by Ella Brooke
"You're welcome," she said, and she tried to show him in the kisses she gave him how very much she meant it. In the wake of her bliss, she realized that Patrick was still clothed from the waist up. "Take this off," she sighed, tugging at his clothes, and with a chuckle, Patrick rose to do as she said.
"Bossy little thing," he said fondly, climbing back into bed with her.
Natalie didn't care about the amusement in his voice as she curled next to him, her head pillowed on his chest. Somehow, when he was naked he seemed even larger, and she felt absurdly and beautifully protected and safe.
"Why do I feel so good with you?" she wondered drowsily, and he made a sound that felt like a purr under her ear.
"Because we fit together, pet," he said. "Because when it comes to this at least, we were made for each other.”
Natalie knew that something about that statement should have set off alarm bells in her head, but right then, it all just felt good. In the exhaustion after their lovemaking, there was nothing she wanted, nothing that could frighten her or upset her. For moment, all was well.
Chapter Thirteen
Sometime around dawn, Natalie woke up. She was alone under the quilt that covered the bed, and she noticed that it had been tucked around her as she slept. From the downstairs portion of the guardhouse, she could smell coffee brewing, and after a moment of deliberation, she levered herself out of bed.
The air had a slightly cold feel to it, but her clothes were nearby. She was grateful that Patrick had thought to have her clothes sent for before they took their trip to Scotland. Now she could slip her nightgown over her head, letting it fall down in loose folds around her hips. She was still chilly, but at least now she was not completely bare.
Natalie descended the ladder carefully, and behind her, she heard Patrick give a low wolf whistle.
"That's a nice thing to see in the morning," he said, and when she had her feet on level ground again, she grinned at him.
"Is it nice enough to score some of that coffee you’re making?" she asked, and he pulled down a pair of stoneware mugs from the cupboards.
"Making coffee is at least something I can do, even if it is not as impressive as your chicken last night," he said. "Still, I intended to bring it to you when you had slept enough."
Natalie was touched by this simple gentle gesture. No other man that she had been with was half as courteous. She watched in bemusement as he prepared the coffee, dark with a splash of cream for him, cream and honey for her.
"You know how I take my coffee," Natalie said with surprise, and he shot her a knowing look.
"I paid attention when we got refreshments at work," he said. "I kept an ear out for yours."
She blushed, hiding her face by leaning down to sip at her coffee. It was boiled ferociously strong and very hot, but it suited her. She sat at the table, letting the drink warm her. She and Patrick felt into a companionable silence as they sipped their coffee together. There was no need for chatter. There was simply a peace that they found together, and something about it made Natalie feel wonderfully soft.
She watched through half closed eyes as Patrick paced with his coffee, finally coming to stand at the enormous set of windows that looked out to the ruins. He was so still that he could have been some soldier or king of a bygone age, appearing to look out over the ruins of what had once been his.
Natalie finished her coffee and went to wrap her arms around him from behind. There was a place between his shoulder blades that felt perfect for her cheek.
"Thank you for bringing me out here," she said quietly. "It's beautiful. I love being with you."
He made that purring sound again, and one large hand drifted down to touch her hands.
"Thank you for coming with me," he said. "I never get an excuse to come out to this property anymore, despite all the work I put in to it. Perhaps later on today, I'll bore you with some of my favorite renovation projects — both the ones that I did here on my own, and the ones that were completed decades and in some cases, centuries ago."
There was something diffident about the way he spoke. She could tell that the guardhouse was important to him, but he spoke about it as if it was something that couldn't possibly interest her. Natalie might not have been interested in old Scottish architecture for its own sake, but if someone she liked a great deal was interested in it, she would certainly make an effort.
And if someone she loved was interested in it...
The word struck her with the force of a blow, and even as she thought it, she knew it was true. Somehow, she had fallen in love with this impossible and generous man; one who was dramatically different from her, who lived his life at right angles to the way she lived hers.
"Natalie? Are you all right?"
Once again, he seemed to sense her moods. He turned around to look at her, setting his mug of coffee off to one side. Natalie looked up into his blue eyes, and she knew that that epiphany was true.
"I love you," she said simply, and she saw his gaze go to one of shock.
"I... I don't know what to say."
It was a little hurtful, but she wasn't surprised. She had just dropped one of the biggest revelations that one person could have for another, and she didn't blame him for being shocked.
"You don't have to say anything," she said, keeping her voice light. "Look, I know that the world has all sorts of expectations about that word. I know that. There's that old saying that women say it to trap men into marriage, and that men use it to trap women into sex. It's ugly, but there is at least a grain of truth to it because I have heard it happen so many times.
"Believe me when I say that I’m not trying to trap you anywhere. I promise you that. I am not trying to get you to do anything — or not to do anything — that you don't want to do. I love you very much, and no matter where we end up, I think I always will."
She smiled at him, because she did love him. After all, where was the harm in loving someone without complications, without strings and without promises?
