Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Five hours later
Juliet stood before the guest bedroom’s bow window and stared out across Loch ìm toward hills golden-hued with spring buttercups. Though it was nearly eight at night, the April light had done naught more than cast a gray evening haze. The gloaming, the Scottish called it.
The rain hadn’t let up, rendering the fields boggy and the road connecting Baile ìm to Dalhousie Manor impassable. She would be staying the night.
Beneath Kilmuir’s roof.
The very idea defied belief.
She turned and took in the bedroom. Clean, but out of current fashion in the manner of a place benignly neglected. Like the atmosphere outside, this room held a gray haze, but it was from the lack of a woman’s touch.
Also benignly neglected? The dress she was wearing.
While her garments dried before the fire, a cheery maid had rummaged through an old cedar chest and at the bottom had found this dress, which was surely more than twice Juliet’s age.
Thankfully, she was a good eight inches taller than its original owner, so the hem cleared the floorboards by a few inches, rendering panniers unnecessary.
All she needed to complete her impersonation of a high-born lady from the previous century was a towering white powdered wig and a beauty patch on her right cheek.
She took a seat before the dressing table and began to twist her hair into a simple chignon at the nape of her neck. She caught her eye in the mirror. The image before her was identical to the one she’d known all her life, and yet…
Who was she?
Who was the woman who nearly ravished a man because he was too polite to refuse her kiss?
For that was what had happened this afternoon in the rain: a near ravishment.
By her.
Of him.
But, oh, his kiss—and the hot, solid feel of him beneath her fingertips—had been everything her secret dreams had thought it would be.
The kiss had started sweetly enough. But when his large, sure hand had trailed down her body to cup her bottom before dragging her against his, oh, so hard length, some mechanism flipped inside her. With his massive, muscled body, he became an object of lust, and she’d become ravenous for him.
Then, like that, he’d pulled away.
“You know why, Miss Windermere.”
Her jaw clenched.
She did.
Miss Dalhousie was why. Though absent, her presence never hovered too far away.
Juliet’s cheeks should be burning with mortification, but they refused.
Thwarted was closer to how she felt.
“Milady?”
Juliet swiveled on the low stool to find the maid at the door. “Yes?” Though not technically a lady, in this servant’s eyes she was.
“I’m to lead ye through the house to supper.”
Juliet stood and gathered a soft woolen shawl about her shoulders. This plain gray garment would never be worn to dine in London. But the Scottish had a much more practical outlook, a fact that didn’t go unappreciated.
As Juliet was led to the dining room, she couldn’t help noting how very different this house was from Dalhousie Manor. All dark mahogany wainscoting and sparsely lit wall sconces, this house was shadowy and spare, not an ounce of fancy or whim on it—a bachelor’s residence.
If anyone in London discovered that she was spending the night alone with the eminently eligible bachelor, the Viscount Kilmuir—never mind the ten or so servants also inhabiting the place—her reputation would be shredded to tatters.
But this was Scotland, and those rules felt very far away.
As if they didn’t apply to her here.
She touched a fingertip to her lips. They were still swollen from the intensity of the kiss…from the delicious scrape of his beard.
She hoped the feeling never faded.
She entered the dining room and found Kilmuir rising to his feet—as a gentleman should—at the other end of a long, oval table gleaming with the reflected glow of flickering light from the candelabras placed along the perimeter of the room.
The crystal chandelier above remained unlit, for which she was grateful.
It would’ve made the dinner feel formal. She much preferred this cozy feel.
Her gaze met his. A taut silence stretched long, and, of a sudden, the twenty feet between them was nothing.
The kiss… It was here.
The knowledge of it.
The remembered feel of it.
A feel that hadn’t left her lips…
Or her hands from touching his body…
From touching…
Him.
A feel that had her squeezing her thighs together beneath her skirts.
For the place that corresponded with him was still begging for a touch of her own.
“You look…” he began, clearly searching for words.
Juliet plucked at her skirts. “Like your grandmother?”
He snorted. “Hardly.”
“Like your grandmother’s ghost?”
He cocked his head.
“The dress, my lord,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “It was in fashion when Marie Antoinette yet remained in possession of her head.”
“Ah,” he said, resuming his seat when she took hers. “I don’t go in for lady’s fashions.”
“I should hope not,” she said. “The empire waist wouldn’t suit you.”
He gave a dry laugh. “And here it is.”
