Protected By The Highlander (Medieval Romance) Read online

  “And what about a man dae ye like? What if he stood right next tae ye? What if he offered ye a piece of his world?” He still did not as much as blink.

  I do not need a man right now! she insisted to herself. Nevertheless, the aching, burning feeling in her loins kept intensifying, and she knew that it was only a matter of moments before she lost all control and let this man have his way with her.

  Yet he did not let her lose control. Instead, he took it from her. Perhaps it was her lack of verbal response that spurred him onward, or maybe he could not control his own desire, but Angus MacDonnell’s tongue was quick to penetrate the fortress of her mouth. No! she wanted to exclaim, but all she could do was revel in the taste. As their tongues wrestled, Angus wrapped his powerful arms around her, grabbed the blanket, and tossed it off of her in a single motion. At any other time this would have caused her to recoil in panic, but she was so lost in the moment that such a thought didn’t so much as pass through her head.

  “I am yours! Take me!” Elizabeth exclaimed the very second their mouths separated.

  More than willing to indulge her, Angus grabbed her by the waist, lifted her off the ground, and practically tossed her back down. She was so aroused that she did not even feel the force of the impact, and by the time he had removed the piece of fabric that covered her shame, she had already begun soaking the ground beneath her.

  “I see that someone cannae resist her desire!” he said as he lunged over her, his skirt-thing already elevated over what was underneath. Not that she needed to see it to know how much he wanted her. His desire was evident in every part of him: his face, the way he held his body. They needed to be one, and it had to happen as soon as possible.

  “Please…” she moaned out, spreading her legs as far as they would go.

  Not saying a word, Angus moved his garment up, exposing his bare manhood for her to see. It was beyond huge, and pointed right between her legs. Having taken a deep breath, he grabbed her by the thighs and penetrated her.

  “Yesss…..” she let out a hushed gasp, almost involuntarily. There was a little bit of pain there, but her arousal drowned almost all of it out. Breathing in through her nose, she bit into her lower lip as she contorted her body around his pulsating member.

  Interpreting this as an invitation for more, Angus pulled out just a little bit before burying his fingers deep into the malleable flesh of her thighs and jamming himself all the way into her again. Suddenly unable to breathe, Elizabeth widened her gaze for a moment, then rolled her eyes backward and let out another pleasurable moan.

  If ye liked that, you will most certainly enjoy this! he thought, lunging forward and grabbing her breasts. Like a savage animal, he kept thrusting in and out, not showing a shred of mercy for the inside of her. And she loved every single moment of it.

  “Yes! Oh, yes, my Laird!” she screamed, not caring even a little bit about who might be able to hear her. It was so liberating to let go; so thoroughly satisfying just to be one with her beloved and enjoy it. This was the way it was supposed to be, and both of them knew it all too well.

  Angus did not say anything. Instead, he allowed his deeds to speak for him. Powerfully, he buried his fingers further into her breasts while the tempo of his thrusts kept increasing with every passing moment. Both of them panted faster and faster, following the rhythm of their undulating bodies. Then, all of a sudden, they screamed in unison. The Scottish highlands that had brought them together ceased to exist, and nothing was real anymore. Nothing but the two of them existed at all, along with the unending bliss that surrounded them.

  A small eternity later

  More satisfied than she ever had been in her life, Elizabeth laid on the hilltop. She had no idea how much time she had spent like that, but she did not care. Nor did she want to be roused out of it, despite the persistent tugging sensation at the top of her head. And is that… is that a voice? Someone was speaking to her, and it was most definitely not Angus! She practically leapt from her prone position, and the entirety of her body ached. Yet it was a good pain, a reminder of how satisfying her morning had been. Annoyed at having to rise so abruptly, she directed a disapproving stare toward whoever it was that had disturbed her. It was one of the men from Angus’s band, but she could not for the life of her remember his name.

  “What is going on? Where is Ang… where is the Laird?” she asked, suddenly not feeling even a little bit comfortable. The shroud that had been placed over her had almost slipped off when she leapt, and she had to hold it with her hands.

  “Th’ Laird is down there by th’ camp! He has sent for ye. I advise that ye hurry up if y’want to see him again!” the man said in a grim tone.

  She felt something constrict around her heart. If I want to see him again? Did something happen to him while I was asleep? The thought horrified her more than anything else she had ever experienced before. “Take me to him, then! Please!” She added the last word as a precaution, so as not to provoke any ire the man may have had against her.

  Luckily, he appeared to be perfectly disinterested and he helped her down as best as he could. By the time they arrived at the encampment there was a significant ruckus, and every single man was gathered around something she could not quite make out.

  A man’s voice could be heard from the center of the ruckus. “Ye insult me again and again, and then ye have th’ gall tae lay with th’ English whore before our very eyes! Without making any effort tae hide th’ sounds ye made! Is there nae shame tae ye, lad?”

  “What can I say, Dougal? When I lay with a woman, I dae it in earnest! When’s th’ last time ye’ve laid with a lass, huh?” Angus talked back to the older man, obviously doing his best to anger him as much as possible.

