I felt so happy and so joyful that I didn’t even know what to say. As I nestled into his arms, I lost myself in his strength, the warmth of the fire, and my hopes and dreams of the future.
I envisioned our home, our garden, our animals and the joy and anticipation of carrying his children. That anticipation, I knew, might be far shorter than I’d expected. Though I may not have any experience with men, I knew well enough that I might already be with his child.
A boy, I was certain.
He’d have Bors’ smile, and my eyes. I could already imagine the pattern I would follow to embroider his swaddling clothes.
Bors shifted, rising up on his knees, and I saw the hunger on his face, knowing with a clutch in my belly that he meant to take me again. Though I was sore, and my sex still thrummed with the orgasms he had given me, I opened my legs willingly and without hesitation.
I was and would always be his, to do with as he pleased.
He ran his tongue over his lips as he looked down at me. He rolled my nipple between two of his fingers, biting his lip as if to share in the sting.
“Every time I’ve had you it’s been so dark,” he said. “Not this time, though.” He glanced at the roaring fire that illuminated the room. “This time, I won’t miss a fucking thing.”
He positioned me on my back, with a cushion beneath my hips so that my breasts spilled back, high onto my chest. For a long moment, his eyes stayed locked on mine. Our gaze unbroken and smoldering, his cock grew thick and hard against my thigh.
“Let me look at you,” he said, breaking away from my gaze. I watched him study my neck, my shoulders, my breasts. I lifted my legs playfully, grinning as I opened my knees, displaying myself for his approval. “I want to memorize every last…”
He stopped cold.
All at once, everything about his demeanor and behavior changed. He drew back and yanked his hands away from me, just as the Clan Johnston soldier had done when they’d exposed my ass.
My heart plummeted and an instantaneous, instinctive sob caught in my throat. He looked at me with the same shock and horror that the men who intended to rape me had. The true sight of me made men recoil. It was one thing when it happened with complete strangers, but now, in the arms of the man I had fallen for so deeply, I felt unspeakably horrified and ashamed of my body.
Of myself.
Embarrassed and ashamed, as well as confused, I closed my legs and hunched away from his gaze.
“Please don’t look at me that way. You said you loved me, but now, the way you look at me, I feel like a spectacle.” From the time I was young I knew my birthmarks were not normal. I had many. My body was dotted with them. But, I never believed them to be such a horror for men to look upon…that they were a sign of some disease that a man might catch just from touching me.
Before I could get away from him to be alone with my shame, he seized one of my ankles in a firm but painless grip, pulling my foot upward, looking along my thigh. “Sara, this mark…”
“What can be so awful about a birthmark?” I sobbed, trying desperately to cover myself with the blankets. “Please stop that, Bors. Please stop looking at me that way.”
Releasing his hold on my wrist, he searched my face—for what, I did not know. My cheeks burned, blood rushed in my ears and the faint memory of my mother and father’s hushed voices one summer evening just after I’d had my first womanly blood about how to rid me of one particular mark.
I remember my mother’s shrill whisper telling my father it wouldn’t be long until I let some boy from the village have his way with me. Sooner or later, someone would see…how they could brand over the mark…or slice it off… I shuddered, how had that memory eluded me until now?
Was I the witch after all?
They were always obsessed with no one ever seeing me unclothed. Not even my sisters. What mark did I have on me that caused such horror in anyone that saw it?
“You don’t know, do you?” Bors’ deep rumbling voice brought me back to the moment. “Of course you don’t. Out here in the highlands the business of the capital is a distant concern. You have no idea who you are. What you are.”
“A few minutes ago we were going to be married. Now you ask what I am, like I’m some sort of beast!”
He stared at me. “Were to be married? No, Sara, that hasn’t changed.”