“Then don’t.”
He shot her a glare and ignored the comment. “What you want is impossible.”
“How do you know what I want?”
One side of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. “What do all young girls who fancy themselves in love want? The faerie tale. Marriage. Children. A husband who loves them back. But that isn’t me, Cate. I’m not the settle-down-with-one-woman type. When you are a little older you will understand.”
Now it was Cate who was angry. “Do not patronize me, Gregor. I’m twenty, not a fifteen-year-old girl anymore. I’m old enough to know my own feelings. I do not ‘fancy’ myself in love. I love you, whether you choose to accept that or not. Although the rest sounds nice, and I do think you are the settle-down-with-one-woman type—the right woman—all I want from you right now is to acknowledge that you feel something for me.”
“What I feel is lust, but I care too much about you to give in to it. Damn it, I’m trying to protect—” Suddenly, he stopped and looked as if he’d just been shot with one of those arrows he was so good with. “How old are you?”
She winced a little sheepishly. “Twenty.”
His gaze narrowed. “Why did you let me think you were younger?”
She shrugged. “You never asked. Your mother thought you’d guessed but didn’t want to know.”
He swore again, dragging his fingers through his hair again but this time more harshly. “Christ, twenty?” He dragged out the word accusingly, scanning her up and down as if she were some sort of strange creature from a menagerie that he’d never seen before.
“Is it really that important?”
“Yes,” he snapped. “No! I’m still your guardian, and you’re still too young.”
Cate’s nose wrinkled. Was that what this was about? Was that why he was fighting his attraction so hard? Because of some misplaced sense of responsibility toward her? She was no longer a foundling in need of rescue. “As you have just seen, I don’t need a protector anymore, Gregor. I can take care of myself.”
“Like you did with young MacNab? Do you know his father wanted to arrest you?”
“For what, defending myself?”
“For humiliating his son.”
She gaped at him as if he were jesting. “So I should have let him strike me?”
“Of course not. You shouldn’t have intervened in the first place.”
“He was hurting Pip.”
“There were a half-dozen of them, Cate. You should have gone for help. What would have happened if I hadn’t shown up when I did?”
She would rather not think about that. “Have you never fought when the odds were against you?”
His mouth fell in a hard line—a hard defensive line. “That isn’t the point.”
“What is the point, then? We are not talking about my fighting, we are talking about why you won’t act on this … lust.” She moved closer, putting her hand on his chest—which he promptly removed. “You don’t need to feel responsible for me.”
“I am responsible for you, and taking advantage of your youth and inexperience would be wrong.”
Cate clenched her teeth to keep her temper in check—barely. She wanted to touch him again, but squeezed her fists at her sides in frustration instead. “Yet you had no problem kissing Seonaid, and she is a year younger than I am. What about her youth and inexperience?”
He clenched his teeth right back at her. “That was a mistake.”
That he knew it just as well as she made it somehow worse. She stared up at him. “How can you do that, Gregor? How can you share intimacies with women when they don’t mean anything to you?”
He barked out a sharp laugh. “Quite easily. The fact that you can ask that question shows just how little you understand of lovemaking. Believe me, caring is not required.”
Cate hated the flush that rose to her cheeks—hated that he could make her feel so silly and naive. “It doesn’t sound like lovemaking at all if you don’t care about the people you are making love to. Does it not bother you to break all those hearts?”
He laughed, actually laughed. “Oh, Lord, you are sweet. Do you think the women I take to my bed care about me? I assure you when a woman is making herself available two minutes after meeting me, it is not me she has fallen in love with but ‘the most handsome man in Scotland.’ ”
“Because that is all you ever let anyone see.”
He smiled, that dazzling roguish smile that had probably felled many a heart but to her felt like a slap. “And you think there is something else?”
She held his gaze steady. “I know there is.”
Her quiet certainty seemed to bother him. He frowned. “Don’t look for something more, Caty. You will only be disappointed. I am quite happy with my life as it is.”
She stiffened at the childish diminutive. “It doesn’t bother you to have them use you like that?”
“Use me?” He laughed again, shaking his head, and then in mock seriousness said, “Aye, it’s a hardship having women eager to jump in my bed, but somehow I manage to carry on.”
But she knew it did matter to him, and that he was making fun of her made her want to lash out and prove it. “And when your sister-in-law used you to make your brother jealous, that didn’t matter either, did it?”
His expression went so cold for a moment she felt a whisper of fear. She thought about stepping back, but his fingers latched around her arm like a vise. The change that came over him was blood-chilling. Gone was the handsome heartbreaker and in his place was a deadly warrior. “Who told you about that?”
She bit her lip, not wanting to give away the confidence.
Guessing the source of her conflict, he pushed her away disgustedly. “Mother. She’s the only one who could. John and Padraig know nothing about it. What did she tell you?”
“Enough to know that it wasn’t your fault. That you cared for Isobel, and she manipulated you.”