  “Is this the man ye all want for yer laird? This poor excuse for a leader who cannae command his own crotch, let alone his men! I know what my answer’d be!” Dougal spoke more to the people than to Angus. From the men’s expressions, it appeared that he was getting to most of them. They were displeased with their Laird’s actions and weren’t afraid to show it.

  “Talk to me when ye speak, Dougal, not tae them! This is between th’ two of us, and not everyone else’s matter!”

  “I disagree! Th’ actions of the Laird concern everyone below th’ Laird, and yers have been deplorable!” He turned back toward Angus before speaking again. “Ye kill one of yer own over an English whore, insult yer most trusted advisor when he comes to advise, and then ye carry yerself in a completely shameless manner! I call ye out, Angus MacDonnel! I call ye out as th’ disappointment that ye are!”

  Once Elizabeth was close enough to see what was going on, Angus gave her a knowing look before turning back toward the older man and speaking again. “Ye call me out, Dougal? Nae, I call ye out! Face me in combat right here and now, and prove tae me and everyone else that ye are th’ better man!”

  Everyone present roared like a wild beast in response. “So it shall be, my Laird.” The way he said the word seethed with contempt, but the crowd roared even louder regardless.

  Are they… are they going to kill each other? Elizabeth tried to step inside the circle, but the man who had led her there stopped her by grabbing her shoulder.

  “This isnae your place tae interfere, lass,” he said, and she knew that she had no way of helping her man. This was their country, their way, and whatever she did then could only lead to more trouble. All she could do was observe. And pray.

  In the following moments, everything got deathly quiet as the circle expanded. Staring into each other’s eyes, the two men grasped their claymores, took on a fighting stance, and proceeded to circle one another like a pair of wild beasts. The resentment could be felt even from Elizabeth’s position, and she couldn’t imagine the way it felt for the two of them. Then, the older man attacked.

  It all happened in the blink of an eye. With the speed of someone half his age, Dougal pounced directly toward Angus. Then, just as he was about to strike him head-on, he abruptly changed direct
ion, leapt to the side, and used the force of his charge to direct an even more powerful swing toward Angus’s body. Much to Dougal’s detriment, Angus seemed to have expected the maneuver, and his own claymore was imposed right in the middle of Dougal’s belly when he made his attack. With a scream, the older man impaled himself on the blade, gritted his teeth, and let go of his own sword.

  “I’ve watched ye fight a hundred times, Dougal. Ever since I was a wee lad,” Angus said, a moment before he turned his blade around while it was still in his opponent’s insides.

  Blood running out of his mouth, Dougal appeared to be about to say something, but instead he merely coughed. Like a rag doll, his body collapsed. Angus let it fall down along with his weapon.

  “Is there anyone else who shares this man’s opinion?” he shouted at the crowd.

  No one answered.

  “Then the matter is settled,” he concluded. He crouched and pulled the claymore out of Dougal’s lifeless body. Confidently, he strode out of the circle, and the men let him pass.

  “Now, prepare yerselves for a right long march! We’ve wasted enough time already! I have a wedding tae plan out!” He gazed into Elizabeth’s eyes again as he finished his sentence.

  At a loss for words, all she could do was blush.

  THE END

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  Desired by the Alien King

  Blinking her bleary, groggy eyes, Gwendolyn tried to focus her mind on the last thing she could remember. The shooting pain in her head—where did that come from?—did not make it any easier.

  She and her archaeological team had been going through the Sarmian excavation. The desert around them was gorgeous. It reminded them of the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert of North America back on Earth, except the browns and tans and the ruddy and rusty colors were streaked with green and grey. Being surrounded by all that beauty had made them wish they were tourists instead of scientists. But they had gotten to work well enough, for each of them was well accustomed to interplanetary travel. More exciting than Sarma itself was the idea of who lived there and what first contact with them meant. Gwendolyn and her people were living the dream of not only every archaeologist on Earth, but every biologist, every biochemist, every political scientist and historian, every philosopher—practically the whole of humanity. They were on the cutting edge of the most exciting thing to happen in human history since the confirmation of extraterrestrial life itself.

  The Sarmians were not merely extraterrestrial—they were humanoid. They had human forms, human anatomy. Except for the trail of hair descending from the hairline of the scalp to the bridge of the nose, they could easily pass for human, at least physically. It was something that science had always deemed biologically impossible, but it turned out to be one of the times when the universe yanked the rug out from under science. The Sarmians had become Earth's great obsession and people from every discipline were all but foaming at the mouth to have a crack at studying the planet and those who lived there.

  And Gwendolyn Rush had snagged for herself the singular honor of leading an archaeological team to the desert wilderness of Sarma, into the ruins of an ancient Sarmian society, to dig for clues to why the Sarmians were so much like humans.

  What they were seeking was not just insights into how ancient and prehistoric Sarmians might have lived, but also confirmation of the only theory that could explain them, a theory so radical that it could have been easily dismissed if the very existence of the Sarmians were not such a radical thing. What the scientists of Earth hoped the planet Sarma might yield was any clue to the identity and nature of the aliens who, the theory held, had come to Earth eons ago and abducted prehistoric humans, taking them across the stars to guide and shape their evolution for some unknowable purpose. The Sarmians were one riddle whose answer might expose a greater one.

