Lacing her fingers through his, he pulled her back into the house.
Their clothes dripped, making a merry puddle on the flagstone floor of the scullery. Before Viola could voice an opinion, Malcolm wrapped his large hands around her waist once more and deposited her, soggy skirts and all, atop an enormous wooden worktable.
She landed with a squeak.
Malcolm threaded one hand into her hair, pressed the other into the small of her back, and stepped into her skirts.
And then—
Viola ceased to be the kisser.
In one breath, she became thekissee. The one being devoured.
But it didn’t take her more than a heartbeat to meet Malcolm’s plundering with a greed of her own. Her perch on the high table evened their height, enabling her to reach him without cricking her neck.
It was the veriest madness.
She hadn’t known it could be like this.
That the touch of his calloused thumb on her cheek could send shivers of sensation skittering down her arms. That her very skin could feel so awake, as if her body had simply been sleeping until this moment finally (finally!) arrived.
They kissed and kissed, heads angled this way and then that, twisting in an effort to be even closer.
He ran a reverent hand along her body, palm caressing from ribcage to hipbone.
“Why did you resist?” she whispered against his mouth.
“My truth? Ye are so wee. I’m afeart I will break ye,” he murmured trailing kisses in the space below her ear. “Ye are the finest porcelain, and I’m not gentleman enough tae know how to care for ye.”
Viola was shaking her head before he even finished speaking.
She would not allow him to give up on them because he worried about her lack of strength. Because in this moment, arching into the scrape of his teeth along her throat, hearing the low growl of his desire, she felt powerful. Indestructible.
“Someone told me recently that I’m fierce.” She ran her palms across his chest, loving that she had permission to touch him, to explore the hard muscles of his body. “I may be small, but I am made of steel, strong enough for the likes of you, Malcolm Penn-Leith. Test me and see.”
Malcolm huffed a soft laugh.
Viola captured it on a kiss.
16
Malcolm walked through the next day in a blur.
Over and over, he relived those moments with Viola and the glory of kissing her lush mouth.
How was he to manage this? His adoration of Viola was just so muchmorethan he had ever expected to feel.
It wasn’t that she had replaced Aileen in his affections. The love and loss he felt for his wife was still very much present.
But Viola had taken up residence inside him, in cells and hollows he had never known existed. She had begun to remodel his thinking—expanding a room here and knocking down a wall there—until her presence felt so much like a homecoming, he floundered to accommodate the shift in his reality.
Viola—the famous, brilliant, talented, Miss Brodure—gave every indication that she might be willing to leave her comforts and literary friends, travel hundreds of miles north to rural Scotland to join him, and live and write as a farmer’s wife in Thistle Muir.
Even giving mental space to the thought felt absurd, and yet, part of him ached for just such a life.
He finally resorted to visiting Aileen’s grave in the kirkyard, hoping to bludgeon some sense into his addled brain.
“What am I tae do?” he whispered to her tombstone as he sat in the sun-warmed grass.
