‘You won’t be needing a book. I can instruct you.’
‘But you won’t be in the carriage with me.’
‘And we’ll not be in Scotland today.’
With that, the conversation ended.
* * *
They pushed themselves further that day than they had the first and, by the time they arrived at the inn, she was exhausted and her nerves were frayed. He did not help her get ready for bed, rather he sent a maid up to assist her, though Penny knew she could have done without.
She lowered all the lamps, save one by the door, and got into bed.
She couldn’t sleep. She wondered if he would come to bed. She was angry, because she was so tired, but she found herself on edge, waiting for the man.
How could she sleep knowing that she might have an experience like she had the night before? Not being certain?
It had been altering and much as though someone had taken small scissors to the places where she was stitched together, snipped them all out and she was waiting to be made anew.
She didn’t know if a reprieve was the answer, or if his touch might be.
She was resentful that he had suddenly become the largest thought in her head.
She hadn’t chosen this. She hadn’t chosen him.
And he consumed her all the same. Had burst through her defences in a way that she hadn’t foreseen and she hated it. She needed to find a way to remake herself.
And silence had only ever been her enemy.
The door opened then and there he was. She shivered. She couldn’t help but react.
He began to strip off his clothes, the dim light from the single lantern playing tricks with light and shadow over that warrior’s body.
She had been so overwhelmed by him last night that, while she had looked, she felt as if she hadn’t been able to fully get a grasp of how he truly appeared. It had been like staring into the sun.
He had scars. Ridges of flesh that spoke of wounds sustained in battle. His chest was broad, his waist narrow, his thighs well muscled. And then there was… Well, the rest of him. Now that she didn’t feel quite so intimidated she could see that he was, in totality, beautiful.
She had seen paintings of naked men, but their members were small and wilted. Not his. It was… In full bloom, by contrast to wilted, she supposed.
She wanted to ask him the words. For everything. That was what she really wanted. She needed a book, an encyclopaedia of his body, one that might come with labels and terms for each illustrated figure.
It was how she learned.
How she had learned everything that she knew so far. It seemed reasonable enough to wish that she might have a book for him. For this. For them.
He said nothing to her, came over to the bed and settled on top of it. Then she waited.
He didn’t move. He didn’t get beneath the blankets. She stole a glance at him and could see that he was lying on his back with his arm thrown up over his face.
He lay there brazen, uncovered, clearly not at all ashamed of his exposed form. She began to feel restless, for she could not sleep with such a great awareness of his presence. With him right there, not knowing what he intended to do. With that strange pressure building between her legs and creating a restlessness in the pit of her stomach.
‘Lachlan,’ she said.
‘Don’t,’ was his response, clipped and short and angry.
‘Don’t what?’
‘I’m not in the mood to be gentle tonight, lass. Just sleep.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ she said, feeling frustrated.
He growled and, suddenly, he was over her, his green eyes blazing into hers.
‘You do that quite a lot,’ she whispered. ‘Growling like a beast.’
‘You tempt me to it.’
‘I don’t know what that means either.’
‘All the more reason you should have let me sleep.’
‘I can’t sleep,’ she confessed.
He kissed her then and she wanted to weep. Because finally, finally she felt something. A surge of strength and power. She had felt so hollow and miserable and lonely all day, ever since he had left her bed last night. But now he was kissing her and every possibility he had raised the night before was there again. It was a magical thing, the way that his kiss burned away the anger she had felt. Her fear. Her trepidation.
He pushed the bedding down with no small amount of violence in his movement and pushed her nightdress up, settling himself between her legs, pressing his hardness to the cleft between her thighs and shifting his hips slowly. She was wet there again and the glide of his heat was smooth, stoking that desire inside her that she had felt the last time they were together.
He entered her much more quickly this time, but it didn’t hurt. She felt slightly tender for a moment, but it receded quickly. His strokes were hard and fast, his grip bruising on her hips, and when his teeth closed down on her lower lip, the shock sent an arrow of even deeper pleasure through her body.
She was like spun glass and knew that he would shatter her soon. But this was so different than how she’d felt all day in the silence. There was a power in this because, as fragile as she was, he was right there with her. She tried to hold back, because she knew how undone it made her feel and it frightened her more than a little. But soon, she couldn’t. His breath, his body, his kiss. The way his heart raged in his chest, the deep, masculine sounds of pleasure that were foreign and mystical to her ears, all combined to stoke the flame of her desire.
‘Penny,’ he said and, the moment his name fell from her lips, a plea she didn’t quite understand, she broke.
She gasped her pleasure, clinging to his shoulders, and that was when he withdrew, spending his own pleasure on to the sheets.
She wanted to ask him why, but her thoughts and words were tangled, and he didn’t leave tonight. Instead he settled himself on the blankets, keeping distance between them, and slept.
How…how could he? How could he sleep with all of this between them?
