To Tame a Highland Warrior by Karen Marie Moning

a run-in with an ill-tempered feline,” Grimm said, holding her gaze.
    “Well, why don’t you change your shirt?” Ramsay asked.
    “I brought only the one,” Grimm told Jillian.
    “You brought one shirt?” Ramsay snorted disbelievingly. “Odin’s spear, Grimm, you can afford a thousand shirts. Becoming a miser, are you?”
    “ ’Tis not the shirt that makes the man, Logan.”
    “Damn good thing for you.” Ramsay carefully straightened the folds of his snowy linen. “Have you considered that it may be a reflection of him?”
    “I’m sure a maid can mend it for you,” Quinn said. “Or I can lend you one.”
    “I doona mind wearing it this way. As for reflections, who’s to see?”
    “You look like a villein, Roderick.” Ramsay sneered.
    Jillian made a resigned sound. “I’ll mend it,” she muttered, dropping her gaze to her plate so she didn’t have to see their stunned expressions.
    “You can sew, lass?” Ramsay asked doubtfully.
    “Of course I can sew. I’m not a complete failure as a woman just because I’m old and unwed,” Jillian snapped.
    “But don’t the maids do that?”
    “Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t,” Jillian replied cryptically.
    “Are you feeling all right, Jillian?” Quinn asked.
    “Oh, will you just hush up?”

C HAPTER 6
    I T INFURIATED HER . E VERY TIME SHE GLIMPSED THE LINE of uneven stitches puckering the center of Grimm’s shirt, she felt herself turning into an irascible, beady-eyed porcupine. It was as humiliating as if he’d stitched the words “Jillian lost control of herself and I’m never going to let her forget it” across his back. She couldn’t believe she’d torn it, but years of suffering his torment as a child had proved her undoing, and she’d simply snapped.
    He was back at Caithness, he was hopelessly attractive, and he still treated her exactly the same as he had when she’d been a child. What would it take to make him see that she wasn’t a child anymore?
Well, stop acting like one, to start with
, she remonstrated herself. Since the moment she’d tenderly mended his shirt, she’d been longing to waylay him, divest him of the pernicious reminder, and gleefully burn it. Doing so, however, would have reinforced his perception that she had a penchant for witless action, so instead she’d procured threeshirts of finer linen, with flawless stitching, and instructed the maids to place them in his room. Did he wear them?
    Nary a one.
    Each day that dawned, he donned the same shirt with the ridiculous pleat down the back. She’d considered asking him why he wouldn’t wear the new ones, but that would be as bad as admitting that his ploy to make her feel stupid and guilty was working. She’d die before she betrayed another ounce of emotion to the emotionless man who was sabotaging her impeccable manners.
    Jillian dragged her eyes from the dark, seductive man walking in the bailey, wearing a badly mended shirt, and forced herself to take a deep, calming breath.
Jillian Alanna Roderick;
she rolled the name behind her teeth, a whisper of exhaled breath. The syllables tumbled euphonically.
I only wish …
    “So it’s the cloister for you, eh, lass?”
    Jillian stiffened. The throaty rumble of Ramsay Logan was not what she needed to hear at this moment. “Um-hmm,” she mumbled in the direction of the window.
    “You won’t last a fortnight,” he said matter-of-factly.
    “How dare you?” Jillian whirled about to face him. “You don’t know a thing about me!”
    Ramsay smiled smugly.
    Jillian blanched as she remembered that he’d seen her naked at the window the day he’d arrived. “I’ll have you know that I have a calling.”
    “I’m sure you do, lass,” Ramsay purred. “I simply think your ears are plugged and you’re hearing the wrong one. A woman like you has a calling to a flesh-and-blood man, not a God who will never make you feel the joy of being a woman.”
    “There are finer things in life than being a