She knew she was being childish, but she couldn’t bear the thought of letting it go. It was all she had left to remind her of the life she’d once shared with her parents and her brother. Time was fading both the tartan and her memories.
As if to underscore that forlorn thought, the long-case clock on the second-floor landing began to sound, not stopping until it had chimed eleven times. As the last hollow bong rolled through the house, Catriona’s spirits sank.
If Simon had betrayed her, she was done for. Eddingham was due back tomorrow afternoon and she knew his first order of business would be to petition her uncle for her hand.
Throwing off the plaid, Catriona climbed down from the window seat and stalked over to the tall cherry wardrobe in the corner. She yanked out a brocaded portmanteau and began to cram handfuls of stockings and undergarments into it.
Her uncle Ross had been right. Her head
was
stuffed full of clouds and dreams. If she hadn’t been clinging to a childish romantic fancy, she never would have entrusted her hopes—and her brother’s life—into the hands of a shameless scapegrace like Simon Wescott. She’d be better off selling the few pieces of jewelry her uncle had given her over the years and booking passage on a mail carriage to Edinburgh. She might arrive in the Highlands with little more than she’d left with, but at least she wouldn’t have to abandon all hope of finding Connor or her clan.
She was digging deeper into the wardrobe when her hands brushed a smooth length of rosewood. Her haste forgotten, she drew the rectangular box from its hiding place and gently lifted the lid. A thick sheaf of clippings was nestled in the box’s silk-lined interior.
Which you no doubt pore over every night in your virginal white nightdress before you slide
between the cold sheets of your lonely bed
.
The echo of Simon’s mocking words was so clear he might have been standing just behind her, near enough to touch. It hardly helped that her white nightdress with its fussy ruffled cuffs and high collar was as virginal as a novice’s robes.
Catriona snapped the lid shut and shoved the box deep into the portmanteau beneath the most unmentionable of her unmentionables.
She was reaching into the wardrobe for the sturdiest, homeliest wool gown she owned when a tremendous clatter came from the direction of the window. She tensed, her heart lurching into an uneven rhythm. The clatter was followed by a blistering oath in a man’s deep familiar baritone.
She ran to the window and leaned out to find Simon Wescott lying on the ground below in a disgruntled tangle of long arms and legs, splintered trellis fragments, and rosebush branches. It was hardly the dashing sight she had envisioned in countless daydreams—
Simon strolling beneath her window while strumming a lute or gazing tenderly up at her, one hand clasped to his heart while he recited,
What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Catriona is the sun!
She bit back a grin, telling herself that the giddiness coursing through her was only relief that he hadn’t broken his fool neck. “Why, good evening, Mr. Wescott,” she called down in an exaggerated whisper. “Why didn’t you just knock on the front door and have the butler announce you? It would have been a great deal more discreet.”
Swiping a trailing branch from his hair, he glared up at her. “And a great deal less painful.”
“I warned you in my note that the trellis might not bear your weight.”
Kicking away an offending piece of the structure, he sat up. “But you failed to warn me about the rosebush growing beneath it.”
“I didn’t see the need. It won’t bloom for several weeks yet.”
“It may not have blooms, but I can assure you it still has plenty of thorns. Or it did until I landed on it. Now I believe most of them are buried in my…person.” Wincing, he unwound a length of vine from his throat and clambered to his feet.
Before Catriona could suggest that she sneak down to the servants’ entrance to let him in, he was scaling the wall itself, using the roughened stones jutting out from the corner of the house for balance.
When his broad shoulders came within reach, she caught him by the back of his coat and helped to haul him through the window, the action giving her ample time to admire the intriguing play of muscles beneath the clinging superfine. She wondered if he had once scaled the rigging of the
Belleisle
with equal grace.
He cleared the window seat and rolled neatly to his feet. She backed away from him, rather intimidated now that she actually had a notorious libertine standing in her bedchamber. In her fantasies, he had always stayed safely outside the window, content to admire her from afar.
