Page 56 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

"Both," she said. "Definitely both."

At some point while he was talking the cold got into her shoulders, and he didn't think about it. He just turned and put his arm around them, and she turned into it. They stood like that facing the water, her shoulder against his chest, his chin near the top of her head.

He stopped talking.

She tipped her face up.

He kissed her slow, certain, his hand coming up to cup her jaw, his thumb tracing the warm line of her cheekbone until her breath hitched against his lips. The shift between them was absolute; the roar of the shore, the biting cold, and the whole dark, endless length of the water receded into nothing.

She kissed him back with a sudden, fiercely gathering desperation, her fingers curling tight into the heavy wool at the front of his coat, anchor and invitation all at once. Alpin growled low in his throat—a sound raw and long-suppressed—and pulled her closer. She came willingly, her body flush against his, and in an instant, the kiss stopped being gentle.

His hand slid from her jaw down to the curve of her nape, tangling in the wind-loosened strands of her hair to tilt her head back. The heat of his mouth turned possessing, demanding every quiet truth she had held back since arriving at Herston.

Grisselle yielded to the pull, her chest heaving against his, her heartbeat hammering so hard in her ears it drowned out the tide. She tightened her grip on his coat, tugging him nearer as if she could pull him past the walls he kept built around himself.

When she finally pulled back first, her breath came in sharp, shallow, ragged gasps against his mouth, her lips swollen and trembling, her eyes wide and dark with a hunger neither of them could pretend was gone.

"Alpin."

"Aye."

"We're not married yet."

"I'm aware."

Her hand loosened in his coat, slowly, finger by finger, without letting go entirely. He kept his arm where it was, her cold cheek against his throat, the water loud in front of them.

"If we keep doing this," she said, "we're going to do something we can't undo before the priest gets here."

"I ken."

"And then Greer will know. And Isobel will know. And Senga will tell the village."

"Senga already tells the village everything."

"Alpin."

He loosened his arm. She stepped back an inch, only an inch, and looked at him in the dark with her hair all undone by the wind and her mouth still warm from his, and he looked back at her and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would improve on the silence.

She straightened her coat and turned toward the castle, and he fell into step beside her. They walked back up the shore without touching, though the inch between their arms said everything the conversation hadn't.

By the time they reached the keep, Greer was waiting in the hall with a shawl.

She handed Grisselle the shawl without a word.

Grisselle took it. "Thank you, Greer."

"Aye," Greer said, and went back to the kitchen, and from somewhere behind the door Isobel's voice rose and fell in whatever she was telling Senga, and the fire in the hall was going, and Nora was quiet in the east room above them.

Alpin stood in the hall and watched Grisselle go up the stairs with the shawl around her shoulders. At the top she looked back at him once, briefly, the way she'd looked at him across the room in the dark with the loch behind the glass, marking that she saw him, and meaning him to know it.

He stayed where he was until he heard her door close.

Then he went and stood by the fire for a long time, doing nothing useful at all, and found he didn't mind.

The tide was out far enough that the wet sand showed black and flat between the stones, and Alpin had been standing on it long enough that the cold had come through his boot soles and settled into his heels.

He'd left Niall losing badly at chess and told himself that wasn't why he'd left, that it was only the pull of the dark and the salt air and the quiet the shore had at this hour, when the firth went still between tides and the only sound was the low drag of water over shingle twenty yards out.