Elizabeth raised herself and absently scratched her thigh. “You are a sight, Miles Montgomery,” she said, smiling, brushing a poached egg from his hair. The yellow was working its way down toward his scalp.
“You are not exactly presentable at court.” With another groan of pain, he removed a serving fork from under his buttocks.
“What do you think your MacGregor is going to think of this?” Elizabeth asked, moving off Miles. She sat up, cross-legged beside him and surveyed the room. The walls, floors, furniture were covered with smashed tarts, and the table was a disaster, everything overturned, dripping, running together—except for a couple of dishes at the very end of the table. On her hands and knees, Elizabeth crawled toward the undisturbed food, squealed once when Miles gave her buttocks a sweet caress, but came back with a bowl of chicken cooked with almonds and a small loaf of wheat bread.
Miles, still stretched on his back on the table, raised himself on his hand. “Still hungry?” he teased.
“Starved.” She grabbed a spoon from under Miles’s ankle and dug into the stew, and when Miles turned soulful, forlorn eyes up to her, she began to feed him also. “Don’t get used to this,” she commanded as she shoveled more food into his mouth.
Miles merely smiled at her and occasionally kissed her fingers.
All in all, they found quite a bit of undestroyed food on the table. Elizabeth hung over the side, with Miles holding an ankle and a wrist, and retrieved a whole roast partridge which had caught on the leg stretchers. Miles refused to feed himself and Elizabeth was “forced” to feed him, even to stripping the meat from the partridge bones.
“Worthless is what you are,” Elizabeth said, scratching. The food on her body was beginning to dry and it itched!
“What you need,” Miles murmured, running nibbling kisses up her arm, “is—”
“I don’t want to hear any of your suggestions, Montgomery!” she warned. “Last night you got me drunk and pounced on me in a tub and now…this!” There were no words to describe the fragrant mess about them. “Damn!” she cursed, using both hands to scratch her thigh. “Is there nothing normal about you?”
“Nothing,” he reassured her as he lazily stepped down from the table and began to dress. “There’s a lake not far from here. How about a swim?”
“I have no idea how to swim.”
He caught her waist and lifted her from the table. “I’ll teach you,” he said so lewdly that Elizabeth laughed and pushed against him.
“Underwater?” she said, and when Miles seemed to consider this seriously, she nearly ran from him, slipping once on an ooze of cod livers but catching herself on the table edge. In record time, she’d slipped into a tartan skirt, a saffron-colored shirt and tossed a plaid about her shoulders. The skirt had been in the line of fire of a cheese tart.
“Do I look as bad as you?” she asked as he pulled food from his hair.
“Worse. But no one will see us.” With that cryptic sentence, he walked toward a tapestry on the far wall, pulled it aside and revealed a staircase built inside the thick stone walls. He took Elizabeth’s hand and led her into the dark, cold passage.
Chapter 10
TWO HOURS LATER THEY WERE WASHED AND MILES WAS drying Elizabeth with a plaid.
“Quite useful, aren’t they?” she murmured, wrapping the tartan cloth about her cool body. The Scots summer was not conducive to lying about nude.
“Many things about the Scots are practical as well as pleasant—if you’d give them half a chance.”
She stopped drying her hair. “What does it matter to you whether I like the Scots or not? I understand your wanting to get me into your bed but I don’t understand this constant…interest, I guess, in my welfare.”
“Elizabeth, if I’d merely wanted you in my bed I could have taken you that first day when you were delivered to me.”
“And you would have lost part of yourself to my ax blade,” she snapped.
After a moment’s surprise, Miles began to laugh. “You and that ax! Oh Elizabeth, you were such a charming sight with your leg sticking out and surrounded by so much hair. You were—”
“You do not have to laugh quite so hard,” she said stiffly. “It was not humorous to me. And I may yet escape you.”
That sobered him. He pulled her down to the ground beside him. “I don’t want to have to go through more nights like those. Rab was missing and we found dead wolves along the cliff and the mare you rode came back limping. We were really afraid you’d fallen over the cliff.”
She pushed at him because he was holding her so tightly she couldn’t breathe. As she looked up at him, she frowned. She’d always thought that if a man did take her virtue, she would hate him, but hate was far removed from what she felt for Miles. Between them now was a soft sense of sharing, as if they’d always been here and always would be.
“Is it always like this?” she whispered, looking up at the trees overhead.
There was a pause before Miles answered. “No,” he said so softly it could have been the wind
.