He released her and she dragged air into her lungs. Her limbs were weak. His hands slid down her thighs, then calves, the cold following, returning her to reality.
“Wickedness,” she whispered, a claw of shame scratching at her. “Is that what men do with their mistresses?”
“Nae. That’s whit a skellum daes wi’ a wumman he canna get out o his blood.” His voice was taut, slicing through the chill peace. “Kitty—”
“It’s all right.” She sat up and pushed her skirts over her legs and her voice quavered. “More than all right. I should thank you.”
He grasped her shoulders and pulled her close and spoke over her brow.
“Kitty, A canna make love tae ye as A wish. A dinna ken why ye believe yer yeld, but A winna take the chance agin. A shoudna the first time.”
“I believe that was my choice to make.” She should not tremble. She should not despair that his desire to avoid getting her with child and being obliged to marry her was stronger than his desire for her. “But I thank you for the consideration, again.” The achy shadow of pleasure in her body tangled with the ache elsewhere. Everywhere.
He wrapped an arm around her waist and tugged her hard against him.
“Dinna thank a man for using ye withoot honor, lass.” He spoke harshly, entirely unlike the poetry-
reciting lover in the stable. Here was intensity she had only glimpsed before. It thrilled her, and alarmed.
“I probably should not.” She searched his glittering eyes, but there was nothing she understood there now. “Still, part of me feels grateful. And since one of us should probably tell the truth, I suppose it will have to be me.”
His hand tightened on her. He bent, captured her lips, and kissed her. He kissed her and the world halted except for his mouth on hers that seemed to urge her to give him everything she wanted to give him anyway, this stranger she knew so little of except that he had not ever truly seemed a stranger to her. There was a tension in his body that did not match the sweet lingering pleasure in hers. But she wanted to meet him where he needed her. For the first time in years she wanted to serve a man’s desires no matter what it meant to her.
He broke away abruptly and wrapped his hand about the side of her face, forcing her gaze to his.
“Was it anely Poole?” His voice grated. “How many men hae ye been wi’?
She quailed, melting beneath the heat of his possessive jealousy. Nothing mattered now, nothing of the world in which she had hidden herself. Not even his secrets. On the edge of falling, she cared only for the arms of this most unlikely man that might catch her.
She could not tell him the truth, that it had only been Lambert. She was not such a fool as all that.
If he imagined he was unsafe from permanent entanglement with her, she must convince him that he could not get her with child. She wanted him more than she had ever wanted the man to whom she had given her innocence. But she knew how to play games of falsity too.
So it must be. Farewell grace. Farewell hoped-for joy. Grim pretense must suffice once again. Her hungry heart, it seemed, could manage nothing nobler. But at least for a short time, for perhaps only tonight, she might feel an echo of happiness.
“Oh,” she forced through her lips, “I daresay at least a dozen.”
She laughed, a sad, sweet sound of regret, and Leam was lost. Lost in a place he had vowed never to enter again. He pulled her tight to him, and willingly she gave him her mouth, her hands, and the soft slope of her neck dipping to her breasts. His heart, thick in his chest, pounded as her questing hands sought.
The tip of her tongue slipped along the edge of his ear and she whispered, “Make love to me, Leam. Save me from this need.”
He dragged her off him, thrusting her away, memories crashing to the fore. Blue eyes pleading, then weeping, tears soaking his skin, jealousy and rage tearing through him. His brother’s crumpled body, blood on the earth. Skirts clogged with river filth and a betrothal ring dulled.
Leam stumbled to his feet, pulling in breaths, and swung around. Five and a half years of impotent fury and grief surged forward.
“No,” he choked out, his stomach cramping, head whirling. “No. Kitty, I beg—I beg your pardon for this. For all of it. I cannot.”
Without looking back, he fled across the moonlit garden.
Not waiting for dawn, Leam gathered his belongings and escaped Willows Hall, casting off temptation beyond his ability to withstand. Pressing his horse and the hounds, he rode east, then north.
North to Alvamoor where his wife and brother awaited him in entombed peace, safely beyond the tumult in his soul they had created. North, where if he was very lucky he would entomb himself as well in a place where that soul could never be tempted again.
Chapter 15
Leam met his sisters on the terrace, the elegant mass of Alvamoor rising up behind him in crenellated red sandstone glory. The park stretched out across slopes to fallow brown fields and misty sheep pastures bordered with serpentine walls of rock. Beyond the stables below, the forest that had given name to his ancestors descended as a great dark shadow down the hill, as though mocking the formal gardens and park close to the house. It was wild Scottish nature and elegant English order combined, and he had missed it.
Wrapped in furs and mufflers, Fiona and Isobel took tea in the brilliant sun. His younger sister leaped up from the table, a graceful sylph of pinstriped muslin, red cloak, and dark curls flying across the terrace. She flung herself upon him and he caught her up.
“You are here!” Her slender arms squeezed. He bent to buss her upon one cheek, then the other.
When their mother died in Leam’s fifteenth year, Fiona had been a wee one. Now on the verge of eighteen she was a beauty, tall like Isobel yet still slender as a reed. “We thought you would never come!”
He smiled into her laughing eyes. “I began to believe I never would either.”
“What delayed you?”
“A snowstorm in Shropshire.” He took her hand and led her back to the table. “What are you doing out here? Haven’t you a place to enjoy tea within where it is warm?”
“I could not
Nature knew you were coming home today.” Her smile danced.
“What were you doing in Shropshire?” Isobel did not rise or even offer her hand. In five years she had not forgiven him as Fiona and their brother Gavin had. None of them had ever spoken of it, but Leam suspected Gavin understood, and Fiona had never cared much for James. As a child she’d made Leam her favorite, and her character was steeped in loyalty—much as Leam had pretended for years to society concerning his wife. But Fiona’s unshakable affection was real.
She squeezed his hand and hung on his arm.
“Yes, do tell us. I wish to know every little bit of everything you have done since we saw you last Christmas. Oh, but it is a terrible shame you missed it this year. Jamie and I made a
“Should I know what that is?”
“A French tower of cream puffs, silly!” She pinched his arm. “I read about it in a Parisian fashion magazine and supposed with all your world traveling you
