“In this case, I’m deadly serious,” he says, looking indeed, deadly serious. No quirk of one corner of his mouth inching up for that half smile he’s given me. He actually thinks marrying me is going to wrap this madness all up in a tidy bundle.
“You’re really willing to marry someone you’ve known for… are we at seventy-two hours? That sounds right. Someone you’ve known for three days.”
“Threeveryeventful days,” he says.
“Even if this is only for the duration of this nightmare of nerve gas and rich British people, how can you marry someone you don’t love? I mean, are you even capable of love?”
Kai seems to give this some thought. “I love my family,” he says slowly. “I would die for any of them without a second’s hesitation. Romantic love? I understand lust. I understand need, and want. I dinna think it’s the same, after seeing my cousins with the women they love. It’s not an issue here, though. Marriages of convenience happen all the time, lass. This will be one of them.”
Why does that make me feel like someone just kicked me in the chest? He’s making it clear that I’m a duty, and that makes me feel small.
I don’t let people make me feel small anymore, so now I’m pissed off.
Abruptly rising, I pick up our plates and head for the kitchen. He’s following me, and it’s like being stalked by Bigfoot. “Give me a minute, all right?” I get the vast expanse of the kitchen counter between us. “I need to think this through.”
He shrugs.He shrugs,like my alarmed resistance to his “proposal” is an insignificant little blip in his busy schedule.
“Then why don’t ya take a hot bath or something,” he suggests, “I’ll clean up down here.”
“You cooked, I clean.”
The words make my heart hurt worse. Mom and Pop used to say that, skirting around each other in our tiny kitchen, trading off dish duty if the other cooked. Pop snapping Mom on the butt with a dishtowel when he thought I wasn’t looking. We didn’t have much money, but god, there was so much love. Enough to fill the cracks in the shitty windows when the wind blew through and to make my thrift store clothes perfectly acceptable, no matter what Darleen Nowicki and her snotty friends said.
Mechanically going through the motions, I finish cleaning the kitchen and start the dishwasher before I realize Kai has disappeared, leaving me to myself as requested.
The only time I’ve been in a kitchen this fancy was when I was cleaning it for someone else. Everything is gorgeous, the beautiful SubZero appliances, the enormous slab of black granite threaded with gold and cream for the countertops. The window over the sink looks out on a well-tended garden and, past that, the blue of the River Clyde.
I don’t belong here.
I belong in a budget hostel with other twenty-somethings traveling as cheaply as possible, not as the wife of a Scottish mafia bazillionaire.
“There’s no other way.”
I jump half a foot and turn, pressing my hand against my chest. “You’re the size of a bull moose. How do you walk around like that, all sneaky and silent?”
“Ya keep comparing me to animals, lass,” he smiles devilishly. “A lesser man might get his feelings hurt.”
“Yeah, the last thing I’m concerned about are yourfeelings,pal.”
“Ya do have it wrong, though.” He moves toward me, all lethal grace, with his gaze fixed on mine. “I’m no moose, not a bear. I’m a wolf, remember?” Kai is almost offensively beautiful, powerful, sculpted muscle on his tall frame and those aristocratic features, high cheekbones, and a perfectly shaped nose… God spent some extra time on that face.
But with his eyes narrowed and that tight jaw, like he’s grinding his teeth, I canfeelhis darker nature rising up. “I’ve committedto protecting ya, and part of that commitment is getting married. Thereisno other way.”
Kai holds up a ring. The diamond is alarmingly large. It still looks small in his gigantic paw. “We’ll be married by a registrar. We’ll tell everyone we just couldn’t wait. Then you can plan some gigantic, overblown thing with my sisters and cousins to add a bit of pageantry and authenticity.”
If possible, the plan is making me feel even worse.
“I have to tell you that your romance game? It is not strong, Kai MacTavish.”
My left hand is engulfed in his as he slides the ring onto my finger. The diamond is set in a little swirl of sapphires, like stars around the moon.
“My charm used to be enough,” he says. “But I pledge you this, Luna Jones. I will keep you safe. I will give you everything your heart desires.”
The “Except for your freedom,” part is unspoken. The bastard.
“I intend to give ya more stamps in your passport and take ya wherever ya want to go. Except away from me,” he adds with a wry smile.
The antique brass light fixture above the island holds us in a little pool of light, and the look in his greener than green eyes is almost tender. His hand is still holding mine, and it’s rough, calloused like he’s done hard work and didn’t mind it, just like me.
