With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection

by Kerrigan Byrne

  She remembered Dunstan's silence as they passed the portrait of his father and older brother, ambushed in the night to atone for the Wildcat Killer's sins. A life for a life.

  It would be natural for Dunstan to feel some bitterness at the tragedy that had befallen his family, yet Dunstan was no zealot, spending his life attempting to gain vengeance on the Scots. He'd built an exemplary military career, become one of the most powerful men in the king's army. He'd subdued the rebellion, and was struggling to bring order in the aftermath of war. Rachel had heard her father discuss a hundred times the fierce challenge of that mission.

  "Dunstan couldn't stand by and watch such a thing happen!" she said with all the earnestness in her soul. "He's a soldier, Gavin, not a murderer, not some monster who would massacre innocent people."

  "Because you love him?"

  "No!" The denial tumbled out too hastily. Fire surged into Rachel's cheeks. She couldn't imagine why she plunged on. "I have some affection for Dunstan, and we—we have the same goals, the same values. He will make an admirable husband, and I, well, I would be an asset as a military wife."

  "I see."

  There was subtle censure in the words, Gavin's fingertips falling away from her face. The imprints where they had rested chilled, leaving Rachel oddly bereft and more than a little defensive.

  "There is no reason why I shouldn't marry a man who is everything I want. Burning passion quickly fades to ash, leaving nothing between two people but bitterness. Marriage must be based on a foundation that will remain after the first blush of infatuation. Dunstan and I struck a practical arrangement that was most satisfactory to both of us."

  Irony twisted Gavin's mouth. "Don't talk to me about practical arrangements, Rachel. My parents had a satisfactory arrangement. There were plenty of logical reasons why my father needed to wed my mother but in the end, the price they both paid was far too high. I remember her, waiting for my father to visit—that eager light in her eye. I remember her trying desperately to please him, picking at the tiniest flaws she could find in me and in herself, attempting to mask them so that my father would approve of us both. She had given him her fortune, he'd given her his title, and they had conceived the heir required to continue the family name. The cold transactions took nine months' time. They paid for the rest of their lives."

  "You said she was a merchant's daughter. They were ill suited. Dunstan and I share common ground."

  "If you marry Dunstan Wells, Rachel, you will suffer more horribly than even my poor mother did."

  Rachel shivered, a blade of ice slipping into her spine. Her eyes widened as she looked into Gavin's. They had always been so open, so honest, so filled with compassion. Now his eyes were filled with dark promise and scathing helplessness.

  It frightened her.

  "You don't understand." She was insistent, but her voice carried an undercurrent of panic. "Your head is full of poet's dreams of perfect love, like you read about in those lovely books you cherish. But it's no more real than the unicorns painted on the pages. It's pleasing to look at and to think about, but it's foolish to believe you can capture it for yourself."

  "You believe that love is mythical? A pretty legend?"

  "What do you believe love is?"

  "If a man loves, he carries the image of his lady in his soul until it is woven so tightly into his spirit that to tear her free would be to destroy himself, to hurt her would be taking a knife blade to his own body, to betray her would be to sell his soul to demons far more cruel than Satan himself."

  The air seemed to thin until she couldn't breathe.

  Where had Gavin Carstares learned of such other-worldly devotion? His treasured books? His own dreams? Or from a woman who had taken his heart into her hands and drawn out such precious emotions? The thought seared deep.

  "You learned this from experience, then?"

  "I learned it from watching my father and Adam's mother together. They loved—truly loved. I owed my poor mother my loyalty, and God knows, I felt her pain. Still, the love between my father and Lydia awed me. It was the most amazing, miraculous, beautiful thing I'd ever seen."

  "Why didn't you run out and seek it for yourself? As your father's heir, isn't it your responsibility to marry?"

  "The day my mother died, she begged me not to make the same mistake that she had. No fortune, no title, no treasure on earth was worth spending eternity alone."

  Rachel could imagine the sensitive boy Gavin must have been, wanting to heal everything he touched, wanting to close the wounds in his mother's soul with the brush of his hand. Why was it Rachel suddenly needed to heal him?

