Page 52 of A Scot on the Rocks

The quiet should have felt awkward with a woman he’d known for less than two days, but it didn’t.

Jamie had shared rooms with women before and understood laughter, flirtation, intimacy, and the pleasant simplicity of two people knowing exactly what they wanted from one another.

This was different. She stood beside him muttering about the astonishing absence of something she called dish soap, and somehow the sight of her in his home felt more natural than it had any right to.

When they returned to the old hall after cleaning up, Olivia went directly to the ghost apparatus, adjusted the cord another inch, and stepped aside while Jamie rehung the lantern where she wanted it.

“Try it now.”

He pulled.

The linen moved slowly behind the arch as the shadow stretched high across the stone, one knock sounding from the far wall before two more answered from nearer the doorway.

Jamie watched the figure distort in the moving light.

Damn her.

“That,” he admitted, “is verra good.”

With a nod she turned and walked toward the south wing. He remained near the lantern for a moment, watching her go. He was accustomed to women noticing his face, his height, or his ability to make them laugh, and he understood that sort of attention well enough to know what to do with it. Olivia, however, had shown greater interest in his whisky than his face, improved a haunting he’d considered perfectly respectable, approved of his smuggling within moments of hearing about the tax, charmed Iseabail by doing almost nothing, and told him about stealing an expensive bottle of wine when she was a child as though the story reflected well upon her.

He still didn’t know what to make of the widow Bennett, but for the first time in a very long while, he found himself wanting to know more about the enchanting woman who’d appeared in his glen.

Chapter 9

Olivia

Maybe horses weren’t so bad. Olivia liked raw carrots and so did Bess.

She’d figured it out after one experimental offering, during which the mare had taken the piece from her palm with a delicacy no creature that large had any right to possess, chewed with deep satisfaction, and then looked at Olivia as if they’d entered into a reasonable contract that ought to continue indefinitely.

“You’re very polite,” Olivia told her, holding out another slice she’d cut from the end of a carrot Jamie had left on the table. “That’s already more than I can say for half the men I’ve dated.”

Bess’s ears flicked forward as she accepted it with a soft nudge against Olivia’s palm.

The stable inside the mostly ruined castle still made Olivia shake her head. Fresh straw covered the floor, tack hung along one stone wall, and the mingled scents of hay, leather, peat smoke, damp wool, and horse filled the space though not unpleasantly.

Bess lowered her head and nudged her empty hand.