The world tilted and spun gracelessly. Or perhaps it was she.
“Niall, I’m—”
“No’ another word,” he cut in, and then started walking, fast. Aisla’s feet tripped into motion, stumbling behind him. He stopped, tossed her like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder, and bore her toward the keep.
Chapter Thirteen
Niall could not recall the last time he’d been so spitting mad. He endured the raucous calls on the way back to the castle, weaving in between groups of celebrating Scotsmen and taking care not to jostle the screeching baggage over his shoulder. He didn’t want a back full of vomit for his efforts. He could feel her fists pounding on the small of his back above his kilt, hear her shrieking protests, but he knew that if he stopped he’d be hard pressed not to erupt in full view of everyone. He was holding on by a thin thread as it was.
“Put me down, ye amadan,” she cried. “I’m going to be sick, do ye hear me?”
Now, her brogue was back, fresh on a bellyful of ale and whisky. And calling him an idiot to boot.
He’d missed the musical sound of it on her tongue, and the truth was he hated her clipped aristocratic accents. Though his own mother was English and insisted his older sister Sorcha have English-speaking tutors, hearing the lilting brogue now reminded him a bit of the girl Aisla used to be. Too bad it only resurfaced with anger, and apparently, copious amounts of liquor.
She reeked of sweat and spirits, though the latter was likely because she’d jostled half of a glass of whisky over the two of them there at the end. He wrinkled his nose and wondered whether he used to smell as bad when he came to her bed after a night of heavy drinking. Worse, he imagined. He’d watched her, though, as she’d danced and flirted with Dougal Buchanan, drinking pint after pint and growing more animated by the second.
A part of him had wanted to feast his eyes on her—she’d been so beautiful and uninhibited during the reel, her face wreathed in delight—but another part of him lamented that it wasn’t him that had brought that passion to her in the first place. Once more, it’d been Dougal Buchanan.
He hadn’t missed Fenella’s pointed comment: some things never change, aye? Though he’d kept a tight rein on his emotions, her words had been like bringing a flame to tinder. Bitterness had exploded inside of him in an uncontrollable rush, making him nearly double over from the force of it. But he’d stood there and watched her make a fool of herself with a blasted smile on his face as if her antics meant nothing.
As if he felt nothing.
A sob burst from the flailing woman over his shoulder. “Please, Niall. I feel ill.”
Heaving a grunt, he changed direction, heading toward the remote gardens on the western edge of the keep, situated near a stream that ran between Maclaren and Tarbendale. With any luck, it was well enough away from the revelry to be deserted. He dumped her unceremoniously to the ground, watching as she stumbled to a hedge and cast up every wretched one of her accounts. Sighing, she then leaned back against the trunk of a silver birch sapling, eyes closed.
“Feel better?” he asked after a moment.
“Some,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
Niall mourned the loss of those sweet, shortened vowels.
After several moments, she opened her eyes and looked up into the starlit sky. The moon was just rising, and the sky was twilight purple. The strains of a lone bagpipe reached their ears. “It’s so beautiful here,” she murmured. “I forgot how beautiful.”
“Did ye?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
Her eyes met his and darted away, rising once more to study the twinkling sky above. She drew several long breaths as if gathering her courage, and Niall waited. As much as he wanted to blister her ears for her heedless words earlier, he knew she was still a trifle disguised. Not that it was an excuse, but he knew from experience what anger did to drunken senses. He’d known what it had done to his. He swallowed hard, and scrubbed the bridge of his nose with his palm.
“This used to be our garden,” she murmured, taking belated stock of their surroundings. She leaned so far backward that she nearly toppled over. “I remember this tree,” she said, wide eyed. “We planted it the day we came to Maclaren.”
“Aye.”
He remembered, too. A whimsical Aisla had wanted something to be a memento of their marriage, something that would grow as they did. As their child grew, too. They’d chosen the tree together, and they’d spent many an early afternoon making love in the grass in this very copse. He stiffened, unsure whether he’d brought them here on purpose or whether it had simply been convenient at the time. Perhaps some combination of the two.
