Highland Heat 2 - All The King's Men Read online

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  About This Story

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  All the King's Men

  ABOUT CHERA

  OTHER BOOKS

  All the King’s Men

  To get information that would help the Scottish cause, the spirited Scottish mistress of a British officer agrees to let herself be wagered in a game of cards…

  Fiery Sorcha is desperate for information that will help the fierce Highland warriors of Clan MacPherson rise up against the English. That’s why she agreed to be the mistress of Major James Anderson in the first place. But when her sinful and silver-tongued lover takes her to a fortress where he’s playing a spy game of his own, he puts her burgeoning feelings to the test by leaving her to the mercy of a group of dashing and devilish officers for the night.

  Stripped of everything before the men’s lust, Sorcha proves insatiable—much to the delight of the officers, and the man who gave her to them. Impossibly, her every sexual adventure seems to draw her even closer to Major Anderson, and she begins to wonder if it’s more than information that she wants from the infuriating Englishman…

  Reader Advisory: This is an erotic romance short story of approximately 14k words that contains sizzling scenes of group sex, exhibitionism, spanking, dark kink and taboo acts. For adults only.

  ALL THE KING’S MEN

  A Highland Heat Story

  Chera Zade

  Al the King’s Men

  © 2015 Chera Zade

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.

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  ~~~

  A trap. It was a trap. And as George Washington’s soldiers rushed into the clearing by the pond, their weapons raised, surrounding the men who had taken me, I was so dizzy with sex and relief and sweet victory that I swooned away.

  Later, having been bathed, and wrapped in a blanket, and spoon-fed warm broth by the patriots, I couldn’t stop shivering. I wasn’t especially cold, but the enormity of what I’d done—and enjoyed—overwhelmed me. When I’d agreed to set myself up as the quarry for Winston and his men, I had anticipated that the whole encounter would be excruciatingly painful.

  Unpleasant as torture. Instead, I had gone to a place far in my mind that allowed me to feel pleasure. More pleasure than I thought possible. And now I stood shamed for it…

  “You were very brave, Sara,” said Billy Falkner, whose sister had been raped and beaten by Winston. Whose father had been killed by the man. “I know what you went through…well, no I can’t know. Truly, I can’t. But I meant what I said when we came up with this plan. I’ll take you for my wife and be honored to have you.”

  “You can’t, Billy. You must realize, I did more than distract those men. I—”

  “I don’t care what you did,” Billy said, kissing me softly. “Because all is fair in love and war, and this is both.”

  All the King's Men

  My lover was asleep.

  I’d waited for his breathing to lengthen, for his pulse to steady, and for the little flutter of his eyes to tell me he was dreaming. When I believed him to be in deep slumber, I watched him a moment more to be sure—and to try to make sense of this man to whom I’d so shamelessly given myself as a mistress.

  By light of day, Major James Anderson’s sparkling blue-eyes and expressive face could be strangely compelling. But asleep in the firelight? Why he looked somewhat ordinary. Even for a bloody Englishman…

  I never intended to become the mistress of any man, much less the kept woman of an English officer; I was a proud Scotswoman after all. But with two brothers and a sweetheart of Clan MacPherson, all of whom were pledged to rise up against the English in the Jacobite cause, I’d been caught up in a struggle beyond my intention or foresight.

  This particular English officer whose bed I now shared was overseeing arrests being made throughout Scotland, and he’d come to Fort William to interrogate the prisoners. What he learned could send my loved ones to their graves—something I couldn’t allow if it was within my power to stop it. So I’d allowed him to seduce me. Allowed him to squire me about in front of his men, and share me with them as his harlot. Yes, I’d let him lure me into wicked acts of pleasure that were likely to send me straight to hell.

  All so I could slip free of his arms in the quiet of night to get about the business of treason…

  I crossed the room on tip-toe to the chest the major kept at the foot of his bed. Kneeling close to the fireplace, I slowly ran my fingers over the wood to find the hidden latch that would open the secret compartment. I knew there must be one because I’d searched in all the obvious places already. And I found it so very gratifying when I heard the soft click, and a drawer slid open.

  There it was. The little leather bound book in which my lover kept his notes. Now that I’d found it, what should I do? The safest action would be to read it, memorize whatever was written in it, and put it back. If I could do this quickly, and in the dim light of the fire, my lover might never know.

  But the boldest action would be to burn it.

  He’d discover it missing and suspect me at once. I’d likely be killed for it. On the other hand, perhaps it would repay the sins I’d committed in his bed if I sacrificed myself for the lives of others. Because there had been sin. And pleasure. More pleasure than I dared to think about. The major had taken my virginity atop a butcher block table with his men looking on, cheering the spectacle. A thing I ought to have hated, but which I took to like a whore. It was almost worse that he took me to his bed every night since, with a worshipfulness that made it feel like lovemaking. Even though I knew it could not be.

