Read Online The MacGregor's Lady by Grace Burrowes - Free Book Online

simplest explanation for the lady eating up her dinner with her bare fingers, wiping her mouth on her scarf, and thanking him kindly for the most crude fare.
    She’d drunk from his flask without comment too, and set about gathering rocks and kindling without grumbling. He’d tossed the tasks at her mostly to give her something to grouch about and to keep her moving, but she was singularly lacking in biting retorts.
    She came around from her side of the bushes and took his arm as if they were bosom bows.
    “It gets like this in Boston,” she said. “So cold your lungs shiver with each breath.”
    “So cold,” he took up the conversation, “you don’t dare breathe through your nose, for the thing freezes together on you.”
    “Yes!” She beamed at him. “That cold. Do you suppose we’ll freeze to death in our sleep?”
    “Tonight? Of course not. This isn’t dangerously cold by my standards. It’s merely inconvenient.”
    “And compromising,” she added, her tone dismissive. “I’ve been compromised before. Will you read to me?”
    “Read to you?”
    “You did earlier this week. The Walter Scott, I think.”
    “You’re reading Scott now.” He’d thought she’d been asleep as soon as he’d started reading. She’d certainly acted asleep. “I can read to you for a bit.”
    When they were back on their blankets under the lean-to, and Asher had arranged the tarps to keep the snow off the fire, he took up the book, lit a coach lamp, and began to read, slowly, because his glasses were in his breast pocket, and he wasn’t about to wrestle them onto his nose before company. For almost an hour, he regaled Hannah with the deeds of old Ivanhoe—an idiot, by Asher’s standards—while she sighed and watched the fire beside him.
    “Nobody’s coming for us tonight, are they?”
    “They’d be fools to try. Had the wind not come up, there would have been a broken track to follow, but that’s not the case now.”
    “Time for bed?”
    She sounded wistful, as if she were longing for a nice, cozy four-poster after somebody had made good use of the warming pan.
    “Time for bed. Give me your cloaks.”
    “I beg your pardon?” Not so tipsy now—not tipsy at all.
    “If we’re not to freeze, and we’re not, then I need your cloaks. We sleep together, like kittens, and use both our coats as extra blankets.”
    “You are a very large kitten, Mr. Balfour.”
    “Call me Asher.”
    “Is that yet another title? I can’t keep them straight as it is. Lord This and Lord That, it’s quite confusing.”
    “Asher is my name, Asher MacGregor.”
    “If you say so.” She untied a cloak and passed it over to him. “Both of them?”
    “Please. We’ll be warmer this way.” He unbuttoned his coat as her second cloak landed in his lap.
    “Now what?” Her teeth were chattering.
    “Under the blankets,” he said, holding up the top several. “You’ll be between two lap robes and have several thicknesses above and below you.”
    “How c-c-cozy.”
    She curled up on her side in a ball. Asher arranged himself behind her, so she was between him and the fire, then spread their respective outer garments on top of the blankets.
    “Asher?”
    He scooted down into the blankets and drew them up over her shoulders, spooning his body around hers.
    “Mister Balfour Asher Lordship MacGregor? What are you doing?”
    “Keeping us both warm.” He tucked her close under the blankets, wrapping an arm around her waist and threading another under her neck so she could use his biceps as a pillow. “Now go to sleep. It’s the best way to get through a truly miserable winter, endorsed by no less beast than the great white bears of the North. I should know.”
    After a few minutes, her teeth stopped chattering, while Asher thought back to all the nights he’d spent in the longhouses, shivering his way to sleep to the sound of incessant coughing and the thick scent of bitter smoke.
    Nobody in the longhouses had ever smelled quite