Staring at her, he searched for his voice, finally grating, “You canna imagine.”
Jane had been quaking with jealousy at the thought of Hugh sampling the pleasures of the Hive—and at the possibility of his interest in Maddy. Jane had no objection to Maddy snagging her cousin Quin, the only male in Jane’s entire Weyland generation, solely for his money.
But the idea of Hugh together with Maddy had made Jane want to claw her eyes out.
Then came Hugh’s quiet admission. His words had softened her, undermining her guard.
“How do you feel, Sìne?” he asked.
Sìne was the Gaelic form of Jane—he pronounced it Shee-ah-na and had never seemed to realize that he always said it as if it were an endearment. Her eyes nearly fluttered closed with pleasure at the name rolling from his tongue. That brogue would be the death of her.
“Lass, are you shivering?”
“Too much excitement,” she said, though she knew that wasn’t why she shook. Even if the crush hadn’t scared her witless, even if seeing him once more hadn’t stunned her, she’d still be reduced to shivers by the way he said her name in his language.
“Hugh, someone really ought to see about these.” Before thinking better of it, she lightly touched the backs of her fingers to the three marks on his face, but he flinched as if burned.
“Did I hurt you?” She laid her hand on his arm, but he slowly shrugged away. “I’m sorry.”
“No bother.”
Then why had he shifted as far away from her as possible on the bench and turned away without a word? As he stared out the window, eyes subtly darting over the street as though searching for something, she took the opportunity to study him.
She couldn’t decide whether the years had been kind or unkind to Hugh. He’d grown larger than he’d been at twenty-two, which was saying something, considering his strapping build even then. He was perhaps six and a half feet tall, still towering over her own five and a half feet, but now his body seemed packed with even more muscle. He was a man in his prime, and the years had honed the strength of his body.
Virile, masculine, rough. All the qualities she’d loved about him before had now become magnified—his heroic actions tonight were proof of that.
Yet if his body had benefited by the years, his face had not. Those three long gashes carved his cheek, and a furrow was etched between his brows. A raised scar marred the side of his neck. And his brown eyes seemed darker, as if the flecks of warm amber that she’d loved to stare at had been extinguished.
As she’d discovered tonight in the melee, Hugh looked…dangerous. The steady, grave Hugh she’d known had become an intense man—an alarming man.
But he also looked markedly unhappy. Wherever he’d been without her for all this time, he hadn’t been content. She could have made the brooding Highlander happy these past years. That was all she’d ever wanted. Just a chance to—
“Do I pass muster?” he asked quietly, facing her.
Striving for politeness, she replied, “The years have been kind.”
“No, they have no’. And we both know it.” His gaze flickered over her. “At least they have for one of us.”
Her hot blush of pleasure flustered her. Luckily, she was saved from having to reply when the cab stopped for Hugh’s horse. The poor animal looked as road-weary and fatigued as Hugh, but Jane could tell that under the layer of dust the animal was exceptionally fine with an unusual build and markings.
After Hugh had tethered the horse to the back of the hansom, and he’d rejoined her, she said, “You’re lucky someone didn’t steal a horse like that. Why didn’t you take it to the city stables a block away?”
“I dinna have t—” He broke off, seeming irritated. “I just dinna.”
“Oh. I see,” she said with a frown. After several moments of silence, she ventured to make conversation with him. Her home was only fifteen minutes away, but as the ride was filled with clipped, awkward exchanges—between two who used to be so at ease with each other—it seemed the longest of her life.
Mercifully, they arrived at last. When Hugh put his hands to her waist to help her down, he seemed to linger, then kept his palm across her back as he escorted her to the front door.
“I don’t have a key.” Jane patted her skirts as if she had pockets. “I lost my reticule tonight.”
“Rolley will be awake,” Hugh said, but he didn’t make a move to knock. He looked like he was about to say something, but whatever he saw in her eyes made him fall silent.
There they stood at the door facing each other, each seeming to await something. Could he see how much she yearned for an apology, or, at the very least, an explanation? The moment stretched out interminably.
Hugh, if you were ever going to make things right between us, now would be the time. But he didn’t. Instead, his eyes grew intent, and his brows drew together.
He’s going to kiss me! she vaguely comprehended, her breaths growing shallow. For the first time? Now?
Anger simmered inside her. He didn’t deserve her kisses. He could have had them freely for the last ten years.
He leaned in….
Without even an apology? Her palm itched to slap him—
At the last instant, the door swung open. “Thought I ’eard something,” Rolley said, standing tense in the doorway.
Hugh drew back and had to cough into his fist to rasp to her, “Go inside now. I’ll see you in the morning when I return.”
“See me?” She blinked up at him. “Whatever for?”
Six
Jane’s cousins called him Hugh “Tears and Years” MacCarrick.
Because she’d wasted an inordinate amount of each on him.
Now that the giddy rush of seeing him again—and the effects of the deceptively potent punch—had worn off, she stared into her dressing table mirror, combing out her hair after her bath. When her eyes glinted in the glass, Jane realized she was about to go wasting even more. She laid down her brush beside the message from Claudia saying they’d all gotten home safely, then put her head in her hands. She shoved the heels of her palms against her eyes, as if that would stem the tears.
