Page 24 of The Laird's Masked Passion

“I am going fer a swim.”

For a moment, Elspeth believed she had misheard him. Then she saw his hand go to the fastening of his cloak.

“Nay,” she said.

He glanced up. “Nay?”

“Nay. It is a small word, but wonderfully clear. I recommend ye attend it.”

“I need tae wash.”

“Then wait until we reach a castle where washing is done behind doors, with basins, servants, and at least the smallest acquaintance with civilization.”

His mouth almost curved. “Ye are welcome tae remain mounted and offended.”

“I am nae offended.”

“Elspeth.”

“I am scandalized. There is a distinction.”

He removed his cloak. Elspeth sat very straight.

“Colin MacKenzie,” she said, in the voice her mother used upon servants, cousins, and disobedient dogs, “dinnae dare tae remove another article of clothing.”

He removed his belt. Her mouth fell open. She shut it at once.

“This isnae amusing.”

“I am nae laughing.”

“Nay. Ye are undressing with the solemnity of a priest, which is somehow worse.”

He bent to remove his boots, utterly untroubled by her horror. Sunlight struck the dark crown of his head and slid along the broad line of his shoulders when he pulled his shirt free. Elspeth looked away so quickly her neck protested.

She fixed her gaze upon a pine tree. It was, she told herself, an excellent pine tree: tall, green, respectable and entirely clothed.

Behind her came the quiet sounds of a man continuing, without shame or hesitation, to make himself unfit for female company.

“This is barbaric,” she announced to the pine.

“Then look elsewhere.”

“Ye vile man, Iamlooking elsewhere.”

A soft sound came from him. The knowledge that it was a near laugh brushed against her temper and made it flare.

She risked one glance, only to ensure he had not fallen, died, or done something else equally inconvenient, and instantly regretted her devotion to practical matters.

He was standing at the edge of the loch with his back half-turned, all hard lines and sun-warmed skin. She had seen his chest the night before when she had tended to his wound, but there was a difference, an alarming and unforgivable difference, between a wounded man seated by firelight and this one standing in the open morning, unashamed as Adam before anyone had had the good sense to invent modesty.

Her breath caught. She turned her head away violently. Unfortunately, imagination proved almost as treacherous as sight.

There was the soft scrape of cloth, a brief silence and then, the splash of water. Elspeth closed her eyes. That was somehow worse. She opened them again and stared at the pine with renewed desperation.

The loch moved behind her in quiet strokes. Colin swam as he did everything else, with a confidence that suggested the world had been made to bear his weight. Water slid and broke around him. She could hear it lapping against his arms. She hated that she could picture it. She hated that every small sound made awareness pass through her like heat beneath skin.

She had been taught many things suitable to a gentlewoman: how to walk, how to sit, how to lower her eyes without seeming dull, how to speak sharply enough to be admired but not so sharply as to alarm. No one had taught her what to do when her unwanted husband stripped naked beside a Highland loch and expected her to endure the event without combustion.