by Julia London
Fergus quit the room without another word.
Arran finished his meal as he tried to look over documents that desperately needed his attention. But it was hopeless—he could not rid his mind of the meeting he’d had today, of the accusations against him.
He sighed, pushed his plate away and stood up. He deposited the papers on his chest of drawers, then rang the bellpull. A moment later, a lad came into the room.
“Take it away,” he said, gesturing to the table. “And return the table to its place.”
“Aye, milord.”
Arran paid no attention as the young man picked up the remnants of his meal. He went to his basin and washed his hands and face. He heard the lad go out, but he did not hear the sounds of the table being moved.
He turned around, prepared to resume his work...but there, in the open door, stood his wife, her hands behind her back. She was wearing a beautiful gown the color of butter, the underskirt and stomacher sea blue. Jewels glistened in her earlobes and just above the mounds of her breasts. She looked like a lone flower in this old gray castle.
Ah, but he was weak for her, had always been and, Diah, likely would always be. An attraction that could very well prove to be the death of him. “What are you doing there?”
She produced a box. “I have a chessboard and chess figures. I thought we might have a game.”
Arran couldn’t help himself—he let his gaze wander over her full bosom, down her waist, to the tips of her slippers peeking out from beneath her skirts. “Chess,” he scoffed. “I’ve no’ played games in an age.”
“Splendid. That means I will have the advantage, as I am forever playing games.” She smiled wryly at her jest and opened the box.
“I didna say I would,” he said, but he made no move to stop her as she began to set up the pieces. When she’d finished, she walked to the sideboard, poured a glass of port and held it out to him.
“What a presumptuous thing you are.”
She smiled as if she’d known all along that he would relent, and Arran sighed. He pushed his fingers through his hair, still damp from his bath. He stood before her in shirttails and with bare feet and would have liked nothing better than to crawl into his bed and sleep. He’d spent a day convincing grown men that this woman wasn’t treacherous when he himself had doubted it. The task had exhausted him, made him damnably feeble.
He looked at the glass of port she held out and said, “I prefer whisky.”
A softly triumphant smile lit her face. She put aside the port, poured whisky, then moved to where he stood to give it to him.
“I told you I did no’ want company this evening,” he said low, his gaze on her mouth.
“Did you?” she purred. “I forgot.”
Arran clasped his hand around the tot and her hand and pulled her closer. “I’ll allow your disobedience this time, Margot. But no’ again.”
“It won’t happen again,” she said, her smile like a bright flash of lightning in a stormy sky.
“Donna mistake me for one of the lovesick puppies that follow you about Norwood Park.”
Her brows dipped over a deeper smile. “I would never mistake you for one of them.” She bent her head and touched her lips to the back of his hand. The softness and warmth of her touch tingled in Arran’s skin, and he was painfully reminded of her mouth on his body just last night. His groin began to kindle.
Arran stepped away before that kindling turned to fire. He went to the table and sank into a chair, his gaze on the twilight sky. Bloody hell, he was being undone by her once again.
Margot helped herself to the port and very gracefully took her seat across from him. He remembered that once she’d told him a gentleman ought to seat a lady. The implication being, of course, that he was no gentleman, for he rarely did it. Perhaps he should have endeavored more to be what she wanted. Perhaps then she wouldn’t have thought of betraying him. But had she betrayed him? He couldn’t look at her sitting across from him, smiling happily at having her way, and believe that she had. Aye, but he’d never believed that she would leave him, either.
“There,” she said as she adjusted the placement of a rook.
“Are you happy now?” Arran drawled.
“Not entirely. I would be happier had I dined with you.” She sipped elegantly.
She was quite young yet, but she seemed so much older than before. More sure of herself. “You have indeed changed, Margot.”
“Have I?” Her eyes sparkled with pleasure in the candlelight. “For the better, I should hope.”
He wasn’t certain of that—but she was definitely more intriguing.
“You have the first move,” she said.
Arran lifted himself up and moved a pawn forward. Margot matched his move.
They carried on, the movements quick in the opening of the game. Arran couldn’t help but notice how Margot delighted in the challenge. She was quite good at it, even instructing him on how to attack her pawn with his. He could imagine her surrounded by admirers as she challenged one gentleman after the other to a game. Her eyes glittered every time she looked up at him, filled with pleasure and laughter, and Arran could further imagine how those men had been drawn to her. Had he somehow missed this playful side of her before? Would things have perhaps been easier between them if he’d discovered it? So many questions from that time lingered.
Margot was the first to take a pawn. “Aha!” she said, and tapped his ivory piece from the board. “You must pay closer attention, Arran, or I’ll have your queen.”
“Never doubt it,” he said.
“Ooh,” she said. “That sounds quite ominous.” She looked up, but her smile faded when she saw his expression.
“Aye, you’re bonny,” he said low. “I can scarcely bring to mind the trembling lass who met me at the altar.”
Margot laughed softly. “I was trembling, wasn’t I? In truth, I could scarcely stand, I was so frightened.”