  "But your mother wasn't alone. She had you."

  "It was almost as if she were afraid of me as I grew—as if she would somehow taint me with the poison of her merchant background if she came too close. I know that her own family had filled her head with dictums about how she was to comport herself in my father's house. She was to behave like a great lady, not shame them or her new husband. The only problem was, she was a sweet, simple girl, with no idea how a lady should act. So she did exactly what the servants ordered—and earned their unending contempt. She fought to be the type of woman my father wanted, and made him despise her with her over-eagerness to please. She corrected my behavior— that was allowed. But my nurse insisted that it was unhealthy and unseemly for a noblewoman to hover over a child. It made the child weak and cowardly, and the mother too drab for her husband's company." Gavin turned and paced to the open door, where the night beckoned. She barely heard his words. "Rachel, there were times that I hated her. I blamed her for allowing everyone in the house to trample over her, but now I know she never had a chance against them."

  Rachel crossed to where he stood, his scarred back gleaming in the rush light, his stallion, obscured by the darkness, whickering in soft greeting.

  "I promised her that I would wed for love, or not at all."

  "And you never loved?"

  A hush fell, the silence thickening. "What if I did? It wouldn't matter anymore. What would I have to offer any woman? From the time of Adam and Eve, a man has wanted to shelter the woman he loves. Provide for her, shower her with joy and warmth and treasures, make a life together in a houseful of children."

  Rachel could imagine all too clearly a rambling manor house filled to bursting with the love in Gavin Carstares's heart. The children—his mismatched set of orphans—would be scrubbed clean, frolicking and bickering, tearing through flowerbeds and painting beautiful designs while their father guided their hands.

  The image overlaid the one she'd always held of her life with Dunstan, a pact struck for the greater glory of England. Dunstan, the right arm of the military. Rachel, the perfect officer's wife—one who would never shame herself by crying when he marched off to war but would face it like a soldier, eyes fixed upon her duty. One who would teach her children not to burden Papa with their tears, despite the fact that they might never see him alive again.

  Rachel swallowed hard, feeling as if she'd spent a lifetime encased in a thin sheet of ice, her emotions numbed, her dreams chilled, her eyes blinded by great heaps of expectations she had never taken time to examine. Not until Gavin Carstares had warmed the cold shield with his dry humor, his tenderness, the unfulfilled longing all too evident in his mouth, his eyes, his hands.

  Have you ever loved?

  What would it matter if I did? What would I have to offer a woman?

  Only his heart, his soul. Only the tender passion in his hands and the dreams in his eyes. Only his pain.

  And his exile.

  A woman would have to be mad to fall in love with a man who was one heartbeat away from a traitor's death—who might one day die before a ravening crowd of spectators, eager for the entertainment of watching a man be hung, drawn, and quartered.

  Rachel recoiled. The image of Gavin being tormented thus was unthinkable. It shook her completely. Of their own volition, her hands swept up to trace the lines of exhaustion about his mouth, his face,
his flesh warm beneath her hands.

  "Don't." He pulled away from her touch, his mouth a hard, white line.

  "Don't what?"

  "Touch me. Look at me as if . . ."

  "As if what?"

  He pushed his fingers through his hair and swore as the cuts snagged and tore open afresh. "As if I know the answers. I don't know the answers, Rachel. I don't know a damn thing, except the need to get the children out of Scotland, to save as many Jacobite soldiers and their wives and mothers as I can. That is all I know, except that whatever I do, it will never be enough. I can't save them all."

  "You know about other things, too." Rachel whispered, feeling as if she were edging out into uncharted waters, uncertain for the first time in her life what to say or do, uncertain what it was that she wanted. "You know about love, Gavin."

  He winced.

  "And you were right, I don't know anything about it. Not the kind spun of unicorns and princesses and magic."

  "Someday you'll find a man who will teach you, Rachel, one who'll give you all the beauty and wonder you can hold and who'll love you as you deserve. Just give yourself a chance."

