“She’s a feisty one, I’ll admit that. At one point she threatened to, ah, remove a certain ‘appendage.’ One I’m very fond of and have no wish to go without.”

Malcolm burst into laughter. “She didn’t!”

“Yes, she did. I tried to talk her into admiring my appendage at a closer distance rather than threatening to remove it, but she refused—” Devon frowned. “Good God, what is wrong?”

Gulping great gusts of air, Malcolm rocked back in his chair, his face red as he struggled to contain his laughter. “D—don’t tell me any more, please! Let me—have to—catch my breath!”

It was too much. Malcolm had always been a laughing soul; it was one of the things Devon liked best about him. But for some reason, this time Devon had the feeling that Malcolm was actually laughing at him and not with him.

So it was that he said in a rather frosty voice, “I beg your pardon, but while it was certainly an amusing moment, it wasn’t that funny.”

Malcolm wiped his eyes, chuckling. “Ah, laddie! If only you knew!”

Devon threw his napkin on the table. “Knew what?”

“Th-that—by the saints, I c-can’t talk.” Malcolm fell into yet another paroxysm of laughter.

Devon was forced to wait while his host composed himself. It took several moments and three or four gulps of tepid ale before Malcolm finally gasped a calmer breath.

The Scotsman wiped his eyes and said, “Here’s the whist of it: the woman you were kissing in your chambers this morning was none other than Miss Katherine Anne Macdonald.”

Devon stilled. Surely Malcolm didn’t mean…“Katherine Anne Macdonald?”

“Aye. My half sister.”

“That tall Amazon is your sister?” Devon repeated, too bemused to do more. Bloody hell. And Devon had thought she was “safe.”

Malcolm read his look of chagrin as something altogether different. “Aye, ’tis a sad thing my father had such a short one for his male child and then sprung a giantess for his daughter, but so ’tis, her mother being a wee bit on the English side.”

“That explains her lack of accent.”

“Lack? You mean it explains why she has one to begin with.”

Devon smiled. “That, too.”

“She’s a wild one, is Kat. My parents’ marriage was not pleasant. After one particular fight, my father stormed out and didn’t come back for three months. Seems he found a seamstress in a nearby town, an impecunious English woman who made her way doing fancy stitch. She was tall with green eyes and red gold hair and was rumored to be a lady of some birth, though that was never substantiated. Kat is the spitting image of her.”