Arran moved a rook into position. “Was I such a beast?”
“A beast!” She laughed lightly. “You were no beast. You were the strongest and most handsome man I’d ever laid eyes on.”
He snorted at flattery he considered false.
“I am sincere! You had completely captured my imagination, though,” she said, putting up a hand, “I will admit I was terribly innocent. But I had scarcely turned eighteen years. I had not the slightest idea what to do with a man like you. I remember looking up, and there was Christ smiling down at me and I thought I might faint dead away.” She smoothly matched his move. “Nor had I any notion of how to be a wife. My mother had long been dead and there was no one to instruct me, no one to tell me about Scotland. Certainly no one to tell me all that went on between husband and wife.” She glanced up and smiled saucily.
“Aye, you trembled then, too,” Arran reminded her, and her smile broadened.
“As did you, as I recall.”
He chuckled. “Perhaps a wee bit.”
“And then I came here, to Balhaire. It felt as if I had journeyed to the end of the world! The people spoke a different language, and none of them were happy to see me. It was so overwhelming, really. I felt quite lost.”
Arran moved a bishop. “I felt a wee bit lost myself.”
“You?” she said, surprised.
“Aye, me. I’d been accustomed to coming and going as I pleased, to dining when I wanted—and alone if I so desired,” he said with a pointed look at her.
She gave him a light laugh and shrugged.
“I didna know how to incorporate a wife into this life, and like you, I had no one to instruct me.”
“But you seemed so confident!”
“I wasna confident, Margot. I hadna been a husband, and I didna want to harm you or displease you in any way.”
“Oh.” Her expressio
n softened. “Oh, Arran, you never harmed me. And any displeasure I suffered was my own doing.”
“Hmm...you have said to the contrary many times.”
“Oh dear,” she said with a rueful smile. “I’m afraid I’ve said many things in the last few years that I wish I’d never said.”
“Well...your displeasure was not entirely of your own doing,” he admitted. “I might have made a greater effort.”
“Perhaps,” she said with an indifferent shrug.
Arran moved a knight and caught her gaze. “What turned so wrong between us, Margot? I canna say what it was that went so terribly wrong.”
“I don’t know,” she said, sounding morose. “I know only that I was naive and I felt abandoned. I had no friends or family here—only you.”
“You might have made friends.”
She snorted. “I didn’t have many opportunities, did I?”
“No,” he said truthfully. “And it didna help that you were English. That made your conceit a wee bit worse, aye?”
Margot blinked at his blunt assessment. And then she laughed, the sound of it warm. “I shall never accuse you of being anything less than unfailingly honest, my lord. Do you mean to say that I was condescending?” she asked, pressing a palm to her chest and feigning offense.
“A wee bit, aye,” he said, smiling.
“Well, I didn’t mean to be,” she said, and moved one of her pieces. “I behaved as I thought was appropriate for the lady of a castle.” She sank back into her chair. “My God, but I was so violently afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing,” she said thoughtfully, and worried the end of a curl. “Yet that’s all I seemed to do. You are beloved here, Arran. It felt impossible to live up to that, and I was quite intimidated by it.”
“And now?” he asked curiously.
Her smiled turned playful. “No.”
God save him, he could not keep a smile from his face. “I didna abandon you,” he said amicably.
“You did,” she insisted. “You left every day to hunt or to train men, or what have you.”
“Aye, all right, perhaps I was a wee bit intimidated by you as well, leannan.”
“Of me?” She laughed and gave a shake of her head as if he amused her.
“Aye, of you. You’re bloody well bonny, Margot, how many times have I said so? We were both of us naive.”
She smiled indulgently. “Lord in heaven, yes. I’d never been truly courted. I’d never even had a first love. Can you imagine?”
“Aye, that I can imagine.”
“Arran!” she said, laughing. “I was far too young for it. No doubt you’ve had a first love, and many more since.” She reached for her queen.
“I’ve had a first love,” he agreed. “It was you.”
Margot’s hand froze on her queen. “Don’t tease me like that,” she said, the light gone from her voice. “Don’t say that if it’s not true.”
Arran slowly reached for her hand. “I would never say it were it no’ true.” To his thinking, there was nothing truer about them. Even now, he had that strange feeling of being tossed into an abyss of empty longing.
Her gaze searched his face. “When did you love me?” she asked softly. “I never knew it.”
Diah, but he’d failed her in so many ways. How could she not know? “From the moment I saw you standing on the balcony at Norwood Park.”
Her lips parted with surprise. “Even then?”
“There’s no logic to how love arrives.”
“And yet you never once said—”
“No, because I was bloody naive, and I foolishly believed that my love would never get away from me. I tried to make you happy, Margot, in all the ways that I knew how. I tried, but I couldna set it all to rights for you. But it was no’ from a lack of devotion. It was from a lack of understanding.”
“I had no idea,” she whispered.
“I know.” He hadn’t known it himself until after she was gone.
