by Lily Maxton
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I suspect that things affect her deeply, whether she lets herself show it or not.” He looked down, brow furrowed as if seeking answers at the bottom of his empty glass, before meeting Mal’s gaze once more. “Whoever she chooses will have to be careful with her heart. They’ll think it’s not very breakable because of the way she acts, but it won’t be true.”
Mal would need to mull that over later. Though it made sense. He knew she didn’t like to seem vulnerable, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t. Maybe it meant the opposite.
“But why are you telling me?”
“Because I see the way she looks back.”
“You can’t be saying you would give your blessing to a match between your sister and a schoolteacher.” The thought was unfathomable to him.
“No,” Arden agreed. “I’m not that revolutionary. I’d prefer a more suitable match. And I’ll tell her that, again and again. But ever since my mother ran off to marry a physician instead of a lord, obedience has never been the Townsends’ strong suit. I would be loath to deny them something, anyway, if it seemed to bring them happiness.” Then he added, “Being in Scotland certainly doesn’t help matters. You don’t even need your guardian’s permission to wed.” He seemed put out by this detail. “In England, things are different.”
“Better?”
He didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “Not necessarily better. Only different.”
A silence fell between them. Mal had been nursing his whisky, but now he took the last sip, letting the peaty flavor forge a trail of fire down his throat.
“You should know, however, that if your intentions toward my sister are dishonorable, I’ll ruin you.”
Mal nearly choked on his drink. The threat was delivered very calmly, and he was certain they weren’t simply idle words. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
When Mal set down his tumbler, Arden stood. “Come, I’ll show you out.”
And he found himself asking about the earl. He was only curious, he told himself. Discovering some smidgen of respect for the man didn’t mean he suddenly liked him. “Were you at Waterloo?”
“No. I served in Spain and Portugal, mostly. I returned home after I was injured. What about you?”
“I joined when I was seventeen. The war dragged on for so damn long. It was all I knew for the better part of a decade.”
And all he knew when he came back was loss.
He remembered leaving his sisters and his mother to join the army. He’d been young, and excited, and ready for an adventure. Ready for some space between himself and the women he loved. Ready for the chance to prove himself to them. His mother had made a special meal of lamb stew—though he remembered thinking they should have kept that lamb for themselves—and then sent him away with a heavy stomach and more bannocks wrapped up in a cloth bag than he could ever eat.
His sisters had wanted a song before he went, but he’d been worried about being late, and he’d left without obliging them. Later, he wished he had.
After he returned, he tried to go over that memory, etch it deep into his mind, embellish each moment, but he hadn’t known it would be the last time he would see them, and there were gaps he simply couldn’t fill.
Had his mother smiled as he left? Had his sisters been disappointed he hadn’t played or had they shrugged it off? What had he said to them, right before he’d gone? What had they said to him?
He could remember their parting broadly, but he couldn’t remember any of the details. Any of the little things that would have brought that day back to life.
He couldn’t remember.
Because he had never guessed that he would need to.
“None of us are the same as we were before the war,” Arden said simply, as if this was an unassailable fact, like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. And Mal supposed it was. “I meant it—if you ever want to talk, I’ll listen.”
Mal didn’t give him a yes or no. He didn’t quite like Arden—even a better aristocrat than most was still an aristocrat—but he would think about it.
Just as he would think about this conversation on the long walk to his cottage.
I see the way she looks back.
Chapter Twenty-One
When Georgina thought of the past twenty minutes or so, she wasn’t exactly embarrassed—she was mostly disoriented.
She had thrown herself at Malcolm Stewart. And then she’d found her pleasure, dress hiked up, bodice pulled down, straddling his thigh, in the dark. She’d gone back to her room, taken a moment to mourn the loss of one of her favorite dresses, and then wondered how to dispose of it so no one saw the ripped bodice, before settling on cutting it into strips and slowly feeding it into the fire.
An echo of a time that had been just as restless, for an entirely different reason.
As Georgina sat cross-legged on the floor by the hearth, the flame warming her already overheated face, she remembered playing music with Mal beside her, the way her fingertips tingled from working over the strings. The way her heart soared when they pushed each other to do better. The way the music wrapped around them, like it was creating a world for just the two of them.
Something about that feeling, one she’d never thought she would have again, had made her reckless, and breathless. She’d carried that feeling with her as she’d gone to look for him…and that, as they said, was that.
Except it wasn’t.
She wanted more. Regardless of whether he stayed, regardless of whether he could learn to trust her or not, she wanted more. But she didn’t know what more would be for her. And she didn’t know how to tell Mal. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to.
It felt like if she told him, she would be admitting there was something wrong with her body, when she had never felt that there was before. Not until a doctor had told her otherwise.
She remembered his words with the sharp clarity of a knife’s edge: You won’t be able to marry, or have children, but I doubt the disorder will affect your health if it hasn’t already. She remembered his face, suffused in pity, when he’d simply assumed that no man would want her as a wife if they knew.
