At The Laird's Command (Sword and Thistle Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

that he did to her in bed. Not just the spankings and paddlings, but the vulgar words that spilled from his mouth. The ways in which he had humiliated her…
    She’d drawn it out of him this time.  
    He’d known perfectly well what she was doing, taunting him about her nightclothes. Working him into a state. And he’d let her do it because he’d needed her to do it. He should have been the one to reassure her that those things he said and did in the heat of passion were forms of love play. That they did not speak to a lack of feeling on his part, but rather, a kind of surrender of his own. She was the sexually inexperienced one, and yet, she seemed to know, without needing to be taught, how to make him feel safe expressing parts of himself for which others would deem him a monster.  
    How was that she did such a miraculous thing?
    If he ever doubted that he loved her, all doubts fled. He loved her more than anything or anyone he had ever loved. And how would he ever bear to part with her when the time came? “I will treasure this paddle, my sweet,” he told her. “No one has ever given me a gift I like better. Excepting, of course, the give you gave me when you surrendered yourself to me.”
    “But the paddle was a gift for me too, my laird,” she said, her eyelashes fluttering against his cheek. “I can never seem to tell you enough how happy it makes me to please you. But I will keep trying to tell you until you believe it. Until you really do believe it.”
    He was starting to, but he had to understand. “Does it make you happy because you are a good girl who likes to sacrifice for her laird, or because it feeds something in you to obey me just as it feeds something in me to command you?”
    “What difference does it make?”
    It made a difference to him. “What if I was not the laird?”
    She startled, as if she couldn’t imagine such a thing. “You will always be the laird. You cannot be afraid that the enemy will take the castle…”
    He was afraid of that. Desperately afraid of that. But as the laird, he couldn’t admit to such, lest he put her in fear. To his people he could only speak confidently of the walls of the castle. About the food that was stockpiled. About the allies that would come shortly to their aid. He couldn’t show fear or his people would fear. He had to have courage for them to have courage. So he forced a confident laugh and said, “No, my sweet. What I want to know is would you want to sacrifice for me if I was not the Macrae but only John Alexander Ramsay Macrea.”
      “It isn’t possible for you to be only anything,” she said, with a deep well of feeling in those violet eyes that stirred in him true courage, rather than the kind he had to feign. “Even if you were not a man with a castle to defend, you’re the man to whom I have pledged myself. The only man to have touched me. The only man I obey. I—I belong to you. I am yours complete. Can you not feel it even now with your scent on me and your seed warm within me?”
    A flare of possessive lust and love burned a hole in him. Oh, yes, he could feel it. He could feel it, indeed. And it made him feel like not just a laird, but a king . “Aye,” he said, reverently stroking her cheek with his thumb. “I do feel it. And it’s good to feel it. Especially when others are trying to steal everything else that is mine away. Know that I protect what’s mine, Heather.”
    He didn’t often use her name, and she seemed to melt to hear it, so he said it again, hoping to make her understand. “Hear me, Heather. I protect what’s mine. I pledge that I will do anything and everything to protect you. With everything I am and everything I have. With my last breath, if need be.”
    She sighed contentedly, with heartbreaking trust.
    A trust he viewed akin to sacrament.
    She was a woman who trusted in him completely, which made him a man who must live up to that trust. He might not survive this siege; he might have to surrender