Nora spent hours with Catarina as she taught her numerous exotic tricks to entice Ewan with gypsy dances. How to roll and undulate her hips in the duplication of Catarina’s wild movements.
She felt strangely erotic and womanly as she learned the dance.
“Will this really work?”
“Trust me,” Catarina assured her. “Men are easily led astray by their desires. All you have to do is cater to them and voila, they are yours.”
“Aye, it’s why Ewan is in so much pain now. Perhaps I shouldn’t do this,” she said as Catarina dressed her in one of Catarina’s low cut gowns. “My mother always told me that it is evil to tease a man.”
“It’s only evil if you have no intention of keeping him.”
Nora bit her lip. “What if I am unsure yet as to whether or not I want him?”
“Are you?”
She hesitated as she thought about the matter. “Aye...nay...maybe?”
Catarina shook her head. “My lady, what more could you want from a man?”
Nora bit her lip in indecision. “Honestly, nothing. If I must marry, and I must, I can think of no one I would rather have than Ewan.”
“Then why are you fretting?”
“What if he doesn’t want me? He likes his quiet solitude and I am most certainly not quiet.”
Catarina tied a thin, gauzy blue veil around her waist. “I wonder if he likes it so much as he is used to it.”
Nora frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I just wonder if he chose it because he liked it or if it was forced upon him by others.”
Catarina stepped away and swept a critical gaze over her.
“Perhaps. I said as much to him myself, but he never commented on if it were true or not.”
Nora paused as Catarina moved to style her hair. “Why are you helping me, Cat? You should be scandalized by what we’re doing, not participating in it.”
She smiled at that. “Life is short, Nora. Like my mother before me, I believe in seizing what you want while you’re young enough to enjoy it. Ewan needs you. I can see it in his eyes. You make him laugh when nothing else does.”
Nora sighed at the thought of his deep, rumbling laugh. “He has beautiful laughter, doesn’t he?”
“Aye, and a smile to match it.”
Nora’s heart fluttered as she remembered Ewan’s tentative smile. The way his face looked when it softened.
“Oh Catarina, I hope you are right. I never anticipated liking him, especially not after the way I met him while he was drunk in his cave. I thought he was a great, nasty beast. But he’s so much more than that.”
Catarina laced ribbons in her hair. “What made you seek him out?”
“My maid suggested it. She said only a MacAllister would have the ability to get me to England. She said they would have the connections that would allow them to transport me to my aunt.”
“You must have been scared.”
“A little,” she confessed. “It helped that she talked one of my father’s men into going with us. He balked at first, then conceded. He said if I was bound to go, better he keep an eye on me than I be harmed. If anyone ever learned he’d known about my flight and I was hurt while escaping, they would hold him responsible.”
“True, no doubt.”
Nora stared at the floor as her mind replayed everything that had happened to her since she started her quest to flee Scotland.