Because what were women for, she thought bitterly, if they couldn’t breed?
Once the dress was in ashes, she felt too restless to sleep, so she went outside. It wasn’t quite dark yet. The sun was setting, wispy clouds tinged with pink and orange. She went to the stables and rode Marian, the chestnut mare, fast across the moors, wind whipping at her face and hair.
She rode and rode, but she couldn’t quiet the turmoil in her mind, or in her heart. And at times like these, the whisper in the back of her head was too loud to ignore—take a risk, let go, let yourself feel something. Let yourself feel anything. The sensation of her heart pounding in her throat was always better than the taut silence that marked its absence.
Eventually, when the sun was just a sliver on the horizon, the light fading fast, she stopped in view of the schoolhouse and the little cottage beyond it.
Pulse racing, she nudged Marian forward.
…
After Mal’s conversation with Arden, he returned to his cottage to find Lachlan waiting for him, stirring the embers in the hearth. He shut the door quietly behind him and shrugged off his coat, slinging it over one of the chairs that sat around the table.
Lachlan looked up. “Mal,” he greeted amiably. “Have you forgotten about us?”
“No,” he said. “Just give me a few more days.”
“To do what?”
“I…” He paused. He wasn’t quite sure what to say. He wasn’t sure which answer would be the truth.
“They trust you, don’t they?” Lachlan said. “You know I’m slow at picking locks. You could filch the keys and let us in. We’d have more time inside the castle, and between the four of us, think of how much we could take.”
All of this was true. It was what Mal wanted, even. He could give them enough to live decent lives, safe
lives, without him. But he found himself hesitating. “We already robbed them once,” he said.
Lachlan stared at him, incredulous. “You stole a few sheep, and you wouldn’t even let Andrew and Ewan go in with me. All I ended up taking was that music box and a couple of jewels.”
“We need to be careful about it,” Mal said. “We can’t just rush in like you always want to…we’ll get ourselves killed. Or caught.”
Lachlan snorted. “Is that why you’re hesitating? You can fool yourself, Mal, but you can’t fool me. You’re hanging around here, waiting for her to notice you, like a dog hoping for scraps at a dinner table.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but then he stopped. Maybe Lachlan was right. Maybe he’d simply put words to a feeling Mal hadn’t wanted to define.
“It doesna matter,” Mal eventually said. “What I feel…my reasons…it doesna matter.”
He knew, when he said it, that it was the truth. They’d all been lost souls until they’d found one another. Mal could pretend he was the one who’d helped them, but they’d helped him, too. They’d given him a reason to continue when he’d been at the lowest point of his life.
It wasn’t as if Georgina wanted him, anyway. She’d crossed the Highlands and thrown her lot in with men she didn’t know in pursuit of a music box. No matter how she looked at him, no matter how fragile her heart was, she wasn’t the type of woman to let something slip away because she was afraid to reach for it.
Unless she didn’t want it that badly in the first place.
The thought threatened to tear his heart to shreds, but perhaps his heart had already been in pieces since the moment he’d met Georgina. One piece for her, and one lonely piece left to him.
But no, that wasn’t quite right, either. His heart had been in pieces long before he’d met her. Ever since the day he’d arrived home to find that home was no longer there.
Somewhere along the way, he’d learned to cut his losses.
After a moment, he said, “Give me two days. I already finished the lessons that far, and you know I hate putting in work for no reason.”
Lachlan looked at him. “Truly?”
“Truly.”
“Are we going to Llynmore?”
“Let me think about it.” He found he was reluctant to steal from Georgina’s family, but that was stupid, wasn’t it? He had access to a castle of riches, and he was wasting the opportunity. Anyway, it wasn’t like the Townsends couldn’t spare some of their wealth.
Some time away from Georgina should clear Mal’s head. His priority was the men who depended on him, not a woman who didn’t want him.
“All right,” Lachlan said.
Not long after Lachlan had gone, there was a soft knock at the door. Mal assumed it was Lachlan again, though the other man didn’t knock on doors so much as fling them open with disregard.
But when he answered it, and saw who it was, his entire world felt like it had tilted, his insides being pulled in a thousand different directions. He’d just decided to let her go for the last time, but this didn’t feel like he’d let go of anything.
So much for cutting his losses.
“Georgina?” he asked gruffly.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lachlan had been leaving as Georgina approached the cottage. When he’d caught sight of her, he halted, and they watched each other warily. There’d been something new in his eyes, something hard, but tired, too.
In the end, he’d just nodded when she explained she needed to talk to Mal. “It’s all right,” he said. “You should see him.”
She’d turned to say something more—it didn’t seem right to leave things there, after everything that had happened—but he was already brushing past her, covering ground with long strides.
And as soon as Georgina saw Mal, her brief exchange with Lachlan was forgotten. Heart thrumming, she slipped past Mal, going to stand by the fire with her hands held out, even though she wasn’t very cold. Her hands trembled, and she balled them into fists.
