by Lucy Monroe
Could he smell her need through the barriers of stone and wood even? She turned to face the door, but made no move to drop the bar into place.
Shona leaned forward, her hands pressed into the wood. “Tell me. Am I like you now?”
The sigh that came across their mental link filled with vexation, but was it because he was angry with her or frustrated by his sexual need? “Nay.”
“You are telling the truth?” She was not one of them; she could not smell a lie.
Oh. “I cannot smell a lie.”
“Nay.”
“I am still as human as I ever was.”
“Aye.”
Relief poured through her—not that she was not Chrechte, but that he had not hidden anything else from her.
Or at least she thought he hadn’t. How would she know? So much had been withheld from her to this point.
“Are there any more secrets?”
He said something in her mind that sounded like a curse, but she did not know. It had been in that ancient language he spoke with the other Chrechte.
“What?” she asked.
“Every word you speak increases my arousal.”
“But that’s not possible.”
The sound of his groan definitely came through the door. “I assure you, it is.”
“You are still touching yourself.”
“Aye. But I would rather be touching you.”
There was something wrong with her. She should be scandalized, but the knowledge excited her.
“You should stop.”
“You should keep talking to me so intimately.”
“I am not saying anything of an intimate nature.”
“Every word inside my head is confirmation of our bond.” His voice was replete with satisfaction and sexual urgency.
He was going to climax from the stimulation of their mental bond. Again, she should be appalled, but she could feel nothing but gratified by the possibility.
“Secrets,” she said in a desperate bid to turn the tide of her own thoughts and desires. “Are there any further secrets?”
She could feel the pain of unfulfilled desire so strongly, it felt like her own, but she knew it was his. Was this another effect of the true mate bond?
“You have worked out for yourself that I plan to return to the MacLeod and take over the clan, have you not?”
She nodded against the door, her heart contracting at the thought of Caelis fighting Uven for the right to lead the clan. Even in a marginally fair fight, there was no way that Uven could come out victorious.
But the man was a weasel and no fight with him would be without treachery.
“Shona?” Caelis asked in her head, his voice strained.
She knew the source of that strain and did her best to ignore it.
“I am here,” she said aloud, knowing he would hear her through the door.
“I must do this thing.”
“I know.” And she did.
Uven had to be stopped, for the sake of their clan, but also for the good of all Chrechte. He was an evil man who would do untold damage if he was left to continue his current path. She was not sure how she knew that to be true, but it was a certainty inside her she could not shake.
“You have not dropped the bar.”
“No.”
“If you wish me to remain out here, do so.” His desire reached out to her through the thick wood and found a corresponding need in her heart.
She could not admit to it, but neither could she make herself drop the thick plank of wood that would keep Caelis on the other side. She didn’t want him touching himself. She wanted to be the one giving him pleasure.
The door began to move inward and Shona stepped back, her heart in her throat.
Chapter 19
The Faol do well not to underestimate the cunning and resourcefulness of humans.
—EMILY OF THE BALMORAL
Caelis stepped inside, his big warrior’s body vibrating with the desire darkening his gentian gaze and the fur he’d been resting on dangling from one big fist. “You should have barred the door, mate.”
“You should have asked me to marry you six years ago.” It was not what she’d intended to say, but she would not take the words back if she could.
They were true and he had to know it.
Tension she did not think had anything to do with his sexual need emanated off of him now. “Aye.”
“I would have said yes then.”
He winced. “I ken.”
Saints above, where was she going with this? Why was she saying these things? Her physical craving for him had not diminished in the least and yet her mouth spewed forth with things completely unrelated.
Or were they?
“I am leaving for Balmoral Island tomorrow.” She made the decision as the words left her mouth.
“You are rejecting me now as I did you then?” he asked, the ever present hunger warring with anger in his blue gaze.
Shona shook her head decisively. “You may come with us and make your intentions known to my family.”
“You know I have other commitments.”
She shrugged. Yes, she knew. Just like six years ago, Caelis had duties and intentions that superseded his promises to her.
“You will not be moved on this?”
“No.” She’d compromised for this man before, and her life had been all the more unhappy for it.
Once again, his jaw appeared hewn from rock. “You know I must return to the MacLeod.”
“And you are fully aware that is the last thing I want to do.” Part of her knew that she might well end up living among her former clan again, but she would not do so on a whim. Nor would she return there as anything less than his fully legal wife.
“I cannot refuse my destiny. I am conriocht. That means I am protector for my people.”
“And you believe protecting the Chrechte requires you to take over as laird of Clan MacLeod.”
“I know it does. It has been foreseen.”
Was she supposed to be impressed? She was. A little. Mayhap even a great deal more than a little, but that did not mean she would dismiss what she knew needed to happen to give a mating between them a foundation she could believe in.