It forced her to conclude that he felt nothing. That somehow this had changed nothing in him.
That she was alone in feeling altered. That created a terrible loneliness indeed.
* * *
In the morning, he was gone again, just as he been the night before. Once again, he bundled her into the carriage and rode on his horse. And again, any closeness that she had felt evaporated.
Of all the concerns she had about marriage, she realised now that they were foolish. She hadn’t even known what concerns to have.
Right now, the deepest was all the feelings she had no names for. And a husband who made her feel both more whole than she’d ever felt in her life and lonelier, too.
This was not the life she had dreamed of.
‘You’re a fool for thinking you could have dreams in the first place.’ And since she was alone in the carriage, she could say it out loud.
But then she rebelled against herself. No, she was not a fool. She was only a fool if she allowed it to stand.
If she wanted change, she would have to make it.
CHAPTER SIX
She never turned him away. Over the next three nights she allowed him to lift her nightdress and take his pleasure in her.
Just looking at her filled him with a strange heaviness and he was grateful for the distance he could keep from her during the days they travelled. Her in the carriage, he on his horse. He did not understand the sense of growing connection to this wide-eyed Englishwoman.
By the time they were in their room at night, he was half-wild with a thing he couldn’t name that made his body hard—but stranger still—made his heart beat too quickly.
As if somehow she had begun to set the pace for the blood in his veins.
He did not allow it.
He set the pace. H
e did not allow her to touch him. He kept control, at all times. But part of him ached to strip her completely bare and explore her body at length.
But she was a wife, not a prostitute. And the things he wanted to do to her were not indignities a man visited upon his wife. His education on carnal acts had been conducted in brothels. He had been a young soldier and it was the way of things. He’d been warned by one of the women there very early on that those who made a business of pleasure were different from delicate society women.
Especially if they were English.
And this he’d confirmed over the years listening to the men in his company talk. Even men who had wives at home, who found solace between battles in the arms of whores.
He’d thought of his own father and his reputation. The way he treated women. And how fragile his mother had been.
The only conclusion he could draw was that this was true. The line between wives and whores.
He gritted his teeth against his own hypocrisy. Because hadn’t he only thought that if he were taking pleasure, the woman deserved it as well?
She had her pleasure. Every time he had his.
But there were certain acts that one did not sully a lady with.
A lady you forced into marriage.
Forced marriage was common enough. If not forced then arranged, based on little more than mutual need.
He had no reason to feel guilt for that.
On the morning of the fourth day, he set his delicate wife in the carriage and mounted his horse as he always did.
‘I’m tired of the carriage,’ she announced, her delicate face appearing in the window.
‘You’ve a few more days of it yet,’ he responded.
‘I wish to ride today.’
‘I haven’t an extra horse for you.’
‘I shall ride with you,’ she persisted.
‘You will be wanting the comfort of the carriage,’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘Then you can put me back in the carriage when you’ve tired of me. Or when I’ve tired of you. Whichever comes first.’
They had managed to exchange a few words since that first day they’d ridden in the carriage together. Since then, only their bodies had shared communication. But he knew full well that if he put the woman on the front of his horse he would be forced to listen to her talk about toast or birds or any number of inane things.
That he found he could not deny her enraged him.
‘Be quick about it,’ he said, dismounting to help her alight from the carriage. He opened the door, lifted her out, then propelled her up on to the horse, nestling her in front of him, her round, glorious backside fitting snugly against his cock.
So it was to be torture for the next several hours.
She fit perfectly against him. He had never had occasion to put a woman on the front of his horse before and he had not appreciated the situation it might create.
And he had been correct about the chatter. For she did chatter.
‘I do believe that is a Scots pine,’ she said, the fifth tree she had named in as many minutes.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘At least, it’s what I recall reading in one of Gilbert White’s papers.’
‘You’ve truly spent that much of your time educating yourself on pines?’
‘My father didn’t have fiction in his library. So, I’ve spent a good deal of time collecting all types of information. On plants. Animals. Aqueducts.’
‘An impressive array of subjects.’
‘The Greek pantheon. Religion in general. But there was one area of my father’s library that was sadly lacking.’
‘Other than Scotland, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Other than Scotland.’ She made a small sound that he couldn’t quite interpret. A hum, as if she was considering whether or not she would carry on. Or pretending to consider it. In the short time he’d known Penny he’d never once got the sense she’d held back something she truly wanted to say. ‘It was alarmingly lacking in the subject of human anatomy. As well as other…practicalities. I have some questions.’
The way she wiggled against him created a pull of desire in his body. ‘Do you now?’
She paused for a moment, then turned her head to the side. He could see her elegant profile, her rosy cheeks partly concealed by the rounded curve of her bonnet. ‘What do you call it?’
‘My apologies, lass, I’m not sure what you mean.’ He had a feeling he did know what she meant and that the intended target was stirring against her backside even as she manoeuvred around the topic like a battle strategist.
