Page 62 of The Scot Beds His Wife

He blinked down at her for a silent moment, the ferocity melting into bewildered displeasure. Where had this barbaric vehemence come from? This simmer of violence and wrath in his blood?

That place.The one he named Mackenzie. The one he’d shoved into the void and locked behind vaults comprised of dispassionate nonchalance and cold calculations painted with a veneer of charm.

Would that he could cut it out of himself.

He didn’t want to feel like this about her.

He didn’t want to feel…

“I—I don’t think I ever was his beloved,” she whispered, biting her lower lip to still a dreadful wobble in her chin.

“I should think not,” Gavin muttered. “And neither should ye love him.”

“I thought I did… but after everything… I knew it could not be so. Or losing him would have broken me.”

Struck with an encompassing tenderness, Gavin looked down at the woman in his bed with a new and genuine respect. He knew a thing or two about loss.

About a broken heart.

“I’m becoming convinced that there’s nothing in this world that could break ye, bonny.”

Suddenly, a path revealed itself. One better than any he’d yet been presented with. One where both of his desires were bundled into a tidy package and delivered into his anxious, enterprising hands.

“Ye’re certain it was these fuckers, these Masters brothers, who sent those men after ye?” he pressed, his heart accelerating with the weightiness of what he was about to propose.

“I know they are. There’s no one else.”

“Then I can help ye, lass, I can help keep ye and, more importantly, Erradale safe from yer enemies.”

“How?” she whispered, then stronger, said, “I mean,why? Why would you?”

“Because if we married, both yeand Erradalewould be mine. And I fight to the death to protect what’s mine.”

CHAPTERFOURTEEN

“Marry you?” Samantha wheezed around the heart that had begun to leap into her throat. Was she still dreaming? Dear God, let her still be dreaming. “What makes you think I’d even consider it? We can’t stand each other.”

That devastating dimple indented the groove next to his cheek. “I’ll give ye that, bonny, but what I have in mind doesna involve a great deal of standing.”

“Be serious,” she hissed. “That may be the worst idea anyone’s ever spoken aloud.”

“I’m not asking ye to like me, lass, only to marry me.”

“Is this some kind of cruel fucking joke?” she gasped.

“Do ye mean to tell me there’s no such thing as a convenient marriage where ye come from?” He twisted his lips into an expression of doubt.

“‘Convenient’?” she echoed. “I very much assume that if you considered marriagea convenience,you’d have done it once or twice by now.”

He had the temerity to laugh, the rich sound producingthe usual explosion of moths inside of her belly. “Do ye know what I like about ye, bonny?”

“I really wish you’d stop calling me—”

“It’s that ye say what ye mean. Ye doona care what I think. Ye’re an honest woman who isna afraid of her own capability. Also, ye’re cleverer than most, which I wouldna have guessed about ye right away, I’m ashamed to admit.”

An unexpected burst of pleasure at the compliment stole her capacity for speech. An honest woman? Lord, was he ever mistaken. She wondered if he’d realize just how much he’d missed the mark in his estimation of her… She was neither honest nor predominantly clever, though she wished to be both. At the moment, neither was she particularly capable of much, since her leg was out of commission.

Also, to make his compliment false in the absolute, she was beginning to realize that shedidcare what he thought…