Her husband. She was holding her husband. She’d never thought to have one. But for Gerard. . . She breathed deeply and raised her hips and took him in, as he needed.
It was painful. It was glorious. And in the end, his wild desire drove her to another shattering climax that left her breathless and spinning.
And in that moment, as he spilled his seed into her, Iona sensed his needs in the same way she understood her queen, sensed what he didn’t really understand himself—because he was a man and an Ives. She almost laughed into his broad shoulder. Instead, she kissed his salty skin anywhere she could reach.
He rolled over, removing his heavy weight. She curled against his side, fearing he’d hurt his shoulder. “I’ll be a very bad countess,” she whispered, not knowing if he heard. “But I’ll be the wife you need.”
His arm tightened around her, and they drifted off to sleep.
A kitten pouncing on their faces woke them in the early dawn.
Gerard growled and lifted the creature up in one hand. “Tell me I made a mistake gifting you with this creature, and it will go back to Phoebe by evening.”
Iona sat up and snatched the kitten from his hand. The sheet fell from her breasts, and her husband instantly took advantage. Cuddling the kitten, she lay back and covered herself again. “You did that on purpose.”
“Probably.” He eyed her with interest. His mussed hair and morning beard gave him a rakish look that had her heart thumping.
“What do we do now?” she whispered. “I had planned to run for Wystan before dawn.”
“It would be foolish to go to Wystan if you need to go to Balmoral. We’ll stay here until then. Do I need to take you into the city and buy you pretty gowns? Or maybe just pretty corsets?” He leered convincingly—giving her a lovely glimpse of the raw male behind his proper façade.
Remembering the golden nightgown he’d bought for her, she slid from the bed in search of it. The kitten insisted on exploring while she shimmied into the loveliest piece of lace-edged silk she’d ever known. “I should make this into an evening gown!” She caressed the sheer silkiness in wonder. “I’ve never owned anything like it.”
She held out the narrow skirt and spun around for him to admire.
Propped on one arm, Gerard regarded her dance with appreciation. “I would shower you with silk, if I could.”
Realizing she’d just cost him any chance at a wealthy wife, Iona plummeted off her foolish cloud. “I don’t need silk. Wystan needs a roof. Your library is far more important than clothes! I hope you did not waste too much on me.”
“It wasn’t a waste. I’m enjoying every minute of money well spent.” He rolled out of bed, drawing the sheet around his hips.
She could still see the bulge of his arousal, but it was what he didn’t say that caused her trepidation. He didn’t have the funds he needed to save Wystan—because of her. “If you’d married an heiress, you would be honeymooning in Italy, exploring your gift. You need to explore your gift as much as you need to put a roof on Wystan.”
That was what she’d sensed last night. He still didn’t want to admit to his friends that he was a gifted Malcolm, but it was his only hope now.
“It is a useless gift.” He shrugged his still-bandaged shoulder. “Keeping Wystan’s library from the damp is more important than Italy. We’ll travel someday. It’s not as if I’m poor. We’ll always have a roof over our heads. You can have silks, if you like.” He advanced on her.
Iona stepped back. “Lowell is quite vocal about your refusal to improve your wardrobe. I won’t have you buying silk for me if you won’t buy new clothes. You have given up far too much for me! I hope I know duty as well as you do. Wystan comes first.”
She darted behind the dressing screen. “Where is my trunk?”
“In the other room, where the kitten should be.” He peered around the screen, completely comfortable with their dishabille and obviously not fretting too much over their pennilessness. “Are you sure you would not like to take breakfast in bed?”
“I’ve never done anything so decadent. I should think it would cause a great deal of trouble.” She had no robe to cover the sheer silk. She’d never lounged about in leisure and didn’t know what to do with herself. She tested the water basin. It was chilly.
“You have much to learn about being a countess, my lady.” He leaned in and kissed her nose. “Do you even own a robe? I’d lend you mine, but then I’d have to order a tray while wearing a sheet. Hop back in bed and let us pretend we are in a mansion above the sunny coast, being pampered.”
Iona basked in that glorious thought, dodged out of the other side of the screen, and jumped back in bed, pulling the covers up. “Dinnae say that you haven’t dreamed of a drafty castle overlooking a loch with snow coming through the windows as your honeymoon.”
“All right, I won’t say it.” He pulled on a robe and yanked a rope.
In a short while, a parade of servants arrived bearing trays of tea and pastries, as well as their clothes and warm water—niceties she’d never experienced. Pulling a sheet up to her neck, Iona nervously allowed a tray to be set over her lap. Gerard merely gestured for his to be set on a dresser. He grabbed the kitten before it could butter its nose on toast and handed it to a departing maid.
“Find it—”
“Kingsley,” Iona informed him. “His name is Kingsley.”
“Please take the king out for nature’s call and find him something more appropriate to eat than toast.” He turned to the valet and maid puttering about with clothes. “Go find something to iron. I think we’ll figure out how to dress ourselves.”
“And shave?” Lowell asked, dourly eyeing his whiskers.
“A beard is just the thing. Go on or I may decide to crawl about the foundation like Max and come in covered in filth,” her lord and husband commanded.
