The Royal Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.
idea of pretending that she didn’t want him, while the air in the Land Rover grew tauter and tauter with every mile.
When they drew up in the stable yard behind Loch Mhoraigh House, Lotty practically threw herself out of the Land Rover to gulp at the fresh air, only to find that her legs were so weak that she had to hang on to the door.
Perhaps she really was ill?
Lotty told herself to get a grip. She was distracted for a little while by unpacking the shopping, and she made herself breathe deeply: in, out, in, out. Not too difficult once you had got the hang of it. She was very glad Corran had left her to it while he took the dogs out. Pookie was thoroughly overexcited after being left all day.
‘I’ve put your case upstairs,’ Corran said briefly before he left.
She would be able to change into something decent for a change. Lotty clung to the hope that wearing clothes from her old life would remind her that she was a princess, not a skittish, fever-eyed girl in a frenzy of lust. She would put on the clothes she wore in the palace, and she would miraculously become sensible and dignified again.
Only it didn’t work out like that.
Lotty remembered packing her most casual clothes, but everything she pulled out of the case looked far too smart for Loch Mhoraigh House. She was half inclined to put it all back, but having made such a fuss about getting the suitcase back, it would look odd if she didn’t wear anything from it.
She chose the most relaxed outfit she could find—a pair of loose trousers and a silk knit top, a scarf knotted casually at her throat—but, far from restoring her to her normal regal self, the slip of the luxurious materials against her skin only made her feel more edgy. Every cell in her body seemed to be jangling with awareness. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, or her feet, and she couldn’t settle to anything.
Corran was checking the oven but he glanced up briefly when Lotty went into the kitchen, and then did a double take. Closing the oven door, he straightened slowly.
‘You look very elegant,’ he said.
Elegant. It was a horrible word, Lotty decided. It was cold and restrained. She didn’t want to be elegant. She wanted to be foxy. She wanted to be sexy. She wanted to be hot.
And elegant didn’t belong at Loch Mhoraigh either. Elegant was out of place, just like she was, Lotty thought miserably.
They had bought a ready meal to heat up for supper, but Lotty was too tense to enjoy the break from cooking. The soft trousers whispered against her legs whenever she shifted in her seat, and with every stretch of her arm, every lift of her hand, the silky top caressed her bare skin. She wished she had her old jeans and pink cardigan on again, or—even better—her filthy working clothes. Anything would be better than sitting there, simmering, unable to think about anything except her own body and Corran sitting across the table.
She was preternaturally aware of him, of his fingers holding the foil packet steady as he helped himself, of the broad, strong wrists. She couldn’t risk looking into those iceberg eyes, but her gaze skittered around the rest of his face, from the dark brows to the forceful nose, across his cheek to his temple, along the uncompromising line of his jaw, and always back to his mouth.
That mouth.
Lotty’s pulse was roaring in her ears. She couldn’t believe that she had spent every other evening sitting at this same table, happily chatting to Corran. At least, she had chatted happily and Corran had offered caustic comments, but it had been comfortable.
It wasn’t comfortable now.
How could one day have changed so much? It wasn’t as if anything had happened. All they had done was sit in the Land Rover, and walk around two stores. And yet it felt as if a fault line had appeared between them, shifting the world out of kilter, and squeezing all the air out of the atmosphere. Lotty had years of experience of stilted situations. She knew just what to do to move the conversation on, to make people relax and smile.
But not now. She felt like a hot air balloon, precariously tethered, and it would take only one little tug and she would just float away out of control. It was all she could do to keep herself in her chair. So their lame attempts at conversation kept getting stuck while Lotty pushed her food around her plate.
‘Not hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘Me neither,’ said Corran, pushing the plate aside. ‘Let’s go out.’
Lotty looked at him blankly. ‘Out?’
‘I’m stir crazy after a whole day indoors or in the car. I need some exercise. We could go for a walk.’
Lotty’s heart was beating high and hard in her throat. ‘OK.’
Outside, it was one of those long, soft Highland evenings she had come to love so much. Corran had told her it was a different story in winter, when the days were short and it was dark and bitterly cold, but in June the sun was only just setting at half past nine, and the cloudless sky was washed with an uncanny orange light.
The breeze ruffling the surface of the loch still carried the warmth of the day, but Lotty was hugging her arms together and her shoulders were hunched with tension.
‘Cold?’ Corran asked her. ‘Do you want to go back and get a jacket?’
‘No, I’m just… No, it’s fine.’ He could see her making an effort to relax her shoulders. ‘I’m fine,’ she said again, but she tucked her hair behind her ears in a gesture he had seen her make before when she was uncertain.
She had been tense all afternoon. Corran couldn’t put his finger on when things had changed. She had been her usual self on the way down to Glasgow, but gradually the ease had leaked out of the air, and then she had started talking about going home.
Her home, which wasn’t Loch Mhoraigh at all. Corran had been conscious of a nasty jolt at the reminder. Of course, he knew that Lotty wasn’t going to be there permanently—that had been the deal, after all—but he hadn’t thought she’d be thinking about going home yet.
He hadn’t thought at all. He’d just got used to Lotty being there. She’d turned into a more useful worker than Corran would ever have imagined and between them they were making good progress on the cottages. Which would explain the rush of relief when she had said that she wasn’t leaving immediately, of course.
Corran didn’t want to think about an alternative explanation.
On the whole he was glad Lotty had reminded him that she was only there temporarily. For some reason she was making a point of it today. Corran almost hadn’t recognised her when she came into the kitchen earlier. She was wearing trousers and a top, just as she had done every evening, but that outfit screamed sophistication and style. And money. Corran didn’t know much about clothes, but even he could see that it must have cost a lot of money. He wondered how many rams he could have bought for the cost of that pair of trousers.
She looked different. Elegant, expensive, a creature from a different world. She made Ella’s fashionable wardrobe look cheap. She didn’t look like she belonged at Mhoraigh any more.
And that was a good thing, Corran tried to convince himself. It made it easier for him to ignore the way her mouth tilted when she smiled. Made it easier to pretend that the blood didn’t rush to his head every time he looked into those luminous grey eyes.
She was walking beside him in silence, fiddling with the inevitable scarf at her neck, slender, straight-backed, those trousers swishing around her legs. Her face was averted slightly, and that meant he could let his eyes rest on the pure line of her throat as it swept down from her ear and curved into her shoulder. Sometimes Corran let himself imagine kissing his way down it…
He pushed the thought aside with a scowl. What was the point? Lotty was the last kind of woman he needed, Corran reminded himself. She didn’t belong here any more than Ella would have done, any more than his mother had done. There was no point in imagining