by Lily Maxton
“Where are ye from, Lachlan?”
He grunted, and she didn’t think he was going to answer, but after a second, he said, “Born and raised in Glasgow.”
“You’re a city boy,” she said.
She meant it as a jest, but Lachlan’s mouth firmed. “I’m as much a Highlander as any of them.”
“I didna say you weren’t. And Glasgow is a fine place.”
“My da left me there one day. Didna come back, even though he said he’d only be gone an hour or two. I’m not very fond of it.”
She looked at him, but he was looking down at the waistcoat in his hands, grip so tight his knuckles were white. “I’m sorry.”
He exhaled sharply. “Don’t be sorry.”
They both stitched in silence for a few minutes, the only sound the rustle of wind through the leaves.
“It’s peaceful here, but I think I’d rather be doing something.”
Lachlan glanced at her, eyebrows lifted. “You’ll get to do something soon enough. Mal’s been gone most of the day, scouting a place.”
She was tempted to ask about the time frame between scouting a place and an actual raid, but she didn’t want to appear too eager, so she changed the subject.
“Mal said you weren’t sure about me joining.”
He blinked, and she was surprised when the slightest flush touched his cheeks. “That wasn’t personal, ye ken? I just wanted to know that you weren’t going to be a weakness.”
He wasn’t giving her or Mal very much credit. “I wouldn’t have joined you if that was the case, and Mal wouldn’t keep me around if I was a weakness, anyway.”
He snorted. “I don’t know about that.”
Georgina felt something hot and embarrassed twist in her stomach. She hadn’t been aware that whatever…pull…they felt toward each other was quite so obvious to anyone else. Especially Lachlan, who didn’t seem any more observant than the typical man.
She didn’t have time to dwell on the matter, though, because Ewan and Andrew stopped by. Ewan was shuffling a deck of cards in his hand.
“You’re not finished yet?” Ewan exclaimed.
Lachlan grunted.
Andrew greeted her with a nod, back to his more subdued self now that the exhilaration of shinty was over.
Ewan plopped down beside her, with Andrew on his other side. “Finish up. We have a match to continue.”
“Continue?” Lachlan said. “I won.”
“Then I have my honor to defend. You’ll play, Cat?”
“You can be my partner again, Cat,” Andrew said. “We’ll thrash them.”
Lachlan rolled his eyes. But then he laughed, bumping Georgina’s shoulder. She thought he was probably only a few years younger than Mal, but he looked like a boy when he smiled like that. “We could play for chores. If I have to stitch one more button onto a waistcoat I might take the needle and stab my own eye.”
“You just like to complain, Lachlan. You wouldna know hard work if it bit you in the arse.” Ewan flushed, then glanced at Georgina. “Pardon me, Miss Cat.”
She held up her hands, reluctantly amused. “All right. Let’s get this game started, Mr. Ewan.”
He smiled at her, lopsidedly, and she felt a surge of warmth, very different from what she felt with Mal. It didn’t blaze like a wildfire—it was the subtle, steady warmth of the hearth. It was how she felt when she teased Robert or Eleanor, or when Theo looked at them with fond exasperation.
It was odd, that she should feel such companionship with men she barely knew. It was odd…and more than a little frightening. Any bonds she formed here would be broken soon enough, and it would be the best thing for all of them.
But for now, she pushed the ugly thought aside. She played cards and laughed easily. At first, she barely noticed when Mal returned. He leaned against a tree trunk to watch them, arms folded loosely, lips lightly curved. When she did notice, she felt entirely too conspicuous.
Mal was the most dangerous of them all.
He might not be the handsome one in the group, but he was the only one who drew her gaze like this. In a shaft of sunlight that slanted through the tree branches, his eyes were bright and his sandy hair revealed streaks of burnished gold. His knee was bent slightly, foot resting on the tree behind him. He looked lazy, and confident, and entirely too appealing. She had to swallow when she remembered the warmth of his rough hand trailing up her calf.
