One Night With the Laird by Nicola Cornick Read Free Book Online

not interested in revenge. Usually he forgot, moved on. It appeared that with Mairi MacLeod he had not moved on.
    He shrugged. That was easy enough to solve. Another night of rapture, this time on his terms, and he would be ready to forget her. It had always worked before. His interest in a woman seldom outlived the intimate knowledge of her.
    He encouraged his horse to a canter that raised the dust on the road. Lady Mairi MacLeod might be faithless and amoral, but then so was he. In that they were well suited. He was certain it would not be long before he was in her bed again.

CHAPTER FOUR
    M AIRI SAT AT her desk with the household accounts spread in front of her. Jack Rutherford had gone, but the air still seemed to hum with his presence, fierce and elemental. It was impossible for her to concentrate. The columns of figures blurred before her eyes, and all she could see was Jack’s face and all she could feel was the touch of his lips against hers. She had wanted him very much and she knew he knew it.
    Damn him.
    She could not really blame Jack for being angry with her. Nor could she blame him for thinking her a whore when she had deliberately told him that any man would have done as a lover that night. That had been the literal truth, but no man could hear that without thinking her a shameless harlot.
    With a little sigh she laid her pen aside and pinched the bridge of her nose to ease the headache behind her eyes. She could not understand why she was attracted to Jack. He was the complete opposite of her husband, Archie, who had been gentle and kind. Yet from the moment that Jack had walked into the drawing room, she had been acutely conscious of him, of the vitality and energy he brought with him, of the confident swagger in his step and the muscular perfection of his body beneath the close-fitting and beautifully tailored clothes. She did not want to want him. Yet it felt as though he had in some way imprinted himself on her so that her senses craved him, the taste and the touch of him. She disliked intensely the feeling that she was so vulnerable to him, but she could not escape it.
    In Edinburgh she had used Jack shamelessly to drive out her feelings of loneliness and melancholy. She had sought out a man that night in order to forget for just a little while the huge weight of responsibility she carried and the secrets she kept. And for a time it had worked; she had forgotten everything in the bliss of Jack’s touch and the shocking, exciting sensations conjured by her own body. She had had so little experience of sex. She had had no idea, no notion at all, that it could be so delicious. It bore no resemblance to the mortifying fumbles she had endured at the start of her marriage to Archie MacLeod when they had barely managed to consummate their union.
    Well, she had certainly made up for that inexperience now. She could barely believe that she had acted with such brazen lack of restraint when she had been with Jack. So much of her knowledge had been theoretical before, gleaned only from the books in her father’s library.
    Even now the memory of Jack’s lovemaking made her feel very hot and slightly faint. She put her head in her hands and groaned. She hungered for Jack now. She wanted to know again that wicked pleasure she had felt at his hands. It was impossible. It could not happen.
    Two blackbirds squabbling on the terrace outside roused her with their noisy calls. Shaking her head impatiently, Mairi turned back to the file of papers on the desk. This was mainly correspondence that Murchison, her secretary, had already filtered and deemed important enough for Mairi to see. Archie MacLeod had not been an elder son, but he had inherited a huge fortune from his nabob godfather at the age of one and twenty. There were the two houses in Edinburgh, the country estate outside the city where Mairi was currently living and Noltland Castle in the eastern Highlands near the town of Cromarty. There was money in bonds and