by Lisa Torquay
Bluidy hell!
~.~.~
Aileen sat with Sam in the kitchen completely off balance. It felt like there had been a stone in her stomach at dinner. Incapable of ingesting a single grain of food, she just shifted the it on the plate. Regret lumped in her with an unescapable heaviness. Regret and something else, an unsated hunger, incomplete. Unfulfilled. It nagged at her causing a foreign ache. She willed it gone. She wished she would be gone herself. Away from him and all the distorted, unrecognised feelings he triggered in her.
With a colossal effort, she tamped down the memories from the earlier hours and focused on the task at hand.
“It has not been a happy marriage, you know.” Sam broke the silence she had retreated to.
Her eyes flew to him. “Which marriage.” He could not possibly be talking about his—.
“My parents.” His eyes so like his father’s blinked with sadness.
She did not find anything to say to this, so she remained silent.
“Father strived to preserve her image for me, but servants talk.” His stare lowered to his hand.
“They should not.” Her comment came. How unfortunate that a boy so intelligent and sweet must face this.
“Grandfather arranged the marriage with The McPherson.” As to the boy’s age, Taran must have been too young, the same age as his son, she calculated.
“My mother left for Aberdeen soon after I was born.” His head shook from one side to the other. “They say she solely fantasised of city life.”
Aileen would never have left a child of hers behind, even less a boy like him.
“Nobody told me the details.” He lamented.
If people talked, they should have given the whole story instead of dropping bits for the boy to piece together. It must have been his father to do it properly, she accused mentally. The last person on Earth to interfere would be her. She was not part of this family and would never be.
“What I learned is she partied a lot.” He continued. “She died overrun by a carriage, too drunk to see it.”
“Oh, Sam, I am so sorry!” She spoke at last.
He lifted his gaze to her, tears in them. His sadness encountered her sympathy, and she embraced him to let him cry as much as he needed.
He sobbed as though he locked his emotions in him for a long time. No nannies or governesses would ever substitute a mother.
Her murmurs expressed encouragement and solace, caressing his red hair as if she would a child. Tears prickled her eyes at the boy’s anguish.
A long time passed before she took his face in her hands and made him meet her stare. “I am sure your mother loved you a lot, Sam.”
“I do not think so, Aileen.” He countered, smart as he would always be.
“Look, Sam, many women have a difficult period after birth.” Several cases reached her in her clan’s manor. “They need more time to recover than most of us.” Her stare firmed on him.
“She stayed in Aberdeen for years without visiting here.” He input this new piece of information as if it confirmed his feelings of rejection.
“It is not like she did not want you, Sam.” The chance to revert eighteen years of that would never be a complete task. “She was too young. Most people are not ready for marriage and children at this age.”
“Like me, you say?” Their hands held together, he straightened his spine. “I do not feel ready for those either.”
“I see.” She answered nodding to assure him. “Let us make sure it will not happen.”
“We can hope.” In his stance, so many dreams of things not remotely related to marriage and heirs.
The implacable tyrant would not make two people unhappy because of his ravings, she promised herself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Taran hurried to the morning room, expecting to find Aileen there before she left for the fields, like she had been doing for the past days.
They had been keeping a safe—extremely safe—distance from each other. Attentive to the direction she took, he would go help works in the most distant part of the manor and they did not meet. Not even for dinner, which he skipped with the excuse of much work in his study. A study that became the very definition of hell where those clandestine memories resided. The ones his mind played over and over, tirelessly. Continued by the cravings his bed brought in the never-ending nights.
The need to speed up his plans and have her out of sight as soon as possible drove him before he went mad with her presence here.
In the morning room, he stopped short. Near the breakfast table, she stood practical dress and apron draping her curvaceous slight frame. The same his dream insisted in undraping with excruciating detail. Only the view of her threatened to put him in a revealing state.
When she turned her luminous mahogany eyes to him, it came like a cannon ball exploding in his guts. What did this woman have that destabilised him this instantaneously, he wondered? He possessed no memory of this happening ever before this day.
Their stares crashed in numberless mute communications and stayed snatched up for several seconds before he forced himself into recomposing.
“Do not go into the fields today.” Why must his voice come so hoarse?
“The reason being?” Plate on the table, she prepared for another battle with him, he guessed.
“The solicitor is coming at eleven.” He delivered nonplussed.
Her perfect brows pleated, quizzical. “I got nothing to do with your estate business.”
“My estate is not the matter.” He informed, bracing for what would come. “You and Sam are signing the marriage contract.”
Fury lit her eyes, dyed her silky skin crimson and brought her fists to her slim waist, which his hands could span to turn her to the table and bend her back onto it and…
“You must be out of your mind!” She hissed, lifting her head to glare at him.
Legs braced, he stared down at her with his Laird’s expression. “I assure you I am not.”
“Have you not heard anything I said the other day?” She defied.
The other day was something he did not want to bring up in a thousand years.
