Perhaps so, but Jeannie refused to acknowledge it. “We will need those crops if we are to survive this coming winter.” Yet she could not even imagine winter now, or much beyond the moment she next saw Finnan.
Aggie only nodded. “I have supper nearly ready. If Danny’s master does not come for him, shall we keep him here a second night?”
“He will come.”
“Because Danny seems so much improved, yet his fever may yet return. You know how it is with fevers—they do rise at night.”
“I cannot imagine the laird failing to collect the lad.”
Yet supper time came and went, and Finnan MacAllister did not appear. To be safe, Aggie carried Danny’s meal up to him, and she remained there well after. Jeannie could hear the two of them conversing in low voices, the soft music of Danny’s words followed by Aggie’s familiar tones.
Jeannie, with no appetite of her own, went to the door and threw it open. It must be later than she thought, for soft dark filled the glen, gathered like a living presence.
She stepped outside and quickly shut the door. A faint breeze greeted her, coming from the west, and in the east the stars emerged one by one through the last of the gloaming.
But for the whisper of the wind, her ears caught no sound. She stepped out down the path, enjoying the cooler air against her skin after the close warmth inside.
The glen had swallowed Finnan MacAllister as if he had never existed. What if he were no real man at all, but only a spirit? Immediately, she chided herself for the fancy. That had been a flesh-and-blood man she held in her arms.
She stepped through the gate in the wall and into deeper darkness. The path wound away northward, but he would not come by the path.
She raised her eyes to the hills that lay like the shoulders of great, slumbering beasts. A stream ran through a copse of rowan trees behind the cottage, and it was there she directed her steps. Beneath the branches she stood and breathed in the night.
“Jeannie.”
He materialized beside her, very like the spirit she had just imagined him to be. His warm fingers caught her hands, and all her senses leaped, instantly aware. Suddenly he filled her—the height of him, the nearness, his scent as he stepped closer, coming at her out of the night. She caught a gleam of light from eyes that might belong to a feral beast, and a glimpse of a tattoo as he raised an arm to draw her in.
“What are you doing out here?” he whispered. “It is not safe.”
And what did she care for safety, when he occupied her world? Gone, it seemed, was the practical woman who had striven so hard to keep an ordered household and an ordered life in Dumfries, denying to the world any suggestion her father might be less than he seemed, less than respectable. She had hung on so long. Surely she deserved to let go now, here in the dark.
She raised her face toward him and said, “Fortunate you found me, then.”
He drew a hard breath an instant before he bent his head and captured her lips. It was, Jeannie thought wildly, as inevitable as the tide, as the setting of the sun and the rising of those stars. Inevitable as eating when hungry, or drinking when dry.
Drinking deep.
So did he drink from her, claiming her mouth and making it his to plunder. He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, and with perfect dominance, and before it ended Jeannie clung to him, heart pounding.
“Well, now,” he murmured, his voice a soft caress in her ear. “Never tell me you came out here looking for that?”
Wicked. But she had, she had.
For answer, she kissed him again, reached for him blindly. This time she slid her tongue into his mouth, marveling at the heat of it. She explored the inside of those supple, honeyed lips and stroked his tongue softly. She felt the pleasure of it spear through him, and wondered again what would happen if she applied her tongue elsewhere on his body.
But he broke the kiss once more, and his hands caught hold of her, steadying. “Jeannie, Jeannie, what are you trying to do to me?”
She guessed she had done it already; she could feel him hard beneath his kilt at the place where their bodies met. A rush of victorious gladness possessed her: he wanted her. That he could not deny.
She had no words to ask for what she desired. She had never yet requested it from any man, had been unable to imagine doing so before she met him. Now, though, she suspected she would bargain whatever she must to the devil for but one more kiss.
Yet she had no notion of how a woman seduced a man, only the insistence of her pounding blood.
“Finnan,” she said softly, deliberately. She wished to claim the man to whom she would give herself.
She stepped away, and he let her. Soft starlight, mingled with the last of the gloaming, filtered through the tree overhead, affording just enough illumination as she reached up with unsteady fingers and began to unlace her bodice.
Finnan caught his breath. For an instant he did not move but merely stood there, a perfect silhouette in black and silver.
