How to Marry a Highlander by Katharine Ashe Page A

that particular hardness the likes of which Annie had been telling her about for years—a masculine hardness that told a woman a man was fully prepared for the marriage act.
    But they were not married and were unlikely to become married. He was kissing her because she had invited him to do so with a wager, the terms of which were truly impossible to fulfill even given her early serendipitous success. And although he wanted her to go away and had in fact told her so in no uncertain terms, she was kissing him back and allowing him to press her thighs apart with his knee and massage her behind with his strong fingers until she was mad for some uncertain satisfaction. When his hands urged her hips against his she arced to him. For a fleeting instant she knew a frisson of gratification, an instant that made her seek it again. It felt so good . Far too good. Better than her wildest imaginings.
    “ Oh .”
    The rumble in his chest echoed her gasp. He kissed her neck, his mouth hot on her tender skin, and the humid air of summer bursting with life and sex surrounded her and filled her head and body with yearning. Six years of need, a young womanhood of frustrated passion desperate to find a mate, seemed to burst from her and fed itself into her clutching hands and her gasps of pleasure.
    He held her against him and spoke at her throat. “Why did ye chuise me, Teresa?”
    “Why did I— Oh .” She nestled her hips into his kneading hands.
    “I’ve nothing.” He nipped at her lower lip and a tingling rush filled her belly. “No money.” His hands bracketed her hips, his fingertips caressing, pleasing. “A crumbling castle. A brood o’ wimmenfolk I canna even clothe properly. A benighted title no proud man would wish to claim.” His voice was heavy with bewilderment and need. “Why me?”
    She ran her palms along his arms, solid and bunched with tension, and groaned from the echoing tension deep in her. “I don’t know.”
    His hands stilled. “Ye dinna ken ?”
    “I dinna ken!” She opened her eyes. “It was a fantasy, a dream, a make-believe story like the stories I always tell. But this time I told it to myself.” The words stumbled from her tongue. “I saw you that night at the ball, and you were so far beyond my reach, and I invented it but I never expected it to come true. I don’t really know how I actually went through with it, came to London and went to your flat and proposed to you. Propositioned you. It was a dream. An impossible dream. It still feels like a dream, for I cannot have possibly traveled so far from being the exceedingly proper wife of the local vicar to kissing an earl with a dark and violent past in a hothouse. It is unthinkable.”
    “’Tis anly a dream, yet ye’ve gone an done this to me?” His eyes seemed to plead and accuse at once. But he had done it all to her, taken her in his arms and touched her and made her need not some ephemeral taste of spring, but him . She wanted to be the spring ewe to his ram. She wanted to be the nectar in the bud to his hummingbird’s probe. She wanted him to make her a woman in this hothouse. Now. Before it was too late and she had to box up her mating metaphors as well as her dreams and store them all away at the back of a closet forever.
    His arms fell away from her and he stepped back. “The exceedingly proper wife o’ the local vicar?” he said in a thick voice.
    “Not yet. And his idea. And my parents’. Decidedly not mine.” She shivered in revulsion.
    “Ye’d be a poor match for a beadle.”
    “If by beadle you mean a vicar, I consider that a compliment.” She lifted her hands to her flaming cheeks. “Now what?”
    “Nou, Miss Teresa Finch-Freeworth,” he said in his beautiful rolling brogue, a muscle contracting in his jaw. “Ye leave.”
    Of course. He had paid on the wager. He owed her nothing more.
    She moved around him toward the door, but he grasped her hand and stayed her.
    “Ye’ve got me so I dinna ken what’s up or