Natalie reached up to wrap her arms around his neck, and he bent down to kiss her. The kiss was perhaps more solemn than what they had shared before, but there was a low thrum of pleasure and passion underneath it.
"Thank you," Patrick said when they broke apart. “I am not sure that I have ever been given a better gift."
She smiled at him, but there was a tiny part of her that wondered if he felt anything similar for her; if there was any kind of hope for them in the future.
***
Patrick shoved his hands deeper into his pockets as he watched Natalie range over the ruins. They were safe, had been declared so by an entire geological team, but there was something unnerving about watching the young American clamber up a pile of stone that had once been part of the curtain wall.
"For the love of God, be careful," he called. "I don't want to airlift you out of here if you make a miscalculation..."
She flashed him a bright grin that never failed to take his breath away. It was like watching the sun come out after a storm, bright and beautiful.
"Don't worry about me, Adair," she said with a laugh. "I was made to do this. Keep up if you can."
He grinned at her, but had absolutely no interest vaulting up the gray stone piles unless there was an absolute need to do so. He liked to think he was too sensible for all this, but then, what the hell was he doing in Scotland with a girl who was far, far too young for him?
It wasn't just age, Patrick had to admit. He had known plenty of women in their early-to-mid twenties, slept with a handful of them, and they could be just as cynical and world-weary as women his own age. Some of them had been making a play for his money, others had simply been curious to see if he was as good as rumors made him out to be.
At the end of the day, however, he had never seen anything special in a woman because of her age, and men who said that they did tended to be the kind he regarded with disgust or suspicion.
Patrick was coming to realize that it did not matter how
old Natalie was. She could be fifty, and there was still a chance that she would be climbing up stone walls, trying to goad him into following her. She would always look around her with that kind of wonder, and she would always shine like a new-found penny.
And she was in love with him.
The words had stuck him with the force of a hammer hitting a nail. When she said them, his heart started beating hard, as if in recognition. All she had done was give him the words to speak out what he suspected he had known for some time now.
There was a reason that his heart felt lighter when he saw her. There was a reason he listened for her step in the corridor, and that sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, the best antidote was tiptoeing down to the library at the townhouse and matching his breathing to hers.
It might have been the worst decision that he could have made when he brought her home with him. She wrecked his peace, but she brought him joy. Life had erupted into color since she had come, and sometimes in his darker moments, Patrick could only look ahead to a time when she was gone.
Love.
He would be a liar if he said that it never occurred to him. He wasn't sure if he believed in it before he met Natalie.
The problem was, he thought, following her progress around the base of the castle, was that love meant two different things to them. For her, it was a river, flashing bright and quick as it traveled from here to there. For him, it was a house that one built with another person, something stable and solid, a place where they live.
Natalie was a wild girl. With her nomad's heart, could she ever truly be happy in Dublin with him? She might try, but it would be akin to forcing a wild bird into a cage. It would break her heart, no matter how beautiful he made the cage, and eventually, Patrick was smart enough to know that it would break his as well.
Suddenly she emerged from the ruins ahead. There was a small outbuilding of the castle that was still mostly intact, and Natalie appeared in the window of the second story.
"This is so wonderful," she called down to him. "These stones were cut from the earth centuries ago, and they are still here!"
"And you might disappear from the earth in an instant if you fall and break your neck," Patrick said warningly. "Be careful up there."
"I'm going to be careful," she responded, dangling her legs over the window ledge. "I just wanted to sit for a moment and wonder what life was like for another woman who saw the world and the sky from this window. Their lives would have been so different from ours, but they would have felt the same things, I think. They would love, they would fight, they would hate. All the same things."
"Read your history books," Patrick said tartly. "Life was nasty, brutish and short. Anything else was a fairytale."
She grinned down at him, undaunted by his curmudgeonly answer.
"I like to think that there was some magic and some love for them, even then. After all, they were still human."
She started to rise from her seat, but some of the rock must have shifted underneath her. With a shriek and flailing of limbs, she fell from the window, and Patrick rushed forward, his mind a blank white sheet of panic.
Oh God, I am going to watch the woman I love die...
The words were the only clear thing in his head, but then she fell into his arms as neatly as if they had rehearsed it. She was a trembling weight, hanging on to him, and for a moment, it felt as if she was never going to let him go.
Then she looked up at him, her face slightly pale but her black eyes luminous.
"People are amazing. You are amazing," she whispered, and for a moment, the words that had appeared in his mind almost fell out of his mouth. He had nearly lost her, and right now all he wanted to do was to tell her he loved her, that she should never try such a thing again.
Instead, Patrick leaned down and kissed her, a hungry thing that filled him with need. The adrenaline was just beginning to pull back from his system, and in its wake, it left a towering need for the woman in his arms.
"Are you okay?" he asked, and she nodded her assent. There was a flash of confusion as he did not put her down, but instead marched to the shelter of the ruined walls, still holding her in his arms.