Her pulse quickened.
He cocked his head as she studied him and then grinned like he’d caught her stealing sweetmeats from a jar.
…
Mal had the vague, startling realization that he was happy. There was something about this—the soft chatter of Catriona and the others, the warmth of a rare sunny day, the trickle of the stream—that made his heart feel at peace.
It was a feeling he hadn’t felt in so long that it took him by surprise.
“Are you going to play?” Lachlan asked, breaking him from his thoughts. “Or will ye just stand there and watch us like a Peeping Tom?”
Mal ignored that insult. “I have a better idea.”
He left and returned a minute later with a bottle of whisky, Catriona’s cittern, and his fiddle. It seemed a fine evening for music.
The men immediately halted their card game in lieu of the promise of whisky and song.
“Will ye play something for us?” Ewan asked Catriona eagerly. “Do ye sing?”
Mal realized he hadn’t asked her to sing when she’d played for him before, which seemed remiss of him now.
“I don’t sing very well,” she admitted.
“Anything is better than Mal’s singing,” Andrew said.
Catriona tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, a rare show of self-consciousness that Mal found endearing. “I could.” She glanced around. “Here?”
“It’s as good a place as any.”
They shifted to let Mal in and the five of them formed a peculiar sort of picnic. Catriona sat cross-legged in the center, like the sun they all revolved around. Suddenly, she leaned forward, uncorked the whisky bottle and took a swig straight from the lip before handing it to Mal.
“Performance nerves,” she explained with an apologetic smile.
Mal didn’t know what she was sorry for. But then, he was a little distracted by the warm, moist spot her mouth left on the bottle when he touched his lips to the glass afterward.
She plucked at the strings, testing the instrument, just as she had before. Then she took a deep breath and eased into a familiar, slow melody, her fingers moving delicately over the neck board. Mal didn’t think he’d be able to look away from her even if the earth caught on fire.
And then.
And then she began to sing, and all hope was lost.
She wasn’t perfect—she hadn’t been lying when she said she didn’t sing very well; her voice was husky, not the typical falsetto that most women sang in, and slightly off key—but Mal didn’t require perfection. All he required was this—her voice and her music settling around him like dusk. She closed her eyes when she sang, and her words pierced him once again: I wanted to feel everything. I wanted to suck the marrow from it.
She didn’t just sing the ballad, she felt it, and Mal felt it, too, deep within him.
“My spirit lives, but strength is gone; The mountain fires now blaze in vain: Remember, sons, the deeds I’ve done, and in your deeds I’ll live again!”
He found himself leaning closer, as if he could ever be close enough.
He found himself coveting each low-sung word.
“So, ere I set, I’ll see you shine, I’ll see your triumph ere I fall; My parting breath shall boast you mine—Good night and joy be with you all.”
When she finished, the silence that followed the song was complete. Mal somehow managed to tear his gaze away from her before her long-lashed eyelids fluttered open. When he did, he saw Ewan blinking too quickly, his hand curled into a tight fist in his lap. Mal might have laughed if he didn’t feel a bit ravaged hi
mself.
Lachlan, surprisingly, was the first who spoke. “It was lovely, lass, but can I put in a request for something more cheery?”
“Softhearted men,” she muttered, smiling a bit.
Ewan perked up. “You should play together, you and Mal.”
Catriona, who had been resting her hands on the side of the instrument, let them fall. Her eyes sparkled as she glanced toward him. “Do ye want to?”
He wanted nothing more, but suddenly, he felt self-conscious. He’d played long enough to play well, but he wasn’t certain he could match her passion. Finally, though, he shrugged, the promise of playing with her outweighing any other consideration. “You can’t have cheery without a fiddle.”
Mal took his fiddle and bow from the case and stood, catching Catriona’s gaze. “Lady’s choice.”
“Do you know ‘Come, Haste to the Wedding’?”
“I know it.”