“A bunch of nonsense.” He deliberately dismissed.
“You will force an arranged marriage on your son, at the same age as you?” The words thrown at him like the stones from these walls. “The one which made you unhappy?”
Her question fell in his guts like hundreds of burning nails cast in rapid succession. Trust this woman to bring all his darkness into light and force him to stare it in the face. Another reason to go through with this.
“Sam has been talking, I see.” The quip attempted to duck the main subject.
Hands on the table, she inclined her delectable torso to him. “But he did not need to do it.” Her glare attacked him full on, with varied effects on his person. “Anyone can see he is a lonely boy trying hard to tackle his mother’s rejection.”
Taran never reckoned the diminutive witch would perceive so deep into his family’s issues. And in such a short time. It also demonstrated that only paid governesses did not provide his son with the necessary emotional support his boy needed. The one Taran found himself unable to give, perhaps because he might have needed it, as well.
He steeled himself against these thoughts. “Our past has nothing to do with you.” An offensive had a better chance of producing a smoke screen.
Her flaring nostrils sucked in air to inflate her chest and divert him of clear thoughts. “Yes, it does, if you are forcing me to be part of this family!”
The woman did not care for smoke screens, obviously. Too intelligent. Too perceptive. Too—
Bluidy hell!
“My study at eleven.” He decreed as he turned and left before his state of constant frustration led him to do something he would regret later. Like kissing those fire-spitting lips until it got swollen. Again.
~.~.~
The more she sought to untangle from the troglodyte’s raving plans, the more he made her slud
ge in it. She fumed along the corridors in the way to the blasted study. The place she had not been in since the day she discovered a kiss could be as lethal as the deadliest of weapons.
These past days, she immersed in intense activity aiming not to remember said study and what transpired in it. Little did she accomplish in this regard, she must admit. The nights had been pure agony of memories and a yearning too intense for her to understand in its whole extension. Then she would work doubly as hard to become as tired as possible to fall in bed exhausted and numb. Still, wisps of thoughts and remembrances flashed in the most unexpected windows of distraction.
The need to devise an effective way to travel back to the McKendrick’s manor more urgent than ever. There had been no clue where her servants stayed, or the carriage. She heard nothing of them. Sam must find something out. She would talk to him.
Hand on the door-knob, she filled her lungs with air, another battle in store. Silence smothered the room as she entered and clicked the door shut.
Sam sat on a chair, a helpless glint in his gaze. A small green leaf specked his wrinkled shirt, spine straight and tense. He conveyed the wish to be anywhere but here. Her heart stretched out to him.
A grey bearded man stood not far from the sturdy desk, short and round-bellied, he held a sheaf of papers in his hand.
But the intractable giant dominated the room. Impeccable white shirt, carefully wrapped tartan pinned to his broad shoulder with meticulous attention, his muscled frame dwarfed the solicitor. Shaved, coal hair in place, his green eyes found her like a fire storm as her cheeks burned. A god a foolhardy would worship in the altar of… despicable yearning.
“You must be Lady Aileen.” The solicitor broke the shouting silence, heedless of the heavy atmosphere. “I am Bruce Fleming.” He bowed.
“Good morning, Mr Fleming.” Her feet advanced into the room unwilling. She avoided glancing at the spot he had pressed her against, but her body remembered everything with a richness of detail she did not believe attainable.
“Take a seat, Aileen.” Sam offered, and she chose the chair beside him intending to transmit him a modicum of hope. The same she began to lose.
“Here is the contract, my lady.” Mr Fleming gave her the paper.
“Do you not think my father should sign it?” She asked. As The McKendrick and her father; the usual way of doing these things.
“He will.” The growl came naturally from the troglodyte. “After you marry, I will present him with a fait-accompli.” Even gelid, his voice coursed through her spine as warm honey.
Aileen lowered her head to the document and started reading it. The contract chained her to the marriage more than a serf to the land in the Middle Ages. Indignation erupted stronger than the sea waves in a storm.
“This is not a contract.” She exclaimed, shooting enraged bullets to the blasted McDougal. “This is a prison conviction!”
“I requested a clear agreement from Mr Fleming.” He replied as if one signed such death-sentences every day.
“And this here?” She read aloud. “’Any children resulting from this union remain with the father, in case the afore mentioned bride decides to leave the McDougal’s lands.’”
The pig-headed giant stared at her with a fixed attention which made her feel fidgety. “The children always stay with the father.”
It lay in the civil law of the time, she understood it. “I would never leave my children behind, contract or no contract.” Her vehemence made the solicitor uneasy as he adjusted his English style suit.
Something crossed Taran’s expression. One second there and then gone. A singular mixture of admiration and strangeness she found herself incapable of explaining.
This was much more than Aileen could take. Standing from her chair, she approached the damned man. Mahogany eyes glared him fiercely in his magnificent eyes, she extended her hands with the paper almost to his hawkish manly nose. “I am not your dead wife.” She hissed for his ears only.
