Graeme was already on his feet. God, had she broken out? Jumped? Fallen? “See that the Father has more tea,” he snapped, striding past the butler. If she’d been injured… “I’ll be back in a moment.”
He took the stairs two at a time. And he wasn’t thinking about the ramifications to him or his if something had happened to her, or about the loss of blunt and corresponding loss of power. He was thinking abouther.One of the house’s two footmen, Ross, pounded on the locked door at the end of the hallway, his unanswered calls sending Graeme’s heart into his throat. Aye, she was a rich Sassenach with the world at her feet, but she had a backbone, too, when he hadn’t expected that.
Shouldering the footman aside, he dug into his pocket for the key, unlocked the door, and slammed into the room. His breath catching, he looked toward the windows. Neither was broken, both were still shut, and the lass herself stood there between them with a lit candle in her hands.
“I am not going to be bullied into marrying you,” she stated, her chin lifted.
As his heart resumed beating again, Graeme took another look at the windows.Devil a bit.Slamming the door closed on Ross’s surprised face, he stalked up to her. Holding her gaze, he first blew out the candle, then swiped a hand through the reversed letters she’d spelled out across the glass in what looked and smelled like strawberry jam.
With the light behind the ten-inch letters,HELPmust have shown bright and red in the window for anyone passing by to see. If Father Michael had arrived an hour later, or left a few minutes early, their discussion about the missing English lass—and his impending marriage—would have gone very differently.
The cleverness of it—he would admire that later. At the moment he needed to stop this from happening again.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she demanded, the lifted chin and defiant gaze betrayed a little by the shaking at the edge of her voice. Then she didn’t like being loomed over, and he definitely loomed now.
He loomed inches from her face, from her firmly closed mouth and full, rose-petal lips, as anger, fury, admiration, frustration, and desire all slammed through him. Taking her shoulders in his big, jam-covered hands, he held her back against the narrow wall between the windows. And then he bent his head and kissed her.
Graeme wasn’t gentle about it, either. Once he touched her, lightning skittered beneath his skin, heated and electric. Her mouth moved against his, likely protesting his ungentlemanly behavior, as her fists clenched and unclenched against his chest.
When he’d had a good taste of her, he lifted his head again. “Never been kissed by a barbarian before, I’ll wager,” he muttered, using every ounce of self-control he possessed to keep from kissing her again.
“I… will not dignify that with a response.”
“I told ye there would be consequences, yer highness.” Firming his grip on her shoulders, he twisted her, pushing her backward toward the bed.
She tried to jerk away from him, her blue gaze shifting between him and the bed. “You wouldn’t dare, sir! I would… I would see you hanged!”
For the briefest of moments he was tempted to play the heathen she clearly thought him. Want heated his blood. Proper female that she was, she would definitely have to marry him once he’d bedded her. If he gave in, though, with her clearly frightened and unwilling, he would deserve the hanging she threatened—if he didn’t, already. Wordlessly he shoved her backward onto the bed. As she struggled to sit upright he crouched down, grabbed the shackle he’d declined to use last night, and swiftly locked it around her left ankle.
“I thought… I thought…”
“What, lass?” he prompted. “Ye thought I meant to have ye against yer will?” Graeme straightened, taking a step backward before she could recover her wits enough to kick him in the head. “If I were that sort of man, ye’d be wiser nae to test me, dunnae ye think?”
Lady Marjorie tugged, but the chain didn’t budge. “I will not be chained like some animal, sir,” she retorted, wielding the “sir” like a weapon and only the shaking of her voice telling him it wasn’t just anger she felt.
“And I’ll nae have ye endangering me and mine,” he retorted. “This isnae yer soft London where ye and yer friends play games aboot who ye dance with and who ye talk to. Here the games end bloody. I dunnae have many rules here, but ye’ll damned well follow ’em, or ye’ll stay chained to the bed until doomsday.”
He wanted to remain in the room to bellow at her, to make damned certain she understood that he wasn’t jesting, to inform her that he could damned well bully her into marriage if he chose to do so. She’d curled her feet up beneath her, though, and shifted as far as she could away from him on the bed. Aye, they’d all fare better if she feared him, but the part of him that had given in to the absurd impulse to kiss her didn’t like the idea of her shrinking away from him.
Clenching his jaw, Graeme turned for the door—and then flinched as a teacup hit him in the back. The delicate porcelain fell to the wooden floor and shattered into a dozen pieces. Well, he hadn’t broken her spirit, anyway. Continuing forward, he pulled open the door. “Cowen, have Ross clean off the window and the mess on the floor,” he ordered, and handed the door key to the butler. “Two of ye in here, and neither of ye talk to her majesty. Lock her in and bring me the key when ye’ve finished.”
“We’ll see to it, Laird Maxton,” the servant replied. “Dunnae ye worry.”
Graeme sent a glance back at the slender figure curled on the bed. Hewasworried, but not about what Lady Marjorie Forrester might attempt next. Rather, he was troubled because in all of her protests over her treatment and what she would and wouldn’t tolerate, she hadn’t uttered a single protest about the kiss.
He had no complaints about it, for damned certain. In fact, he wanted to kiss her again. And that would only make things worse—for all of them.
Chapter Six
The blasted chain and shackle reached far enough that Marjorie could sit in the closer of the two chairs the servants had carried back over to the hearth, but the window and even the door were several feet out of her reach. Her leg felt awkward and oddly weighted, a clear sign that she’d badly miscalculated.
Given the house’s location on the rise, and her windows up on the second floor, the odds of someone seeing her request for aid had been fair. She’d watched people come and go all day, after all. And all she needed was one pair of eyes, one person whom Graeme Maxton didn’t control, to take notice and tell someone—anyone—what he’d seen.
Marjorie shifted again, trying to find a position where the heavy chain didn’t threaten to drag her out of the chair and onto the floor. In none of her wildest imaginings could she have conjured anything as outlandish as her being chained to a bed in a pleasant-looking house in the middle of the Scottish Highlands while a strapping Highlander threatened to marry her. And she certainly couldn’t have imagined her captor kissing her—or that she might possibly have enjoyed it.
The way he’d swooped in, as if he couldn’t quite stop himself, his warm mouth on hers, the scent of whisky and wilderness… She touched her fingers to her lips. Her first kiss—and an ironic one when she considered that her dreams after she’d become Lady Marjorie and moved her scant few personal possessions from Lady Sarah Jeffers’s attic room into massive Leeds House, had been filled with handsome, young, well-born men who waited in a queue to fall in love with her.
Yes, despite the passive… disdain with which she’d been treated since Gabriel had been elevated from army major to the Duke of Lattimer, she had seen a handful of gentlemen callers—all of them fortune hunters. She’d seen to it that none of them got near enough to kiss her.