  I needed to redeem myself. Whether for whoring or starting to feel some strange attachment to an Englishman—I knew not which was worse. But my hands shaking with the gravity of what I was about to do, and I nearly dropped the little book.

  Taking a deep breath to steady myself, I crept to the fireplace. There I paused a moment to pray. That was probably my mistake.

  His voice came out of the dark, groggy, but aware. “You’re not seriously going to burn it, are you?”

  My heart jumped to my throat and lodged itself there. I was caught red-handed. There was no hiding what I had done. The important thing was to destroy whatever evidence my lover had gathered that might hurt the Jacobite cause…so I flung the book into the fire, damn the consequences!

  “Bloody hell,” the major said, sitting up in the bed as the pages smoked and curled atop the little pile of logs. But leather books burned slowly. To keep him from rescuing it from the flames, I was ready to grapple with him. I planted my feet firmly and blocked his way, waiting for him to rush to the fireplace to pull the book out.

  But he didn’t even get out of bed. “You lion-hearted little fool.”

  “I’m sorry,” I cried, because in my moment of triumph, it did feel like some manner of betrayal. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Major Anderson had known of my Jacobite sympathies when he seduced me. He’d known I might spy upon him when he asked me to become his mistress. He’d even jested that it would be an entertaining game of cat and mouse between us.

  He’d just never counted
on my besting him…

  “Well, you should be sorry, Sorcha,” he snapped, thumping the empty mattress beside him. “Because you made the wrong choice. The brave choice, but the foolish one. Do you know that bravery and foolishness so often go together—and with such disastrous results—that I’d rather have a clever coward under my command than a courageous clot-head.”

  He said all this crossly.

  But he ought to have been more than cross to watch months of his work going up in smoke.

  “What was the right choice?” I asked, eying the door, wondering if it would be possible to make a run for it in my night shift. It was a fortress filled with soldiers, though. I wasn’t likely to make it twenty feet.

  “The right choice would’ve been to read the book,” my lover said, with a very disappointed sigh. “Knowledge is power. That’s the first tenet of espionage, my dear.”

  Resigned to the fact there was no escape, I defiantly raised my chin. “And what would I have learned from reading it?”

  He smirked. Very smugly I might add. “The first thing you’d have learned is that it was a book of empty pages. From that, you might have deduced that it had been planted there for you to find. The next logical step, of course, would have been to put it back where you found it and never let on, so as to lull me into a false sense of security and trust. But you let your emotions get away with you. You also stepped on a creaky floorboard near the chest; I chose this room because of that creak, so that was a bit of bad luck for you.”

  The realization of how I’d been manipulated sent my mind reeling. “You tricked me,” I said, with a gasp. “All these weeks together, squiring me about on your arm as your mistress, sending me sweets and little gifts during the day, whispering sweet words against my skin, and taking pleasure in my body at night—”

  “Oh, you did precisely the same thing, Sorcha,” the Englishman said, entirely unchastened. “Minus the squiring and the treats and gifts. The difference between us is that I know who you are, and what you are, and I even admire you for it. Whereas you haven’t apprehended my nature in the slightest. What did you expect was going to happen to you when I realized the book was gone and that you were probably to blame?”

  “I expected that you might imprison me or kill me.”

  The major’s eyes bulged. “Kill you? My god, woman. You really do believe that Englishmen are monsters, don’t you? I don’t kill women—especially not a woman I’ve taken into my bed. I’m incapable of it. That does not, however, mean that I’m incapable of giving you the thrashing of your life. Which you quite deserve. Quite. For getting caught, if nothing else. So come back to bed this instant, or I’ll be forced to fetch my belt.”

  Given that I had believed myself to be facing mortal peril, and my heart was still thumping wildly in my ears, it seemed like a reprieve. And yet, I was so angry, I stood where I was. “I don’t want to share a bed with you.”

  The major lifted a brow. “Think carefully, my dear. The hour is late and I would prefer to end the evening with sweet lovemaking, but if I am not obeyed, I will happily whip your arse to a pretty rose red hue, and take a great deal of pleasure in doing so…”

  There was no question that he meant what he said. And because I’d never taken a whipping in my life—so obedient a child was I—my lower lip wobbled in apprehension. He could easily have me clasped in chains for treason; now might not be time to press my luck.

  I sullenly slipped back into bed beside him, keeping as close to the edge of the mattress as I could get. He was undeterred by my obvious anger. “You are extraordinarily lovely, do you know that?” he asked, brushing a tendril of red hair from my eyes. “Even when you’re scowling like a child whose had her sweets snatched away.”

  “I’m not a child,” I snapped.

  “You’re behaving like one,” he said, with only a wee bit of censure. “I did not force you to become my mistress, after all. I very clearly laid out the conditions of our arrangement. I told you exactly what I expect from you. Exactly what to expect from me. I have kept to my end of the bargain in every particular, have I not?”

