Plaid to the Bone by Mia Marlowe

love him.
    He couldn’t very well expect it of her this soon, and he’d always prided himself on being innately practical, but to his surprise, her words of denial had latched onto his heart with little barbed hooks. He wanted Cait Grant to love him, he realized. Not just to promise she would. Not just a vow to honor and prefer him, but to feel something for him besides this icy disdain.
    He worked his way back up and out from under the mounds of blankets to lie beside her. He tugged her close and she seemed to relax a bit as their bodies pressed together, bare skin against bare skin.
    “Thank ye, Adam,” she said softly. “That feels better.”
    He smiled at her. “We’ll both feel better hereafter, I’m thinkin’. I ken ye wish for me to feel something for ye. I understand as it’s important to ye, but I’ve noticed something over the years. When I was feeling gloomy, if I acted as if I were happy, I started to feel that way.”
    “So the feeling follows the action, ye think?”
    “I do. And now,” he said, “I’m going to act as if I love ye, Cait.”
    He covered her mouth with his in a kiss. Long. Slow. Questioning.
    When he finally drew back, they were both short of breath.
    “That was acting?” she whispered.
    “It was, lass,” he said and nipped her bottom lip. “When it stops being mere doing and becomes love in truth, I’ll tell ye, aye?”
    She nodded.
    “And ye’ll tell me when ye love me,” he said.
    She gulped and nodded again. “I will. Adam?”
    He paused as he nuzzled the satiny skin of her neck and raised his head. “Aye?”
    “Act as if ye love me some more.”

Chapter 9

    “Love isna about sonnets and nosegays. It doesna reside in the giving and receiving of a ring. It happens when one person sees another person’s soul clear through, warts and all, and then, by some mercy of God, doesna turn away.”

    From the journal of Callum Farquhar,
unlucky in love, romantic at heart, and still
waiting for my own private miracle.

    Cait had nearly drowned once. She’d chanced swimming in her selkie cove and got sucked out to the deeper, colder water by a wicked current. No matter how she struggled, she could make no progress back to the shore. The sea was merciless. It tossed her from one trough to the next, washing over her, sucking the breath from her lungs and the strength from her limbs. She’d been almost ready to give up and let the waves take her when a fisherman in a skin coracle happened to see her and hauled her, blue-lipped and convulsing, into his tiny boat.
    It was some time before she felt her body was her own again and even longer before she trusted herself to simply wade in the shallows. She’d been overcome by a force more powerful than herself and she was wary.
    She had the same sense of being totally overwhelmed when Adam kissed her, but she hadn’t been wary this time. She invited him to claim her.
    Cait knew she had to become Adam’s wife in truth, but she expected to be able to maintain a wall around her inner self, even when their bodies came together. That wall was an illusion. Adam smashed through it the first time he suckled her breasts and a wave of tenderness and longing rolled over her.
    When he put his hands on her, she was swept into the deep. He led her through intense peaks, but the taut valleys were no respite for she couldn’t wait to see what came next. She’d never guessed her body could be so filled with pleasure, so driven to alternating frustration and relief by a man’s mouth and hands.
    He gave and gave, with no hint of taking. Each kiss, each caress, sent her deeper into his power. When he kissed down the length of her body, spread her legs and put his mouth on her most sensitive spot, she could have no more freed herself than she could have swum out of that pitiless current.
    There was a measure of freedom in being so controlled, so given over to another’s will, she discovered. She knew what was required to consummate a marriage and