Midnight Honor

stayed drunk for a month and sought to ease himself on every whore within ten miles of Inverness.
    After four years, the ache was still a living thing in his belly. It sent tremors through his arms, down his legs; it sent rivers of heated blood flowing into his groin, swelling him to almost unbearable lengths.
    He had helped Anne to her feet a while ago, but who would help him now? Who, for that matter, would stop him if he turned her on her back and plunged himself between her thighs? He could take her and damn them both to hell without a qualm. He had seen her watching him surreptitiously from a window at Dunmaglass, and he had lost count of the number of embarrassed little glances he caught her sending his way ever since. A kiss would silence her. She was vulnerable, aching with a need Angus was not here to satisfy and had been too foolish to see how precious a thing it was.
    The tension in John's body became as palpable as the heartbeat thundering within his chest. His hands skimmed downward, slowing when they smoothed around her ribs. Hisfingertips brushed against the pillowed curve of her breasts and he bowed his head, cursing his own damning weakness.
    Angus Moy was his friend as well as his laird. Not only that, but he had come to Dunmaglass the day before he left for Edinburgh and asked John to look out for Anne while he was gone. He had said he knew his wife was too stubborn to stay at home with her needlework, and if she managed to get herself thrown in gaol for spitting on the Lord President, would John mind blowing up the courthouse to break her out?
    The irony had almost choked him then, for had her husband come an hour earlier, he could have seen Anne standing there brazen as brass announcing she was going to call out the clan and march to war.
    It choked him now when he thought that if he had gone to Fearchar a day earlier, if he had, indeed, stolen more than a kiss that day at the fair, if he hadn't been so damned arrogant in thinking she was too wild and spirited for anyone else to want to try to tame …?
    “Ye'll be the sorry death o' me, lass,” he whispered. “Ye ken that, do ye not?”
    When there was no answer, he leaned forward and looked at her face. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. She was fast asleep and he did not know whether he should feel relieved or disappointed.
    He straightened her shirt and drew a bundle of blankets up over her shoulders, tucking her in as gently as he would a child. At the last, he could not resist bending over and pressing a kiss into the gleaming red crown of her hair, for he knew it would be the last time he could risk doing such a thing. He loved her far too much to see her hurting any more than she was now, and to put the horns to her husband would surely tear her apart.
    He stoppered the jar of unguent and pushed to his feet, glaring balefully down at the enormous bulge in the front of his kilt. There was little likelihood of his being able to sleep himself this night, he thought grimly, not with his body as tense as a cocked pistol and his mind full of what-ifs and why-nots.
    He fished a Carolina cigar out of his sporran and bit theend. While he was leaning over to light a taper he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced sharply at the darkened corner where Glenna Mor made her bed. She was there, sitting back on her heels, her eyes large and round and dark in a face framed by a tousle of curls. How long she had been watching them, John did not know, but as he stared at her now, she tipped her head and raised her hands to her bodice, peeling the cheap wool aside to show him that her breasts were ripe and lush, her nipples hard as beads.
    Her hands moved again, sliding down into the juncture between her thighs. She seemed to purr and stretch with the sensation and this time, when she tilted her head, she did so in the direction of the door.
    John narrowed his eyes against the flare of the taper. He held it to the end of his cigar and through a thin blue cloud, watched the girl snatch up her cloak and move toward the door.
    Once there, she paused and looked back over her shoulder, smiling an invitation before she slipped outside. With wisps of smoke trailing behind him like a Medusa, John stalked after her, but no sooner had he closed the door behind him when another short, stocky shadow loomed up out of the mist.
    “I were just comin' tae fetch ye,” said Gillies MacBean. “We found a camp down by the river.