Juliet stood beforethe guest bedroom’s bow window and stared out across Loch Ìm toward hills golden-hued with spring buttercups. Though it was nearly eight at night, the April light had done naught more than cast a gray evening haze. The gloaming, the Scottish called it.
The rain hadn’t let up, rendering the fields boggy and the road connecting Baile Ìm to Dalhousie Manor impassable. She would be staying the night.
Beneath Kilmuir’s roof.
The very idea defied belief.
She turned and took in the bedroom. Clean, but out of current fashion in the manner of a place benignly neglected. Like the atmosphere outside, this room held a gray haze, but it was from the lack of a woman’s touch.
Also benignly neglected? The dress she was wearing.
While her garments dried before the fire, a cheery maid had rummaged through an old cedar chest and at the bottom had found this dress, which was surely more than twice Juliet’s age. Thankfully, she was a good eight inches taller than its original owner, so the hem cleared the floorboards by a few inches, rendering panniers unnecessary. All she needed to complete her impersonation of a high-born lady from the previous century was a towering white powdered wig and a beauty patch on her right cheek.
She took a seat before the dressing table and began to twist her hair into a simple chignon at the nape of her neck. She caught her eye in the mirror. The image before her was identical to the one she’d known all her life, and yet…
Who was she?
Who was the woman who nearly ravished a man because he was too polite to refuse her kiss?
For that was what had happened this afternoon in the rain: a near ravishment.
By her.
Of him.
But, oh, his kiss—and the hot, solid feel of him beneath her fingertips—had been everything her secret dreams had thought it would be.
The kiss had started sweetly enough. But when his large, sure hand had trailed down her body to cup her bottom before dragging her against his, oh, sohardlength, some mechanism flipped inside her. With his massive, muscled body, he became an object of lust, and she’d become ravenous for him.
Then, like that, he’d pulled away.
“You know why, Miss Windermere.”
Her jaw clenched.
She did.
Miss Dalhousie was why. Though absent, her presence never hovered too far away.
Juliet’s cheeks should be burning with mortification, but they refused.
Thwartedwas closer to how she felt.
“Milady?”
Juliet swiveled on the low stool to find the maid at the door. “Yes?” Though not technically a lady, in this servant’s eyes she was.
“I’m to lead ye through the house to supper.”
Juliet stood and gathered a soft woolen shawl about her shoulders. This plain gray garment would never be worn to dine in London. But the Scottish had a much more practical outlook, a fact that didn’t go unappreciated.
As Juliet was led to the dining room, she couldn’t help noting how very different this house was from Dalhousie Manor. All dark mahogany wainscoting and sparsely lit wall sconces, this house was shadowy and spare, not an ounce of fancy or whim on it—a bachelor’s residence.
If anyone in London discovered that she was spending the night alone with the eminently eligible bachelor, the Viscount Kilmuir—never mind the ten or so servants also inhabiting the place—her reputation would be shredded to tatters.
But this was Scotland, and those rules felt very far away.
As if they didn’t apply to her here.