Now it was too late.
Chapter 4
Elaine Hawthorn genuinely liked Cearnach MacNeill and the way the braw Highland warrior wore his kilt, sporran, sword, and a dirk tucked in his stocking. Hot and sexy and dangerous came to mind. Not cute, like she’d said.
But rather than focus on that, she should be thinking about how she needed to contact the cousin she was supposed to meet. She’d use Cearnach’s phone back at his car. Yet, she wished she could delay the inevitable and spend more time in Cearnach’s company. Like that was a good idea. Not after the way they’d kissed and not when she still didn’t know why he’d wanted to protect her in St. Andrews so long ago.
He had to know how appealing he looked to her, so she’d tested him to see how he would respond to being called “cute.” She had been amused by his look of surprise, thinking that he’d be so conceited that he wouldn’t care what she said about his appearance. Then he’d regained his cocky arrogance, probably figuring she had been teasing him. Most likely no one had ever called him cute.
She noticed the sidelong glances Cearnach continued to give her, wolf that he was. Her dress was way too revealing, plastered to her body as if it were a redder version of her skin. The heater was going full blast, but the air still felt cold as it hit her wet dress.
He reached down and took her cold hand in his and squeezed. “Why did you really come between Vardon and me? Did you think you could stop that Neanderthal?”
“I suppose I did. Just like you might have believed you could change Calla’s mind about marrying Baird McKinley if you showed up for the wedding. I didn’t give it much thought. I just instinctively stepped into his path.”
“Do you often risk your neck for someone you barely know?”
She shrugged, not willing to tell him she’d always been that way—protective. She was used to being an alpha, not someone who melted into the background. Not like when her uncles had been hanged for pirating, making her fear for her life, and she had had to find her way back to America alone. That had been the hardest for her—tucking tail and running away.
“Have you ever risked getting hurt for someone who was well equipped to handle the likes of Vardon McKinley?” Cearnach asked, still trying to get her to reveal the truth.
“No,” she finally said. Then she gave him an impish smile. “Not usually.”
“Which means it wasn’t just instinct that propelled you into action,” he said, sounding smugly satisfied, as though he knew she had feelings for him and hadn’t wanted to see him hurt.
She reached up to touch her throbbing face where the infuriated Highlander had struck her, her fingers shying away at the last minute. She hadn’t expected to get a fist in the face, having hoped to stop the man from throwing the punch in the first place.
“If I hadn’t confined you, and you had managed to grab Vardon’s dirk, would you have known how to use it?”
She envisioned Vardon’s dagger poking out of the top of his hose. If she’d been able to pull free, she would have grabbed that dagger and threatened Vardon with it—just to get him to back off.
She had been serious about that. “Or I might have gone for yours.”
Silence.
She smiled.
Cearnach cleared his throat. “My dagger…”
“Aye,” she said, borrowing his brogue. The way she said the word still sounded American to her ear.
He chuckled. “You would not have been successful.”
“We’ll never know, will we?” she asked in a tone meant to challenge. “But, yes, I know how to use a dirk. A lightweight sword also.” Being from a family of pirates ensured that.
Thankfully, Vardon had seemed to come to his senses somewhat once he’d struck her. She had ignored him calling her a whore in Gaelic, figuring he was trying to make himself feel that what he had done wasn’t wrong. Besides, he’d said it to infuriate Cearnach, not to slander her. At least that’s the way she was going to view it.
She sighed, touching her lips. They were deliciously swollen from Cearnach’s kisses. No wolf had ever taken charge of her to such an extent. She’d always remained detached, unaffected by men’s kisses, knowing getting stuck on a human could only mean disaster. And a wolf?
She barely refrained from snorting. A wolf was even worse. At least based on her experience.
Her whole body heated again as she recalled the force of his kiss, the passion behind it, the raw need they’d both exhibited while sharing it. She sensed something unspoken between them. That he had felt something more for her than he had felt for women in the past.
She smothered another snort at the notion before she caught Cearnach’s curiosity. The kiss had thoroughly shaken her, making her want much more than was safe. For Cearnach, such a kiss was probably nothing more than what he was used to. Practiced, eliciting the same kind of response in any woman.
Attempting to get her mind off the way he’d made her feel, Elaine continued to pull the fabric of her dress away from her skin, trying to dry it in front of the heater.
If she had been alone, she would have slipped into the backseat, rummaged around in her suitcase, and put something else on. Now she wished she hadn’t worn this particular dress. Robert Kilpatrick had told her to wear a red dress if she had one so he’d be able to pick her out of a crowd. Considering how rainy and cold it was, she would have had to wear her raincoat while she was at the castle ruins, and Robert wouldn’t have seen her red dress anyway.
“Have you been to Scotland before, lass? I was worried you might pull out a camera and begin photographing the church before I escorted you inside.”
She didn’t want to answer him about being in Scotland before. She skipped instead to the issue of the camera and pretended to be a nice little tourist. She patted her purse. “Camera charged, new disk ready to fill up with pictures,” she said proudly.
“Except now it’s raining so hard that it won’t make for very nice pictures,” he said, sounding regretful.
She took a deep breath, recalling the scent of the wolf she’d met so long ago, loving the scent of him now and glad Cearnach didn’t seem to remember her from the past. After receiving the note from her distant cousin, she’d felt that her family’s pirating life had come back to haunt her. She had a comfortable savings from her parents’ inheritance, yet, with cutbacks at the college and the lure of laying claim to the bounty her uncles had hidden somewhere in Scotland, she had been enticed to return.
Of course her cousin wanted a share of the booty. He didn’t know all the details of where the stash was hidden. Just as she didn’t have all the details, either—like two halves of a treasure map. She just had to ensure that her cousin didn’t get the alpha wolf’s share since her uncles had forfeited their lives for taking it from merchant vessels, and she’d been the one to suffer for it once they died.
“Elaine,” Cearnach said as he continued to watch the road, the rain pounding the windshield.
She glanced at him. He was frowning at her—a concerned frown, not an angry one.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“Sorry, no. I was concentrating on drying out my dress.” And thinking about lots of stuff she didn’t want him to know about.
“We’ve met before, lass,” Cearnach said softly, as if speaking in a strictly sweet way might make her come clean.
If she had realized who he was when she first met him after the car accident, she might have given him a different name. Still, she could tell he couldn’t recall who she was. Easy to see why. The clothes she’d worn had covered her from head to toe. Sure, he’d smelled her scent, touched her, looked deeply into her face, but that had been so long ago, in a different place and time, and she had only been sixteen.