She looked out the window. Snow was swirling past. It clearly had been falling for some time as it lay thickly on the side of the road. And it was falling very heavily now. And the wind was gusting. It was hard to see more than ten feet out the carriage window. Alasdair scooted over and joined her in looking at the snow.
He made a low whistle and then said, “Stay on this side of the carriage.” He slid across the seat and opened the opposite carriage door. He stood so that half his body was outside and in the falling snow.
She could hear him shouting to Paterson but she could not hear what he said or Paterson’s answer.
He pulled himself back inside the carriage and closed the door.
She was shivering now. Alasdair sat next to her and put both arms around her and rested his chin on top of her head.
“Ye were right. The carriage will likely have to stop soon.”
Her teeth chattered. “Dr. Andrews. You do not have to hold me.”
“On the contrary,” he said and unbuttoned his coat and pulled her onto his lap and into his chest and wrapped his coat around her. “Because of yer small size, ye have a greater surface area to volume ratio than I do, therefore ye shed heat more quickly and are more likely to get chilled. Our bodies together will effectively decrease both of our surface area to volume ratios and thus conserve our heat.”
She could not get close enough to him and she felt like she wanted to burrow into his waistcoat. “Now you sound like my sister Harry.”
“And besides,” he said and hesitated.
“Besides what?” she asked, her voice muffled by his chest.
“Caught in a snowstorm? Romantic, maybe?”
“Definitely.” The shivers were abating a bit. “Unless you are cold.”
“Shall I kiss ye then to warm ye?”
She stopped shivering.
He still wanted to kiss her.
“Yes,” she said and turned up her face.
He kissed her lips. And in his kiss, there was none of the fervor of the previous day or the previous hour. It was all tenderness.
But the want and the need and ache that had consumed her in the carriage today returned at the touch of his lips. She almost took her arms from around his body and out of the warm cocoon he had made for her and put them up to his neck to pull his mouth and tongue down into hers.
But she refrained from doing so.
She realized that she had already done to him, in a way, what Giles Fortescue had done to her. She had used his affection for her and her own greater experience—slight though it was, it was still greater than his—to push him too quickly into new intimacy. She had only paid attention to her own clutching need. And that had led to his embarrassment and their first—could she call it this?—disagreement.
There would be a time, she hoped, when she might be able to show him her desire, but this was not that time.
She would be patient. As Boyd Cormack had advised her. Of course, it had not been in this area that he had anticipated she would need her patience with Alasdair.
That thought amused her and her mouth curled into a smile under his kiss.
He must have felt some change in her lips because he pulled his head back to look at her face.
“Ye are smiling,” he said, obviously with a touch of relief.
“Yes,” she said. “I am happy.”
And then the carriage came to a stop.
Alasdair and Arabella extricated themselves from each other and Alasdair buttoned up his coat, put on his hat and gloves, rewrapped his tartan scarf, and got out of the carriage.
Within minutes, he had come back in, the cold and the wind and the snow swirling around him.
