Angus was less pleased when their table was quickly surrounded by the rest of the small herd, all hoping to be fed. A larger goat, with bigger horns, pushed forward trying to reach the basket on the table.
‘I think we’d better take our food inside,’ Angus decided.
He blew out the candle and loaded the tray Marie had left behind with the bowls, breadbasket and wine jug. Tilly picked up their glasses and followed him into the cottage, leaving the front door open behind her. The sun was low enough now for the golden light to be streaming through the branches of the olive trees with blinding effect, and when Angus turned from putting the tray on the kitchen table, he had to shade his eyes from the glare. He didn’t wait to adjust to the brightness but stepped forward, bumping into Tilly and spilling the wine she was holding over her hands.
‘Och,sorry,’ Angus said. ‘I was blinded by the light and didn’t see you.’ He twisted to grab the linen cloth, now scrunched up on the tray, as Tilly put the glasses down and then he put his hands over one of hers, the cloth between them, as he began to dry her skin.
Tilly couldn’t feel the cloth at all. She could only feel the way his thumbs were pressing onto the back of her hand and the way his hands were moving as he gently dried each one of her fingers.
And it was thesexiestthing any man had ever done for her.
Angus must have felt how still she had become, because the movement of his hands slowed and he looked up to catch her gaze.
For a long, long moment they simply held that eye contact. Tilly didn’t dare move a single muscle because, if she did, she would have thrown her arms around this man’s neck and stood on tiptoes so that she could touch his lips with her own.
Maybe he could read that thought in her eyes. Or they were somehow communicating telepathically. Not in words but in emotions.
Desire.
Want.
A need that had just become as vital as the oxygen that seemed to have been sucked out of the air around them.
Neither of them spoke. There was no need to.
* * *
The linen cloth slid to the floor as it was discarded. Angus touched Tilly’s face with no more than the tip of his middle finger on her jawbone, just beneath her ear. Her eyes drifted shut as he slowly, reverently traced the line of her jawbone. When it was close enough, he brushed her lips with the tip of his forefinger and, when Tilly’s lips parted and she touched his skin with her tongue, making a tiny mew of what he might imagine ecstasy to sound like, something fundamental changed for Angus McLeod.
He was quite confident that he was competent when it came to sex. Good at it, even, judging by what women had told him in that rather awkward space of time when the deed was completed. He knew how to touch a woman to please her andhow to make things last long enough for them both to achieve maximum satisfaction.
He was breaking his own rules right now, mind you. He wasn’t evenona date with Mathilde, let alone having reached a point where it was acceptable to take things to the next level. Behaviour like this was unthinkable but… that look in Tilly’s eyes when he’d known, without the slightest shadow of doubt, that she wanted himthatmuch… Well, how could any man have resisted that? Adding that temptation to the feeling that he was, temporarily, inhabiting the skin of a man who was nothing like the Angus McLeod the rest of the world got to see. He only had a few days to find out what it was like to be this free and that tipped the scales sharply. What really clinched his surrender, however, was that this might be the wildest thing he’d ever done – and, thank goodness, he hadn’t repacked his bag on the night he knew he would be travelling alone. He still had a healthy supply of condoms tucked away in his toilet bag.
Any attempt to analyse and argue with what he should or should not be doing was over in the nanosecond following that tiny sound Tilly had made.
He’dneverwanted a woman this much.
Ever.
And it wasn’t onlyhispleasure he was chasing. He wanted to give Tilly everything he was capable of giving her, because he knew that every touch, every taste and every sound of being as physically close to her as it was possible to be would be how he would find out how good sex could actually be.
His fingers were threading themselves into the silk of her hair now and, as his lips covered hers, coherent thoughts were evaporating. He caught the scent of her hair, or the perfume she was wearing or… was it her skin? And…
…he was lost. It was as simple as that.
And he had no intention of even looking for a way out anytime soon.
* * *
Why was thissodifferent to any sex Tilly had ever had in her life?
Did it have something to do with it being forbidden? A purely physical adventure that had no expectations of being anything more than that?
Did that somehow give permission for Tilly to let go of – what was it? – an unconscious agenda of watching herself and judging both her performance and her partner’s against some tick list of acceptable standards?
There was no way she could not be totally immersed in this, to the point where she wasn’t thinking of anything else. She wasn’t really thinking at all, in fact. Just floating in a sea of sensuality as the buttons on her dress were undone and it slithered to the floor and then Angus scooped her up into his arms and carried her into a room with one of the most romantic beds Tilly had ever seen – a four-poster with embroidered muslin curtains softly draped from a gathered canopy and tied to each post with ribbons. Her breath came out in a soul-deep sigh of utter bliss as Angus gently put her down, right inside this fairy-tale bed.
Maybe this was purely chemistry and, if that was the case, Tilly was simply going to let it seep into every cell of her body and try and capture this feeling so completely she would be able to remember it for the rest of her life.
