Page 56 of What a Scot Wants
With some trepidation, she nodded. When the balloon was ready, she put her trembling palm into Ronan’s much larger one, and he lifted her into the giant receptacle. A man stood at its center and nodded to her. He was working the contraption that fed fire into the balloon. The heat from the flame blew into her face and hair, and she nearly screamed as the basket went aloft. Ronan’s strong arms wrapped around her, and she shamelessly took comfort from them.
“If we die, we die together, right?” she mumbled after a few minutes of utter queasiness.
“Be brave, Imogen,” he told her with a smile. “Have a look.”
She did and lost her breath in awe at the spread-out countryside below her: wide meadows and trees, tiny little rows of houses on their farms, the gray city they’d come from looming in the distance. Though a number of long ropes tethered them to the ground, they still floated at a considerable height.
“God, it’s beautiful!” She couldn’t help it; she broke into laughter. “It’s incredible, isn’t it?”
“Aye.” But Ronan wasn’t looking at the scenery—he was looking at her. Imogen felt queasy, and it wasn’t just because of the elevation or the movement of the basket on the wind. The look in his eyes made her downright jittery. “I’ve been thinking about something.”
“What about?” she whispered.
That stare of his pierced her, making the breath whoosh from her lungs and her legs feel as insubstantial as twigs. Whatever he was about to say couldn’t be good. And why had he brought her here, hundreds of feet above the ground, to tell her? Did he mean to cry off? Was he finally going to say that he couldn’t go through with the betrothal? The thought didn’t bring with it the relief or happiness she’d expected. Instead, she felt oddly…despondent.
Imogen swallowed hard. “What is it, Ronan?”
“I think we should elope.”
Chapter Fifteen
A shot of fire released from the burner, the contraption set in the center of the wicker basket. The loud noise ate up Imogen’s reply, but Ronan could still read her lips perfectly.
“You think we shouldwhat?”
He’d expected—and counted on—nothing short of absolute shock, and Imogen delivered.
It was a gamble. A serious one. But the answer to his problems had struck with all the subtlety of a war horn the night they’d returned from Lady Reid’s disastrous gathering. If he could make Imogen believe that he had changed his mind, if he convinced her that hewantedthis marriage and no longer wished to end the betrothal, it would give her little choice but to retreat. Or submit. Ronan didn’t believe she would accept him, though.
But there had been something more than just rational thought behind her withdrawal from his lap the other evening in the carriage and from the kiss that had set both of them on fire. No, what Ronan had seen on Imogen’s expression had been well-masked fear. He knew the look, mostly from his time training men at Maclaren. Often, the ones who were the most frightened were also the ones who maintained cool and distant exteriors. As if nothing could touch them.
Imogen had retreated from their intimate, nearly out-of-control coupling in his carriage with an easy shrug of her shoulders because of something deeper than prudent, judicious reasoning.
She was afraid—of what, he couldn’t determine. Maybe it was the increasingly undeniable passion she felt for him. Maybe she was afraid of intimacy itself. She had, after all, spent her adult life alone, refusing suitors left and right. Surely not all of them had been awful. Or it could be a fear of men in general. Silas Calder and Imogen’s reaction to the man came to mind.
After learning what he had from Riverley about Calder being a fortune hunter and the Paxton girl he’d dallied with, Ronan had developed a suspicion. One that he couldn’t confirm without asking Imogen about it. Now was not the time, however. He had a plan for this afternoon, and bringing up Calder wasn’t part of it.
The balloon had started to lower toward the rolling field below, but the burst of hot air had sent it higher into the atmosphere. Imogen stumbled a little toward the high lip of the basket. Ronan caught her elbow.
“Marry me, Imogen. For real, with no more games.”
The words were surprisingly easy to get out. He’d considered what he’d say scores of times over the last day, but he’d wondered if his mouth would seal over and refuse to open when it came time. Hell, he’d been going after his goal to make Imogen cry off all wrong, and the tryst in the carriage had proven it. If he kept pushing, kept trying to get closer, he was willing to wager that she would keep retreating.
The lips he’d ravished in the carriage—and at the opera and at Haven—gaped. He wanted to take her fuller bottom lip and tuck it between his teeth. He could have. The pilot, currently working the burner’s valve, was graciously giving them his back. But Ronan had carefully planned this outing, and he would stick to the script, so to speak.
“I…are you actuallyproposingto me? You do realize, my dear addled Duke, that we are already engaged and have been for some weeks.”
He used his hand on her arm to pull himself closer. Close enough to smell her honeyed skin. “Aye. I am. No’ as part of some agreement made by our families.”
“We both know this isn’t what either of us wants.”
“Perhaps no’ at first,” he said, his fingers drifting to her wrist and delving under the kid glove she wore. She jumped at the sweep of his fingertips against her soft, warm skin. “But the more I’m with ye, Imogen, the more I see something we both do want.”
Two vertical lines pressed into the skin between her brows. She shook her head. “There is nothing we both want other than freedom from this betrothal, without any repercussions, financial or otherwise.”
“Dunnae lie to yerself. Ye feel this as keenly as I.”
In Edinburgh, when they’d first met, Ronan had played the act of perverse, uncouth Highlander and had reveled in Imogen’s horror. However, now that she knew he wasn’t at all what he’d pretended to be, she didn’t seem to know how to react to his advances. These were not put on. Therewassomething between them. He let her see it all now, plain on his face, and, as he’d calculated, he felt her pulling away.
