With effort, she dragged her gaze to his face. His sleek hair was a wild fall about his shoulders. He was the most intense, exciting, and erotic man she’d ever met.
When she was around Drustan MacKeltar, inexplicable things happened to her. When she looked at him, his powerful body, his chiseled jaw, the flashing eyes and sensual mouth, she heard Pan’s distant pipes and suffered an irresistible compulsion to tithe to Dionysus, the ancient god of wine and orgy. The tune was seductive, urging her to cast aside restraint, don her crimson kitten thong, and dance barefoot for a dark forbidding man who claimed he was a sixteenth-century laird.
He glanced back at her, and their gazes collided. She felt like a time bomb ready to explode, ticking, ticking.
Her face must have betrayed her feelings, because he inhaled sharply. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed, and he went quiet, with the perfect stillness of a mountain lion before hurling itself at its prey.
She swallowed. “What are you doing with those stones?” she forced herself to ask, flustered by the intensity of what she was feeling. “Don’t you think it’s time you tell me?”
“I have told you all I can.” His eyes were cool slate, the crystalline light that usually danced within them subdued.
“You don’t trust me. After all I’ve done to help, you still don’t trust me.” She didn’t try to conceal that it hurt her feelings.
“Och, lass, doona be thinking such. ’Tis merely that some things are…forbidden.” Not really, he amended silently, but he simply couldn’t risk revealing his plans yet, lest she abandon him.
“Bullshit,” she said, impatient with his evasions. “If you trust me, nothing is forbidden.”
“I do trust you, wee lass. I am trusting you far more than you know.” With my life, possibly even with my clan’s very existence….
“How am I supposed to believe in you, when you won’t confide in me?”
“Ever the doubter, are you not, Gwen?” he chided. “Kiss me, before I sketch the final symbols. For bonny fortune,” he urged. Shards of crystal glittered in his eyes, reminding her that although sometimes he banked his passionate nature, it was always simmering just beneath the surface.
Gwen started to speak, but he laid a finger to her lips.
“Please, lass, just kiss me. No more words. There have been enough of them between us.” He paused before adding quietly, “If you have aught to say to me, let your heart speak now.”
She took a deep breath.
There was no question what her heart was saying. Earlier that afternoon, when she’d gone down to the village, she’d dug her crimson thong out of her pack and, after washing up, had put it on. Then she’d peeled off her nicotine patch, preferring outright withdrawal to having to explain its presence on her body. She was not going to make love for the first time with a patch on. Besides, once she’d made the decision, a remarkable calm had settled over her.
She knew what she was going to do.
Truth be told, she’d probably known the moment he’d opened his eyes that she was going to give him her virginity. The past two days had been nothing more than her way of growing accustomed to the thought, so she would be less apprehensive when she finally did it.
She wasn’t simply attracted to him, she was drawn to him on every level—mentally, emotionally, and physically.
She wanted him in a way that had no rhyme or reason. She felt things when he spoke to her and touched her that originated from a unique place inside her. It no longer mattered to her that he might be mentally unbalanced. During the passage of the day, digging beside him in the ruins of the castle while he talked of the various members of his clan, she’d realized that she was going to stick by him until he worked out whatever reality problem he was having. She liked him. She wanted to know more about him. She’d begun to respect him, despite his delusions. If she had to check him into a hospital, hold his hand, and sit by his side until he recovered, she was going to do it. If she had to walk around Scotland for months clutching a photograph of him until she found someone who could identify him and shed light upon his condition, she was going to do it.
She tucked her bangs behind her ear and looked at him levelly. Her voice hardly shook when she said, “Make love to me, Drustan.”
Mad or not, she wanted him to be her first lover, here and now, on top of a mountain in the Highlands, beneath a million stars, encircled by ancient stones. Perhaps making love had some healing power. God knew, she probably needed some healing too.
His eyes flared and he went perfectly still. “I did hear that, did I not?” he said carefully. “You did say what I think you said? Or have I truly gone as mad as you accuse me of being?”