Countless nights crying and years of her life she’d squandered. Jane—who knew how precious time was!
When Jane was only six, her mother had died from a lung inflammation, and since then Jane had never been content. Perhaps she knew too well that she could never take for granted a single second, and that was what made her restless. Perhaps she was simply never meant to experience a feeling of complete satisfaction.
She burned to travel, to experience exciting new places—but was it wanderlust, or the yearning to be wherever she wasn’t at the time? Ten years ago, with Hugh at her side, that anxious feeling had dimmed to a point where she could ignore it. She couldn’t explain why.
Then he’d left her behind without a word.
She’d grieved for him, longed for him, and had wasted nearly half of her life on him.
Damn him, no more, she swore to herself, and yet still she replayed their history in her mind, seeking, as usual, some answer as to what she’d done to drive him away….
“The Scotsman is mine.”
Jane had made that declaration to her cousins with her very first look at him. Her heart had stuttered, and she’d decided then that she would be the one to make him happy so his eyes wouldn’t be so grave. She’d been thirteen and he’d been eighteen.
He and his brothers had come down from Scotland to summer at their family’s lake house, Ros Creag, which shared a broad cove with Vinelands, her family’s. When she’d charged up to him to introduce herself, he’d chucked her under the chin and called her “poppet,” and it sounded wonderful the way he said it with his brogue. He was kind to her, and she followed him everywhere.
At her urging, her father had also visited and befriended the reclusive brothers, though they seemed to want to have nothing to do with the rest of the merry Weyland brood. Somehow he persuaded them to come back down the
following summer, delighting her. Since he had no sons, Papa was set on recruiting them to work in his import business.
By the end of the next season at the lake, whenever she got a bee sting or splinter she ran to Hugh alone.
Her fifteenth summer they returned again, but Hugh spent most of the time frowning at her, as if he didn’t quite know what to make of her. When she’d turned sixteen, just when she’d started to fill out, he’d avoided her entirely. He’d decided to work for her father, and spent all his time with him at Ros Creag, discussing the business.
She’d cried from missing her big, solemn Scot. Her cousins told her she could have anyone and that they didn’t want her pining over “that rough MacCarrick,” but upon seeing she would not be dissuaded, they’d suggested she play dirty—and her cousins had known what they were talking about. Their saying was, “Man bows before the Weyland Eight. And if he won’t bow, we’ll make him kneel.”
Claudia had said, “Now we scheme, Janey. By next summer, we’ll make sure you have low-cut dresses, soft as-silk hands”—she grinned a devilish grin—“and a shameless demeanor. Your Highlander won’t know what hit him.”
But he didn’t come the next summer, leaving Jane devastated. Until that one night when luck was with her, and he’d arrived with an urgent message for her father. Whatever could be pressing about relics and antiques, Jane couldn’t fathom.
Before he could ride off again, she made sure he saw her, and he gaped as if he didn’t recognize her. A single night’s stay had turned into two, then three, and he couldn’t seem to spend enough time with her.
Her older cousins had taught her much in the previous year, and every day he was there, she teased and tormented him for the days he hadn’t been.
She’d learned that whispering in his ear could make his eyes slide shut and his lips part, and that running her fingers through his hair as she hugged him could make him hiss in a breath. As often as she could, she’d coaxed him to swim with her—especially after that first time, when he’d frozen in the middle of shrugging out of his shirt to silently watch her removing her skirt and blouse, until she was in naught but stocking, garters, and a chemise. After they swam, Jane—never one for modesty—had slipped from the water in the transparent garment. She’d followed his rapt gaze on her body before he finally jerked his face away. “Hugh, can you see through?”
When he’d turned back to her and given her a slow nod, his eyes dark, she’d said, “Well, darling, if it’s only you.” She’d noted that it had taken him a very long time before he’d been able to get out of the water that day.
During what would prove to be their last afternoon, they’d been lying side by side in the meadow, and she rolled on top of him to tickle him. He despised it when she tickled him, and for hours afterward was surly and tense, his voice husky.
But that time, instead of shaking her off, he reached up and tugged her ribbon loose to free her hair. “So fair,” he rasped as he ran his thumb over her bottom lip. “But you know that well, do you no’?”
She leaned down to kiss him, intending not the torturing little kisses on his ear before she whispered to him, or the brushing of her lips on the back of his neck that she’d been giving him all summer. She wanted her first real kiss.
But he took her shoulders and pushed her up, grating, “You’re too young, lass.”
“I’m almost eighteen, and I’ve already had marriage offers from men older than you.”
He scowled at that, then shook his head. “Sìne, I’m leaving here soon.”
She smiled sadly. “I know. That’s what you do when summer’s over. You go back north to Scotland. And every winter I miss you very much until you return to me here.”
He just stared at her face as if memorizing it.
Jane had never seen him or heard from him again. Not until this night.
She’d been so convinced Hugh would marry her—it had been a foregone conclusion for her—that she’d only been counting the days until Hugh deemed her not too young. She’d believed in him so much, certain they would be together. Yet he’d known he was going to work abroad for years, had known he was leaving her behind. It had been a conscious decision on his part, and he hadn’t even told her why.