"Patrick, I told you I was fine," she said in confusion. "I'm fine, I promise, not a single scrape on me thanks to you."
He laughed menacingly, and he could hear her shiver, cling to him a little tighter.
"I think girls that think they are too clever to ever fall need a good lesson in restraint," he growled, and she squirmed in his arms. He knew he was too strong for her, and when she came to the same realization, she drew her breath in. Her eyes were as deep and dark as ink when she looked up at him, and then he was lying her down in the shadow of the ancient stone.
"A lesson?" she murmured, and he grinned, coming to lie over her, their bodies tangled like a pair of gloves on the cool grass.
"One you will not soon forget," he murmured, kissing her soundly on the mouth.
Chapter Fourteen
A few weeks later, Natalie felt as if life had turned into a strange, golden time. She started working when she was fourteen years old, just a year before her mother died and her adulthood started in full swing. She never had much idle time, and if she were honest with herself, she had always thought that it would bore her.
Now, though they had spoken about work and Patrick took a few meetings over the phone, she was nearly perfectly idle, but fascinated with everything that came her way.
She and Patrick spent their time together, making love, sleeping, wandering and doing whatever else that crossed their path and piqued their interest.
The little guardhouse in Scotland had come to represent a kind of oasis from the rest of the world; a place where she was sheltered and allowed to play and love and laugh exactly as she liked. She never really thought much about the concept of ‘home,’ but now she had one — and it was an isolated guardhouse near the ruin of a castle in Scotland.
She wondered if spending so much time with Patrick was going to wear her down, but somehow it never did. They were as good together speaking as they were in silence, and as good at traveling together as they were at making love. There was a kind of peace that came with it, and there was a tiny part of her that wondered how long she could have this. How long it could even last.
Natalie liked to think that she was a realist, even at her young age. She knew that this could not last, and that eventually Patrick would go back to work and she would move on. That was inevitable. As was the pain of being separated from him.
In the quiet moments, Natalie wondered if she should leave — cutting things off before their relationship bloomed any further. She thought of scenarios where she could tell them that she was leaving, ways she could make it easy for both of them, but her mind recoiled. She got as far as imagining his response before she had to pull away.
It will come soon enough, anyway, she thought. There's no need to hurry it along, right?
Even if she knew that it was going to end, Patrick never seemed to think of it. He made love to her, he ate the food she cooked, and drove her to the small town nearby when she craved something different. He went wading in the icy loch nearby with her, and one day after some coaxing, she got him to climb up on one of the piles of stones at the ruins with her.
Natalie had to force the idea of this golden time ending more than once out of her head, and slowly, it took its toll. She could feel herself growing strangely thin and stretched out, a little more distracted and a little more sharp. She wondered if Patrick sensed it too, and then one day almost three weeks after they arrived in Scotland, she got her answer.
"I think you need some time back in civilization," he murmured, and she smiled up at him in the dim light. Patrick levered himself up on one elbow, looking down on her tenderly as she lie in the bed. She reached her hand up to touch him, running her fingers along the scruff along his jawline. Here in Scotland, he let it go for days at a time, while in Dublin he was always clean-shaven.
"I do?
" she asked, and he nodded.
"It happens to the best of us. Listen, I have a trip coming up in just a day or two, to New York. Come with me, see some shows, do some shopping and take in the sites. This has been amazing, but I wonder if you are feeling a bit pent up."
"I certainly might be," she admitted. "And you?"
He shrugged.
"I’m comfortable wherever I can do work, but yes, getting back to a city would likely be a very good idea, at least for a while. Changes are good, they say."
It made her wonder briefly why he had chosen to take her to this small piece of heaven in Scotland. There was something else there that was teasing her brain, but she couldn't hang on to it. She let it go and turned to him, her smile less genuine than it had been before, but still certainly real enough.
"That sounds amazing, let's do that," she said, and he smiled.
His smile warmed her like the sun itself, she thought. What would it be like when he took it away?
***
Natalie lived in New York for six months once, and at the time, tired, poor, hungry and worn, she thought that it was no different from any other large city. Being on Patrick's arm, however, swept from the private jet at La Guardia straight into the black limousine, she had to admit that the city looked different.
"God, it's so much," Natalie said, peering up at the skyscrapers from behind the tinted glass. "It just keeps going and going."
"That's a funny thing to hear from an experienced world traveler, pet," he said, a teasing note in his voice. "I would have thought you were eager go be back in the midst of all of this life. I wondered if country life was wearing on you."
"Well, I'm definitely feeling like we should grab some street food while the getting's good," she said, "but more of me misses the guardhouse than I thought I would. There's a lot of hustle and bustle here, but there was a kind of joy there that I'm not sure I've found anywhere else."
When she glanced back at Patrick, there was a faintly distant expression on his face, one that was slightly sad.