Page 34 of Somewhere Along The Way (Mackinnon #3)

It was a warm day with no wind and blessed with a cloudless blue sky.

Puddles left from an overnight shower collected along the side of the road, but the road itself was dry.

As she passed beneath trees, golden spikes of sunlight left blotches on the road, and she considered for a moment stopping there to wait beneath the great sweeping boughs of a tree she could only identify as one that did not grow in England.

But she was as tired of waiting as she was of sitting, so she continued on her way.

The scent of heather filled her senses and she removed her bonnet and retied the wide satin ribbon, hanging the hat from her arm.

Before long she began gathering wild flowers that grew along the road, and for lack of a better place to put them, used her bonnet, which soon looked like a basket overrun with color.

All this walking made her warm and her feet hot.

She remembered that Ross had invited her to remove her shoes that night on the shores of the loch, and she toyed with that idea briefly, but that was about as far as the thought went.

She might be walking down the road, common as a peasant, but she wasn’t going to go barefoot like one.

She came to a place where a smaller road forked off to the left.

Certain that this fork was one that led to Dunford, she turned down it.

An hour or so down the road, it became narrower and cluttered with stones and bore the marks of a road little used.

About the time she was wondering if she should turn back, the road ended at the edge of a small beck that gurgled and gushed with frigid water, thawed from melting snow.

A few rotted timbers lying alongside told her there had been a bridge of sorts here at one time, but that was long ago.

At its narrowest point, the beck wasn’t more than six or eight feet wide.

The stones that lay scattered in the water were small and covered with lichen.

She couldn’t step on them, even with care.

Even to try, she feared, would leave her with more than her slippers wet.

At this unpropitious moment she heard the unmistakable sound of a horse approaching and turned to see Ross Mackinnon ride up, looking bigger than Edinburgh and twice as splendid.

“You gave up on waiting in the coach, I see?” he said, swinging down from his horse.

She ignored that. “Did you see Lady MacDonald and the others?”

“I did. They are all safely tucked between the stone walls of Dunford by now, where you would be, if you had remained in the coach. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been looking for you?”

“I thought I’d meet whoever came for me a bit sooner if I walked.”

“And you would have… if you had stayed on the main road. Why did you leave it for this cow trail?”

“I thought it was the turn-off to Dunford.”

“This road doesn’t go anywhere. The one you’re thinking of is another mile or two away,” he said.

She looked away. “I suppose my mother is quite distraught.”

He grinned. “She was. She ordered me to wait for her to change into her riding habit so she could accompany me.”

“How did you persuade her not to come?”

Ross laughed. “I didn’t. I left before she could change.”

“You didn’t,” she said, in horrified tones.

“I did, and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.”

Annabella felt the bubbling of a laugh and clamped her hands over her mouth.

Across from her and watching, Ross had drawn a shaky breath that seemed out of step with his others.

The humor left his eyes, a lingering smile hovering about his mouth.

With no real idea of what he was thinking, Annabella plucked a wilted yellow flower from her bonnet and offered it to him as she said, “Perhaps you can appease her by bringing her flowers.”

“That flower,” he said, not taking his eyes from her face, “would get me in considerably hotter water. It’s wilted beyond recognition. You’d best throw it and the others away.”

She looked at the wilted flower. “I think I’ll keep it,” she said, thrusting it back into her bonnet with the others.

He looked her over appreciatively, from her exquisite face down to the tips of toes that seemed too shy to leave the security of her long, flowing skirt.

He noted the fashionable bonnet dangling from her arm, stuffed with meadow flowers and a peacock feather dropped by one of the Duke of Dunford’s peacocks angling out to one side.

“I suppose,” he said, coming closer, “that it’s time to hoist you on the back of my horse and get you back to Dunford, before my grandfather and your mother have every chambermaid in the area armed with feather dusters and storming the countryside looking for you.”

She knew he was joking, but his words rang true.

Her thoughts angled in the direction of concern for her mother, but she looked at him and lost her train of thought.

There was something disconcerting about a man who looked at a woman that way.

“Yes,” she said in a quite distracted way, “I suppose she might.”

Unwilling to accept the fact that she was betrothed to another man, he studied her smooth, young face.

The full afternoon sun graced her porcelain cheeks and dusted them with amber powder, and he thought he had never seen skin as smooth or as finely textured, at least not on anyone above five years old.

And once again, he had never seen a face or eyes—save the expressive face of a child—display more feeling and more emotion.

She had the body of a seductress, the face of an angel, and the openness and lack of awareness of a child.

Never had he seen her use her uncommonly good looks to her advantage, and for a woman who looked as she did, that was remarkable.

With one swift movement, he plucked her from her feet and swung her up into his arms. Before she could register surprise, he stepped into the water, splashing across the beck with her.

