The Devil Wears Tartan by Karen Ranney Page A

discomfort, followed by an instant of something else, some indefinable sensation that might be pleasure if it lingered long enough. Then it would be gone, as simply as that. She’d no longer be an unmarried girl with foolishness in her past. She’d be a wife, a matron.
    There was no reason to feel shame now. This act was sacrosanct and allowed. More than allowed, wasn’t she to do it as often as her husband wished?
    “Do you not want to have it simply done with and over? I thought men felt that way.”
    “Then shall we get to it?” His smile was soft, intriguing. “If you’re impatient, that is.”
    She didn’t say anything as he stretched out his hand and placed his fingers on her throat.
    “What do you do all day that makes your hands so hard?” she asked, and knew again, by his sudden startled look, that she’d surprised him.
    “I ride every day. The reins produce calluses.”
    “Every day?”
    “Every day,” he said.
    “Even today?”
    “Are you delaying the inevitable, Davina? Or have you suddenly decided that you aren’t as impatient as you thought?”
    “I’m not at all impatient,” she said. “I’m simply attempting to be courteous.”
    Amusement danced in his eyes. “That is excessively sporting of you.”
    She smiled back at him. “It is, isn’t it?”
    Suddenly she was in the middle of the bed and he was leaning over her.
    “I find that I’m impatient after all,” he said.
    “Truly?”
    “Excessively.”
    “Oh.”
    The palms of his hands were warm, the tips of his fingers delicate as they trailed over her limbs. What she had once thought inviolate, he invaded, intrusive and gentle all at once. He held her chin as he kissed her, his fingertips stroking against her throat as he did so. The outline of one ear, the rounded curve of her shoulder, the angle of her elbow, each was a target for his touch.
    When her hips arched he was suddenly there, sliding inside her with such gentleness and skill that she could only moan slightly in response and surrender.
    He whispered instructions to her and she obeyed, wishing that she were more experienced. Shouldn’t she hold something back of herself, be more circumspect or cautious? How could she? She’d never felt anything like what was happening to her, had never expected to. Her feet clung to his calves as he began to thrust rhythmically,
    When she was a child, she’d seen a rainbow for the first time. It had stretched over Edinburgh in colors so brilliant that she’d been speechless in wonder. She felt the same now, awed by something she didn’t quite understand.
    This, then, was what the poets meant when they spoke of hearts wishing to weep, or a soul feeling as if it were entwined with another. She didn’t know this man, but he knew her. When she sighed, his lips were there to capture the sound. When she placed her hand on his cheek in wonder, his hand pressed against the back of it as if to hold her spellbound.
    In the next moment the world was gone, the night split by sunlight. She gasped, desperate for a breath. She wrapped her arms around Marshall’s shoulders and held on to him as pleasure raced through her, colored gold and yellow-white.
     
    “You weren’t a virgin.”
    Her heart fluttered in her chest, a tiny bird encaged by her skin. Slowly Davina slipped her hands below the covers and clenched them into fists.
    “You weren’t a virgin,” he repeated, raising himself up on one elbow to study her in the light from the lamp.
    How very strange that he was more handsome at this moment than he’d been before. There was a ruddy color on his cheeks, and his brown eyes appeared almost black. His lips were curved into a smile. For a moment she was fixated on his mouth, wishing that she were brave enough to reach up and kiss him.
    Perhaps it was his handsomeness that made her feel strangely shy. Or was it the sudden realization that intimacy had not made him less of a stranger? She knew the touch of his hands, the softness of his