This was the promised conflagration.
A torch tossed onto spilled tar pitch, flames instantly erupting.
Though such a wee thing, she pushed him back against the door, never once taking her lips off his.
Kieran smiled.
She felt his expression.
“Ye better not be laughing at me,” she whispered against his mouth.
“Never.” He smiled more broadly.
“Then why are ye smiling?”
“Cause when I’m with ye, I cannae help it. Ye make me properfouon happiness.”
“Your answer is acceptable,” she replied, tone as haughty as a duchess.
He laughed.
She kissed him for that, a hungry nip of lips that pulled a groan from his throat.
“Are ye going to take advantage of me, lass? Compromise my honor with your kisses?”
She snorted. “Ye seem rather willing, MacTavish.”
“That I am.” He kissed her again, savoring the feel of her smile against his lips.
And somehow, he knew in that very moment—
He wasn’t just kissing a beautiful, fiery lass.
He was kissing his future wife.
16
Kieran allowed Jamie a day of reprieve.
One day without him haunting her every step.
Or rather . . . Eilidh.
He had ceased to think of her as Jamie, truth be told.
She stubbornly refused to eventryto remember.
And now . . . there was the specter of Simon Fitzpatrick.
Simon the Curate.
Simon theSassenach.
The man seemed a veritable milksop just from his name alone.
Kieran hated Simon with vitriolic passion. He wished death and destruction upon the man’s house and a pox upon his person.
It didn’t help that thehaarhad rolled in off the North Sea, blanketing the landscape in dense fog. Kieran felt as if the world itself were collapsing in on him.
