Eyes closed, smiling, kneading him as a contented cat would, she tested the muscular flesh of Duncan’s torso with fingernails like delicate, unsheathed claws.
“I love the feel of you,” Amber said softly. “When you slept so unnaturally, I spent many hours rubbing oil of amber into your skin to keep away fever.”
“Did it work?”
“Of course. Amber is noted for its ability to take fire from a body.”
“It wouldn’t work on me now,” Duncan said.
“Why not?”
“Your hands bring me fever.”
Amber didn’t doubt it. She could feel the passionate heat radiating from Duncan’s body.
And if that wasn’t enough, she had the truth of his words pouring into her through the medium of touch.
“’Tis like bathing in a magical fire,” she whispered.
“What is?”
“Touching you. Feeling your passion.”
The smile Duncan gave Amber was rather fierce, but she didn’t care. She felt the truth of him, and that truth was his restraint. He had given his vow, and he was a man who would die before he was forsworn.
“But I must confess something to you,” she whispered.
“Why? Do I look like a priest?”
Amber laughed. “Nay. You look like what you are, a warrior both fierce and sensual.”
“Then why confess to me?”
“Because I only now realized that I smooth
ed oil over you long after the danger of fever was past.”
Duncan’s breath caught. “Did you?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Why?”
“For the forbidden pleasure of touching you.”
One of Amber’s fingertips brushed over a male nipple. The sudden surge of pleasure that went through Duncan was as clear to her as a cry. Her fingers returned, lingered, and teased with a skill far beyond her experience, for his response was her unfailing sensual guide.
“But touching me isn’t forbidden now?” Duncan asked almost roughly.
“No. ’Tis foolish,” Amber whispered, “but not forbidden.”
“Why not?”
She bent her head and kissed first one, then the other, nipple. When she drew her tongue slowly over him, his whole body tightened with a pleasure that was nearly violent.
“Because you promised that I would be safe here with you,” Amber whispered.
“Today,” he said, doubting he would ever be able to withstand such temptation again.
“Yes, today, now,” she said, “in this place where ancient stones watch over the sea.”
Duncan framed Amber’s face with his hands, then took her mouth with a hunger that was like nothing he had ever felt before. The kiss was deep and powerful, urgent with the rhythms of the joining that he would not permit, for he had given his vow.
Amber yielded her mouth and took his at the same time, glorying in the heat and strength of the man holding her. The pricking of her nails against his skin made him groan with pleasure. Hearing his passion, feeling it, tasting it, Amber raked slowly over his muscular back again.
“You will make me wild,” Duncan said against her mouth.
“I feel wild,” she admitted, “but ’tis your doing.”
He bit her lower lip with savage care.
“How wild do you feel?” he asked. “Enough to be naked to my hands and eyes? Enough to let me caress you in new ways?”
The violence of the hunger that went through Duncan as he spoke told Amber that he wanted her to say yes so much that he was shaking with it.
Knowing that, touching him, trusting him, it was impossible for her to say no.
“Yes,” Amber whispered.
Duncan’s arms tightened until she could barely breathe. Slowly he pressed her back until she lay once more on the ground. Her mantle fell away, revealing the pale curves and pink buds drawn tight by his mouth.