Niall looked around. He hadn’t been here in years, but someone had maintained it. His mother’s gardener, he suspected. Sweetly scented, thick rose bushes grew around the edges of the garden. A small stone bench sat in one corner near a working fountain with two cherubs. The tree Aisla was still staring at grew in the middle of the garden; its focal point, surrounded by the white marble bench beneath her skirts. The tree had matured and filled out in the last six years.
A look of sadness crossed her face, her full lips twisting with a bittersweet expression. He knew why. It was because it had survived when their marriage hadn’t.
“Do you remember that day when we came here?” she asked softly, her fingers tracing the marble edge of the bench. “To Maclaren?”
He leaned against an oak at the far end and folded his arms across his chest. “Aye.”
“We were so happy.” Her voice caught. “We were happy, weren’t we?”
“Sometimes.”
Their eyes joined in a meeting of shared, fraught history. She’d been deeply unhappy toward the end, he knew. After the loss of the babe, she’d retreated into herself, turning away from any comfort he, or anyone, could have offered. In hindsight, he hadn’t known how to react, and he’d chosen to curb his own pain with ale and whisky.
He flinched at the memory of his heedless words.
“Ye’ll have more children someday, Aisla,” he’d told her in all his youthful arrogance.
“It was our child, Niall,” she had sobbed. “Ours. And now she’s dead.”
And he had wept, even with the seed of doubt that she might have played him false. He’d had no proof, of course. Except his own suspicions and insecurities, steeped in the belief that he could never be enough for someone like her. How could she ever love him? A cripple?
And now, she’d danced with the Buchanan as if the man hadn’t been the one to drive a loch-sized wedge between them. With the tensions between the Maclarens and Campbells, he hadn’t expected to see Rose Campbell’s betrothed among the revelers. Had he only come because of the news of Aisla’s return? Or with some other nefarious purpose? Ronan’s words came back to him: I got the notion he hates ye.
Drawing a strangled breath, he cleared his throat, ready to tell Aisla that they should head to the stables and back to Tarbendale, but then she stood and weaved her way over to the fountain where a thick rosebush with blushing pink roses stood.
Her words were nearly inaudible as her fingers caressed one perfect bloom. “I planted this the day after I lost the baby.” He heard the broken sob there at the end, but Niall didn’t move. He couldn’t move. Pain kept his back pressed to that tree.
“I didnae ken,” he said, though a bit stupidly, and only because he didn’t know what else to say.
“Why would you have known? You weren’t there,” she replied, though her tone held none of the bitter challenge that he had grown so accustomed to. She was simply stating the facts. And she was correct. In the days after she miscarried, Niall had thought it best to give her time and space to grieve. So he’d stayed away. In taverns, mostly, managing his own grief with as much ale and whisky as he could. The babe had started to feel like the one thing that had been tethering them together, and once it was lost, there’d seemed to be no hope left for them. He couldn’t hold on to her, and he’d been at a loss on how to regai
n her.
“I should have been,” he admitted, leaning his head back, against the tree. Closing his eyes, he could see perfectly just how much of an idiot he’d been. He saw the same behavior in a number of the young men here at Maclaren and Tarbendale. Good lads, but young, showing up for work at Tarben Castle and the mines with a splitting headache and bloodshot eyes every morning. A few of them had wives. Bairns.
“I was a fool,” he added, sliding down the trunk of the tree to sit upon the grass. He kept one knee bent, his arm resting on it as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Ye needed me, and I wasnae there. I ken that, Aisla. I ken it now, and I should have then.”
She was quiet as she crouched near the rose shrub, the petals of a bloom still sliding between her fingers. He’d been so selfish, so sodding drunk, all the time. At Montgomery, Aisla’s home, it had been different. No one had known him or had soft expectations of him. No one had thought of him as anything less. He’d been free…and happy. But once he’d returned with a pregnant wife to Maclaren, everything had changed. He’d felt useless and afraid that he was lacking and not what she wanted. He’d let his fears win. And he’d lost her anyway.