He laughed harshly. “So being stupid and gullible is an excuse for bedding my brother’s future wife?” Cate’s eyes widened, and he laughed harshly. “Aye, I’d wager my mother didn’t know about that. But that’s the risk when two young people start playing a game in which they don’t know all the rules.” That warning was directed at her. “She played me perfectly. I thought she loved me, and she thought flirting and allowing a few liberties to the laird-to-be’s ‘useless but beautiful to look at’—her words—younger brother would make Alasdair jealous. Imagine her horror when we were both carried away by a few liberties. More than once. But her plan worked. Alasdair heard the rumors—or some of them—and came home.”
Cate reached for him, but he shrugged her hand off.
She tried to ignore the stab of hurt provoked by the rejection. “He didn’t know that you and she …?”
The gaze he turned on her was full of pain and self-loathing. “Not right away. I left to fulfill my service for my uncle, thinking I would be announcing our engagement when I returned home; instead she was married to my brother. But he must have learned the truth at some point. The brother I’d idolized could barely stand to be in the same room with me.” He shrugged as if it didn’t mean anything, but she knew it meant everything. “He left not long after I returned and was killed during the siege of Bothwell Castle a few months later. My father blamed me, of course.”
“That’s ridiculous! You had nothing to do with it!”
His eyes were hot and empty as he glared at her. “Didn’t I? The truth destroyed my brother. You see, it turned out he really did love her. She needn’t have used me at all—he’d intended to marry her all along. Her betrayal—my betrayal—drove him to the edge, and he volunteered for every dangerous job he could. Eventually one killed him.”
“That isn’t your fault, Gregor. You cannot be responsible for your brother’s actions—or Isobel’s.”
He held her gaze a long time. Eventually his mouth quirked. “My father didn’t agree. After we buried my brother it was as if I ceased to exist. Turns out disdain
was better than being invisible. So when Bruce was looking for men to join him, I left.”
“What happened to Isobel?”
“She died in childbirth a few months after we buried my brother. In case you were wondering, it wasn’t mine. She and Alasdair had been married for over a year before I returned.”
“You cared for her, Gregor. What happened wasn’t your fault.”
He gave her a long, slow, wicked look meant to scare her away. “As I said, caring had little to do with it.”
“So because you care about me and don’t want me to get hurt, you will not act on your ‘lust,’ but because you do not care about those other women it’s fine to take them to your bed? Do you not think that is a bit backward?” She moved closer. “Why don’t you just pretend I’m Seonaid?”
He obviously didn’t appreciate her sarcasm. “You are nothing like Seonaid.”
That they could both agree upon. But the tension she could feel rolling off him in hot waves egged her on. She wanted him to take her in his arms and show her all the passion her body was clamoring for.
“If caring is not required, what is required?” she challenged, standing so close to him their bodies were almost brushing. “Are my breasts not large enough for you? Is my face not pretty enough?”
He uttered a curse she’d never heard from him before. She could feel the tension reverberating off him like a drum. The tic in his jaw pulsed angrily. “Stop it, Cate. It won’t work. I told you I am not the man for you.”
She heard the heavy warning in his voice, but she did not heed it. He was close to giving in; she could feel it. She pressed the tips of the breasts he seemed determined not to look at against his chest, forcing him to try to deny the attraction sparking between them. “Why am I so different? Am I not willing enough? Must I throw myself down at your feet like everyone else?”
He grabbed her arm, jerking her against him, his eyes hot with anger—and something else. “Is that not what you’ve been doing since I returned?”
Cate gasped. Was that what he thought? She’d never meant … She hadn’t thought he would see it that way. She didn’t want to be anything like those women. “I was trying to get you to notice me because I love you.”
“As if I haven’t heard that before.”
He glanced down at the breasts poking into his chest, and the heat of it scorched her. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. She thought his body was drumming with a need as powerful as hers. That the pull would be as irresistible for him as it was for her. That she had what it took to attract a man like him.
Instead, his mouth curved in a slow smile. “I’m not so easily trapped, little one. Believe me, if a pretty face and a pert pair of breasts were all it took, I would have found myself standing at the church door years ago.”
Cate wrenched away, drawing back in horror. My God, what had she been thinking? She hadn’t been trying to trap him into anything except maybe a kiss. But had she actually thought to use her body to do so?
She wasn’t sensual or entrancing. She didn’t captivate or intrigue. She wasn’t the type of woman men couldn’t resist kissing (as evidenced by the fact that she was twenty and had never been kissed!). She was “cute,” not beautiful. Her body was taut and strong from fighting, not soft and lush for lovemaking.
And his rejection reminded her of that. It crushed her womanly confidence, and worse, made her feel silly for trying.
She hoped the tears choking her throat hadn’t reached her eyes. “I wanted you to kiss me because I love you. Because every time I close my eyes and dream of what my first kiss will be like, yours is the only face I ever see. Because I’m twenty years old and I’ve never wanted any other man but you. And because I thought you wanted to kiss me, too. So if you are going to accuse me of anything, have it be for being a fool to think I had what it takes to tempt you.”
Nine
Gregor was fighting on his last gasp of air. He couldn’t fucking breathe. Have what it takes to tempt him? Did the lass have any idea how hard it had been for him to pull away? How that feel of her breasts against his chest had set off nerve endings he never even knew he had? How his skin had tightened, his blood had heated, and his cock had thickened until it was hammering against his stomach with need he hadn’t felt since he was her age? How much he wanted to push her up against the wall of the barrack and give her exactly what she was asking for—and probably a whole hell of a lot more?
