“I can’t make love to you here, Martha,” he muttered in a desperate attempt to cling to the last shreds of his integrity. He groaned softly into her hair. “There’s no room to move.”

“We don’t have to. I just want to give you pleasure…as you did for me.” She leaned over him so that her hair curtained his face, and kissed him, driving all rational thought from his mind.

Reaching inside his loosened breeches, Martha wrapped her hand around his shaft. Unable to help himself, Fraser groaned long and deep into her mouth. She squeezed gently, then slid her hand down his length in a single exploratory stroke before releasing him. Fraser’s hips bucked in a combination of shock and pleasure.

“Please don’t stop.” The words came out on a hiss.

Taking encouragement from this request, she touched him again. Her fingers curled around his shaft and gently drew his cock out through the opening in his breeches. Less tentative now, she commenced stroking him. Fraser strained upward, seeking more. While she ran one hand down his shaft, then back, she used the other to explore his aroused flesh. First, she traced a finger lightly around the rim. Then, moving lower, she cupped his balls.

“I know you said we couldn’t make love here,” she said softly, as Fraser lay back, rendered helpless by her touch. “But I’d like to try.”

Glad to regain control, he shifted into a sitting position with his back against the wall, lifting Martha so that she straddled him. Her hair fell about both their faces. “Are you quite sure, lass?” he asked and she nodded vigorously.

Fraser pulled her nightgown up to her waist, holding her buttocks steady so that his cock could probe her entrance. Martha’s hands tightened on his shoulders at the sensation of him probing her. Lifting his hips, he pushed himself upward and met resistance. Martha gasped.

“Will I stop?” Fraser asked.

“No.” It sounded like her teeth were gritted.

With one hard thrust, he drove into her. Martha cried out and dug sharp nails into his shoulder. Once he was fully engulfed in her tight warmth, it took every ounce of Fraser’s self-control to remain still. He needed to allow her body to stretch and grow, to become accustomed to the feel of him iron-hard and throbbing inside her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with his lips against her neck. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I asked you to, remember?” she whispered, turning her head so that she could kiss him again. “Please, Fraser…I want you to move now.”

Ever so gently, he began to rock, holding her tight against him. “Ah, Martha,” he murmured. “Ye feel so damn good.”

Her tight muscles held him in a delicious grip. Following his lead, she matched his movements, grinding her pelvis in time with his while holding every inch of him deep within her. Fraser increased the pace, lifting her body so that he could thrust up into her. Tugging her nightgown higher, his lips sought her nipple, and a tiny sob tore out of her as his mouth closed around it. Just as Fraser felt his own control slipping, Martha began to writhe wildly above him, arching her back and calling his name. As the first explosion of pleasure hit him, Fraser lifted Martha so that his seed pulsed hot and hard over his own stomach instead of into her.

Gasping for breath, he drew her into his arms, kissing her long and deep until the quivering in both their bodies had stilled. For a long time after the kiss had ended, Martha was silent. Worryingly so. Fraser couldn’t see her face.

“Are you sorry, lass?”

“No. Are you?”

He laughed. “’Tis a foolish question to ask of a man, Martha.”

“Oh. I know nothing of these things.” It was a stark reminder of why he should have shown more restraint. However great the temptation, he should have resisted it. Even as those guilty thoughts crowded in on him, the memory of thrusting deep inside her that first time made his body tingle with renewed lust. Martha nestled back into his arms, a hint of mischief in her next words. “Do you think those priests of bygone days are all turning in their graves at the use to which we have just put their hiding place?”

When Tom Drury arrived the next morning and released them from the priest hole, Martha could see the look of sympathy on his face as she stammered out a garbled explanation. She was well aware that her blushes, coupled with the way she was unable to look at Fraser, spoke volumes about her embarrassment. Smoothing down her hair and nightdress in a flustered manner, she recovered her shawl and wrapped it thankfully around herself.

Fraser, on the other hand, seemed unperturbed and inclined to view the whole incident with amusement. He had reached a hand down into the hidden space and helped Martha out before setting off to the kitchen in search of food.

“I know it’s a difficult situation,” Tom said to Martha. “It must have been horribly trying for you to be confined in such a small space with a man you dislike so cordially. At least you can console yourself with the thought that he will soon be gone.”

“Yes.” Martha glanced toward the kitchen, where Fraser’s voice could be heard upraised in an old Scots ballad. “He will, won’t he?”

Later that day, word came of a Jacobite victory in the foulest of winter weather and worst imaginable conditions. This had taken place in a ferocious clash at Falkirk, north of Edinburgh. Fraser was elated, explaining that this would raise the spirits of the highlanders, not only because a defeat of the English was long overdue. Falkirk was symbolic as the place in which William Wallace had been defeated centuries earlier in a battle during which the Scots army had effectively been wiped out by the English.

Harry, his eyes alight with excitement, descended on the old dower house and spent an hour discussing the details of the battle with Fraser. For Martha the talk of charges and tactics and columns washed over and around her like a foreign tongue. She was too busy fighting her own constant battle, one which she waged lately with the voice inside her head which kept prompting her to throw herself into Fraser’s arms and demand he take her immediately up to his bed. With hindsight, she knew it was a battle she was destined to lose.

It was probably just as well, therefore, that Fraser suggested he and Harry should take their rods down to the lake which lay half a mile to the west of Mr. Delacourt’s farm boundary. The removal of Fraser from her vicinity would considerably reduce the possibility of Martha indulging any unseemly and embarrassing displays of wanton lust. She watched from the kitchen window as his broad-shouldered frame disappeared from view and tried to convince herself that she was glad of this distance from his presence. She needed time to think.

And she did think. She thought about how he sometimes kissed her with long, slow, erotic movements of his tongue and sometimes with quick urgent thrusts. She remembered the different sensations provoked by his lips softly suckling her nipple then his teeth sharply nipping. Her body thrummed at the recollection of his fingers probing just inside her and the very different feeling of his cock stretching and filling her.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she murmured, pressing the cool back of her hand to her burning cheek. “Will I ever be able to think of anything else again?”

But she had to stop these thoughts and plant her feet firmly back on the ground. She wasn’t Rosie, lost in some foolish, girlish dream of love. No, she had very deliberately allowed… She paused. What had she allowed, exactly? Fraser had not seduced her. Seduction implied an inequality that had not been part of their interaction. Martha might be less experienced, but she had not been less wanting. There was that thrill of remembrance once more. She had made a choice. It might be the maddest, most dangerous, most improper choice imaginable, but it was her choice nonetheless. And, having chosen, she would do it all again. And again. That awareness prompted a sudden, restless longing to see Fraser. He could be gone tomorrow. The thought made her heart clench with hurt.