“We were too young,” she whispered. “Maybe we were doomed from the start.”
He heard her despondency in the bleak excuse. “I dunnae believe that. There are plenty of people who marry young and make a success of it. Age was no’ our only obstacle.”
Aisla released the rose bloom and looked over her shoulder at him. “The drink, then? Because you claim you don’t drink now, and you’re…” She took a breath and averted her gaze. “You’re a completely different man.”
He held still, recognizing her words as a doorway, one he’d been angling for. She’d finally seen the one thing he’d wished her to: that he had changed, utterly and wholly. Niall’s mind jumped to Ronan’s wager, but he couldn’t press onward. It was too tenuous a moment, and he didn’t want Aisla to pull away. She was right. His habits had been, most definitely, their largest obstacle. He could admit that now, and had been able to for some time. He smiled faintly. “Was I as sloppy a drunk as ye were just now?”
Aisla rolled her eyes. “Worse.”
He nodded, accepting it as truth. “Well then, in that respect, yes, I’ve changed. But some things are more difficult to adjust.”
She straightened and turned to him, crossing her arms. “Such as?”
She wobbled a bit, and Niall got up fast, to catch her before she lost her footing. He led her back to the tree, and when he sat down, he eased her down beside him. She felt good there, tucked in close against him. The honesty of their frank conversation had scrubbed away every lick of anger and frustration over her outburst in the courtyard. With her defenses at half mast, perhaps this was the true Aisla.
“Such as trust. And jealousy,” he replied.
More specifically, the lack of trust, and an abundance of jealousy. They would be enough to threaten any relationship.
“I’m still possessive,” he whispered against the crown of her head, her soft blond curls loosened from their pins from the way she’d been carried upside down. “I cannae stand to see ye flirting with another man. No’ then and no’ now. And here ye are, showing up with Leclerc, saying ye want to marry him…knowing that the two of ye…” She stiffened beneath his arm, and he could feel her bristling to meet him in battle. He quickly redirected the conversation. “I’m sorry. But…why do ye want to marry him?”
Aisla’s arms and shoulders relaxed again. “Because he needs me. He needs my help. His mother is dying and wants to see him wed. I want to laugh and be happy. And because he’s my friend. My best friend.”
A friend. Well, it was true that when Leclerc looked at Aisla it wasn’t with any sort of fire. He likely saw the marriage as a pleasant and beneficial arrangement. Niall wasn’t certain how any marriage like that would inspire happiness or laughter, though.
“Ye used to laugh with me.”
He felt her shrug a shoulder with a soft hiccup. “I did, but there was nothing to laugh or smile about when I saw you drunk all the time with your friends. With Fenella.”
“Aisla—”
“You said you were possessive, that you can’t stand to see me flirt with another man. Don’t you think I felt the same? Why is it so impossible for you to understand the pain I felt when I found you in Fenella’s cottage? When I see you with her now?”
He closed his eyes, batting away the spear of guilt that always jutted out at his chest when he remembered that whisky-soaked night. Though, truly, little of it he did actually remember. But then Niall stopped—stopped pushing back the guilt, and instead, let it come. He’d been ignoring it, shoving it away, keeping it out of sight and out of mind. Anything to move onward and upward, away from the mess that had been his marriage. What he hadn’t done, he realized, as he and Aisla sat together under the tree having their first peaceful, amiable conversation, was feel the guilt fully. And accept it for what it was.
“I understand yer hurt. I felt it myself,” he said, thinking of Dougal Buchanan. “But I swear to ye, Aisla, I never slept with the lass.” He drew a breath and held it in his lungs for a protracted moment and then let it go. “Even if I were ape-drunk, I would never think to betray ye in that way.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered.