“Do you... Do you still feel the same?” she asked uncertainly.
Arran glanced at the chessboard. She could move her queen to his king now and hold him at checkmate. She could knock him from his throne, could send him sprawling off the board that was his life. He looked up again. “No, I donna feel the same. I donna trust you, leannan. Tell me, how can I trust you?”
He desperately wanted her to tell him that he could trust her. Tell him anything, tell him she had nothing to hide. But Margot didn’t say that. She sighed and rubbed her forehead as if she had a pain there. “I wouldn’t trust me, either,” she quietly admitted.
His heart sank, tumbling deeper into that abyss, carried on a storm of uncertainty and mistrust.
She suddenly stood up from the table, leaving her queen within striking distance of his king. “Only you can say if you will trust me,” she said as she moved around the table to him.
“And only you can say if you mean to leave me again,” he said curtly.
She sighed and ran her hand over the top of his head. She lifted her skirts, revealing her long, slender legs, and straddled his lap. Once more, Arran didn’t stop her—but he was keenly aware that she was trying to change the course of the conversation, using the only means at her disposal to best him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and said, “I don’t want to leave you again.” And she began to move on him.
He grabbed her hips in his hands to steady her. “That is no answer. Do you think I donna see what you are about, how you use your body to avoid answering me?”
“But I have answered you, as best I can,” she said sweetly, and kissed his temple. “Now I am trying to please you as best I can, in a way that you have taught me. Now I think of how it could have been between us had I stayed. I think of the children we might have already brought into this world, and I want to make it up to you. I want to begin fresh.” She kissed his cheek. “I don’t want to leave you again,” she whispered.
“It’s too late for this, Margot,” he said brusquely, and turned his head.
“It can never be too late—we are married.” She looped her arms loosely around his neck and moved seductively on him, arousing him, hardening him. “Think of it—we could sail to France and begin anew...just you and me.” She kissed his cheek.
“France!” he muttered as she took his face between her hands and kissed one eye, then the other.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely, to go away from Scotland and England, to someplace new? Where no one knows us?” she asked between kisses. “No one to trouble or inconvenience us?”
He wondered who troubled or inconvenienced them now, and this desire, expressed by a wife he scarcely knew now, pricked at his conscience. Arran’s head urged him to stop her, to understand what she meant, not to be fooled by pleasures of the flesh. But his flesh—Christ, tonight his flesh was much stronger in its need of her than his heart.
He would deal with her duplicity on the morrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow.
“We could sail on one of your ships,” she whispered.
There was something quite wrong with her wish to escape, but Arran didn’t want to think of it at that moment. He was in the abyss. “You’re nattering, woman,” he said, and suddenly grabbed her and stood up. He carried her to his bed, deposited her on it and moved over her. He could put his distrust of her on hold for one more night...but only one more night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IT WAS WONDERFUL, beautiful, extraordinary. There was something so delicious about the way Arran took command of her body, arousing her with kisses and caresses, his tongue lapping her into oblivion, his cock pressing her to a crisis so utterly shattering that she marveled she could find all the pieces of her and put them back together again. It was carnal bliss, wholesale ecstasy, and it left her feeling warm and adored and very lethargic.
But when the m
orning light began to filter in through the drapes, the questions about who this man was, about who she was now, began to slip back into her thoughts, and the bed felt less warm to her.
She had begun last night wanting only to gain his trust. But then, quite unexpectedly, they’d had perhaps the most honest conversation about their marriage they’d ever had, and a window had opened in Margot. Feelings she’d not expected had come in through that window, and she’d meant it when she’d said it could never be too late for them. She’d wanted to forget the strife between them and rebuild what she had torn down when she’d left. She wanted to believe that there was a path for them, that they could be happy.
And still, a tiny doubt crept into her thoughts. What if her father was right about him? What if he was right and she was wrong?
Margot pretended to be asleep when Arran rose. She lay on her side and listened to the sounds of him dressing and gathering his things. She kept her eyes closed when he leaned over the bed and kissed her shoulder.
“Good morning,” he murmured, and quit the room.
When he’d gone, she rolled onto her back and sighed to the canopy above the bed. What he’d said to her last night—that she was his first love—had pirouetted into her dreams, and she had awakened more than once in the night to assure herself that he was still there, that he had spoken those words to her. She thought about how he held her, as if she were his only love. She thought about what Mrs. Gowan had said of his demeanor after she’d left. She thought about all of this, and with a single tear slipping from the corner of her eye, she thought about how he said he didn’t feel the same any longer because he could not trust her.
For God’s sake, why would he?
He wasn’t wrong about her. He had every reason to be suspicious of her. She had been condescending when she’d first come to Balhaire; she could see that now with the clarity the past few years had given her. She hadn’t shown him much affection, in spite of having felt some for him. She’d been so determined to be wounded and indignant about the injustice her family had done to her that she’d never been able to nurture her feelings for him properly. And God knew she’d been damnably blind to his affection for her.