“Do you know if too much or too little sand and loose rock is mixed into the soil of a motte, over time it will sink and the keep along with it?” she asked him.
He stared at her as if she’d gone mad, but she could not allow that to bother her.
“I know this because the baron told me once, rather gleefully, as he recounted the collapse of another baron’s keep. The entire structure, which had taken four entire years to build, was utterly destroyed.”
“Your marriage to the old man is something we would both do well to forget.”
“That is not possible.”
“Aye, it is.”
“No.”
He frowned down at her, clearly wanting to argue further.
She forestalled him.
“I hated every moment the baron touched me, but I love my daughter. I can no more forget her origins than I could Eadan’s.”
And if Caelis could not tolerate that, then there was truly no hope of a future between them. No matter what his Chrechte law said about sacred mates.
“She is mine,” Caelis claimed fiercely. “Just as you are, if you were not too stubborn to admit it.”
“You cannot undo her parentage just by willing it to be so.” Any more than he could simply will Shona to be his mated wife.
“He is dead. I am alive. I am her father, now and forever.” Utter conviction rang in his voice.
She shook her head in disbelief. “You’re a very possessive man.”
“I was not possessive enough six years ago, but I cannot regret that fact now.”
“You can’t?” Shona asked, shocked and more than a little dismayed.
“Marjory is meant to be ours, however she came to be. Can you regret your daughter?”
He’d asked her this
once before.
She understood his motive better for doing so now. “Never.”
“Aye.”
“Making a family takes more than just claiming everyone belongs together.” It required more than mere legal documentation as well.
“Aye, it takes some cooperation on your part.”
And his, if he would but acknowledge it. “When a motte sinks, the wall joints loosen and eventually, the entire keep will come down.”
“We are back to mottes again?”
“Listen to me, Caelis. I will not be the keep that crashes under the burden of my sinking foundation.”
“You are not a building,” he said, exasperation thickly lacing each word.
“No, but our mating is like the keep that seeks to protect those who live within it.”
“You admit we are mates.”
“I have never denied it.” Not once.
He spun away, slamming his open palm against the thick stone wall. “How can our mating protect our family like this fabled keep you go on about when you live on Balmoral Island and I live with the MacLeod? Keeps do not straddle two holdings, much less an entire sea.”
“Six years ago, you denied me before my family, withdrawing your courtship formally to my father.”
“To my shame.” His proud head dropped, his shoulders sagging.
It was not her intention to make him ashamed. “That is not my point.”
“What is your point?” he asked with barely suppressed impatience as he spun to face her again.
“That our mating now needs you to recognize me before my family once again.” She put her hand on his forearm, imploring him with everything in her to understand. “If I have value in your eyes, then you will acknowledge that before others.”
“Is not a mating and wedding enough for that?”
Talk about fabled entities. He kept talking about theirs as if it were already planned, but she’d not yet even agreed to marry him.
Not that he’d asked.
Because he had not.
“Thus far, your Chrechte ways have been naught but annoying to me, if you want the truth. I can put little faith in a mating; even less can I trust in a marriage after what I experienced with the baron. Standing before man and God, speaking vows of fidelity and honor in no way ensures a man will value his wife.” Or that he, she and their children would live together as a family in harmony.
“He was a poor husband.”
“There are much worse.” Audrey’s father and the current Baron of Heronshire, to name a couple.
“Not all mates are exemplary, either,” Caelis offered as if doing so pained him.
“Knowing what I do now about the Chrechte, I am well aware of that. Uven’s first wife must have been his true mate for him to have begot a child from her.” They had been both married and mated, but that had not turned out well for the poor woman.
“Aye.”
“My father always considered the circumstances of her death suspect, though I wasn’t supposed to know.” She’d overheard her parents talking.
“After learning how easy he found it to murder my own parents for disagreeing with him, I have no difficulty believing he would kill his human mate.”
“The old laird was still alive when it happened, but my father never voiced his concerns. Now, I understand the old laird would probably not have criticized or even disapproved if he’d known his son killed his mate. Because she was human and they were Fearghall.”
Caelis nodded, his expression grim.
“Believe it, or not, I do understand that the clan needs you.”
“Good.”
“But that does not mean I will disregard my own concerns.”
“I am not trying to do that, either.”
It was her turn to nod and say, “Good. You want me to have faith in institutions when I need to be able to trust you.”
“You do not trust me?” he asked with every evidence of not actually knowing the answer.
Did he think the past twenty-four hours had changed everything?
From the wounded expression on his handsome features, she thought he may very well have done.
“Am I to snap my fingers and all is forgotten? How am I to trust you?”
“I revealed my Chrechte nature to you.”
