A Promise of Love by Karen Ranney

not miss her mocking smile, schooled her own features into a perfect mask, giving nothing of her thoughts away. She did not realize that her eyes turned flat, betraying little, appearing like the calm waters of the deepest loch.
    It was grating on his nerves.
    Alisdair told himself that he had been as polite as possible, but she continued to be perverse. She fled from a room if he entered it, refused to speak to him when he was being civil, stared at him when she thought he was unaware. If he had to spend the rest of the term of his grandmother's idiotic scheme coupled with such an antagonist, he would cheerfully strangle her. Let the English hang him for that.
    If Malcolm had to bind him to an Englishwoman, he should have at least noted whether she grew pale around a man, if her breathing accelerated and was faint at the same time, if she looked as though she would rather die than be caressed. It was the least the old matchmaker could do. But, no, Malcolm had forgotten those little details, and Alisdair was tied to a cold spinster, no matter how many times she’d been wed.
    Thank God this unholy bond would last only a little while. It was a thought he should have remembered. Instead, that flat expression on Judith’s face goaded him to thoughts best left unvoiced. Or, was it the fact that her hair seemed to shine even in the gloom of an approaching storm. Her lips seemed too full for fretfulness, and her soft, pillowy breasts gave the lie to her coldness, coaxed his palms to curl.
    "Do you not think the lad bonny, Judith?"
    His voice was too smooth, too honeyed, as soft as velvet, as dark as a moonlit moor. The wind tossed his hair from his face, the darkening sky was a perfect backdrop for the tanned expanse of his bare torso. He was an avenging god of storm and dark anger.
    Judith took one step back, so slight that he should not have noticed. Yet, he did, and the sway of her skirts as she did so. He noted, too, that the pulse beat at her neck accelerated, as if he had touched her with more than his mind.
    She was silent still, yet the air swirled with heaviness, as if her thoughts added weight to it.
    "I thought all women grew soft and maternal at the sight of a babe. Are the English so different then? Is it that Douglas is only a Scot? Do you English consider him only half-human?"
    When she did not speak, he grabbed her arm and pulled her closer. Perhaps she should have pulled away then. If she had distanced herself from him, she would not have felt the warmth of the hand which lay upon her arm. Skin against skin. Too intimate.
    He forced her chin up so that he could see her eyes, staring into her face with studied intent before he abruptly released her. There was no expression at all in those azure eyes and the total absence of emotion disturbed him. It was as if part of his English wife had disappeared somehow, as if she'd retreated from his words, from his very presence, from his punishing grip upon her forearm.
    Something made him want to banish that calm, nothing-look on her face. Any emotion was preferable to that flat look in her eyes.
    "Or is it that you have no maternal leanings yourself, Judith? Twice married and no bairn. Yet you, Judith," he continued, his thin edged smile infinitely cruel, "have the hips of a born breeder. You could spit babes into the world without a gasp."
    She didn't bother to respond. His words did not surprise her; she was immune to ridicule. Her father had not ceased commenting upon her appearance since she was a child. Peter's mother had read her a litany of her faults from daybreak to dusk, and Anthony had not abstained in his scathing remarks about her looks, her abilities, her many liabilities. The MacLeod's words paled in comparison to those she’d received in the past.
    The thunder rolled, a drum beat of punctuation to her silence.
    "Yet, it's true ice is not a fertile ground," he said brutally. "Were you never warm and willing, then? Only cold like now? If so, I can see why no