Nay, he realized, looking into her shimmering eyes. She didn’t. She had no bloody idea. She was innocent and sweet and despite what he’d said, without any feminine wiles of which to speak.
He would be glad she was so in the dark if it weren’t for the tears. Tears she was fighting to hide. Tears that told him he’d hurt her in a way that he hadn’t intended, in a place that was vulnerable. The air of womanly confidence was all for show. The dress, the hair, the perfect lady of the castle—Cate was testing her femininity in a way she never had before. All he had to do was look at her now, and see how comfortable she was in her peasant’s rags on the practice yard, to know that it couldn’t have been easy for her. Just as he knew that if he let her think she wasn’t desirable, it would crush her feminine pride to dust.
If he were honest with himself—which he didn’t want to be, damn it—he would also admit that, selfishly, he wanted to be the first to kiss her. That he knew how close his brother had been to kissing her, and just picturing it still drove him half-crazed and filled him with a new emotion: jealousy. Not even when he’d returned to Dunlyon and seen the woman he thought he would marry by his brother’s side had he felt this way. That had been more shock—and then stung pride and shame when he realized she’d used him. Perhaps he knew better than anyone how fragile a young man’s—or woman’s—pride could be.
He squared his shoulders as if preparing for battle as he stared at the freckled, dirt-smudged face turned to his. One kiss, he told himself. He could manage one kiss for the sake of her fledgling confidence.
“Come here, Cate.”
His voice was so gruff, she eyed him warily. “Why?” He didn’t answer, but just held her stare. Nervously biting her lip, she edged closer to him. “What do you want?”
He tipped her chin back with the crook of his finger, holding her gaze with his. Christ, she was pretty. Big doe eyes under straight, delicate brows, a slender nose, high cheekbones in the perfect oval of her face, a pointy chin and softly curved lips that were almost too red to believe they hadn’t been stained with crushed berries. Even mussed, with her hair pinned back and dressed in some of the most hideous garments he’d ever seen on a woman, she took his breath away.
“You have more than enough to tempt me, Cate, and I’m going to prove it.”
The delicate line of her brows drew together. “How?”
She looked so befuddled he had to smile. “By giving you your first kiss.”
Her eyes widened. “You are?”
He nodded.
“What do I do?” Her voice wobbled a little.
Christ, now she was uncertain? He laughed and shook his head, thinking if he didn’t shut her up this could go on all day. “Close your eyes.”
She did as he bid, but then immediately peeked one eye open at him. “Are you sure? Since this is my first time, I don’t want to miss anything.”
He chuckled huskily; just the anticipation of kissing her was making him throb. “Do you want me to kiss you or not, Cate?”
The eye immediately snapped shut.
He stilled, arrested by just looking at her. Breathe, he thought to himself, but his lungs couldn’t seem to take in air at the sight of her face turned to his with such trust and innocent surrender.
His heart pounded and his cotun suddenly felt like it had been made for Pip. Just a kiss. Something he’d done hundreds of times. But he wanted to make this good—really good. She deserved something special, and he would muster every bit of his skill to give it to her.
Slowly, wanting to savor every moment
of this, he lowered his mouth to hers. He heard her sharp intake of breath as his lips brushed hers and felt something jam in his chest. His lungs? His heart? He didn’t know, but everything seemed to start aching.
She tasted so damned sweet, he wanted more. Nay, he ached for more.
He brushed his mouth over her velvety lips again. So soft. So incredibly soft. He had to let his mouth linger, press a little harder, but that was it, he assured himself. He held his mouth there, giving her the kiss, but not giving in to the urge pounding through his body. The urge to pull her up against him, open her lips under his, and taste every inch of that silky, sweet mouth with his tongue.
Pull back. You have to pull back.
But God, it felt so good, and he’d been wanting to do this for so damned long. Just a moment longer and he swore—
She moaned, and whatever promise he’d been about to make to himself was lost in the surge of lust that shot through him as her mouth opened under his.
He dropped the hand from the gentle hold on her chin and plunged it into the knot at the back of her head, to bring her mouth more firmly against him, while his other hand slid around her waist to bring her body against his.
Oh God, yes. He groaned as sensation crashed down over him in a hot wave and dragged him under. There was no holding back.
One kiss? He was a damned fool.
Cate’s breath stilled as she waited for his lips to finally touch hers. The first brush was so light and feathery soft, she actually wondered whether she’d imagined it. But then he brushed against her again and the heat of the contact singed her all the way down to her toes.
She felt her heart try to jump out of her chest, but she caught it and dragged it back down. Yet she could not control the fluttering. The budding excitement. The overwhelming euphoria of knowing that she was being kissed by the man she loved.
Finally.
Cate had dreamed of this moment so many times, she thought she knew what to expect. But the feel of his mouth on hers was unlike anything she’d ever imagined. It was warm and possessive, tender and sweet, and so exquisitely perfect a thousand dreams could not have captured it.
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