A Highland Duchess (41 page)

“Ian, please.”

She held out her arms to him.

Her eyes were huge, the pupils dark. A flush suffused her face. Even with the bruise on her cheek, she was still beautiful. A last thought before he tenderly kissed her and lost the ability to reason or think.

Her hips moved back and forth, as if she couldn’t bear the heat between them. His hand dove between her thighs, explored the soft, swollen folds. His fingers stroked across her dampness, and her thighs clamped against his hand, trapping him, needing him. His fingers moved, gently at first, then bore down with more pressure, circling the opening of her body with such delicate care that her sudden, indrawn breath interrupted their kiss.

He smiled, then bent and drew a nipple into his heated mouth, arousing her with sharp little bites, then soothing her with the tip of his tongue.

Emma could hear the breathless sound of her own voice, feel the grip of her hands on his shoulders, her fingernails scraping gently down his chest. She writhed in his arms as he kissed his way between her breasts and down her stomach to hover at her navel.

He slipped into her heat, clenching his teeth when she closed around him like a fist. A soft cry escaped her as her hands beat against his shoulders, then gripped him with possessive fingers, a push and pull of desire that drove him nearly mad.

“Ian,” she whispered, nearly sobbing in her need of him.

Overcome with love, desperate with arousal, he began to withdraw, push himself inside, then withdraw again. He fought his way to sanity through levels of pleasure.

Emma wrapped her arms around his neck, arched up to bite gently at his throat.

“Now, now, now,” she said, her voice vibrating with emotion.

He closed his mouth over hers, absorbed her shuddering breaths.

One arm supported his weight as his other hand reached under her, slipped under her beautiful bottom and lifted her up to him. A gasp escaped her, and she clung to him, her lips pressed against his throat.

This was not simply lovemaking. This was mating. This was elemental and fierce and as right and proper as the sun rising or the moon hanging above the earth.

Her surrender summoned his own. He emptied himself into her, barely conscious as he collapsed half on top of her. Her hands slid weakly to the mattress as he murmured an incoherent apology, rousing enough to roll to the side. She turned her head and softly kissed his chest.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know.” She patted his chest possessively. “You always have.”

“I always have,” he admitted. “And you?”

“My dearest Ian,” she said, emotion thickening her voice. “Must you ask?”

“Yes,” he said. “I find I must.”

“I love you,” she said, placing her palm against his cheek. “I love you,” she repeated, rising up to kiss the curve of his ear. “I love you,” she said against his lips when he turned his head to kiss her.

He looked at her, grateful that he’d left the lamp burning. His memory would forever furnish the beauty of her shadowed face.

Ian bent his head and touched his lips to the space between her breasts, a benediction with a kiss. He kissed her throat, then the edge of her jaw.

“I used to believe in science to the exclusion of all else,” he said. “Science has rules. Science is measurable. Science can be proven, repeatedly. Fate is something else entirely, but Emma if . . . ” His voice trailed off.

Her hand cupped the side of his face. He turned his head to kiss her palm.

She had the strangest thought, a faint recollection of a woman in a mirror, the laughing, loved woman in the Tulloch Sgàthán. She’d been reaching for someone beyond her sight, and as Emma looked at Ian, she knew it had been him. Later, she’d tell him about the mirror, but for now, she only smiled.

“I believe in
you
. Must we believe in anything else but each other?”

He smiled. “No,” he said, and kissed her again.

Author’s Note

V
ictorian society has always fascinated me because of its duplicity. On the one hand, Victoria was a virtuous—and staid—Queen. On the other, the Victorian age produced a great deal of pornography, both written and photographic. What went on behind the scenes was often as informative as what happened in public. The orgies at Chavensworth are based on rumors and innuendo of the time.

In Greek mythology, a Maenad (translation: raving one) was a female follower of Dionysus. The Maenads were often depicted as being in a drunken, ecstatic rapture in which they lose all self-control.

Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, any money a woman earned, or inherited, automatically became the property of her husband.

The music hall Bryce frequented was modeled on an actual club functioning in 1866.

“I Once Loved a Lass,” also known as “The False Bride” is a folk ballad dating from the seventeenth century.

A Collection of Strathspey Reels With a Bass for the Violoncello or Harpsichord,
by Alexander McGlashan, 1778, 1781, features “The Highlanders Farewell.”

We truly do stand on the shoulders of giants, men who worked in relative obscurity with only an idea. John Tyndall is one of those giants, and Ian’s work is patterned after his experiments. In Tyndall’s lab, he came up with a way to create pure air by coating the inside of a box with glycerin. What he discovered was that there were no signs of floating microorganisms in the air of the boxes so treated. His work verified Louis Pasteur’s demonstration that the presence of germs—or microorganisms—were necessary to the decomposition of flesh. Tyndall developed a method of killing germs that was known as “Tyndallization.” He and Pasteur communicated often during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Aristotle (384 B.C.–322 B.C.) proposed the theory of Spontaneous Generation. According to his theory, all living things are generated from nonliving things. The creature generated was dependent upon properties of the nonliving pneuma—or vital heat—and the five elements he believed comprised all matter: fire, air, earth, water, and aether (the divine substance that makes up the planets and stars). This theory lasted until Louis Pasteur proved it false in 1859.

Since poisoning cases were often reported by the press, and contained those elements that made for reader interest (love, betrayal, and rage), public perception was that the Victorian era was associated with a poisoning epidemic, and that poisoning was a fashionable crime. The truth was that the actual numbers of criminal cases involving poison remained constant throughout the century.

In Victorian England murder by poison was proven mainly by circumstantial evidence, since most forensic tools had not yet been developed. The Reinsch test is one exception. This test was a method to detect arsenic poisoning and was developed in 1841. In the book, Ian performed the test on the remaining contents of the wine bottles. In actuality, the test was performed on bodily fluids.

People were expected to sign the Poison Book when purchasing arsenic in 1866, but it was a common enough occurrence, since arsenic was used for a variety of purposes: to kill rats, as a complexion enhancer, and even as a food dye. (A coloring agent—Scheele’s Green—was made from adding copper sulfate to a solution of arsenic and used as a food dye in sweets.)

The treatment for arsenic poisoning was as I described it in the book. However, there are no definitive statistics on survivors, so it’s uncertain if the treatment was efficacious.

About the Author

KAREN RANNEY wanted to be a writer from the time she was five years old and filled her Big Chief tablet with stories. People in stories did amazing things and she was too shy to do anything amazing. Years spent in Japan, Paris, and Italy, however, not only fueled her imagination, but proved that she wasn’t that shy after all. Yet she prefers to keep her current adventures between the covers of her books. Karen lives in San Antonio, Texas, and loves to hear from her readers at
www.karenranney.com.

By Karen Ranney

A Highland Duchess

Sold to a Laird

A Scotsman in Love

The Devil Wears Tartan

The Scottish Companion

Autumn in Scotland

An Unlikely Governess

Till Next We Meet

So In Love

To Love a Scottish Lord

The Irresistible MacRae

When the Laird Returns

One Man’s Love

After the Kiss

My True Love

My Beloved

Upon a Wicked Time

My Wicked Fantasy

Coming Soon

A Borrowed Scot

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A HIGHLAND DUCHESS. Copyright © 2010 by Karen Ranney. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition August 2010 ISBN: 9780062005328

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