Being in a man’s arms was awkward for her, and the moment they reached the other side, she asked him to put her down. “Please,” she said, looking into his eyes with such pleading that he was helpless to do anything less than she asked.

He lowered her to her feet, but he didn’t release her.

Instead he pulled her closer, losing himself in the slow, penetrating sensation of just how good she felt.

But she was shy and inexperienced and stiff as a board, and he knew he had to get her back.

“I’d better get you back,” he said. “Can you ride?”

“I prefer to walk.”

Tucking the reins into the back of his waistband, he walked along beside her. The road was rougher now, more like a winding path than a road. Rain had collected in potholes and the ground in between was soggy heath, making walking slow and difficult.

“You’re getting your slippers muddy—and your skirts as well.”

“They’re ruined anyway. What’s a little mud after so much walking?”

“Just the same, I think you should ride. Come on, I’ll give you a boost up.”

“I told you, I’d rather walk. Why can’t you leave me alone? Don’t you have anyone else you can bother?”

He looked thoughtful for a minute. “Nope. You’re the only one I can think of,” he said. “A gentleman wouldn’t let a lady walk while he rode.”

“And how would you be knowing anything about a gentleman?” she asked. “I’m surprised the word is even in your vocabulary.”

“Oh, I know about gentlemen, all right—not that I ever rightly remember seeing one, but I’ve heard of them.” He laughed. “Ease up a bit and give me a fighting chance. No man likes to see a lass walking—not even a muddy one.”

He stuck his thumbs in his leather belt and continued walking comfortably beside her.

She saw such amusement in the depths of his vivid eyes that her acute irritation gave way to immediate embarrassment, which she was sure sent flames of color to her cheeks.

To get her mind on something else, she took a swipe at a smear of mud on her sleeve.

“I must look as if I’ve been wallowing in pig swill. ”

“Someday I shall show you how to get really muddy and enjoy it,” he said casually.

“You aren’t going to teach me anything, because I shall go to great extremes to see that you and I never cross paths again.”

“Why are you being so stubborn?”

“I’m not stubborn. I’m simply not interested in having anything to do with you. There is, you know, a vast difference between the two.”

“There’s a vast difference between the two of us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t ever come together. In fact, that’s just what I would love to do. Come together.”

“You speak of it in rather epic terms, as if you’re describing what happens when two stars crash into each other—or two goats.”

He laughed. “In some ways it is a lot like that, for fragmented is how I think I could describe myself afterward.”

“Afterward?” She turned her head toward him, and he noticed she had the most adorable frown between her eyes when she was vexed. “Are we talking about the same thing?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said, laughing. “If we were, I have a hunch you’d be slapping my face about now.”

Intuitively, she shivered, feeling a sense of dread and a need to cower away from him.

This man was too much for her: too overpowering, too raw, too unrefined.

There was an audacious luster to this man that was both fresh and flagrant and much too forbidding.

She really did not know the man at all and had no idea what he might do now that she was out here in the middle of nowhere with him.

Never had a man seemed so tall, so menacing, so capable of confusing her with nothing more than his presence.

Wariness and confusion were evident in her eyes, which were as green as a Highland glen—eyes that narrowed in a way he found irresistible.

“I think…” she began.

Suddenly he stopped her by pressing his hand lightly over her mouth. “You talk too much,” he said. His thumb traced the fullness of her lower lip. “Such a waste for a mouth that could be put to much better use.”

Her intuition told her she was treading on thin ice. She tried to pull away but found herself hauled up against him, his body much more serious than the teasing play of light so evident in his eyes.

He looked down into that lovely heart-shaped face, seeing the grassy greenness of her eyes, so open and trusting. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said softly. “You don’t know what it does to a man to have a woman look at him like that.”

He had fully intended to press his suit a bit, to see just how far he could get with her, but there was something about her that brought out the good in him, all the things he had thought nonexistent, lost, or buried too deep ever to surface.

She reminded him too much of the things that were good in the world, and that made him feel as if he were staring down the barrel of a Hawken rifle with something helpless, like a spotted fawn, in his sight.

He couldn’t pull the trigger. No matter how hungry he was.

“You probably don’t,” he said softly. “I can see that you prefer to remain ignorant—but in any case, you shouldn’t be afraid of me. I’d be the last person on earth to ever do you harm—even if it meant my life.”

He stared at her and something about the way he did brought a dizzy rush of weakness to her knees. The spell was broken, but not before the effect of that warm, intense look in his eyes made her feel suddenly more alive than she had ever felt.

It was difficult to imagine, standing out here on a tranquil moor with him, that there were such things in the world as pain and misery and suffering.

At this moment, the world seemed fresh and newly created, and oh, so full of promise, with all that she desired no more than a heartbeat away.

All she had to do was reach out and take it.