Wanton made a sound. A soft, eager, mortifying sound.
(Field Observation 22.3: Upon contact, vocal restraint becomes hypothetical.)
His hand rose to cradle her jaw, thumb sweeping slowly—achingly—across her cheek. Her knees forgot their contract with gravity. Her fingers curled into the leather straps across his shoulders, pulling him closer as though she were conducting an experiment in magnetic attraction.
Tavish groaned and slid his other hand to the small of her back. The world tilted. The tent blurred. Her pulse spiked in a way no responsible scientist would chart without a disclaimer.
She kissed him back—enthusiastically, disastrously—part lips, part logic failure.
Warmth pooled low in her belly. Her toes curled inside her boots.
He deepened the kiss, mouth slanting over hers with Highland certainty, and Wanton's spine liquefied. Her notebook slipped from her lap and thudded to the furs below.
Field Observation 22.1: Kiss intensity increases in direct correlation to emotional sincerity and exposed musculature.
The kiss should have been brief. For data. For notes.
Instead, she surged upward, pushing off her haunches with all the grace of a woman who had once tried to mount a mule backwards but had now discovered a far more rewarding ascent.
Her restraint shrieked, like a timid governess arriving to chaperone a bacchanal. The poor dear fled her body with the velocity of a startled pheasant. It flapped toward the tent flap, collided with a pole, and escaped into the night, never to be heard from again.
“Good riddance,” Wanton thought, feeling oddly lighter without the meddling creature. Truly, restraint had overstayed its welcome—an unwanted guest blocking the door between her and empirical discovery. And Tavish’s mouth. And several promising data points in between.
Her last scrap of caution sighed, picked up its skirts, and also left.
Which left Wanton with Tavish, a racing pulse, and the dawning realization that some experiments were meant to be conducted without supervision.
Her palms splayed across his bare chest, a topography of muscle and stubbornness. Every inch of her pressed against him with the sort of academic fervor that would get her expelled from any institution with standards. Tavish exhaled her name and tangled his fingers in her curls, pulling her closer.
His lips parted hers with aching slowness, like he was memorizing the taste of defiance.
She tilted her head, angled for better access—as any dedicated scholar would—and immediately felt something hot and urgent pressing low against her belly, only the kilt and a gasp between discovery and full dissertation.
She whimpered. Actually whimpered.
Field Note: Must never let Prudence hear of this.
The kiss deepened, and suddenly her hands weren't obeying commands. They slid downward, trailing past his ribs, past the ridged landscape of his abdomen, until—
Her fingers planted firmly on his thighs.
Tavish groaned.
Low. Raw. The kind of sound that rearranged organs and cracked internal moral compasses clean in half.
His legs tensed beneath her palms. Strong, spread just enough. Waiting. Wanting.
She pressed a little harder, curious. For science.
He pulled back just enough to look at her, and Saints help her, his pupils were blown wide, like a man facing something holy. Or wholly unmanageable.
"Lass," he rasped, "if ye keep lookin' at me like that, I'm gonna forget all about my arm."
"Excellent," she whispered. "Forgetfulness is scientifically proven to accelerate recovery." She then kissed him again, fueled by every thrum of blood in her limbs and every curiosity in her bones.
His hands found her hips, dragging her closer between his knees, until her skirts bunched around her thighs and her body slotted against his like an equation solved at last.
She pulled back, breath trembling. "I want to continue the experiment."
