Oh, no. Touching him was out of the question. There would not be any touching.
But before Maddie knew what was happening, he’d caught her ungloved hand and drawn it inside his unbuttoned coat, pressing it to his chest.
And they were touching.
Intimately.
A stupid, instinctive thrill shot through her. She’d never held hands with any man. Never felt a man’s skin pressed against her own. Curiosity clamored louder than her objections.
His hand was large and strong. Roughened with calluses, marked with scars and powder burns. Those marks revealed his life to be one of battle and strife, just as surely as her pale, ink-stained fingers told hers to be a life of scribbling . . . and no adventure at all.
He flattened her palm against the well-worn lawn of his shirt. Beneath it, he was impressively solid. Warm.
Real.
“I’m no ghost, mo chridhe. Just a man. Flesh and bone.”
Mo chridhe.
He kept using those words. She wasn’t fluent in Gaelic, but over the years she’d gathered a few bits here and there. She knew mo chridhe meant “my heart.”
The words were a lover’s endearment, but there was no tenderness in his voice. Only a low, simmering anger. He spoke the words like a man who’d cut out his own heart long ago and left it buried in the cold, dark ground.
With their joined hands, he eased aside one lapel of his coat. The gesture revealed a corner of yellowed paper tucked inside his breast pocket. She recognized the handwriting on the envelope.
It was her own.
“I received your letters, lass. Every last one.”
God help her. He knew.
He knew she’d lied. He knew everything.
And he was here to make her pay.
“Aunt Thea,” she whispered, “I believe I’ll be needing that posset after all.”
So, Logan thought. This is the girl.
At last he had her in his grasp. Madeline Eloise Gracechurch. In her own words, the greatest ninny to ever draw breath in England.
The lass wasn’t in England now. And pale as she’d grown in the past few seconds, he suspected she might not be breathing, either.
He gave her hand a little squeeze, and she drew in a gasp. Color flooded her cheeks.
There, that was better.
To be truthful, Logan needed a moment to locate his own composure. She’d knocked the breath from him, too.
He’d spent a great deal of time wondering how she looked. Too much time over the years. Of course she’d sent him sketches of every blessed mushroom, moth, and blossom in existence—but never any likenesses of herself.
By the gods, she was bonny. Far prettier than her letters had led him to imagine. Also smaller, more delicate.
“So . . .” she said, “this means . . . you . . . I . . . gack.”
Much less articulate, too.
Logan’s gaze slid to her aunt, who was somehow exactly as he’d always pictured her. Frail shoulders, busy eyes, saffron-yellow turban.
“Perhaps you’ll permit us a few minutes alone, Aunt Thea. May I call you Aunt Thea?”
“But . . . certainly you may.”
“No,” his betrothed moaned. “Please, don’t.”
Logan patted her slender shoulder. “There, there.”
Aunt Thea hurried to excuse her niece. “You must forgive her, Captain. We believed you dead for years. She’s worn mourning ever since. To have you back again . . . well, it’s such a shock. She’s overwrought.”
“That’s understandable,” he said.
And it was.
Logan would be surprised, too, if a person he’d invented from thin air, then cravenly lied about for close to a decade, appeared on his doorstep one afternoon.
Surprised, shocked . . . perhaps even frightened.
Madeline Gracechurch appeared to be no less than terrified.
“What was it you mentioned wanting, mo chridhe? A poultice?”
“A posset,” Aunt Thea said. “I’ll heat one at once.”
As soon as her aunt had left the room, Logan tightened his grip around Madeline’s slender wrist, drawing her to her feet.
The motion seemed to help her find her tongue.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“I thought we covered that already.”
“Have you no conscience, coming in here as an imposter and frightening my aunt?”
“Imposter?” He made an amused sound. “I’m no imposter, lass. But I’ll admit—I am entirely without conscience.”
She wet her lips with a nervous flick of her tongue, drawing his gaze to a small, kiss-shaped mouth that might otherwise have escaped his attention.