  "But how will I know?"

  "When he kisses you—as if he were tasting an angel. When he bares his soul to you and trusts you with every vulnerability in his heart. When he makes you unleash all the beauty, all the passion—the softness and strength that you've kept buried between your father's rules and your own sense of duty."

  God in heaven, Rachel wondered, does Gavin Carstares have any idea that he's just described himself? She raised her face to his, the warmth of his breath on her skin, heat rising across the curves of her breast, up her throat, to spill into her cheeks.

  "I've never been kissed as if I were an angel," she said, drowning in his silver-misted eyes. "I suppose it would be unfair to hold my beaux at fault. I'm stubborn and proud and, after all, they were too busy attempting to come up with crazed feats of courage to waste much energy on the quality of their kisses."

  "Then they were damned fools. They should have been thinking about kissing you every waking moment, dreaming of the way your breath would catch at the first brush of their fingers, the way your eyes would soften, your lashes sweep down just a little. They should have been imagining your lips parting, as their mouth drifted against them, tasting heaven. Not shyness, no maidenly rot of drawing away. You'd be as infernally brave in the discovery of love as you are in every other facet of your life."

  Rachel was afire, a liquid heat drizzling from where his breath brushed her skin, to pool in secret, feminine places he'd managed to touch without moving so much as his hand. Longings that could never be fulfilled were mirrored in Gavin's eyes. And she knew in that instant that he had been dreaming of that kiss, late at night when he'd lain upon his heather pallet, an arm's reach away from her. So close.

  It was madness to hunger for his touch this fiercely. It was dark dishonor to court his kiss when she was betrothed to another man. Gavin was a man as impossible to hold as one of myth or legend. This chance to taste his mouth was as fleeting as a shard of rainbow trapped in a raindrop as it fell into the ocean.

  Her heart almost beat its way out of her chest as she lifted her gaze to his and let her own roiling emotions show there, unhidden for the first time. "Show me, Gavin," she pleaded. "Show me how it feels to be kissed as if I were an angel."

  "I can't." He forced the words out of his smoke-seared throat.

  The words wounded, yet Rachel lifted her chin, allowing him no retreat. "Why can't you?"

  "Because if I did, I would never stop—and I can't have you, Rachel. I can never have you."

  "It's only a kiss, Gavin. You say a man should cherish me. But I don't even know what that is. Show me, so that I'll be able to tell once this is all over, and you're back in your glen alone. It isn't fair to send me away with the dreams you've spun in my head and in my heart, not knowing how to capture them."

  A soft groan tore from Gavin's throat. His battered hands framed her face, his touch so tender an answering ache shuddered to life in Rachel's heart.

  His mouth drifted down, strong and firm, tasting of flavors Rachel had never known: hunger and regret, worship and hopelessness, awe and loss. His lips melted into hers, seeking, as if on a holy quest, clinging, as if he were a drowning man and she were a tiny island of sanity in a violent sea.

  But beneath his tenderness, Rachel tasted other things he was holding back—passion, need, the grief and shame and shattered honor of a man who had lost everything on a battlefield. She knew he was a man who had been forced to abandon everything he'd loved in order to fulfill not his own dreams, but the dying wish of the father whose love he'd tried so fiercely to win.

  Rachel let her lips part under his and threaded her fingers through the tawny thickness of his hair, pressing her body closer to his. Soft breasts pushed against the hard masculine wall of his chest, thigh brushed thigh, the fragile skin of her inner arm brushing against the fiery satin of Gavin's naked shoulder.

  His tongue quested with fervor, tracing her lips, slipping inside, and she came undone.

  She wanted. She burned. She bled from wounds inside herself that only Gavin could heal. But he was under such rigid control, as if she were somehow torturing him, tormenting him. She arched her head back, trying to deepen the kiss with a hunger she'd never suspected existed inside herself, inside the world of mortals and far from love ballads and legends and maiden's imaginings. Hers was not the need of a starry-eyed virgin, but a woman's need, so piercing that every part of her was lanced by it. Such sweet, sweet pain.

