Page 63 of The MacGregor's Lady
Except her plan backfired as she all but pitched against his chest when her hip protested anything remotely resemblingwhisking.
He caught her snugly against a frame as solid as the granite she’d seen in such abundance in the North. “Careful now. Think of all the fellows who’ll be disappointed if you have to sit out your waltzes tomorrow night.”
She couldn’t think, not of the fortune hunters, not of waltzing, because his scent was assaulting her reason and his voice was a growling burr right near her ear. He was warm and male, and they were alone in a way all the closed doors in London couldn’t emulate.
“Have I kissed you yet out-of-doors?” He addressed himself to the top of her head, where he’d rested his chin. “In the gazebo, but that’s not quite like kissing you in what passes for the wild in England. And while I cannot convince you to marry me, I can ask for a kiss from a pretty lady on a pretty day—for only a kiss.”
He wasn’taskingfor anything. He was breathing in her scent, his chest expanding with each inhalation while Hannah felt a finger clad in soft, horsy-scented leather touch her chin and an exaltation of larks soar aloft under her breastbone.
“Just a kiss, Hannah. Just one more…” He sounded as if he were promising himself it would be the last “just one more,” but Asher MacGregor could interpret “one” to mean a single eternity of delicate invitation from his lips to hers, a possession that yielded as it seduced, and a voluptuous promise of pleasures yet unexplored.
Hannah’s senses conspired with him, bringing her the sensation—intimate, masculine—of the contour of his jaw beneath her gloved palm, and awareness, even more intimate and masculine, of his erection rising against her belly.
How long she indulged in Asher’s version of “one more kiss,” Hannah could not have said. Too long and not nearly long enough.
A horse snorted, and Hannah found herself set back, Asher’s hands on her shoulders for long enough that she didn’t stumble. He tucked a pair of reins into her grasp and turned his back to her, ostensibly to check the snugness of his horse’s girth.
“Good morning, all.” Connor MacGregor tipped his hat from the back of a stout gray as the beast ambled into the clearing. “Spathfoy and I saw your groom heading back on foot and decided to seek the shade of the woods.”
The Earl of Spathfoy tipped his hat as well, both the gesture and his expression more reserved than Connor’s smirk. Spathfoy was married to Genie’s younger sister, Hester, and to Hannah’s eye, he was the predictable result of a Scottish heiress marrying an English lord. Spathfoy had the English air of hauteur, along with the physique of a dark-haired, robust Viking. Hannah dealt with him warily, for all he seemed unabashedly smitten with his countess.
“You tired of hopping hedges and leaping ditches?” Asher asked, circling around to the front of his gelding and looping the reins over its head. “We were about to water the horses.”
“A fine idea.” Connor vaulted off his horse in a maneuver that involved neither stirrups nor much decorum. Spathfoy’s dismount was a more punctilious affair.
“The ladies suggested we might be more likely to find deer here in the wood,” Spathfoy observed. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any fawns?”
He arched an eyebrow at Asher, and Hannah realized Spathfoy might have made a subtle pun. Fauns? A faun was a variation on the satyr, if she recalled her mythology. Subtle but not humorous, at least not to her.
Another rustling in the bushes from the opposite direction was followed by a cheerful, “Well, there you are!”
Malcolm emerged on horseback from the foliage, followed by two young women Hannah vaguely recognized, and at the back of the party, a groom on a pink-muzzled cob.
“Oh.” Malcolm’s smile faltered. “And Cousin Con, and Spathfoy. Are you lost?”
Asher took Hannah’s reins from her hand. “Connor MacGregor couldn’t get lost in the woods if it was darkest night and the middle of a dense fog. It’s Miss Pringle and Miss Hargreave, isn’t it? Ladies.”
Asher bowed at Malcolm’s companions. They simpered and tittered, and generally let it be known that finding an earl lurking in the underbrush relieved them of any pretensions toward sense. Of Spathfoy and Connor, they took the barest notice, and of Hannah, no notice beyond the civilities.
The interruptions—plural—were welcome because they gave Hannah a moment to regain her composure. By the time the men had watered eight horses, checked eight girths, and restored three ladies to their saddles, Hannah could pretend she hadn’t nearly been caught with her tongue in Asher MacGregor’s mouth and her breasts pressed to his chest.
“Fine day for a romp in the woods, isn’t it?” Connor asked as he held a branch back for Hannah and her mount to pass under.
Or perhaps she had been caught. “The day is lovely.”
Or it had been, for a few forbidden moments.
Connor’s horse fell in step beside Hannah’s mare, while ahead of them, Asher kept the ladies company. Malcolm rode at the front of the cavalcade, and Spathfoy, like a disapproving Viking nanny, brought up the rear.
“And you’re a lovely lady,” Connor said, “but we have lovely ladies aplenty in Scotland, and I will even admit that England boasts a few, seeing as my own darling wife hails from Albion.”
For him, this was flowery speech indeed. “Is there something you’d like to ask me, Connor?”
“Ask ye?” Dark brows rose, as if the very notion intrigued. “No, not ask. I do admit to some puzzlement, though.”
Hannah waited, for there was nothing idle about Connor’s puzzlement.
“I ask myself why, when Balfour has had the pick of the lovely ladies in the United States and Canada, and the lovely ladies in Aberdeenshire and Edinburgh, and the lovely ladies in London—of whom there are entire regiments—why does my brother the earl find it necessary to kiss only your wee self?”