She thought that must mean a great deal more to his race than it possibly could to her, particularly when he had waited so long to do it. “After hiding it our entire lives, including when you were convincing me to share your furs without marriage.”
The knowledge others had held it from her as well still hurt, but she was doing her best not to hold him accountable for her parents’ actions, or Thomas’s and Audrey’s.
“I could not help myself. I believed you would be mine as well. It was no lie when I promised you marriage.”
“Your wolf wanted its mate.”
And the beast’s needs would have made the younger Caelis convinced of his future plans. Shona could understand that a little better, especially considering how very much those same needs influenced her and she was not even Chrechte.
“Aye. And I was younger; I didna have the control. We had already waited so long.”
She nodded, understanding and mayhap even accepting. “But what is there in that for me to trust?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it again, no words coming forth and the most interesting expressions coming over his face.
First shock, then consternation and finally enlightenment.
“Last night, I didna put my sex inside you.”
She’d wanted him to. He’d known it, too, probably as intimately as she had. “You did not risk pregnancy and I thank you, but you did not leave my bed, either, and allowed Audrey to find us together. You cannot tell me you did not hear her stirring in the next room.”
“Stone walls are thick. I did not hear her until she was outside your chamber.”
“And then it was too late.”
So he had not compromised her on purpose. Another mark in his favor.
“Aye. Do you want me to apologize for staying with my mate?” The frown he gave her said he’d do it, but wouldn’t like it.
Clearly he thought that title gave him all sorts of rights and privileges. She wasn’t sure it didn’t, not with how strongly she felt the pull as well.
“No.”
He stared at her expectantly. She simply looked back, waiting. Either he would come up with better arguments and convince her she could trust him, or realize how little he’d actually done to bring that about.
“I shifted into conriocht in front of you,” he said after several seconds of silence, with the air of a man who should not have had to draw attention to an obvious fact.
“You shifted in front of others as well.”
“I did it for you, to protect you and our children.”
If he but knew it, every time he referred to both Marjory and Eadan as his own, Caelis added to the sturdiness of the foundation for their mating-marriage she was so concerned about.
And this was a point she found easy to concede. “I am convinced our physical safety is paramount to you now.”
“But it wasn’t before. That is what you are thinking.” He turned away again, his body now rigid with tension.
“Is it?” she asked, not so sure that was the way she thought any longer.
“It never even occurred to me that you and your parents would leave our clan. It was your home.”
“But not one where we were welcome, and you knew that better than I.”
His jaw taut, he jerked his head in acknowledgment.
“And yet you believed we would stay, that I would remain with the clan. Unmarried.”
Again that single jerk of his head.
He had said so before; now she believed him. Couldn’t help herself, really. It explained too many of his actions and attitudes that could only otherwise be justified by believing him the monster she’d imagined for six years. Whatever Caelis was, conriocht or human, h
e was no monster. His assumptions six years ago had been arrogant, poorly thought out and bordering on the idiotic, but he had believed them.
“You thought you could watch over me, but by leaving with my parents, I took that option away from you.” She was now absolutely certain that was how he’d seen it.
But he shook his head. “You would not have left if I had done right by you.” His hands fisted at his sides. “I could have gone with you. I should have left the clan with your family.”
And now he wanted her to return. Could he not see the irony in that?
She could, just as she could see the irony in what she was about to say. “I love you.”
“What?” He turned back to her so fast it was a blur of movement in the glow cast by the single candle burning beside her bed. Absolute shock written over his features and in the very way he held his big body. “What did you say?”
“I love you. I never stopped.” She’d wanted to, saints above had she wanted to, but she’d never been able to turn off her emotions.
She’d tried so hard, to protect herself, to protect her children, but the love and desire burned brighter inside her now than it had six years ago. Which was why she would not, simply could not, marry or ceremonially mate with this man if she did not trust him to do right by her.
She had more to lose than he did, though he would never understand that. His wolf had named her mate before she’d even known what desire was. They had waited for her, Caelis and his wolf, but he had not loved her.
If he had loved her, he would not have repudiated her. Whatever he felt for her, it was tempered by his duty to the Chrechte and always would be.
She could accept that because she had no other choice to do otherwise, but she would not accept that she would always come last.
Oh, Shona had no doubt that he needed her, but he would survive losing her. He’d more than survived these past six years; he’d thrived and found a destiny he could never have dreamed of.
She, on the other hand, had come close to losing her mind and only the love and determination to protect and raise her children had saved her.
He had spent six years celibate. And while she was sure that had been a trial for him, she had spent those same years submitting to the touch of a man who killed a little bit of her soul every time he used her body to slake his lust. She had spent every one of those days until their individual deaths reviled by parents she loved with her whole heart. Each day, she’d stoically suffered slights big and small for being the Scottish upstart married to a man three times her age.