“Shall I send you an invitation to my wedding?” she asked and there was anger in her voice.
“No,” he said softly. “I don’t think I could stand that.”
She looked up at him and saw the longing in his eyes. In one motion she went to him, stood on tiptoe, and put her arms around his neck. “Hold me. Just once, hold me as though you don’t think of me as a childish nuisance. Pretend I’m Tabitha and hold me as you would her.”
He ran his hands over her hair, which was hanging down her back in fat waves. It gleamed in the lamplight. “This is the gold you own that I like,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. He picked up a tendril of her hair and held it to his nose, then to his lips. “Those men are fools if they don’t make you laugh, if they don’t throw you across a horse and run away with you.”
“Will you do that with me?” she asked, looking up at him, her eyes on his lips.
“I canna,” he said, his accent heavy.
“Why?” she demanded even as she moved her hips close to him. “Sometimes it seems that every man in this city wants me, but none of them interest me, and you know why?”
“No,” he said as he put his cheek against her hair. “Why are you not in love with one of those fancy young bucks I’ve seen go in and out of this house?”
“Because I compare them all to you and find them wanting.”
“Me?” he asked, smiling down at her as his hand stroked her hair, then her cheek. “They’re men who’ve been raised as you have, who know what you do. What don’t they have that I do?”
“What would one of them do if he found a woman in a coffin in the back of his wagon?”
Angus laughed in a way that she could feel as she pressed her breasts against his chest. “For one thing, they wouldn’t be driving a wagon themselves. They’d pay someone else to do it.”
“My point exactly,” she said. “Angus, you don’t understand that I love you.”
“Don’t say that.” He dropped his hand from her hair. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. And don’t tell me I don’t know what love is. People are born knowing what love is. Even the people who’ve never had it know when it’s missing from their lives.”
“You’re young and you—”
“So are you. To hear you talk, you’d think you were an old man, but you’re young, with your whole life before you. I want to go with you. I want to share your life. I want to—”
He pulled her arms from around his neck and his face lost its humor. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re in love with what you think I am. In your mind I’m a... a...”
“A romantic Scotsman?” she said, her arms at her sides, her fists clenched. She’d just told him she loved him, but he was telling her she didn’t. “Do you think I see you as something out of a novel, a man with no faults?”
“I think—”
She didn’t let him finish his sentence. “I know what you’re like. I know you better than you think I do. You’re stubborn beyond all imagining. Even now when you have the offer of the love of a woman who is rich and not bad to look at, you’re so damned stubborn that you won’t take her up on her offer.
“And you have an awful temper,” she continued. “You take out your anger at other things on me. You like to tease, but when you’re teased in return, that magnificent pride of yours makes your whole body turn into marble. You freeze, with your backbone rigid, and your face shows me that I have dared to make light of the McTern of McTern.”
“If you find so much fault with me, I canna see what you’d want with a man like me.”
“There!” she said. “Look at you. You climb up a wall to sneak into my bedroom, lounge about on my bed until I’m mad with desire for you, but when I tell you I love you, you tell me I’m too much of a child to know what love is. And now you are getting angry at me! You’re not only an uneducated man, you’re a stupid one too. Go on, get out of here! Jump out the window. Run off to Virginia and—”
She broke off because he pulled her into his arms and put his mouth to hers. Edilean would have said that she was knowledgeable in kissing, as it had been a favorite pastime of hers when she’d visited the country houses of her schoolmates, but those schoolgirl kisses were not like the one Angus gave her.
His kiss wasn’t gentle, and it wasn’t light. It was filled with all the longing and pent-up desire that he’d felt from the moment he’d first seen her. Since the courtyard in Scotland, when she’d made a fool of him in front of everyone, he’d wanted her. During their weeks of being in the same room together on the ship, she’d driven him mad with desire. A glimpse of her hand as it pushed a golden strand of hair behind her ear would make him want her so much that he’d had to leave the cabin and go on deck.
At first he kissed her with his mouth closed, but when she pressed her body fully against his and went limp so that her whole weight was in his arms, he opened his mouth. When his tongue touched hers, she gave a little moan that sent the blood coursing through his body.
When her legs gave way under her, he lifted her and carried her the few steps to the bed. He’d seen her in bed many times, and always, he’d wanted to lie beside her, to hold her, to touch her. There were nights when he lay in his hammock and just looked at her, watching her sleep. He knew every little sound she made—and loved all of them.
His kiss deepened and her body became more pliant as he stretched out beside her. Her leg went over his hips, and his hand went under her gown and up her bare leg, her thigh, then over her round little bottom.
“Edilean,” he whispered as he kissed her neck, her cheeks, all the places on her beautiful face that he’d so longed to touch.