Page 9 of The Laird's Masked Passion

His arm was locked about her waist with such absolute possession that her breath seemed to belong less to her lungs than to the strength holding her upright. The other hand kept the reins gathered tight. His chest was a hard wall behind her shoulders, while his thighs caged hers against the saddle. The heat of him came through silk, linen, wool, and fear with a wicked persistence that no amount of outrage could quite banish.

Elspeth had never been so near a man. She had been led through dances and stood in crowded halls where gentlemen bowed and smiled and spoke with careful nothingness. But this was not a dance. There was no music, no mother watching, no safe space between one body and another. There was only the thunderof hooves, the rough road jolting beneath them, and Colin MacKenzie’s breath at her ear.

“Slow down,” she gasped, though she did not know whether she wished him to slow the horse or the terrible beating of her own heart.

He did neither.

“Hold still.”

“I should be delighted tae obey,” she snapped, clutching at the saddle, “had ye provided me with a chair instead of a war-beast.”

His arm tightened as the horse leapt a rut in the road. Elspeth’s back struck his chest, and a gasp escaped her. She felt, rather than heard, his breath catch.

“Are ye hurt?” she heard him ask.

The question should not have softened anything in her. It was hardly tenderness to ask whether one had broken the woman one had just bought, married, kissed, and stolen from a cathedral under attack. Yet there it was, a tender note beneath his command, as if concern had slipped out before he could imprison it.

“I am furious,” she snarled. “It is a condition often mistaken for injury by men who have caused it.”

“Then ye are well enough tae argue.”

“I wasbornwell enough tae argue.”

A sound moved in his chest again. It might have been laughter, had he been the sort of man permitted such ordinary habits.

Elspeth hated that she noticed it. She hated still more that the sound warmed the place where his chest pressed against her back. Her body seemed determined to collect evidence against her sense: the scrape of his jaw near her temple when he glanced behind them, the leather-and-smoke scent of him, the firm flex of his arm when the horse veered and he brought it back.

She fixed her gaze on the road ahead and tried to think of murder.

“Who were they?” she demanded.

“I dinnae ken.”

A gust of wind snatched at her loosened hair and flung it across his mouth. He turned his face, and she felt the movement against the side of her head. The intimacy of it was so sudden, so improper, that her next breath came too shallow.

“Ye expect me tae believe,” she continued because anger was safer than silence, “that men in black burst intae a cathedral on the hour of yer wedding, and ye have nae notion who sent them?”

“I dinnae ken fer certain.”

“Ah. A husband of admirable precision. Bought by the pound and cautious by the ounce.”

“Careful, wife.”

The word struck harder than the wind.

Wife.

It was absurd. It was monstrous. It had been spoken over her while blood rang outside church doors and her mother stood white-faced beneath her father’s hand. Yet now, it lived betweenthem, carried by the rhythm of a horse galloping away from every life she had known.

“I am nae yer wife in any way that matters,” she corrected.

His hand shifted at her waist, and the small adjustment sent a dangerous awareness through her middle. “The Church disagrees.”

“The Church also stood by while I was sold. I find its judgment presently lacking.”

“The Crown witnessed it.”

“Then the Crown may ride in front of ye and be crushed against yer chest for an hour.”