He didn’t let her finish.
He kissed her.
Wanton could only held on to his shoulders. This was data collection under extreme conditions. Mouths slanting, hands anchoring, knees nudging apart straw and propriety with brute Highland efficiency.
His lips moved over hers like a storm front rolling across moorland—hot, damp, and utterly devastating. His tongue swept in, a Highland warrior mapping her soft palate, any deeper and he would reach her tonsils.
Wanton moaned. Entirely involuntarily.
Her hands left his shoulders—merciful Newton, what breadth—and slid beneath the collar of his shirt, searching for proof of musculature. She found it. Abundantly.
Tavish growled low in his throat and hitched up her skirts.
Wanton gasped.
His hand paused mid-thigh, fingers curling.
“What the hell,” he cursed, voice rougher than caber bark. “What sort o’ Sassenach torture device is this?”
“It’s not a torture device—it’s progress!” It wasn’t as though everyone had the built-in physics to go about… unencumbered. Some of them—herself included—preferred to keep their most tender variables properly padded.
“Progress,” he muttered, as if she'd personally betrayed his ancestry. “should come wi’ fewer buckles.”
“They were devised for extreme environments,” she babbled, heat flooding every part of her body except where she wanted it most. “Horse bites. Splinters. Chafing.”
He exhaled against her neck.
“Ye’re killin’ me, lass.”
Field Observation 21.2: Highlanders have a surprisingly low tolerance for reinforced drawers.
“In the name of science, can you… undo them?” she asked, breathless.
He looked up, eyes molten. “Oh, I can. But you’ll owe me another tumble for each button.”
Wanton swallowed. “There are eleven.”
“Then clear yer afternoon.”
And then his mouth was on her throat—hot, open, possessive—and his fingers slipped beneath the protective layers with a hiss of fabric and a muttered Gaelic oath she suspected translated to saints preserve me from scholars in armored bloomers.
With a growl so deep it shook through her bones, Tavish shifted his grip, and grabbed her hips.
In one Highland motion, she found herself flat on her back in a bed of golden chaos, skirts rucked up around her hips and Tavish MacTease braced over her like the wrath of very aroused gods.
She would later catalogue this as Highland Maneuver No. 3: The Tactical Inversion.
Historians might credit battlefields for its origin; Wanton suspected the bedroom.
Either way, it demonstrated a mastery of leverage that Newton himself would have blushed to observe.
“Much better,” he murmured, gaze burning down her body.
She arched, her breath catching as his hand found skin.
Her thighs fell apart of their own volition.
Her head lolled back.
