Blood was Laise de MacGregor’s legacy to the throne of Scotland. Battles he had won and lost. But the battle within himself was the hardest of all.
Killing was nothing. Raiding an afterthought. Plundering a habit. But the emotions that threatened to spill from him were the fear he could not shake. The sin that draped his very soul.
He was king, the highest of all, yet he craved one of the lowest. Finnean, one of his guardsmen, had a brother. A beautiful man, with stunning sapphire eyes under thick midnight black hair. Diarmad was everything Laise wanted in a lover. Beautiful, strong, courageous, even if he was just a courtier, and not within the ranks of Laise’s military, nor one of the noblemen that were nettles in Laise’s side.
The desires that coursed through him were a risk. To allow his dark propensities to be revealed…to the queen, to the queen mother…to the noblemen that claimed alliance, but would stab him in the back on the first provocation, was not something he was willing to do. His liaisons had to be discrete; his loins curtailed until behind closed doors.
But what he felt for Diarmad was so much more than the release his body craved. Diarmad engaged his heart. And the King of the land, sovereign of the people could not take a man with righteousness in front of church and God, the sin too great. But Laise could nor more stop his heart from longing for Diarmad, than he could still his breath.
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