“I’m a bit disappointed in your lack of finesse, Mr. Wescott. I assumed you would have had ample experience at this.”
Rubbing his backside, he eyed her darkly. “At what? Plucking thorns out of my—”
“Sneaking through women’s windows in the dead of night,” she inserted smoothly.
“After all, isn’t that the most expedient way to avoid their husbands?”
He shook his tawny fall of hair over his shoulders and smoothed the claret silk of his waistcoat. “I’ll have you know that I stopped trifling with married women years ago.
They had an annoying habit of falling in love with me and insisting on divorcing their husbands.”
“How very tiresome that must have been for you. And the husbands,” she added dryly.
“I can assure you that my suffering was far greater than theirs, Miss Kin—” He scowled at her. “What in the bloody hell is your Christian name anyway?”
“Catriona,” she informed him, deciding this might not be the most opportune moment to chide him for swearing.
“Catriona,” he repeated, the name rolling from his tongue like music. “Naturally it would be
Catriona
,” he muttered beneath his breath. “Not Gladys or Gertrude or Brunhilde.” His expression brightened. “May I call you Kitty?”
She smiled pleasantly. “Not unless you want to land right back in that rosebush.”
He edged away from the window and swept her a genteel bow. “Good evening, my fair Catriona. Per the instructions you sent to my jail cell, I’ve come to compromise you.”
Judging from his lazy, come-hither grin and the provocative way the buff doeskin of his trousers clung to his lean hips like a second skin, he looked more than equal to the task.
Catriona swallowed, her mouth suddenly going dry. “No, you’ve come to
pretend
to compromise me. We’re not wed yet, Mr. Wescott.”
“But we are practically betrothed. So don’t you think you should call me Simon?”
Closing the distance between them, he captured her hand and brought her palm to his lips. “Or perhaps ‘darling.’ Or ‘sweetcakes.’ Or some other endearment that indicates your passionate and undying affection for me.”
Unnerved by the devilish twinkle in his eye, Catriona curled her hand into a fist. “My aunt has been married to my uncle for over thirty years and I’ve never heard her address him as anything other than ‘my lord.’”
Simon shrugged, the twinkle in his eye only deepening. “I’m only a humble knight, but I have no objection whatsoever to you addressing me as ‘my lord.’” Gently tilting her clenched hand, he brushed his parted lips over the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist. His voice deepened to a husky purr. “You can even add ‘and master’ in our more intimate moments if it pleases you.”
Fighting to ignore the melting sensation that seemed to radiate from the caress of his lips, Catriona jerked her hand out of his grip. “Have you always been so utterly shameless?”
He struggled to look contrite, but failed miserably. “So they tell me. My mother was an opera dancer, you know. I spent the first nine years of my life being raised backstage at the theater. The other dancers were always cooing over me, rumpling my hair, passing me from one lap to another.” A nostalgic smile curved his lips. “They doted on me and I adored everything about them. The way they chattered amongst themselves. The way their hair smelled. The way their petticoats rustled when they walked. I disappeared one night during a performance of
Don Giovanni
when I was six years old and my mother claimed she found me on bended knee before one of the prettiest girls in the company, stammering out a marriage proposal.”
Catriona couldn’t help but smile at the image of a green-eyed, golden-haired little boy in short pants trying to woo a sophisticated dancer during an opera devoted to the dissolute life of Don Juan. “What happened to her?” she asked softly.
“She refused me, of course. Said I was too short and told me to come back and ask again in ten years when I’d grown into my ears. It was a devastating blow to both my heart and my confidence, but after a brief and bitter period of mourning, I managed to gather up the shattered pieces of my heart and carry on.”
“No…I meant your mother.”
All of that effortless charm vanished from his face, leaving its chiseled planes even more compelling than before. “She died when I was nine. And I went to live with my father.”
He turned away and began to restlessly prowl the bedchamber, making it clear that no more confessions would be forthcoming. Pausing at her dressing table, he tugged the stopper from a bottle of lavender water and brought it to his nose. It gave Catriona an odd shivery feeling to watch his strong, masculine hands handling her things. It was almost as if they were gliding across her own skin.
