Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] by Master of The Highland (html) Page A

herself before the roaring pulse in her ears welled to epic proportions . . . as did the wealth of love swelling the stranger’s heart.
Nay, his heart —her shadow man’s—and the sudden recognition nearly brought her to her knees, for his emotions no longer came to her from a great distance.
He was here.
Within the cathedral walls.
And nearing her by the minute.
His heart pounding ever stronger, hers skittering wildly out of beat. Forcing herself to keep placing one foot before the other, she moved onward. Praise be they’d almost reached the shrine again.
It was one thing to wax romantic about a man’s depth of feeling—his capacity to love—and send him light and warmth in her dreams, and something else entirely to stand before him.
To face him.
In especial, now, when she’d committed herself to an undertaking the successful outcome of which condemned her to ruin and a life of piety behind cloistered walls.
A rush of heat suddenly pricking the backs of her eyes, she grabbed Nella’s hand. “Come, let us look for the exvoto and be gone from here,” she implored, already pushing forward, dragging her friend through the crowd.
In as much a miracle as those wrought by sacred relics, the little band of hawk-eyed sacrists had all hands full assisting a pilgrim who’d fallen into a state of writhing blessedness on the far side of the feretory.
Seizing the opportunity, Madeline hurried to the spot Nella indicated, dropping to her knees in front of the tomb enclosure before propriety or watchful sacrists could stop her. Near-crazed by the intensity of the emotions spinning in her breast, she thrust her hands into the cluster of offerings hanging from the metal-wrought gates.
And the instant her fingers curled around the little silver-cast leg, his voice joined the chaos, filling her head and heart as surely as he would have filled her ears had he truly spoken the words.
A beggary votive thief! A postulant and a cutpurse.
Madeline shot to her feet, the swift movement, or mayhap her shame, shattering his hold on her, the wild racing of her heart now truly hers alone, the panic inside her no one’s but her own.
Forgetting Nella, the sacrists, and the wee silver leg pressing icy-cold against her dampening palm, she hitched up her skirts with her free hand and searched for the surest place to push through the solid-packed, prayer-murmuring throng.
Half-afraid her knees would buckle before she could get away, she tried to block her shadow man’s voice, but it slid through her, its rich timbre every bit as deep, husky, and beautiful as she’d known it would be.
Unbearably seductive and maddeningly distracting, it imprinted itself on the very fabric of her heart, doing the strangest things to her senses, and fully muddling her ability to think.
Beggary. A cutpurse.
Her breath came fast and shallow and she scarce heard the words . . . only the golden warmth of his mellifluous voice.
“A sticky-fingered postulant.” The words slipped from Iain’s lips, though how they had, he scarce knew, for his jaw had to be brushing the cold stone of the cathedral floor.
His astonishment complete, he stared at the plainfrocked, travel-stained lass—the very one he’d just identified as it —as she.
The source of his weeks of discomfiture.
The reason every fiber of his being had inexplicably tightened, his loins all afire and setting like stone, the nearer he’d come to the cathedral.
To her.
A would-be nun and votive thief!
Iain stared at her, too stunned by the unlikelihood of his discovery, the immeasurable intensity of his heart-pounding reaction to her proximity, to draw breath, much less step forward and challenge her to hand over the wee whate’er-it-was he’d just witnessed her pluck from a cluster of ex-voto offerings affixed to the gates of St. Kentigern’s shrine.
Nay, stricken as he was by his unaccountable reaction, he stood wholly flummoxed—in truth, fully undone — and hoped none of the wild and base urges thundering through him showed