Wide-eyed with horror, Lowell fled.
Iona sipped her tea and watched him with interest. “You could grow a beard and wear a colorful scarf over your battered head and look like a pirate. Foundation exploring may be just the thing. Didn’t Max say it is Roman? We needn’t go to Italy to explore Roman ruins.”
* * *
“I cannot believe I’m spending the first day of our wedded life crawling around in a sewer.” Gerard held up his lantern so his dainty bride could avoid sticking her too-large boot into a hole.
“You’re not crawling,” she pointed out pragmatically. “And I do not believe this part was the sewer. Did you not listen when Lydia regaled us with tales of ghosts and spirits down here?”
“It’s Lydia’s duty to listen to books.” Of course, he was listening to a Roman soldier chuckling in his head. Iona couldn’t know that.
“But Max is the one who saw the ghost, remember? Can there be any better place for us to practice your talent for seeing history? There is no one around to notice. Think of this as my wedding gift to you.”
She had him there. Allowing him to explore the peculiar without disapproval was quite a spectacular gift, now that he realized the freedom she provided.
“Here.” She lifted her lantern to examine what appeared to be a filled-in archway. “I can sense. . . the oddity. It’s not like feeling the knife we found. I can’t describe the scent.”
“Mold. Decay. Rot.” Hiding his exhilaration at this freedom, Gerard found the names engraved on the arch as Max had described. His fingers tingled. He picked up weird. . . sensations. People whispering. Bells tolling. Song. Prayer. A church?
“You’re hiding behind cynicism,” she accused, hitting the mark dead on. “You’re afraid you’re weird—like me.”
“Maybe I’m afraid I’m not weird.” That was a stupid retort. The voice in his head cackled agreement.
“You’re not insane,” she reassured him.
“I didn’t think I was.” But he did, down deep inside. Ives weren’t weird. He was an Ives, a logical, educated earl, someday a marquess. He was meant to be a leader of men—not a madman who stroked sto
nes. His bride was a shade too perceptive.
“I can smell your fear, and I know perfectly well it isn’t of ghosts. Tell me you don’t feel anything here.” She ran her hand over the arch.
Gerard didn’t want to open his Pandora’s box of fears, but Iona seemed as mad as he was. She hadn’t minded his earlier vision. And sensing vibrations may have saved his life. He supposed if he were to be labeled a Mad Malcolm, he should at least experiment to see if it was justified.
As if he stroked old stones every day, he removed his leather glove and pretended he was an archeologist hunting for hidden hieroglyphics.
The vibration stung him, almost like a bee. He yanked his hand away.
“I’m not sensing anything painful or I would have warned you.” Iona regarded him with fascination, as one might a monster in a freak show.
“And to think, I married you for life. What was I thinking?” She’d given him a map, one that might locate a Roman ruin. But he’d need this weird talent to find anything. If there might actually be treasure. . .
He held his palm a fraction above the surface, looking for. . . who knows what. Curiosity and excitement warred with practicality. “Will we spend the rest of our days crawling about Wystan, hunting ghosts?”
“Or treasure,” she said with equanimity. “Or just satisfying our intellectual nosiness.”
For good or ill, and against all logical sense, he’d married a woman after his own heart. Feeling a little less stifled, he crouched down and flattened his palm against the oldest name carved into the wall.
No church bells. “Chanting Latin,” he decided.
Iona crouched beside him. “Bell has been studying her affliction. She says we may be like tuning forks, designed to find a perfect pitch in the energies around us. In our case, that pitch may be the right combination of vibration and smell.”
She laid her delicate fingers across his. The connection was instantaneous.
Hooded figures, large and small, male and female. Sorrow. A bier carrying a slender, white-robed woman. A man in primitive leather armor—a Roman soldier?—kissing her cold cheek, laying a circlet of gold on her chest.
The chanting increased. The soldier embraced the shoulders of two weeping girls. “My treasures,” he murmured.
The trio wept and watched as the bier was laid inside a vault and sealed.
Warning shouts. With the tomb sealed, the robed figures slipped away.
Immense sorrow and tension. Setting a gold medallion into the seal, the soldier hugged his daughters, then handed them over to another. “You must go south to your mother’s family, to safety.”
* * *
Iona lost her grip and sat down abruptly, shaken. Undoubtedly ruining his trousers, her husband sat beside her and drew her into his lap, murmuring comforting, if meaningless, phrases.
How did one make meaning of what they’d seen? She shivered in his embrace. Gerard had done this. Her husband had pulled ancient history out of a stone.
Once she’d drawn her mind out of the vision and recovered from the shock, she leaned into his broad shoulder and contemplated what they had seen. “Interesting, if not illuminating. Very good for a beginner.”
He snorted and dug his square chin into the top of her head. “Minx. Admit, you were enthralled.”
“Maybe, just a little.” She leaned back and kissed his stubbly jaw. “I could smell his grief. I’ve never had visions until you came along. You could be a very dangerous man.”
Gerard fished inside his pocket and produced a small gold coin. “Not necessarily. I may have had guidance. This is one of the artifacts Max dug out of the foundation in his repairs.”
