Chapter Ten
She awoke dry and warm. Lying there, Elizabeth couldn’t recall the last time she felt this way. She also didn’t recall falling asleep.
Her stomach growled, and she realized it was the smell of roasting meat that roused her. As she stretched on the bed, her feet slipped out from beneath the blanket. She sat up and looked around the cottage. “Alexander?”
There was no sign of him, but she saw the bird on an iron spit over a fire.
Alexander. She lay back again and closed her eyes. The brave Highlander who’d come to her rescue over and over again. The honorable man who’d forgiven her error in judgment and not once reminded her that they were in this predicament because of her foolish blunder. The gallant hero who’d undressed her, seen her naked, touched her flesh, but not once taken advantage of her vulnerable condition. The courteous laird who’d even prepared a meal.
Alexander. Not my Alexander. Not my Highlander. She remembered the wistful tone in Queen Margaret’s words about romance. Now she understood. Elizabeth now realized the extent of her error in judgment.
Where was he?
The crackling flames and the hiss of dripping fat were the only sounds. No wind whistled past the edges of the shutters or the door. No gusts of rain battered the walls of the cottage. Was it possible that the storm was over?
Wrapping the blanket around her, she got out of the bed. He couldn’t be too far away.
How had this happened? In her entire life, she’d always been in control. She was not prone to accidents. She was not clumsy. She’d never needed to be rescued, and here Alexander had saved her yet again.
Recalling how she’d stood naked before him, Elizabeth felt the heat rise and spread across her skin. But she hadn’t felt the blush of modesty then. She’d simply wanted to be free of the bees and the wetness that had seeped into her bones. But it was more than that. Something in her world had shifted. Something existed now that hadn’t existed before.
Into her mind came the painting she had seen in Florence in the palace of the Magnifico. Botticelli’s vision of Venus. With the flood waters of the sea all around her, her golden hair flowing across her uncovered skin, the goddess showed no false sense of modesty. She was willing to share this intimate view of herself. Earlier, when Alexander had gazed at her, she suddenly knew how Venus felt.
And she wanted him. After he’d carried her back into the cottage, she would have freely given up the blanket if he’d have stripped off his clothes and used his body to warm her. Skin to skin. Her hands all over his chest and back and arms. Holding him against her, belly to belly, thigh to thigh.
She touched her flushed cheeks and tried to ignore the wobbly knees and the heavy, tingling sensation in her breasts.
There was no sign of her undergarments or her dress or shoes. Near the bed, the wooden chest had been left open. She looked through the folded clothing. A man’s shirt and breeches. A woman’s woolen dress. She took it out and laid it on the bed. At the bottom of the chest, she found the partially sewn pieces of a tiny linen dress.
“You have a bairn on the way,” she murmured to the absent mistress.
Replacing the baby’s garment, Elizabeth glanced around the cottage. She’d overlooked the freshly sawn wood stacked in one corner beside a half-built cradle.
As she stared at it, an unexpected thought edged into her consciousness. In recent years, she’d been fighting the notion of marrying this Highlander, hostile to the thought of finding herself deserted in a place where she’d be a stranger, away from everything she knew and cared about. She’d made herself believe happiness lay in the life she had with her father. Travel, grandeur, building, learning. She’d imagined it was all or nothing. One way or the other.
She’d scoffed at thoughts of having a family of her own, of planning a future that encompassed anything beyond her own needs and desires. But here, wrapped in a coarse blanket of homespun wool, she realized this tidy cottage glowed with an aura of tenderness, of happiness that existed not in spite of life’s toil, but because of it.
And for the first time, she longed for something like that in her own life.
The hiss of juices drew Elizabeth’s attention. The duck was on fire.
“Damnation!” she cursed, hurrying over. She looked around her in panic. There was nothing she could use to grasp the hot iron skewer without burning herself. “Nay, I’m not about to let you go to waste.”
Whipping the blanket off her shoulders, she wrapped one corner of it around her hand and arm, and reached for the rod. After a couple of tries, she pulled the bird to safety. But in the meantime, a loose corner of the blanket found its way into the flames and was now on fire.
