Page 30 of In Search of a Husband
It was then she was forced to admit a Scottish burr was deeply attractive.
Kate went limp as Mr. MacInnes propelled her upward. She sputtered, swatting the water and cursing none too ladylike. Her eyes stung, and she couldn’t touch the bottom here.
“What the hell are ye doin’?” he asked.
Not Kelpies, then.
Well, that was embarrassing.
“You made me lose my bar of soap,” she hissed back indignantly. She swam closer toward the riverbank, only then remembering the girls had run off with her clothes. Kate was stuck here, not just in Scotland, but in this river… with him. “I came to bathe.”
“It appeared as if you were struggling.”
She scoffed. “I have everything well in hand.”
He sank beneath the water, then emerged running his hands through his hair so it slicked back off his face. In London, perhaps, she wouldn’t have considered him handsome. But Gabriel MacInnes was made to be appreciated in the Scottish Highlands. She was certain of it.
“Do ye now?”
Kate glanced nervously toward the riverbank, then forced a big smile. “Yes.”
He nodded, swimming around her. She shouldn’t have, but she found herself treading water, staring at the corded muscles of his arms, of his powerful shoulders. This was far too intimate of a meeting. She recognized that, and he seemed completely oblivious. Or maybe he didn’t care, which was entirely reckless in another way.
“Why are you here?” she asked at last.
The water beaded over his creamy skin, kissed lightly with the slightest of tans as if he spent a few weeks oceanside during the summer.
“I swim every afternoon before I head into the village to handle things at the inn.”
“I thought the inn was closed.”
“Might be for good if I can’t get the fire damage repaired so we can reopen. Our village has hosted the Harvest Festival here every autumn for the past twenty years. We must be open in time.”
She swam around him now, her eyes studying the sharp lines of his face. His blue eyes were far too efficient at ridding her of any sense.
“But you are planning for more than an inn, I believe. You wish to open a distillery.”
“I wish to do whatever it takes to restore my family’s legacy. And my family’s illicit whisky was well kent. There’s an opportunity to open a proper distillery, a legal one—that is, now with the recent Excise Act. But my family…”
This man, washed in the honey-warmed sun of a late September afternoon, was a damn crime.
“We shouldn’t be alone here. Swimming.”
“Who will tell on us? And to whom?”
She scoffed again. “That is exactly what a man would say who isn’t afraid of ruin.”
“I’m moments away from being ruined, Miss Bancroft. It’s only that I refuse to give up.”
“Such fortitude.”
Maybe it was the current or maybe it was that she was studying the curves of his lips a little too intensely, but Kate was suddenly inches from Mr. MacInnes in the water. She felt the ripples of him treading water close by, like a caress which was unexpected and intimate. And she was fairly certain she hated this man.
“The girls took yer clothes, didna they?” he asked finally, a stupid smug Scottish smile plastered across his annoyingly handsome face.
Kate shoved her hand against the surface of the water and splashed him.
“Nae need to be feisty.”