She could sense his unease as he handed her the coin. In the light of their lamps, she examined it. “You think it is similar to the one in the vision?”
He reluctantly nodded. “It speaks to me. That’s why I picked it up.”
He waited for her reaction, as if this were a matter of grave importance. She’d been speaking to bees all her life. She was more curious than amazed. But for Gerard—it revealed so much.
“It is a weird sensation, isn’t it?” She phrased her words with care, as if hearing voices in her head was an everyday matter. “I had to learn to accept the buzz and interpret.”
He relaxed a fraction. “The soldier in our vision spoke colloquial Latin, like the voice in my head. It’s not easy to interpret. He called his daughters his treasures. He used that word when I found the coin.”
“I’ve had some Latin. I wasn’t certain. The others weren’t soldiers, were they? Even the men plaited their hair, like the woman’s. Her hair was gold.”
“So was the children’s. The voice in my head said there was treasure in Wystan. If it is the same soldier—”
“He sent his daughters to Wystan—the original Malcolms! The people in hoods, could they have been a Celtic tribe? Could the one leading the indecipherable chant have been a druid? He had golden hair too. Druids are part of our Malcolm legends.” Iona eagerly reviewed the vision, but her knowledge of ancient language was nil.
“Perhaps the legends are based on visions such as these—and our interpretations. It could be their carvings in this arch. I suppose I’ll have to take writing my journal a little more seriously.”
She pinched his arm through his coat, then kissed his cheek when that brought no reaction. “You should always take journals seriously. We should ask Lydia for books on visions.”
“Oh no, you don’t!” He stood, still holding her. “I’ll not have Max laughing me out of the house. This goes no further than us. An earl with an affinity for dead people does not lead to intelligent discussion.”
“You’re being ridiculous.” She wriggled out of his hold to shake out her dirty skirt. “If you wish one day to write scholarly tomes on ancient civilizations, perhaps it might matter—”
He snorted inelegantly. “I doubt that vision qualifies as research. It’s just . . . interesting.” He tilted his head as if listening. “The soldier is gone from my head, perhaps to be with his wife now that we’ve found her.”
He pressed the coin into the dirt by the wall and covered it. “But he was right. I found my treasure at Wystan. We’ll figure out how to repair the castle together. I had considered closing it and letting it rot, but we need to know more of its history.”
“Closing Wystan?” She stared at him in horror. “You’d be cursed into all eternity. Or we both would be, since it’s my fault you can’t marry an heiress.”
“I should be allowed one happiness outside of duty. And that would be you, my love.” He hugged her and began an interesting exploration that she wasn’t about to allow down here.
His amazingly heroic deeds had proved his love as far as she was concerned, even though he’d never said the word until now. Still, Iona pushed away. “We should explore a little more while we’re here.”
If she loved him, she had to repay his romantic, fateful gesture in some manner. She hoped, just a little bit, that they might find something valuable. Or at least useful.
“Seeing visions doesn’t make your head hurt?” He let her push him away.
“A little, but I’m fascinated. It’s hard to quit now. Why did that one stone call to you and not the others?”
Gerard shrugged and studied the arch. “As I said, I apparently have an affinity for dead people. I simply started with the oldest name. Does this wall contain a burial vault for our ancestors?”
“Quite possibly, although isn’t it the foundation of Lydia’s library? Perhaps the memories were somehow implanted here.”
Not rejecting her theory, he studied the arch. “Roman texts claim the druids were literate, but they kept their stories in their heads, handing them down verbally, as primitive tribes do elsewhere.”
“But if the druids are the origin of Malcolm gifts. . .” Excitedly, Iona held her lantern to the writing on the arch. “Perhaps they had a gift for leaving their stories in stones? Let us try one more, please?”
“
You really believe they had some means of impressing tales into stone?” He kept his voice neutral.
She grew more confident knowing her husband did not scoff at one of her wilder theories. “If the bottom stone showed only a crypt without the tower that’s there today, could we try one of these middle stones to test if it is a century when the tower existed?”
He held a palm over the middle stones. “I sensed church bells and chants earlier. You may only see more funerals.”
“Our vision showed only a stone vault,” she argued. “It could mean the original watchtower was built on top of it. Would they still have access to the vault after that?”
He cast a light down the tunnel they’d been following. “Through the passageways beneath here, possibly. Do we have to tell Lydia that the library may be a mausoleum?”
“They buried the previous librarians in a vault beneath the chapel. For all we know, there could be veritable catacombs under the entire castle. Let’s try one more, please?”
He glared down at her. Iona grinned back. The earl’s scowls might intimidate others into doing his bidding, but not her.
“Which name?” he asked in surrender to her whims.
Iona examined the wall, using her sense of smell more than her eyes. Sadness permeated the stone blocks, but she found whiffs of love and respect.
“I don’t think any of them will be terribly enlightening,” she decided. “Lydia has journals back to the 14th century, I believe, when the castle was built. Perhaps chose a stone before that point, when it was only a watchtower? I think this is the name on the first journal.” She pointed at a block a few feet from the ground. “So we should start before it?”
Gerard placed his palm over the name she indicated. Biting her lip, Iona covered his hand with hers.
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