  And that was what brought Gwendolyn light years from Earth into the heat and dust and undeniable beauty of another planet, supervising other archaeologists and students in the digging and scraping and sorting and categorizing for later study of structures buried in the sand and the objects and artifacts that they contained. As much as Gwendolyn loved and cared about the work, it made her wish that she were a leaner and lighter woman. Gwen was pretty—an almost luminous beauty in fact—with a soft round face, bright blue eyes, and an incandescent smile. When she did not have her hair bound up in a scarf or rolled up under a hat, it fell in loose black curls about her shoulders. But it was in the mid section that she felt a bit ponderous when she went to work on a dig. Her hips, buttocks, and thighs had somewhat more of a spread than she would have liked. At times she would watch the female students who accompanied her on digs, note their hips and thighs that lacked the same spread, and think, A decade and a half ago, that was me.

  But then, a decade and a half ago Gwendolyn was not one of the youngest leaders of the field of xenoarchaeology, whose perseverance had contributed to humanity's greater understanding of the non-human species of the galaxy. A decade and a half ago she could only dream of leading the effort to understand the other human-like species in the galaxy, something that biology had predicted man would never see. Even if she was not what the most desirable men wanted to take to bed, there were compensations.

  Work on Sarma proceeded uneventfully until Gwen and the crew noticed a greying of what had been a perfect blue sky, and a low sound like a million heavy breaths exhaling coming in from the distance. They all looked up from their tools and their excavations and found something growing and looming into view on the horizon. It was a spreading vastness of ruddy brown emerging over the hills in the distance, and it could mean only one thing. Gwen cursed the luck. While modern Sarmian society was as advanced as Earth in many ways, they did not have a lot of the niceties of Earth, such as weather-tracking and severe weather dissipation systems. On Earth, massive sandstorms rising out of nowhere had ceased to be a problem long ago. Sarma, damn it all, still had them.

  As the airborne tsunami of sand came rushing in, Gwen ordered everyone to cover up their work, throw on scarves and goggles, and take cover themselves. She had just gotten her tools into an electric wheelbarrow along with some pottery whose markings and symbols she wanted to study and covered her eyes and her face when everything around her disappeared into flying sand. She pulled her electrolocator out of her pocket and turned it on, meaning to use it to find her way around by detecting masses and other moving bodies in the low visibility of the sandstorm. The screen on the device showed the shapes of structures and devices around her and the moving forms of the rest of her party. It also detected two other moving bodies coming up behind her, which she took to be simply two other members of her team looking for shelter.

  And it was then—ah-ha, then!—when that damn pain in her head started. She wondered now if she might have accidentally backed into something, but no, she remembered that the electrolocator showed nothing in the flying sand behind her but those two moving bodies. Her next assumption was that one of them had run into her. What sense did that make, one of them running into the back of her head? Which led to her next hypothesis: she had been struck on the back of the head, deliberately hit. And that was when the sandstorm and everything else disappeared into blackness in her memory.

  Now, opening her eyes and wincing from that nagging throb in her skull, Gwen started to become aware of other things. There was something unfamiliar under her, soft and cushiony and satiny. And whatever she had on, it wasn't the durable fatigues that she had been wearing on the
dig. It was soft too, luxurious and flowing. Getting her vision back into focus, Gwen saw that she was in a circular room with windows from floor to ceiling on every side. Outside and stretching out all around was a panorama of the Sarmian countryside in which she had been digging, with whirling and billowing clouds of sandstorm whipping through it, thinning here and thickening there. Inside the room, everything was red and gold and magenta. It was all silky, satiny fabrics, drapes and blankets and carpets, divans and cushions and Ottomans, and a very large bed on which she was resting. And Gwen was dressed not for an archaeological dig, but in a flowing gown that suggested activities of a totally different sort.

  After a moment of utter bewilderment taking this all in, Gwen sat up on the bed and blurted out her confusion: "What in the name of hell am I doing here?"

  Her voice bounced off the walls and windows of her surroundings, and only silence greeted her outburst. She half expected she had no answer forthcoming and would have to get up and start looking for one. That was when a portal at the far end of the chamber hissed and slid open, and he came striding in.

  He was a Sarmian, no question about that. But in Gwen's unscientific opinion he was the most jaw-dropping specimen of manhood ever to appear before her wondering eyes. He was tall, like a pillar on a monument to masculinity. He wore nothing but loose-fitting silken leggings and thin, solid-gold armbands on a body built to be naked. It seemed to her that nature had taken on the role of a sculptor and hewn the most perfect body humanly imaginable from solid marble, then rendered it into flesh. The face was as chiseled as the rest of him, with a handsomeness that appeared to command without words, Submit to desire. Short brown hair crowned his head. Eyes the color of the desert sands blazed hotly at her. In his expression was no violence, no threat, but the unspoken understanding that he was accustomed to being obeyed. But even in this tone, the words that he poured out in a low voice like a desert wind were surprisingly gentle: "Gwendolyn, you are awake. It is good. I have been most anxious to know you. I bid you welcome."