Free How to Marry a Highlander by Katharine Ashe Page B

story th’ither day while ye were upstairs.” He stood solid and powerful and entirely unapologetic before her.
    Heat suffused her cheeks. “You should not have.”
    “It was a fine piece.”
    “You liked it?”
    “Aye. Verra much. Ye’ve got a talent, lass.”
    She could not withhold her smile. “Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it. So glad that I won’t even chastise you for calling me lass.”
    His beautiful blue eyes glimmered with candlelight. “I beg yer pardon.”
    “You are forgiven. Again.” She felt wonderfully warm and much too happy and he was far too handsome and she was thoroughly infatuated.
    “Mr. Abel Brown paid a call on me this eve.”
    “What?” She clutched her reticule between her fingers. “That is—who?”
    “The proprietor o’ Brown & Cheaver Booksellers.”
    “The bookseller ?”
    Lord Eads took a step toward her. “Seems he wishes to court Abigail.”
    “He does?” She was short of breath.
    He halted so that mere inches separated them. “He said he niver imagined I’d allou such a thing, but he begged for her hand.”
    “Did—” Her heart was performing complicated pirouettes. “Did you give it?”
    “Aye, I gave it. Who woulda thought Abby’d be the first?” Affection played across his face. He truly cared for his sisters’ happiness.
    “Do you consider a bookseller a suitable match for your sister?”
    “He’s a guid man wi’ a steady income and a fine shop. If she’s got no trouble wi’ it, I dinna.”
    “You must be thrilled,” she babbled because his eyes had taken on a gleam of pure intentionality and now that the moment she’d been dreaming of for eighteen months was finally happening she had no idea what to do . “I must congratulate you on this happy news, my lord.”
    “’Tis I that should congratulate ye.”
    “Oh, no. I really didn’t have anything to do with it.” What was she saying? “They’d already met be—”
    He slipped his hand into her hair.
    “Oh!” she sighed. His touch didn’t feel like she had dreamed it. It felt infinitely better , strong and warm and confident, and as he bent his head she got dizzy on his scent of exotic spices. Her eyelids fluttered down. “I have never kissed a man who was wearing a skirt before,” she whispered.
    “’Tis no a skirt.”
    “Be that as it may . . .”
    “But ye have kissed a man?” he said over her lips.
    “Once.”
    “What was he wearing?”
    He was laughing at her again, even at this moment. Or rather, with her. She liked it. It made her heart feel light and deliciously free.
    “Muddy boots and a coat that smelled of shotgun smoke.”
    “Bounder.”
    “Definitely a bounder. He cornered me in the gunroom after he returned from shooting with my brothers. I thought I would give it a try, to see what all the fuss was about, you know,” she said airily.
    “What did ye discover?” He was drawing this out, to torture her or because he didn’t wish to do it. But he had come in the middle of the night to pay his debt on the wager. Perhaps he was as eager as she.
    “Discover?” she breathed.
    “Aboot the fuss?”
    “That it was overrated.”
    His thumb stroked the tender ridge of her cheek. “Then he wasna doing it right.”
    “Are you going to prove that now?”
    “Aye.”
    H er lips were sweet. Sweeter than he’d imagined. Sweeter than any woman’s lips he’d ever tasted. He caught her soft sigh in his mouth and stroked his thumb across her buttercream cheek dusted with pale cinnamon freckles. He tasted her again, this time longer, deeper, and her lips were soft responding, then eager.
    His cock stirred.
    He broke the contact. “Ye’ve anly been kissed once afore? By the bounder?”
    “Yes.” Her breaths were quick against his lips. “Only that once.”
    “Ye’ve got a knack for it.”
    “I’ve thought about it quite a lot,” she said shakily. “Was that all I get? That one?”
    “That wasna quite one, nou was it?”
    She shook her head.
    He took her