‘Your…that is… I am actually aware of the biological…that is to say the Latin…’
‘A cock,’ he said, opting for bluntness.
Her shoulders twitched.
‘Really?’ she asked, her head whipping to the side again, the blue ribbon on her bonnet moving with her. ‘Like a rooster?’
‘Aye,’ he returned.
He had the strangest urge to laugh. Not at her, so much as the situation itself. He could not remember the last time he’d laughed from humour. At least when not in his cups.
‘Fascinating indeed.’ It wasn’t his imagination. She arched her back against him just then. ‘A cock.’ She tested the word and it was far too enticing, that sweet voice and the innocence wound through it, saying such a provoking thing.
‘Be careful wielding that,’ he said. ‘That word on a woman’s lips could cause the downfall of mankind. Or cause a scandal at the very least.’
‘Is it? It’s very difficult to know what’s scandalous when you haven’t the context. I’ve been so protected from scandal that I fear I’m not as shocked by some things as I ought to be. Ruination is such a broad term, don’t you think? And, as far as I’m aware, a woman can be ruined by going into a closed carriage with a man, or a darkened path in a garden, as easily as she can be ruined by the actual… Well, by copulation.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes.’ She paused for a moment. Then made that same humming noise she had before. ‘What do you call that? Is it the same as it is with animals?’
Then he would have laughed if she wasn’t sitting so close to him. Were he not pressed against her temptation of a backside. ‘There are many things you can call it.’
‘Tell me.’ She sounded eager and bright and he wanted—badly—to drag her down from the horse, tell his men to occupy themselves, take her into the nearest copse of trees and spend his time naming the act while performing it with her in a variety of fashions.
It was the strength of the need that stopped him.
For where there was no control, there was chaos.
And Lachlan was not a man who indulged in chaos.
He shifted. ‘Tup. Screwing. But then neither is a term you would use in polite company.’
She made a noise as if considering it.
‘Don’t go saying that,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Not fitting for a lady.’
‘But the act is? For a married lady, at least. So why can’t I say it?’
‘You’re not such an innocent, surely.’ He knew fine ladies were sheltered from the world and he’d known she was untouched, but how could she know so little, yet respond to his touch so beautifully?
‘I don’t know. I feel as though I have gaps in my knowledge of the world. Of life. I didn’t know that the act between a man and a woman would feel quite so good. Or quite so terrible.’
He stiffened. ‘It’s terrible?’
‘Oh, it feels wonderful while you do it. But I don’t understand why you won’t…’ She twitched her shoulders and for some reason he had the deep sense that she was frowning, though he couldn’t see her face. ‘I don’t know the word for that either.’
‘Orgasm,’ he said. ‘
That’s what the peak is called. The little death.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It does feel like that. As though your whole body might shutter to a stop at any moment. As if you’re shattered and crushed back together all at once.’
He had nothing to say to that. He shouldn’t feel…pleased.
He had never imagined that he might have such a forthright talk about such subjects with his wife. Not that he wasn’t accustomed to speaking of it. The men of his acquaintance were quite bold about such things and whores certainly had no cause to blush about the subject.
He had not imagined that a woman of her breeding would engage in the discussion, but she seemed fascinated.
He remembered well the way that she had tackled saving the small bird. The tenacity of her. It was the same now.
‘I know how one—or rather two—creates a child,’ she said. ‘I’ve read a great many books about farm animals. And I figure, as it is the same with all animals, it is the same with people. Also, I had a governess who presented quite a few stern warnings about men and their predation. Why do you not wish to create a child with me?’
‘I’ll not carry on my line,’ he said. ‘A decision I made long before I chose you as a wife.’
He didn’t see the point in manoeuvring around the truth. He owed her nothing, it was true. He had married her only to take something from her father, not to give anything to her. It cost him nothing to tell her why he had no interest in fathering a child. ‘My father was chief of the clan. By marriage to my mother. MacKenzie is her name. Was her name. My father earned his position through the trust of her father. The trust of the people. But he was weak. While the clan was diminished my father went to Edinburgh, and he spent his money, the money of the people, on frivolous things. On women, on houses about the city. He wanted to buy his way into being like them. Like a Sassenach.’
‘What is that?’
‘An outsider. English. That was what he became. He forsook his clan. The Highlands. After everything the English did to us.’
‘But you fought for England. In the war.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I did. I would do it again, because the world has no place for bloodthirsty madmen and I would stand against that even if it meant standing with an enemy. Don’t mistake me, my relationship with your country is complicated. But my allegiance first and foremost is to Scotland. Is to the clan. My father traded his allegiance for his own comfort. Charged outlandish rents to the farmers and spent their money. He used them poorly. I would see everything returned to the people. I will not carry on a weak bloodline.’
Harlequin Historical July 2020 - Box Set 1 of 2 Page 57