The Highlander's Harlot (Sword and Thistle 1)

“No, we haven’t. You’ve told me that I should be afraid of you. You told me that how you would treat me if you were to let yourself loose. And you told me that I didn’t want it; that I shouldn’t want it. But you never asked for my consent, and I am giving it.”

“You don’t know—”

“I want to be your whore,” I said, the word echoing off the walls. “If that’s what I must be to touch you. To be on my knees for you, swallowing your seed. To enjoy your body. To be enjoyed. Then that’s what I want. I can be brave. I can be shameless. I can be anything you want me to be.”

“The last time you provoked me this way, you came away from it with welts upon your pretty ass!”

“Aye,” I said. “And then, just after waking, I looked at them in the mirror. Saw your mark upon my body. Felt within myself such a quivering, such a need, that I had to touch myself. Not that I knew how to give myself pleasure—I needed you for that. But you keep awakening this need in me, this hunger of my own, and then refusing to satisfy it! Which is why I’m not scared of you or your belt, only scared that you will never accept everything I want to give you. Even my shame. Especially that.”

He went red, as if I’d put a torch to him. And that torch was desire. Sexual hunger. He nearly leapt up from the table to grab me. But somehow he restrained himself, his fingers grasping the edge. His teeth clenching. “I’ll grab you roughly.”

I lifted my chin at the challenge. “And I’ll whimper with pleasure.”

“I’ll demand your complete obedience.”

“I’ll give it.”

“I’ll call you names,” he added, narrowing his eyes.

“I will treasure each one.”

Rising from the table, he put his palms flat on it. “I’ll let my men watch.”

I swallowed, remembering how it had been the first time, when he tore my dress to bare my breasts to his warriors. But this time, this time, it wouldn’t be for show. This time it would be real. But instead of revulsion, I felt a surge of aroused pride at the thought of anyone seeing me under my laird, where I longed to be. “Let them watch.”

His eyebrows went up. “And if I want to share you with them?”

My heart thumped dully in my chest as I considered that. I didn’t want anyone but him. But if I had to endure the hands of other men in order to have him, to strengthen him, to be for him what he was for me…a safe harbor…then I would do it. “I am yours to take, or to give away, my laird.”

~~~

Ian Macrae.

Why did it have to be the scowling, surly, Ian that the laird summoned to witness my surrender to him that night? My only consolation was that the wounded warrior seemed to wish he was just about anywhere but in his laird’s bedchambers. Holding his bandaged ribs, Ian lowered into a chair, as sour as I’d ever seen him.

“You think I’m the devil with women?” the laird asked, confronting his cousin while I stood there. “And aye, I might be, Ian. But you’re going to see for yourself how it is truly before you decide to blacken my name again.”

Ian shot me a look of accusation, as if I’d betrayed him. And I supposed that I had, telling the laird what he’d said. But now we both stood to be disciplined for it, didn’t we?

“Do you want to kneel for me, lass?” the laird asked.

And strangely, the question sent a thrill through me. I did want to kneel for him. Even with Ian watching. And it was so much sexier now than it had been the first time. I told myself that Ian simply didn’t matter. He was no more to me than if my laird had said he wanted to take me in nature so the birds could watch.

I knelt and the laird raised my arms up and lifted my shift over my body so that I was naked—completely naked—before the two men. Then he took a belt from his wardrobe, and I knew he would strike me. The leather came down with a crack on my bottom. Then another, and another. He wasn’t nearly as savage with it as the first time, but it made me cry out. And yet, I smothered my cries because I didn’t want Ian to think this was some manner of abuse. Because it wasn’t. I wanted these lashes. I wanted to take these lashes for my laird. And every bit of the sting brought the blood to my nether parts, arousing me beyond reason.

“Good,” the laird said with a hint of praise in his voice, though his hands stroked me softly as if I were a troubled animal—a mount that was coming under his control. And yet, I sensed his craving was for more than pain. He wanted my shame. “Now crawl to the bed and open your legs. Touch your cunt.”

Cunt. I knew the vulgar word, and it struck me hard. But it also made me tingle between my legs to be spoken to this way. More than that, the thought of touching myself for him made me wet. Even wetter, somehow, that Ian was watching.

My stomach trembled with need as I crawled to the bed in obedience. I lay down on my stomach and spread my legs, reaching behind me to trace trembling fingers between my legs. As I lay there, my fingers feeling the slippery wetness of my arousal, the laird stopped me. “I’d thought to take you for the first time on your hands and knees with your ass whipped like this, though that would rob you of the memory of how you were first taken. And I want you to remember. I want you to see my features as I fuck your virgin pussy. So you will turn over, and you will keep your eyes open, and you will see me. You will look into my eyes when I do it, and you will never forget.”

Then he grabbed me by the nape of the neck, my hair twisted in his fist. “Understand what I’m saying, Heather. I’ll take your virginity this evening, but that’s not enough to sate me. I want you to be a whore. More, I want you to earn the title of whore. To crave it. To wear it proudly. To call yourself it. To make sure every other person in this castle knows you for it. My. Whore. I shall not be sated until you are that.”

His words battered down on me like cold rain. The word whore kept slapping against my face harder than the Donald’s had struck me. Harder than the belt he’d lashed me with. The shame danced on my skin and prickled like nothing I’d ever felt. That I should earn my

fallen reputation? As if I were somehow beneath it now? I’d been a good respectable girl. And a bit ago, I’d been a good daughter who had offered herself for her family. But now, I only wanted to be his. I reddened but took it into myself. Glad to sacrifice it to him. Glad to feel so alive, so strangely freed. “I want to be your whore,” I said savagely. “But I don’t know how to earn it.”

“You’re not expected to know what you haven’t been taught. Tonight, my requirement for you is simple. If you want this, you will open your thighs and beg me to fuck you. I’ll tie you down if you’d like that better—but if you struggle, it won’t be pleasant. I’m used to breaking animals and I intend to break you the same way.”