Page 35 of The Scot Beds His Wife

Until it was too late.

His favorite was pretending to be the prey. Allowing himself to be stalked, to be desired, pursued. Then, just as the predator thought him ripe for the picking, he’d turn and strike, savoring the openmouthed, confounded astonishment of his opponent.

This tended to be just as efficient with women as with wolves.

There was something more than a little satisfying about ripping the heart out of someone the moment before they expected to do the same to you.

Perhaps his enjoyment of that made him a monster.

But the blood of monsters ran in the Mackenzie family, did it not? He’d been sired by one. His body sullied. His name tainted.

His mother ruined.

He’d initially thought that if he learned to be something else, anything else, his family curse wouldn’t touch him. He’d taught himself to be everything. The poet and the prince. The lordling and the lion. The lover and the hunter. What were the Scots before steam and smoke and English money?

They were hunters.

He’d learned his artful skills from observation, experience, and the most remarkable tutors of all…

Pain. Hunger. Failure.

He’d been a fool to assume this new venture at ranching would be any different. That it wouldn’t be one more thing that would chip away at his soul before he mastered it. He’d thought he could study enough books, discuss it with enough experts, that he’d slide into it as easily as he did a lathered countess’s quim.

Why, he wondered with an expelled breath, musteverythingbe such an arduous battle? Why did all he sought come at such a price to his very being? When so many seemed to hack their bloody way through life, heedless of the devastation left in their wake, and still the heavens poured bounteous blessings on their undeserving heads. Whilehewas left in the mire with no choice but the difficult, undesired one.

Cocking his rifle, Gavin watched the prey he’d hunted by way of small puddles of blood and such flail about in piteous distress before relaxing back to its side.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” he muttered.

The beast looked up at him with eyes both gentle and wary from beneath a fringe of ridiculously long russet hair.

There was pain in those eyes too, and fear.

Strange,he thought bitterly, how there’s always a little more innocence left to lose.

The click of someone else’s firearm froze the finger he’d inched toward the trigger. Gavin knew just who was behind him before she even opened her mouth.

He could sense her, somehow. In the way the hairs on his body seemed to lift and vibrate at her approach.

“Oh, it’s you,” she lamented.

“Aye, bonny…’tis me.” William Blake he was not, buthe’d not the temperament to cultivate a persona at the moment, as he was just about as happy to encounter her as she sounded to have happened upon him.

“Where I come from, butchering someone else’s cattle is a hanging offense.” Her threat was wry, if not subtle.

Gavin cursed every square inch of that capitalist mecca that turned what should have been a good Scottish girl into a goddamned, trigger-happy American.

“I’m notbutcheringanything,” he replied from between clenched teeth. Fury at himself for allowing her to sneak up on him surpassed his ire at the strange anticipation that heated his blood as she nudged her horse nearer. “I’m putting it out of its misery.”

“That right?” Her dismount from behind him was muffled by the soft ground cover. “She keel over from tedium after too long in your company? Can’t be the first time that’s ever happened. No reason to put a bullet in her head.”

“If a woman loses consciousness in my company, it’s generally due to a swoon. Or pleasurable exhaustion.” As she drew abreast of him, Gavin looked down at her to weigh the effect of his innuendo and, once again, found himself enjoying that she was among only a handful of ladies he’d met in his life who were taller than his shoulders.

Because he wanted to smile at her, he frowned, sternly.

The sound she made was so unladylike, he couldn’t tell if it was a snort or a laugh. “You saying that’s what happened here? You tuckered her out with your lovemaking?”

Her cobalt eyes danced with self-satisfied mirth, and yet he found himself surveying their surface with the same appreciation he’d done for Loch Awe beneath the rare noonday sun.