“Here what is?”
“The renowned wit of Miss Windermere.”
The remark wasn’t in the least caustic, but spoken with that too-appealing lopsided smile of his. He wasn’t the least intimidated by her wit, that smile said.
She liked that about him.
His solid, quiet confidence.
Oh, she more than liked it. She found it…ravishing.
“We shall have to shout our conversation all night if we keep these places at the table,” she said.
He nodded. “Perhaps we meet halfway?”
In unison, they rose, and she went to her left, and he to his, so they now faced each other across the crosswise span of the table.
“Better?” he asked, sitting back as servants moved their table settings before them.
“Much.”
His scent reached her here. Kilmuir always managed to smell like man, but somehow like good man. A man who had hiked three hours in a pine forest and perhaps rubbed a bit of sap on himself for good measure. She was never been able to smell pine without thinking of him.
A bowl of soup appeared before her, and her heart lifted. “Cock-a-leekie,” she said, lifting a spoonful to her mouth.
“It’s mostly simple fare we eat here,” said Kilmuir.
“I look forward to my trips to Scotland just for the soup.”
They each tucked into the meal before Juliet supposed she should be a good guest and make conversation with the lord—or in this case laird—of the manor.
It was odd to think of him in that way. It seemed so…
adult…which could be a strange thing when they’d known each other since youth.
And yet… “In the year that you’ve been here, you seem to have settled into the running of Baile ìm,” she observed.
She wouldn’t observe—at least not aloud—that it imbued him with a new seriousness and capability that only enhanced his manly attractiveness.
She cleared her throat. “Do you enjoy it?”
“Aye,” he said, taking a draw of his ale. “You know Archie is like a brother to me.”
She nodded.
“But around the time I turned thirty, I’d grown tired of playing the spoiled lord about Town.”
She felt her brow lift. “You and Archie were very popular. Particularly amongst the ladies.”
He snorted. “Lords are always popular amongst ladies.”
“You’re referring to title huntresses,” she said. “But you and Archie aren’t exactly toads.” He had to have an inkling what supremely dashing figures he and Archie had cut in those Mayfair drawing rooms.
He shrugged the observation away. “Well, it was boring.”
And there it was—that ability of his she so admired. To take a complicated matter and make it simple. Because the simple truth was Mayfair drawing rooms were boring.
The idea occurred to her that she hoped never to return to one.
Ridiculous idea.
Of course, she would. She was an unmarried lady who made her home in London. Those drawing rooms were an integral part of her life there.
“And are you ever bored here?” she prompted. She wanted to know more about his life in Scotland.
“Never. I might even be somewhat useful.” He sat back and let a servant take his empty bowl. “Or at least, that’s my goal. My tenants and workers might not think so yet, but I’m determined they will.”
Before she knew it, honest words were spilling from her mouth. “I think you can do anything you put your mind to.” Too honest.
A note of surprise flashed behind his eyes before a mischievous light replaced it. “Even write poetry like you?”
“Perhaps not that.” She wouldn’t let him change the subject. “But that doesn’t mean much. Simply our talents lie in different directions.”
“Diplomatic of you to say.”
“I never say anything I don’t mean, Kilmuir.”
His head cocked to the side. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling less certain of the statement than she had a moment ago. He had the look of a man about to use it to his advantage.
“I have a question for you then.”
She hesitated. “And that is?”
“Out of all your family, you’re the only one who never called me Rory.”
Her mouth snapped shut.
“Why is that?” he pressed.
Her heart beat out a heavy thud. She’d just told him she never lied, but to tell the truth after all these years…
And yet why shouldn’t she?
She reached for her tankard of ale and took a long pull. She released a small burp behind her hand before saying in a rush, “The answer is quite simple.” She inhaled a quick, bracing gulp of air. “I harbored a—”
“A hearty distaste for the lumbering Scottish brute Archie was always bringing home during holidays?” he inserted with a smile that now reached both sides of his mouth.
Oh, that she could speak around this lump in her throat… “I harbored a secret infatuation for you.”
His smile froze, and the room went airless in the wake of her secret exposed. Into the stunned silence, she added, “In my youth.”
“Infatuation?” he repeated. “For me?”
She nodded, tightly. So many feelings charged through her—mortification, bafflement…relief. Strange, that last one.
At last, he spoke. “I thought you could barely tolerate my presence.”