Read Online As High as the Heavens by Kathleen Morgan - Free Book Online Page B

can't bring along both yer serving maids and
cook, no matter how small his house might be?" She
frowned. "Nay, I don't like it at all."
    "That's not the half of it, Beth." Heather pulled the
sleeping gown down into place and fastened the highnecked collar closed. "Not only is Duncan Mackenzie an
overbearing despot, but he's also a crude, brazen rogue."
She shuddered. "And to think I must work in close quarters with him for the next three months!"
    Beth eyed her wryly. "Well, he is one of the most braw,
strapping young men I've seen in many a day. If I hadn't
already set my sights on Tavish Gordon. . ." She finished
the sentence with a besotted sigh.

    "Ah, aye, the elusive Tavish," Heather said with a
chuckle, choosing to ignore her maid's reference to Duncan's quite impressive physical attributes. "One would
think that man had had enough of the single life after
forty-two years, and be sick nigh unto death of sharing
his sleeping quarters with all my father's fine horses."
    "He has yet to find the right woman, he has told me."
Beth walked to the four-poster bed and turned back the
thick woolen sheets. "Well, I'll tell ye true. I've decided
to be that woman. My Seamus has been dead all of six
years now, and it's past time I take another man to husband."
    "So ye think Tavish is the one for ye, do ye?"
    Beth nodded. "Aye, that I do."
    "Then mayhap I can convince my father to allow Tavish to accompany us to the Mackenzie's steading and
serve as groomsman and personal guard for the time
we must remain there." Heather grinned conspiratorially. "Think on it, Beth. Three months crowded together
into a simple cottage. If the man doesn't offer for ye by
the first spring flowers, he isn't worthy to be called a
Scotsman."
    A chestnut brow arched, and interest flared in a pair
of gray eyes. "That's an intriguing thought," Beth agreed
slowly. "But can ye get yer father to part with his precious head groomsman, even if only for a few months?"
She made her way to the hearth, took up a set of iron
tongs, and removed a brick she had placed there earlier
to heat.
    Heather gave an injured sniff. "That's the least my
father can do, after what he has managed to entangle me in." Picking up the book she had been reading before
supper, she began to leaf idly through it.

    "I must confess," Beth offered as she returned from
the hearth. "The few times I saw him, yer Highlander
didn't seem all that crude or brazen, leastwise not to me."
She lifted the bedclothes and slid the hot brick along
the length of the mattress at the foot of the bed. "He but
smiled at me, then stepped aside in a most gentlemanly
fashion so I might pass. But there was naught offensive
in his words or manner. Of course, mind ye, I'm hardly
a lass in the first bloom of womanhood, nor as bonny
as ye.
    "For yer information, he's not my Highlander. And, secondly, he hardly treated Janet Mackenzie as churlishly,
either," Heather muttered, "and she was single-handedly
trying to strip him naked when first I met him."
    Beth turned. "He was naked, was he? And does yer
father know of this?"
    "He wasn't completely naked." Heather rolled her eyes
in exasperation. "He still had his kilt clutched to him.
Though," she added with a wry chuckle, "Janet was trying her verra hardest to relieve him of that, too."
    "And how did he appear?" Beth asked after she had
extracted the brick from the bed and returned it to the
hearth, then hurried back to her mistress. "Was he as
well-made without his clothes as with them? Was he
truly, as Janet put it"-she paused for a giggle and impish
grin-"the finest piece of man flesh in these parts?"
    Her maid's unabashedly shameless questions stirred
memories Heather would've preferred to have forgotten. Memories of Duncan Mackenzie, standing there, his wild mane of dark hair damp, his face, arms, and
legs mud-splattered, his magnificent body bulging with
muscle and most attractively hair-roughened.

    A hot rush of blood