“What are you doing here, lass?”
She turned slowly, vaguely taking note of the sparsely furnished but well-kept room. She took the most note of the narrow mattress along the wall.
“It’s nearly dusk,” she said, finding she was having trouble looking at Mal. She’d never thought of herself as a bashful person, and she certainly hadn’t been bashful only an hour before, but it was different like this. She felt more open, more vulnerable. She supposed that was the point. Finally, though, she reached deep within herself and found her strength. She met Mal’s gaze head-on. “You’ll need to light more candles.”
She lifted her hands to undo the hidden fastenings at the front of her dress. A plain dark-green one that she wore when she needed something serviceable. It was the same linen-wool blend as the one she’d burned because it had Mal’s blood on it.
He stepped forward, catching her hands. The rough, warm clasp of them made her shiver. “Are you sure?”
She pulled back, out of his reach, and nodded. “But you have to do as I say.” If this was surrender, she wouldn’t be doing it alone.
His lips curved, as if he would have expected no less of her. “Aye.”
“Light the candles,” she said, voice hoarse.
He went around with a spill, lighting a few tallow candles on the dining table, and then two more on a small stand by the bed.
By the time he’d turned back, her dress was pooled at her feet. She stood before him, only in her chemise and stays. His gaze flickered over her hungrily, and she wondered how much he could see of her body through the thin fabric.
“Unlace me,” she said.
He moved behind her, loosening the strings of her stays, but she hadn’t said he could touch her, and he didn’t. When the corset sagged, he stepped back, retaking his spot by the table, where he could watch her, unhindered.
She peeled out of the stays and lifted the chemise over her head. Cool air touched her breasts, her thighs. She felt like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.
Then she opened her hand, and the cotton fabric fluttered to the ground. Her arms fell to her sides. And though she wanted to cover herself, she didn’t. With her heart in her throat, she let Mal watch her.
He had his hip against the table. To anyone else he might have seemed almost bored, but she noticed the tension in his jaw, in the way his fingers curled against the table’s edge. And then, lower, a bulge against the fabric of his kilt.
He didn’t shift, or try to hide it, and Georgina felt the first stirring of desire, low in her abdomen.
“Well?”
“I already said you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It hasn’t changed. It won’t change.”
She licked her lips. She wanted to believe him.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He crossed the room in two strides, took her into his arms, bent her head back with the force of his kiss. The wool of his kilt scratched against her bare thighs; the softer fabric of his shirt tickled her stomach and breasts.
It was an odd feeling, to be bare when he was clothed. To be open to him when he was closed.
She parted her lips and he licked into her mouth, deep and hot.
“Take this off,” she murmured against him, gripping his kilt.
Together, they unfurled him, and just as he’d looked at her, Georgina looked at him. He was broad-shouldered and wiry. Hair dusted his chest and a flat, toned abdomen, pointed down to caress his hard length. She felt a flutter of nervousness.
And then, somehow, she became fascinated by his feet. She realized she’d never seen them before, and it seemed an oddly intimate thing—the pale arches and stubby toes, usually hidden from sight.
“Feet are strange,” she said, out of the blue.
Mal cocked his head. “Do you mean my feet are strange?”
“No. It’s just…it’s like we’re walking around on misshapen hands.”
“Hmm.” He stared down at them. “They do look a bit like misshap
en hands. You, however, have beautiful feet.”
She laughed. “I doubt that.”
He came toward her, an amused glint in his eye. And then, to her surprise, he went down on his knees in front of her. He touched her ankle until she crooked her leg, resting her foot atop his thigh.
“Perfectly shaped toes,” he said. He brushed his finger across each one. “Just the right amount of slope for an ankle.” His thumb ghosted across her skin. “And this arch—it’s beautiful enough to make me weep.”
He bent down to kiss that soft, tender spot on her foot, and she felt something tight in her throat. She swallowed past it.
“You are a ridiculous man.”
He peered up at her through his eyelashes. “Is that any way to treat the person who’s going to make you weep with pleasure?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “All of this weeping…are you quite sure you know what you’re doing?”
He grinned and smoothed his hand along her calf, forging a trail that burned like fire but made her shiver like ice. “I suppose we’ll find out.” He lowered her foot, bent forward and kissed her knee. “Are you nervous, lass?”
She was nervous. Not because of Mal; it was just…odd. They were naked, standing here talking like they might talk to each other in a drawing room. Like it was just a normal evening.
But she’d never let nervousness get in her way before. “Only a little,” she said.
His fingers lightly traced the sensitive skin at the back of her knee while he touched his lips to the front.
“Can I taste you?”
Her heart thrashed against her ribs like a caged bird. With him kneeling like this, there was no mistaking what he meant. She swallowed hard and gave one short nod. She thought he might suggest going to the bed first, but he nudged her legs a little wider and continued his path, leaving openmouthed kisses against the inside of her thigh.