Pride of Spirit — Andrea K. Stein

Will two stubborn Highlanders ignore what their senses already know?

Will he sense the love in front of him despite the loss of his sight?

Will she overcome her wariness of men to embrace the man he's become?

1st Lieutenant Simon Demarest, late of the Royal Navy, is no longer the man he used to be. The man he used to be led boarding parties with little more than an ax and a blood-curdling cry sure to stop a slaver's crew in their tracks. The man he used to be could dance all night with the prettiest girl in the room.

The man he is now cannot even read a book for himself. Instead, he must sit like an invalid -- well, he is an invalid -- and listen while some dried-up spinster reads to him. Still, there's something odd about the spinster -- her scent. Her aura lingers long after the times she reads to him. And Miss MacKenzie's scent is one he used to know so well, that of a warm, aroused woman. He can barely make sense of her words for her overwhelming essence. She gives off the pheromones of someone who's slept all night cradled in nothing more than a field of lavender... whilst pleasuring herself.

Aileen MacKenzie has had quite enough of men, thank you very much, from her father who decided she should assume her dead mother's duties as chatelaine, cook, housekeeper and everything else in his cavernous, drafty manse out on the moor near Inverness, to her dratted, interfering eight brothers.

She's her own woman now, owner of the subscription library in the heart of Inverness, thanks to an elderly aunt's bequest. She really doesn't need the money Dr. MacCloud offers her to read to his blind patient. But there's something about this stubborn invalid, something she can't resist. And what kind of Christian woman would she be to turn her back on a fellow Highlander in need?