And tore the document. Once. The solicitor’s eyes bulged at the defiance of the great McDougal. She tore the paper twice. In the corner of her eye, Sam lowered his head with a secret smile. She tore it the third time. His green gaze hurled spears of outrage at her. She did not stop until she reduced it to nothing. Her attention fixed on him, obdurate. The tiny pieces fell at his feet.
She smiled. Triumphant. At his squinted stare.
But there emerged a whole inferno of infuriation in her.
To Sam. “I wonder how the Bromeliaceae is faring.” A friendly grin to the adolescent, despite everything.
The boy promptly stood and accompanied her. “It has grown a lot since you saw it.”
“Let us check it.” They left the study chatting as if they had been in the room just for tea.
~.~.~
I am not your dead wife. Her perturbing statement kept playing in his mind as a chorus of ancient epic songs. He did not wish to dwell on her statement. He did not wish to revisit that time of his life, or ponder on the effects the period produced on him. Taran buried those events in the abyss of the past and never returned to them. Ever. They remained not in the past, though, did they? It he drew up a document where said events reflected in every line. This woman entered his life to revolve, subvert, unearth old skeletons. The fact put him on edge. She put him on edge. For infinitely thorny reasons.
Taran paced his empty study like a wolf in search of its prey. His authority alone should make the maddening witch sign the accursed contract. His long fingers raked his sable hair. But, no, of course not. Not her! She had to defy him in every way she might find.
So, he must have… convinced her—coerce so ugly a word—bargained a chip she would not have refused. He played this wrong, he saw now. Because she had been thwarting him from day one! Clearly, she was going to do it today. The woman possessed not a sense of self-preservation. The will to seize her elegant hand and make her sign the damned thing strong enough to force him to lock his muscles and stay immovable.
It came mixed with amazement at her dare. Even more at the way she undisguisedly protected Sam from his father’s wrath by taking him away with her so smartly. Then he did not wish to seize her hand. He wanted to seize her, take her somewhere quiet and show her how much that meant to him. Confounding buidseach! Had he known she would oppose this fierce resistance, he would have planned something more incisive. Possibly by abducting her and taking her directly to the priest and be done with it. But his son deserved to get used to the idea before his life changed, he had reckoned. The plan backfired spectacularly because the both became allies against him.
That was all he needed, he breathed a self-derogatory smirk. A headstrong shrew giving a bad example to Sam. He even felt a certain commiseration for the McKendricks if they experienced half the trouble to marry her!
His piled desk demanded he do long overdue work. Concentration in shortage, he tried to go through it.
~.~.~
“You were superb up there, Aileen.” Sam started as they left the hothouse.
They spent agreeable hours in the premise while he measured and made notes of the botanical specimens he kept track of closely. The world would lose a first-class scientist. The boy already combined weak species with stronger ones to create a resistant breed of grain that survived much easier in difficult weather like the Highland’s. Had his father allowed him to go to Oxford, he would definitely do his country a high service.
He received a smile from her. “I must, Sam. Or we both would be in for a life sentence of unhappiness.”
An inward sigh surfaced in her. She did not belong to this clan and she would not interfere with the boy’s future or the man might drag her to church by the hair, she suspected.
“I agree, but my father can be a tad… narrow-minded in these matters.” Arms behind him, his expression showed scepticism at those methods.
“A tad?” Her mouth breathed an incredulous laugh.
His pensive smile made her conclude he matured too fast f
or his age. “You are right. A lot.” He shrugged. “Clan matters are foremost in his life.”
The pig-headed giant should have married again, she conjectured. He would not be hassling his son now. She decided not to externalise the musing; Sam was too inexperienced for these subjects. To visualise the man married to someone else did grotesque things to her insides. Though if he had married again, she would never have met him, for he would have had other children to ensure the clan’s succession. Inestimably fortunate it would have been for her!
“I can understand it.” She answered instead. “But my brothers do not go around abducting women.”
“I would like to meet them. They seem to be good folks.”
“They are.” She replied nostalgic. The memory of them caused her to miss her family and her home.
Minutes passed in silence.
“Do you by any chance learned where my servants and carriage are, Sam?”
His gaze flew to her. “I am not sure, but I can try to find out.”
“Good.”
“Are you planning another escapade?” His smug countenance showed she earned his admiration in the first attempt. “I beg of you to be more careful this time.”
“I would not be so stupid again.” She agreed.
“You had better not to, I reckon.”
“I believe I have an idea, but I will require your help.” Her eyes distant, hoping to obtain a measure of advantage this time.
“Anything you need.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Before she put her plan into action, she called for a talk to the troglodyte once more to make sure there could be no other way.
The opportunity came as they worked the fields. This time heaping the stacks of oat sheaves on the carts to take them to the barn. Workers would separate the grain from the rest of the plant.