“Can you keep up?” she asked, arching a brow, challenge written all over her face.
A slow smile overtook his face. “Worry about your own playing, darling. I’ll worry about mine.”
She shrugged, but her mouth twitched. He could feel the weight of the other men’s gazes as they looked back and forth between the pair of them. They could feel it, too, this attraction between him and Catriona. They could see it.
They’d be blind not to.
Mal wasn’t sure if he liked it, though. It made him feel oddly vulnerable, like his heart was walking around outside his chest, liable to get kicked or stomped on by indifferent passersby.
Instead of dwelling on the peculiar feeling, he focused on the hard, smooth surface of the fiddle tucked beneath his jaw, the elasticity of the strings beneath his fingers. The bow was a familiar shape in his hand.
He nodded at Catriona, letting her start, and then matched her pace.
When she heard the first wailing notes from the fiddle, she looked up at him and smiled, pale eyes alight, as though he’d done something delightful.
They played like that for a while, Catriona tapping her foot, the men clapping in time. Their gazes would leave each other and then unerringly find each other again, like they were opposing magnets, or planets pulled in by each other’s gravity.
Then Catriona picked up the tempo and shot him a challenging, narrow-eyed stare that made heat prickle along his spine. He obliged, pulse thrumming.
The music swelled between them, rising and falling like the tide. Mal’s heart matched its hard, fast rhythm. He glanced at Catriona, and then increased the pace again.
This time she frowned, a little wrinkle appearing in her forehead that he wanted to trace with his fingertips. To her credit, she kept up with him for a good minute, but eventually she started to slip, fingers hitting the wrong strings in her haste to push faster.
She finally stopped and set down the guitar, ending their duel. The men applauded heartily and she gave an endearing little bow. Mal expected her enjoyment to fade when she turned back to him, but he was startled to find she wasn’t annoyed with him for playing too fast. Instead, she grinned wider, her cheeks tinged pink.
“Good playing, Mal,” Ewan said. He lifted the whisky bottle in a toast. “I think Miss Cat pushed ye to do better.”
Catriona’s eyebrows lifted.
“He’s not usually so clean,” Lachlan put in. “He’ll be going along just fine and then he’ll hit a wrong note and it sounds god-awful.”
Andrew grunted in agreement.
“Is that so?” Catriona said, a smirk tugging at her mouth.
The woman was a devil. Beautiful, but a devil.
“I didna realize the three of you were music instructors,” Mal said to his men. “I don’t see you playing anything.”
They shrugged, and next to him, Catriona laughed.
“They don’t know what they’re saying. They probably wouldna know a reel from a jig,” Mal said to her.
“I heard that!” Ewan exclaimed. “Just because you’re embarrassed, it doesn’t give you the right to be insulting.”
Catriona laughed harder, and Mal just stared at her, captivated. His fingers itched to push back a lock of her hair, to let the pad of his thumb sweep across her cheek.
…
Georgina’s laughter died down, subdued by a pang of unease. She’d forgotten. For a moment, for too long a moment, she’d let herself forget.
There was a wall between them, with her on one side and the rest of them—and Mal, most especially Mal—on the other. But when he looked at her like this, it felt like there was nothing between them. Not clothes. Not distance. Not even the stone-thick walls of Llynmore Castle, a place she’d lived for years. A place she belonged.
“I’ll put these away,” she said, placing the instruments back in their cases. It wasn’t that it really needed to be done, just that she needed something to do.
She had stacked the fiddle and cittern with the rest of their things when she heard the crunch of fallen leaves behind her. She straightened and turned to find Mal walking toward her.
“We’re out of whisky,” he explained.
They were close enough to the men that she could hear the faint murmur of voices, but far enough that she couldn’t see them or hear exactly what they said. She and Mal were, for all purposes, alone.
A forbidden thrill shot through her. Which she, like any sensible woman, ignored. (See, she would have told her siblings—I can be sensible.)
Except it was a little too late at this point.
