“Well, then,” he crooned, “you can stay and welcome me home. I ha’ been away a while, but I have come back now with just a wee bit of business before me.”
“What sort of business?” Jeannie asked. As if she did not know. Yet he thought her a simple housemaid, his for the charming and taking.
“I’ve a she-devil to see on her way, a right cuckoo, who has taken up residence in the wrong nest.”
“Oh?”
“Aye, but she’ll get her comeuppance soon enough. How long have you been at Avrie House? I will fair admit, I do not remember you. And I would remember such a face.”
He took yet another step closer. Barely a whisper now separated them. He reached out with that beautiful hand toward Jeannie’s cheek, and the breath froze in her lungs.
All sorts of thoughts and wanton images immediately flooded her mind. She wanted to tear that plaid from his loins. She wanted to throw herself down on the mossy bank, hike up her skirts, and offer herself to him in a primal dance attended by the warm air, the warmer sun, the earth, and the water of the pool. She wanted to taste him, starting with his lips and working her way downward. Of course, she told herself a bit wildly, she would do none of those things. But he possessed a potent—and wicked—magic.
She imagined his warm, strong fingers curling round her face and into her hair, the sensation both beguiling and possessing, but she took a decisive step back out of his reach and fixed him with a fierce stare.
“Wait.” Now she spoke the word, her voice a-quiver. Hauling on every bit of courage and determination she owned, she looked up into his eyes.
She’d been mistaken—they weren’t just tawny brown but flecked with gold and copper that caught the light like the peaty trout pool. All his intelligence shone there, along with that bright desire, an entirely potent combination.
She told him, “I am not who you think.”
A smile lifted the corners of his mouth, revealing two dimples. “Who are you, then? A fairy woman come walking from the nearestsidhe? You are surely enchanting enough.”
“I am the cuckoo you wish to chase from the nest.”
Yes, and his wits moved very swiftly indeed. With a hiss very like that of a snake, he withdrew his hand without having touched her, and the expression in his eyes changed from teasing warmth to hard disparagement. He leaped back so quickly he tottered on the edge of the pool.
“You?” His gaze measured her in a new way, dismissing the brightness of her hair, rejecting her face and form. “I should have known. Geordie said you were beautiful—and coldhearted.”
“He said that of me?” Despite herself, Jeannie felt surprised.
“Aye, did you think he would not write his nearest friend, telling the events of his life?”
Jeannie thought Geordie had spent his days and nights too sore drunk to pick up a pen or put it to paper. She did not say so. Instead she voiced the obvious. “You are Finnan MacAllister.”
“I am.” He straightened his spine, and Jeannie experienced a sharp echo of the attraction that had so nearly undone her. “And you are the scheming trollop who broke my friend’s heart.”
Chapter Four
Well, so this was Jeannie Robertson—Jeannie MacWherter now, to give the she-devil her due. Geordie had married the wench fairly, even if he had lived to regret it. Finnan told himself he should have expected her to be this beautiful. Geordie was not the man to give his heart easily. Beneath all his muscle and bluster, Geordie had cherished a vision of the perfect woman, carried many years.
Finnan stood on the bank of the pool with the warm sun striking his back and regarded the woman with distaste. As young mercenaries, he and Geordie had fought their way across most of Scotland, seducing whatever women crossed their paths. But that was just coupling, an act as basic as enjoying a flagon of ale. Through it all Geordie always saved a part of himself because Geordie believed in the real thing: love.
How many nights—or days—had Finnan and Geordie, lying beneath the high, distant stars or huddled in the rain, talked aboutsomeday?
Someday, for Finnan, had always meant coming home and regaining possession of this sacred place, taking it from the grasping fingers of his enemies. He’d done that, and the glen possessed his heart.
For Geordie,somedayhad always centered around a woman—the perfect woman. “We’ll have a home, Finn, a real home, and I won’t have to go wandering any more. She won’t want me to go wandering because she’ll miss me so. She will be beautiful, warm, and true—and she’ll love only me.”
Geordie believed he had found that woman when he met Jeannie Robertson. Finnan still remembered the words scrawled on the paper in Geordie’s difficult hand.
She is everything I ever imagined, everything a man could want, sweet, kind, beautiful, and with a good head on her shoulders. She looks like an angel, with golden hair and eyes so blue I cannot think straight when I gaze into them.
Aye, and she did look like an angel, Finnan admitted, glaring at her now—the treacherous wench. Treacherous she must be, for that had been only the first of Geordie’s letters, penned before she took his heart into her hands and shredded it.
But how dare she appear so innocent? The curve of her cheek, which he longed to touch, was sweet and rounded as that of a child; those blue eyes looked guileless, and the same deep shade as the sky over her head. Her body, well-curved also, pulled at him from beneath her plain clothing with a promise equal parts chastity and seduction. He ached to strip that drab brown dress from her, just to see what lay beneath.
Had she, indeed, been a housemaid, he might well have had his way with her. He shuddered, an involuntary reaction.
