Page 34 of Enchantment of a Highlander

He faced toward her and stopped.

“Celia.” Her name was a hoarse whisper on his lips.

His hair was wet and pulled back in his customary braid. His clothes had been crisply cleaned. The colors of his plaid were more vibrant than normal, the saffron dye to his leine all the more golden.

Those were not all that drew her eye.

He’d shaved the day’s growth of stubble he typically wore. It softened his face, easing out the hard lines of his jaw and cheekbones, and left his mouth looking soft, full, and sumptuous.

How would it feel to nuzzle her lips against his clean-shaven face? To let the sensitivity of her mouth caress the smoothness of his jaw before encountering the warm, silky heat of his lips?

His dark brows drew downward. “Has something happened with Duncan?”

“No.” The word rasped from her throat and made her pause to clear it as delicately as was possible. “No, Duncan is fine. Uh…that is, I haven’t seen him yet today, but I assume he is or I imagine I would have been taken to him without pause.”

“Then it’s me you seek.”

The quiet authority in his deep voice swept across her skin and left a trail of pleasant prickles.

She nodded and again her gaze slipped to his smooth jaw, to the sensual shape of his lips.

The reason she’d come here niggled in the back of her mind.

He let his own gaze wander down her face, her neck, her breasts. Her heartbeat fluttered from steady to erratic.

Though he didn’t step toward her, though he hadn’t touched her or even spoken, Celia’s body heated with wet desire.

“I came to talk to you.” Her voice sounded as breathless as she felt.

He raised an eyebrow for her to continue.

That slow, steady gaze of his made the words in her head go fuzzy, all the rehearsed speech now reduced to a blur of ideas. “You see, you’ve done too much,” she said finally.

“I havena done anything at all,” he replied in a velvety voice made more for the bedroom than for discussion.

She swallowed around her dry mouth. “You’ve been too generous.”

“No nearly so much as I could be.”

“The cottage,” she blurted. “It’s too much. I thank you for caring for my herbs and giving me a lock, but the furniture, it’s too much. The bed…”

The feather bed. It had been the best night of sleep in her life. The pillow fluffiness of it had cradled her into sleep.

“You dinna like the bed?” he asked.

It was too easy to imagine him in the bed, the contrast of the white bed sheets to the black of his hair, the hardness of his body pressing her into the softness of the bed. To think of the bed now with such wicked thoughts, its pillowed surface seemed more of a cloud to shield the tangle of sweat-slicked bodies and muffle the cries of pleasure.

“It’s too costly.” She forced the words from her dry throat. “I could never pay it back.”

He shrugged. “Ye come to see Duncan every day—’tis payment enough.”

She gritted her teeth against the thoughts writhing in her mind. “I don’t want you to expect anything more from me than has already been discussed.”

His gaze narrowed slightly. “Ye’ve stated yer own expectations.”

“Yes. I just didn’t want…” She felt foolish suddenly, standing there stammering out a broken speech that had been so smooth in her mind only minutes before.

“Me to break my vow to ye? Do ye think so little of me?” His jaw tightened.