Page 57 of Gift-Wrapped in a Kilt

Gavin's mouth slid into a sensual smile. "Why don't we try that again?"

"Um…" She struggled to catch her breath, but he lingered centimeters away from her, destroying any hope she might've had of regaining her composure. "We should get back to the house. Calli will be wondering if we've kidnapped her puppies."

They had returned to the house then, though Gavin held her hand all the while.

Later that day, a trip to a gift shop had left Aidan mildly annoyed because, according to him, she and Gavin had "flirted like teenagers and almost had a poke right there on the floor." He was exaggerating. Maybe she and Gavin had flirted, but that was all. Grinning and touching each other's hands did not equate to having sex on the floor of a tourist shop.

Besides, Aidan actually was having a poke at Gavin's sister on a nightly basis. He had no call to criticize Jamie's flirtations with Calli's brother.

That's when the unfortunate incident happened.

Calli and Aidan had taken off for a night at a motel to have "private" time. Though Jamie and Gavin could've done anything they wanted that night, they'd done nothing sexier than holding hands. Since their first kiss, they'd had little time alone to try that again. Jamie had wanted to try. Badly. She'd begun to wonder if Gavin didn't.

Until the morning after their night alone in Calli's house. He'd slept in the hunting shack, despite Jamie suggesting he could sleep in Calli's room. He'd made a strange face at the suggestion and said, "She and Aidan are — well, you know. In that room."

Having sex, he'd meant. It made him uncomfortable to think of his baby sister enjoying carnal relations with anyone, but especially with Aidan.

After breakfast, Jamie and Gavin sat down on the sofa to talk. The chatting lasted about two minutes. He'd leaned in close, his breaths ghosting over her lips, and said, "I think it's damn well time we tried that again."

She knew what he meant. Her skin tightened at the suggestion, and a tingling in her scalp spread down to her breasts.

"Aye," she said. "We should."

He scooted closer, stretching one arm across the sofa's back behind her. She angled sideways to face him, her knees bent and her belly quivering with excitement. Their one kiss had left her burning for more.

Gavin clasped her upper arm gently, urging her to lean in as he slanted toward her.

Their lips touched.

A spark — she swore to God it felt like a real spark — crackled on her mouth, shooting straight down her body through her breasts and down to her sex. A breath rushed out of her, and her lips opened. He parted his own lips to inhale as if drawing her breath into him, and he ghosted his mouth over hers, back and forth, his breaths a whisper on her skin. Her eyes drifted closed, anticipation a heady current arcing through her. His fingers tightened ever so slightly on her arm. She sagged toward him, and her hands contacted his chest, firm and warm beneath his shirt. Her fingers curled into his flesh when he flicked his tongue out to tease her top lip.

He sealed his mouth over hers.

She sighed against his lips, sliding one hand up to his neck, and higher, to his nape. He slipped his tongue between her lips to torment her with slow, gentle glides that had her moaning and mashing her breasts to his chest, thrusting her hand up into his hair to cradle the back of his head, even as his exploration of her mouth grew more heated, more passionate. She opened wider for him, and he ravished her with an abandon that stole her breath, her thoughts, her inhibitions.

The hand on her arm found her breast. He scraped his thumb over her nipple.

She gasped into his mouth, shocked by a jolt of raw pleasure.

The front door burst inward.

Jamie and Gavin jumped at the same time, their lips torn from each other. Jamie flung a hand up to her mouth, partly to hide her swollen lips, partly in shock at the thunderous expression on Aidan's face.

Never in her life had she seen easygoing Aidan so upset.

Gavin's look of phony innocence did not ease Aidan's anger.

Here in her bedroom in Rory's castle, Jamie touched her lips. They tingled from the memory of that day. Yes, Aidan had been angry, but he'd mostly been embarrassed to have caught his baby sister "sucking face" with Calli's brother. That's what Calli had called it when Aidan stormed into the house and she tried to calm him down. Jamie stifled a laugh when she remembered the events after Aidan and Calli walked in on her and Gavin. Aidan's not-so-righteous indignation had crumbled when Calli accidentally referred to her house as Aidan's home too.

Calli's flub had changed the tack of the conversation, steering it away from Jamie and Gavin and their make-out session on the sofa.

The interplay between Aidan and Calli had been entertaining, but also enlightening. Jamie learned a lot about man-woman relationships by watching her brothers interact with, and bollocks it up with, various women. Now that her brothers had found their fairy-tale loves with Calli, Erica, and Emery, Jamie tried to learn from how they interacted with their wives compared with how they'd treated them before they admitted they'd fallen head over heels for the Americans.

Lachlan had broken Erica's heart, but she forgave him because he finally shared his secrets with her, secrets he had never told anyone else. Even Jamie didn't know what drove Lachlan to fear love. She did know, because everyone had heard the story a dozen times or more, that Lachlan literally fell to his knees and begged Erica to take him back.

Aidan had told Calli he would win her heart, and he had, but Calli then broke his heart, terrified to trust anyone after being stuck in a marriage of convenience for so long. Aidan forgave her because she finally opened up to him and shared her fears.

Rory had seduced Emery into a marriage of convenience but refused to love her, then let her walk out on him rather than express his true feelings. Emery forgave him because he finally opened up to her about his past marriages, telling her things no one else had ever known or would ever know. He'd nearly stripped naked in the town square of Loch Fairbairn to show Emery he loved her enough to risk any sort of humiliation to win her back.

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