“Did I kidnap you and carry you off? We met twice before the nuptials, Margot. By God, if you’d had a doubt of it, you might have expressed it to me then.”

“We met two times!” She laughed at the absurdity of it. “Yes, of course, a sum total of two meetings is quite sufficient to determine compatibility for the rest of one’s life. Whatever made me think otherwise? I had to have reason to cry off, but I scarcely knew you at all.”

“What did you want, then, a bloody courtship?”

“Yes!”

Arran suddenly bolted up and over her, pinning her down with his body, his gaze dark and locked with hers. “If you found me and Balhaire so objectionable, why in hell have you now returned?”

Margot held his gaze just as fiercely. “I told you,” she said calmly. “Perhaps I’ve not given our marriage its due. I should like to try again.”

“Donna ever lie to me, Margot Mackenzie, do you hear me now?” he breathed hotly. “You will no’ like what will come of it if you do.” His eyes moved hungrily down her body. He bent his head and took her breast in his mouth, teasing it a moment before lifting his gaze to hers once more. “Never lie to me, aye? Am I clear?”

His blue eyes were two bits of hard ice, and Margot was terrified to feel her face coloring with her deceit. Could he see it? “Yes,” she said. She was lying to him now! Fate had made her a despicable liar.

Arran grunted. He kissed her belly, pushed aside the bed linens and moved down between her legs, his tongue and mouth on her sex, and Margot felt herself sinking once more. “Are you lying to me now, leannan?”

God help her, he’d seen the deceit in her. She knew it. But his tongue slid over her again, long and slow, and he looked up once more, expecting an answer. The gentle lover she’d first known was gone, and this wolf—this brazen, alluring, dangerous wolf—was in his place. “No,” she lied, and closed her eyes, giving herself up to the wolf’s attentions once more.

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

Balhaire
1706

ARRAN COULDN’T UNDERSTAND HER. She had everything she might possibly want, and yet she cried.

Jock, Griselda’s brother, said Arran should simply command her to stop crying. Jock’s father agreed.

“How am I to do that, then?” Arran asked impatiently. “You canna simply command a woman to cease her tears.”

“You take a strap to her, that’s how,” said Uncle Ivor.

Arran blanched. “Never,” he’d said thunderously, “and God help me if you’ve taken a strap to Aunt Lilleas!”

“’Course I’ve no’,” Uncle Ivor thundered right back, appalled. “She’d skin me like a hare if I had as much as a fleeting thought of it.”

Arran didn’t understand his uncle, either.