Free Some Like It Scot by Donna Kauffman

as the driver peeled away from the curb, sending her sprawling toward Graham, who was getting his own self situated on the seat next to her and couldn’t brace himself for the collision.
    â€œOh!” she gasped, planting her hands on his chest—his broad, well-muscled chest. How was it, back in the garden, she’d thought him a kind of gentle giant, albeit a bit of an odd soul as well, who’d just happened across an angry bride and tried his best to console her? Because the man who’d stood up inside her family church and loudly proclaimed her to be his, who’d caught her in his arms, then boldly confronted her parents before making his way through an angry throng, leaping down old stone steps and carrying her swiftly to their escape chariot…wasn’t anything like that guy in the garden.
    â€œSorry,” she said, trying to extricate herself, but her veil was hopelessly caught and knotted on the giant sword he had pinned to his plaid, keeping the tartan from slipping off his shoulder. Like it would dare.
    â€œStop squirming for a wee moment,” he instructed, trying to blow the netting off his face. “Just—”
    She reached up and tugged the whole thing off her head, sending a number of pins and clips flying. She didn’t care, although she was certain her veil-hair look was ever-so-delightful. But it wasn’t like she had to worry about the after-ceremony photos. “There,” she said, thrusting it at him. “It’s not like I need it anymore.” Then it hit her, all over again. What she’d done.
    Had she really, truly, just done that? Walked out on her family?
    How wrong was it, that on her wedding day, when she’d left a man standing at the altar—a man she did love—it was leaving her family that scared her more.
    Graham took the veil from her, frowning, and held it in his hands, not looking at it, but staring at her.
    She noticed, and paused in her attempts to tame the skirt of her dress into something she could actually sit in, while simultaneously keeping her tightly laced boobs from not cutting off her breathing entirely. “What?”
    He snapped out of his reverie, and ducked his chin as he went to work, carefully untangling the veil from his sword. “Nothing, nothing a’tall.”
    He sounded like the man in the garden—which would be interesting at any other time. She dared a glance out the rear window as the limo careened around the corner, mercifully cutting the church from view. She let out a deep sigh of relief, which did absolutely nothing to quell the wave of nausea climbing rapidly up her throat. “Driver! Pull over! Pull over!”
    The driver immediately swerved to the nearest curb, sending her once again sprawling across Graham’s lap. She shoved the door handle and pulled herself straight over him, just in time to get her head past the running board, and…nothing. Dammit. She’d feel so much better, so much…freer, if she could just—
    She froze when she felt his fingers moving along her spine. “What”—she cleared her throat, and it had nothing to do with the tightness of her dress or the urge to toss her cookies—“are you doing?”
    â€œYe canno’ breathe in this…contraption,” he said, and went to work unlacing the back of her dress.
    â€œSeriously, you can’t do—oh.” She stopped speaking as her ability to take in a deep breath became a possibility. She breathed deeply twice more. Then sighed—heavily, for a change—in abject relief. “Thank you,” she said, never more sincerely. “But…you need to stop, uh, or I won’t have—”
    â€œGive me a moment,” he said, every bit as calm and collected as he’d been in the garden.
    Her port in the storm, indeed.
    He tugged gently on the laces, but not so much that she felt constrained. He fiddled about a moment longer, then said,