Page 51 of Gift-Wrapped in a Kilt

She took three long, slow breaths. Straightened her clothes. Smoothed her hair. And climbed back into the car to head home.

Tonight, she would reassert her control. She would.

Your bum's oot the windae again, eh?

Chapter Nineteen

Gavin rang the doorbell of Dùndubhan and waited. And waited. The sun had set, plunging the world into a darkness broken only by the light positioned above the door and the faint glow of more lights inside the house. The castle. Sheesh, who lived in a freaking castle?

Rory MacTaggart did. Like he was a king or something, looking down on his subjects from the highest floor of the frigging tower.

Gavin groaned. Okay, maybe he did have a weird complex about Rory, about his wealth and his lifestyle. Not jealousy, not exactly. Something more like anxiety.

He had no frigging idea what that meant.

The door swung inward, revealing Jamie.

Gavin somehow clung to a neutral expression even as his cock twitched. She wore a babydoll nightie made of sheer, midnight-blue fabric that billowed around her, its hem barely below her hips. The spaghetti straps that held the nightie up seemed about to tumble off her shoulders. Panels of intricate lace covered her breasts, sort of, though he glimpsed the rosy peaks of her nipples, stiff and jutting against the fabric. Through the gauzy length of the babydoll, he spied matching, minuscule panties as sheer as the nightie, revealing the thatch of cinnamon hairs on her mound.

Jamie leaned her curvy body against the door, waving for him to enter. "Let's go into my bedroom."

He scuffled through the doorway into the vestibule.

She shut the door and sashayed into the hall, angling left toward the dining room.

Gavin couldn't resist admiring her voluptuous hips as they swayed and her round bottom as it moved beneath the flimsy fabric. His mouth watered, and his palms sweated. He hadn't seen her naked in five days. That might explain why he got a raging hard-on every time he came within fifty feet of her and why he'd been having the most erotic dreams of his life. Despite her claim she wanted only sex and her announcement she'd summon him when the mood struck her, she'd been avoiding him. Avoiding intimacy. Avoiding dealing with their problems.

Another irony in this whole mess. For months, he'd avoided intimacy — both the emotional and the physical kind. The more time he spent around Jamie's brothers, the more self-conscious he got and the more difficult it was to get it up in the bedroom. He was finally getting an inkling why her brothers bugged him so much, but he needed to talk it out with his best friend, the only person who understood him completely.

Jamie.

And she wouldn't tolerate conversation.

With Iain's help, Gavin had figured out one thing for sure. He had to cut out the wuss-bag behavior and act like the man Jamie had fallen for eighteen months ago. Act like the man who'd, half jokingly, threatened to murder Aidan for banging his baby sister. The man who'd swept Jamie off her feet.

Sex only with no real intimacy? Screw that idea. He'd proved her wrong five days ago when she tried to keep their encounter impersonal. Still, she refused to give up her lame idea. She left him with one option.

Keep seducing her. Keep forcing her to experience their connection. Keep her in the moment with him at all times, not retreating into her detached vixen persona.

She could keep some of the vixen stuff. He did love her feisty side.

Jamie guided him into her bedroom. She twirled around and fell backward onto the bed, her body sprawled across it and the nightie riding up to reveal a hint of the curly hairs between her thighs, with only a sliver of lacy fabric to cover them. The pinkish light from the bedside lamp sprayed across her golden-brown hair. Her breasts mounded on her chest, plump and succulent, the taut nipples begging to be sucked.

"Well?" she said, wriggling her red-painted toes. "Get to work, Gavin. I called you here for sex, not to have you gawp at me all night."

His cock pulsed. It wanted her. He wanted her. But this sex-only crap had to stop this instant.

Gavin shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it onto the floor. "I know what you think you want. But I also know what you really want. I know you, Jamie, and you can't fool me. I gave you what you really need the last time we were together. You can lie and say it meant nothing, but I know the truth."

"Bod an Donais." She pushed up onto her elbows, and the nightie slipped out of position, allowing one breast to nearly spill out. "Fuck me, Gavin. That's what I want. It's all I want. Hot, screaming sex for twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, and then you leave."

Though her words hit him like a slap to the face, something in her eyes made him stop and study those hazel irises, glimmering in the soft light. Maybe she'd hoped erasing all intimacy and emotion between them would push him to do the right thing, finally. Well, it had worked, he supposed. He'd woken up to the fact he couldn't live without this woman.

No more dafty boy.

He tugged his T-shirt out of his waistband and pulled it off over his head. As the shirt flumped to the floor, he stripped off his sneakers, jeans, and boxers. Naked, he strode to the bed and bent over it to brace his hands at either side of her head, their faces inches apart.

"No," he said.

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