His fingers were shaking, and his breath hitched in his throat as I reached up to kiss him again, and then we were tearing each other’s clothes off, both gasping as we lay hot skin against hot skin. He pressed his face to my hair and called me his darling, and told me he loved me again and again, as he took me with a fierce passion that did, I am afraid, break my poor little wooden bed.
‘Perhaps,’ I said later, as we lay on the floor in a tumble of blankets. ‘I can stay here in future when you go back to the sea.’ I propped myself up on one elbow and ran my hand down Neil’s bare chest. ‘And you may visit me when you can, as though I am your mistress, for that is what you wanted of me when you first met me.’
He laughed and trapped my fingers within his. ‘From the moment I first saw you I wanted you,’ he said. ‘But now I want you as my wife and my mistress and my love, Catriona. And I want you to be with me wherever I go.’
After I had kissed him, to demonstrate my approval of his words, we lay in dreamy entanglement, my head on his shoulder, my hair spread across his chest as he played with the strands.
‘Of course,’ I said slyly, looking up at him, ‘I understand that really you only wanted to marry me to get your hands on Glen Clair, because you knew that it could turn a tidy profit if it were not so neglected…’
He rolled me over beneath him and trapped my squirming body with his own, hard on mine. ‘I am restoring Glen Clair because I love it and I love you,’ he said. He took my face in his hands and held me still for his kiss. ‘No matter where we travel, he said, ‘this will be home for us, and for our children, and for our children’s children.’
And so it was.
IMPRINT: e-book HMB Series Specials
ISBN: 9781460821435
TITLE: KIDNAPPED: HIS INNOCENT MISTRESS
First Australian Publication 2012
Copyright © 2012 NICOLA CORNICK
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Kidnapped: His Innocent Mistress Page 22
