Page 31 of The Scot Beds His Wife

“Ye’ll answer for that,” Locryn threatened.

Unceasingly amused, Samantha guessed, “You’re referring to her tits, right?”

“Nay,” said Calybrid only a beat faster than Locryn’s “Aye.”

“You know you can be frank around me.”

“Who’s this Frank?” Locryn scratched his russet hair.

“It means candid.” Samantha laughed. “You don’t have to mince words just because I’m a woman.”

“We ken that,” Calybrid said sheepishly. “It’s just…”

“I think Cal didna want ye to feel slighted because ye doona have any breasts,” Locryn said.

“I do too have breasts,” Samantha argued, then crossed her arms over her conspicuously flat chest when three pairs of eyes skeptically surveyed the unimpressive topography.

“Doona fash, Sam.” Calybrid, spying her scowl, hurried to balm the wound. “Ye’re plenty fair.”

“Aye,” Locryn agreed.

“With eyes the color of the Alt Dubh Gorm.”

“Sure, that too.”

“Just… no one will write odes to yer breasts is all.”

“On account of ye not having any,” Locryn supplied, rather unnecessarily, in Samantha’s opinion.

Calybrid knocked Locryn again. “It’s like ye doona even want supper, ye daft ox.”

“Well, I know who’s not getting the grouse breasts, anyhow,” she teased, winking her forgiveness at the odd, elderly pair.

When Samantha summoned the courage to glance over at Callum, she noted a bit of pink had crawled from beneath his collar and disappeared beneath his beard. His eyes gleamed like amber in the sun, though, with good humor and perhaps something else.

Something that made her look away.

While her little operation of outcasts ate grouse, wild greens, and gravy she made with the drippings, in companionable silence, Samantha considered her position.

Despite her promise to Alison, she realized that she truly didn’t want to lose this place. In the week she’d been here at Erradale, she’d fallen in love. The manor house itself was a rather labyrinthine, rambling estate that seemed to have been added onto by each generation. This main hall, its windows rippled with age and thick wood and mortar walls, was bigger than any cabin she’d ever lived in. The structure itself older than her entire country.

Because she spent her days rounding up cattle spread for miles across bog-riddled moors dappled with splendid lochs, she was left with no time for the care and upkeep of the house. Nor could she split wood for a fireplace in both the spacious master suite and the great hall. And so each night, she rolled a plethora of soft furs onto the giant flagstones of the great hearth, and let the dancing ghosts cast by the firelight on the blue stones lull her exhausted body to sleep. Sometimes, she’d wake with a start and the shadows created by nothing but dying embers would loom over her.

Sometimes they wore the faces of her demons. Of her sins.

Of the man she’d murdered. The man she’d loved.

At least she thought she’d loved him.

However, Samantha had begun to wonder, if she’d trulyloved Bennett, would she not mourn him more deeply? Would she not remember him more fondly?

Would she have been unable to pull the trigger, in spite of everything he’d done? Of everything he was threatening to do…

Troubled, she felt the hairs at the nape of her neck prickle with awareness, and she looked up to find Callum silently studying her with the steady gaze of an cartographer deciphering a foreign map.

Unwilling to be caught in a brood, she ran a tongue over her teeth to clear any remnants of her supper and flashed him an unrepentant grin, which he blithely returned.

“Callum,” she ventured, having dispensed with proprieties almost immediately after they’d become acquainted. “Have you always lived here… in the Highlands, I mean?”