Kieran set down his cup, moving on, but a gladness hummed along his skin. “As you’ve said, it’s not fair that I know yourself, but you dinnae know me. So, I’d like tae even the playing field, as it were. I am prepared to give something, too.”
Eilidh dragged her gaze from the coffeepot and back to her own plate. “I cannot imagine what you might have that would sway me—”
Kieran hefted the burlap sack that had been sitting at his feet and set it on the table.
Eilidh’s eyebrows lifted upward. Mrs. McKay stopped her knitting in the corner.
He reached into the sack and pulled out an orange. The orange fruit mimicked the color in Eilidh’s shawl and hair ribbon, glowing in the morning light.
Her eyes widened.
Kieran presented the fruit to her, resting it on the tip of his fingers.
“Where did you get that?” she whispered.
“Lady Kildrum has a neighbor with an obliging greenhouse. She called in a favor.”
Eilidh swallowed, her eyes never leaving the fruit.
“Ye remember?” Kieran asked, voice soft. “Me peeling ye oranges in Rio de Janeiro? We walked along the beach and skipped rocks in the waves and had a lunch of local smoked fish,pãozhinos, fried plantains, and . . . fresh oranges.”
She shook her head, but her chest moved in quick breaths.
He continued, “Ye told me then about the time your father brought home oranges from a trip to Jamaica. He had picked them right as he left and kept them cool during the long voyage, just for ye tae have a drop of tropical sunshine, he said.”
“They were the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted,” she murmured.
“Aye. Just like the oranges in Rio.” He set the fruit on the table between them.
“You think to bribe me with tropical fruit now?”
Kieran smiled.Nae, I plan to woo ye with oranges.
“Isnae that obvious?” He laced his hands together on the tabletop. “I’m not so unscrupulous as tae wield the might of my irresistible self upon ye. I wish tae win ye, fair and square. Not through chicanery.”
She rolled her eyes in earnest at that, but he could sense no real irritation in it.
Eilidh went back to eating her eggs and black pudding, but her eyes kept wandering to the orange.
“Here is what I propose,” he continued. “I have five more oranges in the bag. For each day that ye try to remember, ye get an orange—”
She snorted. “You vastly overestimate my love of oranges, Master MacTavish.”
“No. I dinnae think I do.” Kieran smiled. “You’re convinced ye won’t hang, but I ken it’s more that the thought of hanging is too abstract. Ye need something tangible as a motivation to remember. And so—” He rolled the orange around the tabletop with his fingers before lifting it. “It smells lovely.”
He extended the orange toward her.
She regarded it warily.
“Why do I feel like Eve in the Garden of Eden? Eyeing fruit offered by a serpent?”
“How ye wound me!” Kieran mock-gasped, pretending her words were a dagger to his chest. “Do ye hear this, Mrs. McKay? How the fair lass slanders me?”
The older lady chuckled. “Ye know yourself tae be handsome enough tae tempt the Devil hisself, Master MacTavish.”
“You’re quite the flirt, Mrs. McKay,” Kieran laughed.
She winked at him. “I turned the head of many a lad in my day.”
