Page 69 of The Scot Beds His Wife
Dear God, she’d pulled a few stunts in her day, but this… this beat them all.
Reaching the wall, she leaned heavily upon it, muttering a rare request to heaven in hopes that no one lingered beneath the window. She used her elbow for leverage, and set the chamber pot on the stone ledge as she opened the casement and peeked down to the grounds of Inverthorne to check for any unsuspecting victims below.
What she found was paradise.
Had she not known better, she’d have thought Inverthorne a castle in the clouds. Indeed, dense swirls of silver and white mist as thick as bales of lamb’s wool hovered over both the forest to the north, and the moors to the south below the window. A pale, brilliant sky met the darker blue of the ocean on a distant horizon to the west, beyond which Samantha understood were the Hebrides. The wild green isles were visible from Ravencroft, but not from the long shores of Gairloch and Inverthorne lands.
Winter scented the air with frost and evergreens and juniper. The camphorlike essence mixed with the damp chill, and miraculously stilled her unsettled stomach. Closing her eyes, she inhaled what felt like the first deep breath she’d taken in years.
This.This place. This handsome castle in the clouds. Its towers of gray stone had lorded over the Highland mist for longer than the country in which she was born ever existed. It had withstood epic sea gales, invasions, and brutal sieges.
That had to count for something, didn’t it? Maybe… maybe she could find sanctuary here. What had Alison called it?
Comraich.
What a lovely word. She wondered if it would beextended to someone like her. Not Alison Ross, an orphaned Scottish heiress, but Samantha Masters, an orphaned nobody.
No, worse than that. A thief. A liar.
A murderer.
As she stared, unblinking, down into the vapor, Samantha had never in her life wished harder to be someone else. Not somewhere else, living another life. But here. Now. In this chamber belonging to quite possibly the most arrogant, most beautiful man ever created of the earth and mist and fortified by fire.
But not as Samantha Masters. As someone elegant and graceful, ladylike and seductive with buckets of—what was the word Mena Mackenzie had used?—ah, yes. Accomplishments. What if she were someone who could entice a man such as Gavin St. James to be more thansomewhat faithful?
Emitting a self-loathing sound, she scowled down at the covered chamber pot, gripping the handles in preparation to empty it, keenly aware of a few calluses on the pads of her palms pressed against the smooth porcelain.
Christ, when had she become so sentimental and foolish? Marriage to Lord Thorne was a very unlikely long-term solution. It was a means to an end, a desperate grasp for survival. She knew next to nothing about him, only that he was an unscrupulous scoundrel, a notorious rake, a relentless rival, and… a man of his word.
She didn’t understand exactly how she knew that. She just did. She felt it in that place unpolluted by desire or distrust. That place that recognized the verisimilitude in his vow to protect her once she belonged to him.
She muttered a low curse every time she was forced to accept that she needed protection at the moment. That herchild needed it. Neededhim. But only for now. Once she healed. Once the baby arrived. Once she was paid her first and maybe her second annuity.
Once Gavin had tired of her… which he undoubtably would.
She could consider her choices.
The ancient hinges of the chamber door protested movement in the late morning chill. In a thoughtless panic, Samantha shoved the entire chamber pot out the window, simultaneously allowing the sheet to drop from her body.
“Shit,” she cussed. “Goddammit.” She watched the pot disappear into the mist with something akin to fascinated horror, before whirling to face Gavin and groping for a viable reason to be up and about on her screaming leg just as desperately as she groped for the bedclothes.
First, she’d need to gauge just how much he’d seen of—
The figure framed in the stone arch stymied her speechless. A woman. A small, delicately beautiful woman with lush hair the precise color of the sand about eighty miles east of where she’d grown up. The place where the sunbaked Nevada desert met the stretch of salt flats.
A melange of dark gold, laced with striations of white was styled and coiffed to perfection. The woman stood still and straight as a china doll, and she gave Samantha the impression of similar fragility. Her skin had surely never touched the sun, and when she drifted into the chamber, her feet didn’t seem to touch the ground.
“Is everything all right, Miss Ross?” Her accent was a softer version than that of the Highlands men Samantha was used to, laced with touching feminine concern.
No. She couldn’t think of one thing about this situation that even approached the realm of all right.
But she was alive. She’d survived. And that was a place to start.
“I’m just fine, thank you.” Samantha lied carefully.
“That surprises me. I can’t imagine that any woman who’d fought off malefactors almost entirely on her own, was shot in the process, and then proposed to all in the course of one night could resemble anything close to fine.” The lady’s delicate nose twitched a little, and she turned her face to the window. “Are you ill, Miss Ross?”
Two things became very apparent to Samantha the moment the elegant woman turned her face toward the window, revealing stunning eyes the color of dappled oak leaves. First, that the woman was blind.
