Read Online Sing Me Home by Lisa Ann Verge - Free Book Online

now—”
    “Are you quitting on me, lass?”
    Those hazel eyes narrowed, her little nostrils flared, and Colin could tell by the tightening of her jaw that he’d found a weakness.
    “I sang your love song,” she said. “What more do you expect from me?”
    “Passion.”
    Her sharp intake of breath left her mouth open. He felt the familiar slide of weight into his loins. He rasped his palm over her cheek, across her ear, to rake his fingers deep into her hair. The curls sprung soft against his fingers. He heard a slight tear of her coif as he plunged his fingers too deep. He lowered his head before she could think, speak, or stop him from doing what he’d wanted to do since she’d marched so boldly into the campsite outside of Killeigh.
    He pressed his mouth against those soft, soft lips. They pillowed beneath his. She tasted of salt and fresh herbs. He sensed the shock that arced through her, sensed, in its wake, a weakening of her spine, a suppleness in the way her body leaned into him. Fragments of poetry sifted through his mind like so many broken promises.
    He nudged her lips apart, wanting to be the bellows to prod this spark of passion into a fire, wanting to feel her shudder against him in the pleasure he knew he could give her. But what he tasted as she made a sound in the base of her throat was something he’d not tasted in so many years so as to forget the flavor. What he tasted, as her fingers worked their way up his chest between them, was a surprise so sudden, so sweet, so fresh that it made him weak in the knees.
    Innocent passion.
    By God’s blood, he wanted this one in his bed. He wanted to lay her down on the ground and feel her tremble as he dragged his hands up her thighs. He wanted to burrow his head between her legs and taste her until she arched up in pleasure. He wanted to slip his aching cock deep into her cleft and move inside her until she cried out for more.
    He pulled away to see her dazed gaze full of bewildered curiosity, and then the man he once was—the better man, the honorable idiot he’d thought he’d drowned in ale and fleshy pleasure—suddenly stirred within him.
    He stepped away from her.
    It took every ounce of his will.
    Then he chucked her under the chin, pretending he didn’t carry a stick the size of a tree trunk in his braies.
    “That’s passion, Maura,” he said. “Best we leave it at a taste.”

Chapter Six
    T he mead hall was alive with revelry. Serving girls hipped their way through the crowd. Ale splashed from the horns raised in toasts. Two fires crackled amid circles of red-hot stones and spewed up a stinging haze to the smoke-holes gaping amid the thatch on either end of the hall. The air smelled of venison roasted in honey, the bones of which littered the trestle table amid the soft white flesh of boiled wild onions.
    Maura stood in the shadows, her back against the wood of a roof-tree, her gaze traveling over the seated Irish warriors with their flowing mustaches and glowing faces. The O’Dunn had ordered the trestle table pushed to one side of the mead hall to leave a space open for the troupe to entertain. Now, the twins wrapped themselves in knots on the rushes, their white thighs jiggling like pork fat as their tunics rode up their legs. Their bodies stretched in ways Maura never thought possible. The room rang with the bawdy comments of the Irishmen while Maura tried to swallow the dry lump growing in her throat.
    She was to perform next.
    She plucked at a splinter on the post, wishing it was just the usual nerves that had her twitchy and anxious. She’d always been a little edgy singing at feast days, standing before all the black robes and crisp white veils and sharp, expectant eyes—but she’d long learned that working herself up only made things worse. It was Colin’s kiss that tormented her now, as it had since Colin had marched her back to the road to rejoin the troupe yesterday. The feelings that kiss had unleashed had grown in