“Are you certain this scheme of yours is going to work?” he asked, returning the scent bottle to its place before pivoting to face her. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler for me to compromise you in one of the more traditional ways? I could have sent you a naughty letter proclaiming my devotion or been caught stealing a kiss behind a potted palm at Almack’s.”
“My uncle can be very canny. We have to convince him that I’m utterly ruined. He may suspect that I’m up to no good, but if the servants witness my disgrace, he’ll have no choice but to let us wed.”
“What if he decides to shoot me instead?”
She smiled sweetly at him. “Then I’ll have to find another groom, won’t I?”
“Heartless wench.” Narrowing his eyes at her, he strode across the chamber and flung himself to his back on her bed. He looked disarmingly masculine reclining there among all of the lace-trimmed pillows and padded bolsters.
Folding his arms behind his head and crossing his boots at the ankle, he gazed morosely up at the wooden tester that canopied the top half of the bed. “I can’t believe I’m about to be condemned for a crime I haven’t even had the pleasure of committing.” He slanted her a provocative look from beneath his lashes. “Yet.”
To hide her consternation, Catriona seized his ankles and swept his lower legs over the edge of the bed, rescuing her cream-colored satin counterpane from the insult of his boot heels. “Just think of it as punishment for all of the crimes you’ve got away with over the years. The stolen hearts. The pilfered virtues.”
Not the least bit fazed, he sat up and began to tug off his boots, pitching them one by one over the opposite side of the bed. “When they find us together in your bed in the morning, don’t you think they’ll wonder why I didn’t steal away before we could be discovered?”
“Perhaps they’ll believe we fell asleep before you could go.”
He nodded. “That would make perfect sense. Naturally, you’d be exhausted after a night of my strenuous and wildly inventive lovemaking.”
Catriona folded her arms over her chest. “Or perhaps I simply dozed off out of boredom.”
He lifted one eyebrow and gave her a bemused look, letting her know just how unlikely a scenario that was.
As he peeled off his coat and began to unknot his cravat, she realized he had no intention of stopping at his boots.
“What are you doing?” she demanded as his deft fingers began to unfasten the cloth-covered buttons of his waistcoat.
“I’m disrobing, of course.” He spoke very gently, as if explaining a complicated mathematical equation to a slow-witted child. “We can hardly be caught
in flagrante
delicto
with all of our clothes on, can we?”
He shrugged the waistcoat off of his broad shoulders and began to remove the silver studs from the front placket of his shirt, one at a time. Catriona was nearly as mesmerized by the deliberate grace of his fingers as she was by the impressive expanse of chest that was gradually being revealed as each stud slid from its neatly stitched mooring.
The well-defined muscles of his abdomen slowly came into view. A golden sprinkling of chest hair narrowed into a neat V just below his navel, like a cherub’s arrow pointing the way to either heaven or hell. Swallowing hard, Catriona jerked her gaze back up to his face.
He wasn’t watching his hands. He was watching her. The wicked sparkle in his heavy-lidded eyes let her know just how much he was enjoying her discomfiture.
She whirled around, feeling her freckles melt in a scalding rush of heat. Struggling to keep her voice as cold as her cheeks were hot, she asked, “If it’s not too much bother, would you please let me know when you’re done stripping off all your clothes?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “Eager for a little look-see, are we?”
She closed her eyes briefly, counting to ten. “And when you’re tucked safely beneath the covers.”
She tapped her bare foot against the maple floor as several minutes passed.
There were a few mysterious bumps and thumps, followed by an intriguing rustling, before he finally said, “You can turn around now. There’s no danger of offending your maidenly modesty.”
In her bolder daydreams Catriona had dared to imagine Simon in her arms, but never in her bed. She reluctantly turned, half afraid he would still be standing there on the rug beside her bed as naked as on the day he was born. But true to his word, he was tucked neatly beneath the blankets. Well, at least half of him was.