“Hellfire! This is not happening. We are not burning this place down.” She dropped the bird. Rolling the blanket up and throwing it onto the packed dirt floor, Elizabeth beat it with her hands and stomped on it until the fire was out.
Using the scorched blanket, she picked up their dinner off the floor and brushed off some ash clinging to the skin.
“Much better,” she murmured. “Who says cooking is an art?”
But as she turned to put the bird on the table, her heart stopped.
Alexander stood bare-chested in the doorway.
* * *
She was as naked as Eve, as beautiful as a faerie queen.
Alexander’s eyes devoured every inch of her luminous skin, lingering over every luscious curve, until he realized he needed to force his lungs to breathe.
“I saved it,” Elizabeth said proudly, dropping the burned carcass of the bird on the table.
To his great disappointment, she shook the blanket open and draped it around her shoulders, holding it closed over her chest as she hurried across the cottage to the bed.
“It’s a wee bit burned on the skin, but definitely edible,” she continued.
As she leaned over the bed to pick up a dress, he had a beautiful view of her perfect, heart-shaped bottom.
“That’s a good-sized goose,” she called over her shoulder.
It wasn’t a goose, but there was no point in correcting her. She was pretending that he hadn’t been standing there, watching her. But he had been, and he knew now that there was no going back. He hadn’t wanted to admit it, even to himself. He’d known it from the moment that boat sank beneath them. Perhaps even earlier, when he’d dived into that flooding river. He knew he was lying even as he told her he didn’t want to marry.
Elizabeth was his, and they’d be wed in six days. The way he felt now, there would be no backing out, regardless of what they’d said to each other. He wondered how much persuasion she’d need to feel the same.
She turned, clutching the dress to her chest. He continued to stare, unable to get enough of her. The parted edges of the burned blanket gave him a clear glimpse of her long legs all the way to the hip. And then there was her face, so alert and alive, and the golden hair, loose and wild, begging for him to dig his fingers into its glowing tresses.
She was looking past him at the table, and he followed her gaze. “I don’t know why I said goose. That’s not a goose. It’s duck. I know the difference.”
When he looked back at her, Elizabeth was studying him, and he realized that he was nearly as naked as she was. The blasted rain had finally stopped, so he’d rinsed the worst of the mud out of their clothes and left them, with his boots, outside to dry.
Her gaze lingered on his chest before moving slowly down past his kilt to his bare feet. Her breast rose and fell. When she looked back into his face, a blush colored her cheek.
“How did you get clean?” she asked.
“I washed in the duck pond.”
“I’ll do that, too.”
“I’ll show you where it is,” he said, images of washing her clean burning in his mind. He felt himself growing hard. By the devil, he’d love to run his lips over every inch of her body.
“I saw it below the barn.”
“The flood waters are still rising,” he told her. “They’re nearly to the pond itself.”
“I’ll manage.”
She started to move past him to the door, but before he knew what he was doing, he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her in one sweeping motion against him.
She gasped and he kissed her, a hard kiss that ended before she could even think of fighting him. He pulled back.
But she wasn’t fighting him. She didn’t move. Her face was inches away from his. Her eyes wide. One palm slowly flattened against his chest. He could have sworn she’d stopped breathing entirely. But her heart was beating so hard that he could hear it, or was that the sound of his own heart?
“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured against her lips, staring into her blue eyes. He brushed a finger across her dirt-spattered cheek and touched her lips, still wet from his kiss. He felt her shudder. His mouth lowered to hers again, this time tenderly, caressingly.
“Elizabeth.” He dug his fingers into her hair, cupping the back of her neck, teasing the seam of her lips with his tongue.
A soft moan escaped her throat. That sound of surrender was the sweetest he’d ever heard. Her eyes closed. He deepened the kiss, thrusting into the sweet opening of her mouth, exploring. She trembled in his arms, her body becoming soft and molding to his.
He wanted to cast aside the blanket and the dress that separated them. He wanted to bury himself deep inside her.
She drew back from the kiss and looked into his eyes.
“I’ll be back,” she whispered.