She and Mal both bent forward at the same time, reaching for the handle of the ale jug. Their fingers brushed, and Mal surprised her by taking her hand. She faced him, startled.
“You sing beautifully,” he said, his voice low.
She snorted. Her music teacher, upon hearing her, had suggested she not sing in a public setting. “You said you weren’t a liar.”
“Let me rephrase that…you sing imperfectly, but you sing with everything you have. I could listen to you for hours.”
She was unused to such stark praise, and she wasn’t sure how to accept it. “Then my voice would be even hoarser than it already is.”
They were still holding hands. Mal’s grip was loose, and she could pull free if she wanted to. But she found she didn’t much want to.
He tsked lightly. “Hasn’t anyone ever complimented you before?”
No, she realized. Not the way he did. Not like this.
His thumb brushed over her knuckles, and she shivered at the soft caress. “You’re going to have to help me, lass. Sometimes you look at me like you want to rip my kilt off and have your wicked way with me, but sometimes I canna fathom what you’re thinking at all. If you want something of me, you’re going to have to tell me what it is.”
She was a little dazed, thinking about Mal’s kilt being ripped off. She imagined grasping the wool fabric in her hands, pulling, tugging, unraveling until—good Lord—was it true that Highlanders wore nothing underneath? She found her gaze drifting downward, toward blue and green plaid and his leather sporran. Caught herself just in time.
But he knew. When she looked up, the slightest smile lifted the corner of his mouth.
What she wanted…what she wanted…
What she wanted and what she had to do were two entirely different things. But Mal had given her an opening…and perhaps for just a little while, she could pretend.
“I want you to kiss me,” she said. “Once.” Only once, just to know how he felt. Just to know what he tasted like.
Georgina had been curious about many things in her life, but never had her curiosity been solely focused on one person. Never had it been so potent.
Maybe, after the kiss, she could put this useless desire behind her.
He studied her face, searching. She didn’t know what he saw there, but after a moment, he murmured, “Only once. Is this a challenge, lass?”
Maybe it was. Maybe she wanted him to make it unforgettable. Something she could remember. Something she could take with her w
hen she left this place. And this man.
“Aye.”
His breath touched her lips as he leaned forward. “I accept.”
Chapter Eight
Mal’s lips were warm, and a little rough. He kissed her gently, sweetly, demanding no more than she wanted to give, and this seemed a contradiction. In other ways, Mal was a man who took what he wanted, but not in this.
She’d had a few stolen kisses in Edinburgh, some that were more heated than this one, but none that affected her as much as the reverent press of Mal’s mouth.
He could have taken what he wanted. She would have let him.
But the kiss remained chaste until she deepened it. Until she reached up with an awkward hand to touch his chest. Until she parted her lips and welcomed him inside.
He was giving her control, letting her lead this dance when other men hadn’t. When other men had held her in place and plundered her mouth. And this feeling of power seared her. It was heady and erotic, and it made the pulse between her thighs quicken.
The scent of cloves drifted to her—the soap they used—but on Mal it was mixed with the smell of earth and peat smoke, disparate things coming together in an intoxicating alchemy. Mal’s hands gripped her waist, and she bit at his lower lip, felt more than heard the hitch in his breath. A wave of pleasure washed through her at the reaction. She wanted to press closer. She wanted to press as close as she could get, to fit their hips together, to find some kind of friction for this aching want.
But she stepped back instead.
She didn’t want to tease them both with something she couldn’t give. She couldn’t let a kiss turn to more.
And regardless of whether it turned to more or not, Mal had made his feelings toward the Highland landowners abundantly clear. If he ever found out she was the sister of an earl—he would despise her. He might anyway when she left with no word.
But she quickly squashed whatever guilt she felt. What had happened to Mal’s family was awful, and her heart threatened to break when she thought of him, away at war, helpless to save them, helpless to do anything but come back to the tatters of what had once been a whole life. She didn’t know how he’d withstood such pain.