“Then mayhap ye shouldnae be pointing oot that she has other plans, lass.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Stay here, you mean? Lady Marjorie wants to be a success in Society. She can’t do that here.” Aside from that, happiness and success rarely had anything to do with each other. So while she might find one here, she certainly wouldn’t find the other.
The blacksmith shrugged. “Mayhap she’ll change her mind aboot what she wants.”
If Marjorie wasn’t careful, she might find herself without a choice altogether. And that would leave her with neither happiness nor success. Nor any need for a lady’s companion, because she would no longer be considered a lady.
Chapter Thirteen
Graeme could swear the number of cats in the house had multiplied. They might well have done it on their own, as cats were known to do, or Connell might have smuggled more inside on the chance that no one would notice. Either way, some of them were going to have to go out to the stable.
Nudging a brown and white one aside with his bare foot, he closed himself out of his bedchamber and padded next door to Marjorie’s room. Aye, she’d tried to set him after some of the local lasses, but luckily she’d done it so awkwardly that he hadn’t thought her serious.
He’d be damned if he’d knock tonight, so he pushed down on the door handle. It gave, and he let out the breath he’d held. She hadn’t changed her mind about sex with him—at least not yet. If ithadbeen locked he likely would have forgotten about being stealthy, put his shoulder to it, and knocked the door off its hinges.
She’d moved the two shabby, overstuffed chairs back in front of the window, and as he closed the door he could make out her silhouette against the silver-touched night beyond. “Did someaught catch yer eye oot there?” he asked quietly, moving up behind the chair so he could run his fingers though her loose, dark hair.
“Connell spent an hour before dinner trying to convince me that he’d found a pair of faeries living in a hollow tree just past the river, and that I would be able to see them after dark because their wings glow silver.”
“And ye’re expecting to see them, then?”
“No. But I wanted to look, anyway. It seems a good night for faeries—and elves and selkies and banshees and all the other magic folk who seem to live in the Highlands. Why do you have so many mythical creatures here?”
“Mythical creatures need wild places. There’s nae a place in the world more wild than the Highlands.”
“I like when you talk about the Highlands that way.”
Graeme lifted an eyebrow. “Which way is that?”
“Like you cherish it.”
The Highlands wasn’t the only thing he was coming to cherish. That thought—the realization of just how vital this Sassenach was becoming to him and after such a short time—terrified him in a way nothing else ever had. A man in the Highlands needed to be strong, sturdy, and self-sufficient. He’d seen up close what happened to a man who gave up too much of his happiness, of himself, to someone else. And he’d vowed it would never happen to him. Hell, he’d been ready to marry a stranger, a Sassenach lass he’d thought stuffy and spoiled. If he didn’t love her, she couldn’t hurt him.
And yet he thought about that same lass every waking hour, dreamed about her at night, craved her endlessly. Just the scent of lemon put a damned tent in his kilt. She was a flame, and he, a moth.
Perhaps it was all lust, tied up in pretty ribbons. Aye, that could be it; he needed to purge her from his thoughts, and the only logical way to do that was to sate himself in her. Immediately and repeatedly, until he could breathe and think again.
She looked up over her shoulder at him. “You’re being very quiet,” she observed. “Do you not enjoy it here? I know for a fact that there areeasierplaces to live.”
“Nae fer me, lass,” he said, shaking his head. “I went to London. Aboot nine years ago. Warm days, flowers, sweating in my fancy clothes, parasols and wee yapping dogs riding with lasses in their carriages.”
With a chuckle Marjorie turned around to kneel on her chair, her arms folded beneath her chin as she gazed up at him. “Is that all you remember?”
Graeme shrugged. “I remember people looking sideways at me, hearing them wonder if I was a Jacobite spy—as if they’d forgotten aboot Culloden and what the redcoats did to the Jacobites. I bloodied my share of noses, got myself challenged to two duels, and got handed a lifetime ban to some place called Almack’s.” It had been more troublesome than that, but he reckoned she understood the underlying message—that he and London hadn’t been compatible. At all.
“Ah, Almack’s. Everyone wants an invitation, and everyone loathes attending,” she said, nodding. “I’ve never been invited, myself.”
“And do ye want to be?” For a lass with as much sense as she had, it seemed a very odd, and very hollow, goal.
“It’s a sign of acceptance.” Marjorie visibly shook herself. “But I don’t want to talk about London any longer tonight.”
“Nae? Did ye have someaught else in mind, then?” He put his hands on either side of her folded arms and leaned in to kiss her.
The moment she swept her arms up around his neck he took her by the waist and lifted her over the back of the chair. Even with all the uncertainty sitting between them, the questions that all came down to when and how she would leave,thiswas certain. The desire between them was both genuine and unmistakable. And he damned well knew what to do about that.
Graeme stood her beside the bed, took the bottom hem of her night rail, and lifted it off over her head. Her small breasts with their pebbled nipples practically begged for his attention, but tonight he had something else in mind. “On the bed,” he instructed, shirking his own shirt and kilt.
She lay down with her head on the pillow as she had two nights ago. With a grin he wrapped his fingers around her ankles and pulled her around sideways so she lay crossways across the bed, her legs parted around his thighs as he stood on the floor. Holding her gaze, he knelt, caught hold of her right leg, and kissed the back of her knee. With kisses and nips of his teeth he made his way toward the apex of her thighs.