  She was shaking when Gavin's hands closed on her shoulders, gently breaking the kiss and the subtle, sensual contact of their bodies.

  Rachel stifled a whimper of protest, feeling as if this man, with his angel's kiss, had stripped her soul until it was naked and new, something unfamiliar and totally of his making.

  How was it possible that her whole world could shift off its axis because of a coward and a dreamer, a traitor and a brigand?

  "That is how a man should kiss you, lady," Gavin whispered, utter desolation in his eyes. “Don't destroy your life with a loveless marriage. I'm already lost, Rachel. But you're not. Not yet."

  But she was lost, Rachel realized with a surge of panic and of wonder—lost in the soul of a man who was everything she'd scorned. She was lost in his dreams and his nightmares, and the certainty that she could never share them.

  Lost.

  Because in that instant she was certain that no man, of human flesh or spun of sorcerer's arts, could ever kiss her as Gavin had.

  Chapter Twelve

  The beast was stalking him.

  Gavin could feel its fetid breath against his throat, hear its claws rattling the bars of its prison. It snarled in malevolent anticipation. Victory was assured. It would feast on Gavin this night.

  Gavin knew the cold sweat of terror, the subtle madness that would follow. With each second that ticked past, the bars of that prison were melting, thinning. Soon the beast would be free.

  No! He staggered to his feet and paced the confines of the tiny croft. He had to fight it, had to beat it back. He couldn't let it escape, not with Rachel here to see him, hear him.

  It had been painful enough that she knew about Prestonpans, but to expose her to this ugliness caged inside him, trying to break free—no, he'd rather slit his own throat than have her hear so much as a whisper of his pain.

  His gaze flashed to where she lay cuddled on the makeshift bed he'd made for her near the fire. The light turned her skin to sweet cream, her hair to dark secrets. Her gown was wound around the supple curves of her body, but not half so tangled as the emotions he'd stirred between the two of them with his kiss hours before.

  Gavin could still see wonder clinging to her lashes, awe painted onto the rose silk of her lips. He could feel the confusion still clutched in the curve of her hand.

  He felt a wild jealousy toward the Scotsman who had built this croft, carved t
he cradle that lay tucked in the shadows. He felt as if he would gladly sacrifice everything—his name, his future, his life-- for just a tiny space in time where he could build dreams for Rachel the way that simple unknown man had built them for his lady. He yearned to hew for her a bed out of bog oak, to work for her until his hands bled, to love her until this simple hovel was transformed in her eyes into a place more beautiful than any enchanted castle on a fairy hill.

  But that was as impossible as the other phantasm he futilely chased—the ability to wash his hands clean of blood, dredge his spirit from the muck of battlefields and failures and regrets.

  Exhaustion suffocated him, grief so heavy his whole being seemed carved from stone. A harsh sound tore from his throat, and he stifled it beneath his fist, biting his knuckles until they bled.

  The beast snarled, mocking him. No coward could ever defeat it. It was too brutal, too savage, too strong. Nothing could save him on the nights when it came, hunting in the place where his nightmares lived.

  Nothing, not even an angel.

  Rachel.

  Every fiber of his being screamed with the need to touch her. But he couldn't. He shouldn't even stay here, watching her like a damned soul with his face pressed against the gates of heaven. A noble man would walk away, knowing he had no right to touch her, even with his eyes, knowing he wasn't worthy.

  Coward.

  The jibe echoed from deep in the beast's lair.

  I only want to sit beside her, watch her for a little while, Gavin reasoned. For her, I can beat it back into the darkness.

  Coward.

  He sank down to his knees a hand's breadth from where she lay, his shoulders sagging against the rough wall behind him.

  He should never have kissed her, discovered with such painful clarity everything that he had lost.

  He loved her, his militant angel, a lady brave enough, honorable enough to be a hero's bride. The lady deserved to hold the whole world in her hands, unlimited treasures for her to explore: a forever of laughter and loving, bounty and joy, things he could never hope to give her.