But he knew it did. Niall felt Aisla shift and begin to sit up and away from him. He took her by the arms to hold her in place. “Nothing has ever happened, and it never will. She’s my housekeeper. A friend. Nothing more. I give ye my word, Aisla. The word of a sober man.”
She stared into his eyes, as if searching for a crack in his vow. Something for her to point out and use against him. But she didn’t find it. Instead, she nodded slowly.
“I believe you.”
They were the sweetest three words he’d ever heard her say. Other than another three, of course. Those three words he couldn’t hope to ever hear again. I love you.
Aisla licked her lips, her eyes glistening. “And I hope you accord me the same consideration when I tell you, once and for all, that I was never with Dougal. I gave myself only to you, I chose you, I married you.”
There was so much pain, and yet so much hope in her eyes right then…hope that he’d believe her the way she’d believed him. Again, he felt the familiar jab of the spear. No more guilt, he’d promised himself. But he was tired of running away from it. The woman seated beside him, looking at him with so much openness and heart, baring herself in ways she hadn’t since her return. This was the girl he’d known at Montgomery. This was Aisla, before they’d snuffed out their marriage.
He squeezed her arms gently. “I believe you, too.”
She sucked in a breath of air and nodded, leaning forward to bury her forehead against his chest. “Do you think of her?” she whispered. “The babe?”
He nodded solemnly. “Every single day.”
“Me, too. I wanted her so badly. I loved her even though she and I had only known each other a few months. She was special.” She exhaled on a half sob. “She would have been loved, wouldn’t she?”
Niall’s throat grew tight. “Aye.”
She sat a moment, frozen and unblinking. And then the corners of her mouth tipped downward and trembled, as if it was all too much to keep buttoned up inside. Aisla sobbed, the smell of ale and whisky mixed with the fragrant roses she’d rustled on the shrub. He stroked her hair and back, until finally her sobs fell off into rhythmic breathing. Aisla’s weight against his side and chest had grown limp. Niall tucked in his chin and peered down to see her lashes splayed out against her pink cheeks.
God, he hadn’t held her like this in years. She hadn’t trusted him to. No, she’d kept him at arm’s length and for good reason. He hadn’t deserved her trust.
And now the tables were turned so thoroughly, it would be funny if it wasn’t so painful. She was an adorable, if furiously cantankerous, drunk. Most of what she’d said had been yelled in anger, he knew, but that much hurt c
ould have only been born from a place of love. He would wager his entire fortune on the fact that some of that affection was still there, and he had fewer than four weeks to make her see it.
Four weeks to win back his Highland bride for good. Not for the sake of a wager or for anything else beyond the two of them. But simply because he wanted her to stay.
For the first time in years, he felt the hollowness in his chest ease.
Chapter Fourteen
Why in God-awful hell did it feel like she was on a ship?
A sinking ship caught in the middle of the English Channel.
The room was lurching and careening before she even cracked an eyelid. When Aisla finally managed to open her eyes, she winced against the bright sunlight streaming in through the parted curtains. At least the room was no longer whirling, though everything in it spun. She moaned as she rolled over, her mattress and pillows cradling her body and yet somehow making her feel even worse, what with her churning stomach and her throbbing head.
Blasted ale and whisky. And her blasted loose tongue! She pressed the heels of her palms against her temples, each one pulsing in matched pain, and felt a new rush of sickness. This one sourced by guilt, and not an over indulgence of spirits.
Good Lord, what had she said?
Bits and pieces came back to her. Makenna’s hurt expression, and Julien’s disappointed one. Niall’s fury as he tossed her over his shoulder and carried her away to stop her from making an even worse arse out of herself.
She tried to sit up, but the pain in her head didn’t allow her to make much progress. The door to the bedchamber opened, and in bustled Pauline. She carried a stack of linen and one of Aisla’s favorite gowns.
The maid propped one thin brow and inspected Aisla, concern and pity in her eyes. “Ah, my lady, you are finally awake. I will ring for a bath immediately.”
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