He hadn’t asked her to wait for him, or given Jane her chance to make him happy.
And now, ten years later, she stared into the mirror, watching the tears roll down her face….
Tonight, the women Jane had seen at the masquerade had hard eyes for all their swagger and flirting. They were bitter, but it wasn’t simply due to economics or circumstances, as Belinda lamented.
Those hard-eyed women had been hurt by men.
Jane recognized it in them with perfect clarity, because this very mirror reflected the same quality growing in her own eyes every day. She could finally acknowledge that.
She would do whatever it took to avoid that fate. Bitterness was a life sentence, and it was one that was entirely avoidable.
She dried her tears—for the last time.
Early tomorrow morn, she’d accept Freddie’s proposal.
Seven
The side door to the Weyland home was unlocked the next morning.
Hugh’s body went tense as he let himself inside the quiet house, striding directly to the second floor to find Jane, unholstering his pistol as he hurried up the carpeted stairs. Had Weyland even arrived home from the night before?
He finally heard movement in a room down the hallway and hastened to follow the sounds. Through a cracked-open bedroom door, he spied Jane on her knees, sweeping her hand back and forth under the bed.
He inhaled deeply, gathering control, then stowed his weapon behind him under his jacket.
Unable to help himself, he entered her room and approached silently, staring at her body clad in naught but a silk gown. She slowly gazed up to meet his eyes. She had the damnedest green eyes.
“Just what are you doing in my bedroom?” she demanded, rising to her feet. Though scarcely dressed, with her curves more highlighted than concealed, she sashayed around him, continuing to search through piles of lace for whatever she was missing, unconcerned by her state of undress.
He could see her nipples under the silk and swallowed hard. Why couldn’t she have grown reserved over the years? Never had he encountered a woman so immodest. But then, that last summer with her, he hadn’t complained whenever she swam with him.
“What do you want, Hugh?”
“Where’s your father gone so early?”
When she shrugged, the threadlike strap of her gown skimmed down her shoulder. Typical Jane, she did not pull it back. “I don’t know. Did you check in his study? That’s where he is these days, twenty hours out of twenty-four.”
Something was different about her this morning. From the time he’d left her last night, fighting not to kiss her, to now, she’d become colder. He felt it strongly.
“I dinna see him. The door was open, and Rolley’s nowhere to be seen.”
“Then your guess is as good as mine. Why don’t you run down there and check again?” She turned, dismissing him.
“You’re coming with me. Put on a robe.”
When she ignored him, he scanned the room for a wrap. No wonder she’d been searching for something. Shoes, stockings, laces, and satiny corsets littered the room. Dresses were puddled where she’d dropped them. So much disorder. Hugh hated disorder, craved the opposite in every aspect of his life.
He finally spotted something that might cover her. “Put this on.”
“I’m not going downstairs until I’m fully attired. I’m late as it is for an engagement.” She chuckled as if at some private joke.
“We have a problem, then.” For all he knew, Weyland and Rolley had been taken down. “Because I’m no’ letting you out of my sight.”
“And why is that?”
“Your house is empty with the door unlocked.”
“Call down.”
He strode to the doorway. “Weyland,” he bellow
ed. No answer. “The robe, Jane.”
“To hell, Hugh.”
Why was she the one woman on earth he didn’t intimidate?
“I’ve told you I’ll go when I’m ready.”
“Then dress yourself,” he grated.
“Leave the room.”
“No’ going to happen.”
“Turn around, then.” When he didn’t, she tapped her cheek and said, “But there’s nothing you haven’t sneaked a peek at before, is there?”
Stunned by the difference in her, he grated, “As I said last night, lass, there’s little you have no’ shown me.”
Her eyes glittered with anger. “But just as you’ve changed, so have I.” She put her shoulders back and pulled her hair behind her, clearly aware that her figure had become even more tempting.
He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, about to say something he shouldn’t. “Just dress,” he ordered. As he turned from her, he caught his reflection in the basin mirror and scowled. He was well aware that the years had not been kind.
One night’s restless sleep had done nothing to alleviate his exhaustion, and for the last three days, his injuries had prevented him from shaving.
Was it only three days ago that he’d been in a war? That he’d killed?
Now her reflection caught his attention. He watched her in the mirror as she poised a dainty foot on a stool to roll her stocking up one long leg—
He found his jaw slackening in wonderment when she slid her gown higher to wrap the wickedest garter he’d ever seen around her thigh. As she tied it into a perfect bow, his hands clenched the edges of the washstand so hard he thought he’d break the marble.
That last summer, she’d always worn her garters high. Because her shifts were so short….
He forced himself to look away. When he heard stiff material rustling, he asked, “Are you no’ done yet?” He didn’t recognize his voice.
“Be patient with me, Hugh.” How many times had he heard that phrase?
He exhaled and answered as he always had, “I try, lass.” Think of other things. He spied her bow propped up near the doorway and noticed fresh blades of grass affixed to the bottom of her full quiver. He was pleased she’d kept up with her archery.
Kresley Cole - [MacCarrick Brothers 02] Page 4