How to Marry a Highlander Read Online Free Page B

chewed her lip. His gaze slipped down to her mouth. It was the first time he had looked away from her eyes except that perfunctory perusal of her whole person. No man had ever looked at her lips like this, like he was considering them and he liked what he saw. Her breasts, yes. Her lips, never.
    Her thoughts got muddled. She could not seem to come up with words.
    Ever so slowly his chest rose in a heavy breath, then fell. He did not remove his attention from her mouth.
    “Do you want to kiss me?” she whispered.
    His gaze trailed up to her eyes. “’Tis a wonder I’ve no yet thrown ye outta ma house.”
    “Your so-called house is unfit for an earl and his seven sisters,” she said unsteadily. “You will never find respectable husbands for them if you have no place for suitors to come calling.”
    “Nou ye be insulting ma house an ma hospitality,” he said without any rancor whatsoever. “What’ll come next from that pretty mouth, I wonder?”
    “That I think you really do want to kiss me. And I would very much like you to. You may, you know. Kiss me. Now.” She was trembling quite fiercely, but it wasn’t to be helped. She was living her dream .
    He closed the space between them until his broad chest was scant inches from her breasts, and he bent his head. Her eyelids fluttered to half-mast. He would kiss her and her legs were so wobbly she would crumble in a heap at his feet.
    “Ye’d best be going nou, Miss Teresa Finch-Freeworth o’ Brennon Manor at Harrows Court Crossing in Cheshire.”
    Good gracious, he’d been paying attention. He said her name with such lush Highland music that the wobbliness spread from her knees to every one of her joints. “I haven’t done anything like this before,” she said. “But it’s you.”
    “Aye?”
    “And I think . . . I know . . . That is . . .”
    His whiskers were dark and scant and framed the most perfect lips she had ever seen.
    “What have ye heard o’ me, lass?”
    “Nothing.” Not true .
    “Do ye ken I’ve no money? That the coffers be dry? Ye’d get nothing from me were I to take ye on, no even a solid roof over yer head.”
    “I don’t know what you mean by ‘taking me on.’”
    “Ye’ve run away from home?”
    “No. That is, not precisely. I came here to—” She stepped back from him. “You think I have run away from home to become an actress or some other sort of low female and am throwing myself upon you in the hopes that you will become my protector. Like your sister, Effie, said. Don’t you?”
    He lifted a single expressive brow.
    “I am not,” she said. “I have the most respectable of intentions toward you. And myself.”
    “I dinna suppose yer father knows o’ this.”
    “My parents do not know I am here. Naturally,” she added. “They would think this as preposterous as you clearly do.”
    “Mebbe because it is.” Then he touched her again, but this time not on her face. He skimmed his knuckles across her shoulder and followed the action with his gaze. A perfectly delicious little shiver wiggled through her.
    “What are you doing?” she whispered.
    “Lass, do ye ken what a man thinks when a leddy visits him at his home?”
    That she was yearning for more touches like that one? “You mean the home he shares with his seven sisters?”
    A glimmer lit his eyes. “Touché.”
    “My lord, I have a proposal for you.”
    “Anither?”
    “Amended, since you rejected my first proposal.”
    “That I did.”
    “If I promised that I would not consider myself compromised and demand marriage, would you kiss me now?”
    His brow grew dark. “No.”
    No ? What sort of man would not kiss a woman who offered kisses freely?
    “Are you rejecting me because you find me unappealing?”
    Slowly that single brow lifted again and he tilted his head slightly as though to suggest she was only now beginning to speak foolishly. And his gaze dipped to her mouth anew.
    Her stomach did twirling tumbles.
    “What if I find a husband