Insolent: The Moray Druids #1 (Highland Historical) Read Free Page A

process movement, she was shackled to a chest by bands of pure iron, and being devoured by a mouth that was cold no longer.
    Pulled onto an enormous body bowing with the first breath of life, Morgana knew she should panic. That she should struggle. But she didn’t. It would have been fruitless. There was no escaping a hold this powerful.
    The Viking ripped off his helm and sat up, dragging her into his lap and cradling her body into the cavern of his. Once again, Morgana found herself a captive. For something about this kiss was stronger than any length of rope or magick spell could ever be.
    There was a hint of the divine in his savage lips. A glimpse of the eternal.
    And just like that, she was bound.
    The Viking ripped at the front of Morgana’s bodice; effectively breaking the spell and dumping her soundly back into reality.
    “No!” she gasped, ripping her mouth away from his.
    To her utter shock, he stilled, though his big hand nestled in the valley of her breasts, spreading unsettling warmth through her. She became equally frozen as she looked up into his face.
    By the Goddess, she was cradled in the lap of a monster.
    Morgana often felt when she looked out into the absolute black of a moonless night, a bereft sort of expectant danger. Like the darkness peered back at her, studied her weaknesses, and reached into the places of her soul where magick resided that should never see the light.
    If one concentrated that darkness, that trepidation that lifted the hairs on the back of one’s neck and caused even the bravest of men to avoid the shadows, it still wouldn’t have aptly described the pure black emptiness of the Viking’s eyes. He seemed to study her in that way she imagined the nighttime did. Those fathomless pools of onyx roaming her face as though she were the peculiarity.
    She remained locked with the beast in a moment of stunned visual discovery. Aside from his eyes, or lack thereof, the rest of his face was undoubtedly male. Or would be, if the Gods of war, those fiends of destruction, ever created a warrior’s features.
    Nothing about those broad and brutal planes were ever meant to please the eye. His chin and jaw, set in sharp angles, thrust forward with unyielding menace. A forehead positioned in an eternal scowl shadowed those already impossibly dark, deep-set eyes. Scroll tattoos toyed with his hairline and disappeared into his abundant dark hair.
    But his lips.
    Morgana’s gaze latched on to them with a desperate fascination. Those lips were the Goddess’s compensation for his frightening demeanor. She’d never before seen lips like that on a man. The rest of him would have to be so alarmingly masculine in order to claim such a luscious mouth.
    “What are you?” she breathed the question. For surely a creature such as he was not of this world.
    He didn’t answer. Instead, his hand lifted from her chest to her cheek. With a tenderness that shocked Morgana, the Viking explored her own features with the thoroughness of a blind man. A soft ticking rumble, like that of a contented cat, began to emanate from somewhere within his massive chest. It echoed through her in the most unsettling way, the vibrations rocketing a strange awareness directly to between her legs.
    Morgana submitted to this, wondering if his sight was, indeed impaired by the soulless voids of his eyes.
    A slow recognition began to permeate her memory, one her brother, Malcolm, and her cousin, Kenna, had discussed in awe-struck whispers after pouring through tomes in Dun Moray’s library.
    Morgana had never been much for the hours of scouring spells and memorizing the legends of her Druid people as her brother and cousin were. She learned from the forests, from the rivers, from the elders of Moray. She would rather read the faces of her people than a dusty old book.
    But this story she remembered, because she found a brutal sort of romance within it. One of a Northman blessed by the war Goddess Freya with preternatural strength