  He had, at that. He let me want for nothing. I merely had to point to a bauble and he would make a gift of it for me. Dresses, bonnets, combs, gloves. There was very little he denied me in, or out, of his bed. But it hadn’t been the promise of enrichment that had lured me there. “Why did you plant a false book for me to find?” I asked, seething, still wondering where he must have hidden the real one. “Just to torment me?”

  The major sighed. “Isn’t it obvious that I want to teach you?”

  “Teach me what?”

  “Spycraft and oh, so many other things…”

  My mouth fell slightly agape. “Spycraft?”

  “Surely you’ve deduced, by now, that the services I render the crown are not of an ordinary nature…”

  What I had deduced was that there were many things about him that made no sense. He had the bearing of nobility, but no title. He spent more lavishly than someone might on a soldier’s salary. He had a very vague notion of morality, a suspicious lack of anxiety about all sexual matters, and was entirely too dashing for an Englishman.

  Suddenly, my hopes soared.

  My God, were we actually allies?

  I lowered my voice to a pitifully hopeful whisper. “Are you saying that you’re a foreign agent? Are you a Frenchman secretly working against the English for Charles Stuart?”

  He looked as pained as if I had run him through with a sword. “I would never betray crown and country. Much more importantly, I’m not a Frenchman!”

  He said this with all the affront only an Englishman could bring to bear, and my hopes were entirely dashed. “Then I don’t understand. If you’re not a spy—”

  “Yes, continue with that thought. If I am not a spy against the English, and I’m obviously not pretending to be a Scotsman for the English, then what must I be?”

  “A spymaster,” I breathed.

  “Very good,” he said, with an audible smooch to my nose. “You can learn the craft from me. I find it rather gratifying to teach you…” He then smiled as if delighted that I had come to the correct conclusion, dipping his head to press a hot kiss on my bare shoulder.

  As always, his mouth ignited a fire beneath my skin, but my stomach went cold with horrified understanding. He recruited and trained spies in Scotland. And he thought he was recruiting and training me!

  But I would never betray the Jacobites. My chest heaving with offense, I said, “I fear you have misjudged me completely.”

  “Have I?” he asked, slowly, wickedly, nibbling his way up my neck to growl in my ear. “Oh, I don’t think I have. I think you’re a brave, adventurous sensualist who has been sorely neglected and overlooked by the very countrymen to whom she’s so fiercely loyal…”

  That struck a nerve at the core of me. My father had never seen me as fit for more than a nursemaid to care for him in his dotage. My brothers dismissed me as the little sister who kept the kitchen at the tavern. And the fierce highland warrior I had wanted to marry abandoned me at the first obstacle to our love.

  But that didn’t mean I would betray them.

  “You can’t turn me,” I insisted, even as I hissed with helpless pleasure at the way his teeth gently scraped at the soft lobe of my ear.

  “I don’t need to turn you, my dear Sorcha,” he whispered, his steely arm wrapping around me to draw me closer. “Do you know what makes for the most pleasurable sexual experiences? There’s an art to it, you know…” An art he knew well. But in spite of all the ways in which he’d debauched me, I still felt a novice in the ways of lovemaking.

  “Surrender?” I guessed.

  I felt him smile against my neck as his hand drifted between my legs. “Surrender is certainly a pleasurable thing between the two of us. You enjoy surrendering, and I enjoy your surrender. But that is unique to the two of us. Still, it proves the general point. The art of sexual pleasure is in seeking the nexus of common interest. Th
e very place where both lovers get what they want and need.” He said this just as his fingers found the very place between my legs where I most needed him to touch, and I moaned in spite of myself.

  “I always look for those common interests with a mistress,” he murmured, his breath deepening with his own arousal. “And it is the very same thing I look for in a spy. I don’t need to turn you, Sorcha. I only need to find the sweet spot to exploit where our interests are precisely the same.”

  “You are diabolical,” I hissed again, this time with pleasure, the nub between my nether lips swelling and hardening under his attentions.

  “Do you really think so?” he asked, amusement in his accented voice as he drew me into another long night of pleasure. “I rather like to think that I’m on the side of the angels. After all, I love to make you cry Oh, God…”

  ~~~

  “What is troubling you, my dear?” Major Anderson asked the next Sunday morning as I splashed water on my face, my shaking hands apparently having given me away. From his side of the bed, where he was pulling on his breeches, he said, “Don’t tell me you’re still agitated about the blank book…”

  “My courses are late,” I whispered, not daring to look at him.

  The room went silent for a moment. Utterly silent.

  “For the first time since I took you for my mistress or the second?” he finally asked.

  “The first,” I snapped, because I knew precisely why he was asking.

  Mercifully, my woman’s blood had flowed a few weeks after he’d shared me with his men in my father’s kitchen. At least I could cling to the fact that if I was with child, I would at least know the name of its father. And I suppose that was the answer he wanted to hear, too, because Major Anderson quickly closed the space between us, grasping me in his arms, his blue eyes gleaming. “So then it’s mine. You’re to bear my child!”