“It’s no wonder we must strategize against one another for our own survival,” she said.
He tipped his head slightly, studying her. “What do ye lose if your school fails to make a profit, Evelyn? Because if I fail to win Finlarig back, I lose my honor, my clan, and if I’m unable to protect my people…my life.” His words held no self-pity, just fact.
She thought of Nathaniel, standing before their father’s desk, the night before she left, with her betrothal contract in his hands, their father’s will before him. Make the school profitable, Evie. The sheep will help to bring in coin. Then it won’t matter that you are cut from Father’s inheritance. You will be an independent woman and won’t need to marry anyone if you so desire.
The thought of being trapped in a loveless marriage squeezed the very breath from Evelyn. She would be forced to dwell with Philip, to kiss his cold skin, forced to let him paw her body. She would live away from Scarlet, forced to spend her days playing the subservient wife, something her honor would likely not allow. She would be a disappointment, laughed at and probably despised by Philip. Her life would spiral down until she’d be forced to flee under the suffocation of an aristocratic marriage, and who knows what would become of her.
Forcing an inhale through her nose, she leaned forward. “If I fail,” she said, “I lose my honor, my family, and my life.”
…
Grey shut the door to his bedroom, holding his taper before him as he strode past Evelyn’s silent door. The lass must still be sleeping. It was before dawn, but after a night of tossing in his bed, knowing she was just a wall away, he’d finally risen for the day. Even in his dreams, he had stood before the door connecting their rooms, unsure if he should knock. Her silence was the answer.
He walked lightly in his boots along the corridor to take the steps down into the great hall. After their words before the gatehouse last night, Evelyn had barely said a complete sentence to him, and retired early as soon as she’d eaten. He’d had to survive an interrogation by her sister after Evelyn went above.
Scarlet Worthington had a nose for secrets and a mind that could easily take her down a carnal path where she’d guess that he and Evelyn had spent an adventurous night together. So, after a few non-answers, he’d retired to his own room. After an hour of listening for a light knock, he’d finally forced himself to sleep, only to wake every few hours.
Grey rubbed the side of his face with his hand. “Bloody hell,” he whispered, lighting one wall sconce down the back corridor toward the kitchen. What he wouldn’t give to be warm and welcome next to Evelyn. Would you give up Finlarig?
“Mo chreach,” he muttered. He wanted Evelyn and Finlarig. You can’t have everything in life. His mother’s words haunted him as much as not knowing where her murdered body lay. Bloody foking hell.
His boots thudded along the descending stone ramp out the back of the keep, past the untended herb gardens, and into the dark kitchen. He strode directly to the glowing coals in the hearth and stirred them with the iron poker. Adding some dry peat, he blew on the catching fire and added some cut wood. Molly would likely want it soon enough. Standing, he looked around at the empty room, last year’s herbs still hanging in the windows. By now Gram would have replaced them, but she refused to return to Finlarig, and now her mind seemed to have snapped toward bloody retaliation.
Grey opened the stone larder and held his taper close to the opening. Evelyn’s tarts. He plucked one out and took a bite. Chewing, he paused to examine the dark fruit inside. Blaeberry. The lass had used blaeberries in her tarts.
“Shall I add tart thief to your offenses?”
Evelyn’s voice whipped him around to face the door where she stepped inside. She was dressed as if for the day, her hair pulled back into her matronly knot. Without waiting for a reply, she walked across the room to take water from the copper in a small pot, setting it on an iron spider over the coals.
“Are the tarts not for your students and teachers?” he asked and took another bite of the sweetened berries housed in the light crust. Her spine looked very straight. “I was but breaking my fast for the day,” he said.
“’Tis barely day.” Evelyn straightened to look at him. “Could you not sleep?”
“Nay.” He couldn’t tell if she looked tired in the low light. Did dark circles plague the skin beneath her eyes? He’d seen his own in the mirror that still sat in his bedchamber. “And what brings ye here so early? Or do ye walk in your sleep?”
She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Why couldn’t you sleep?”
Evelyn didn’t play games or spill words about like some lasses. He grinned. She wanted the truth, but could she handle it? “My thoughts kept running,” he said and shoved the rest of the tart into his mouth.
“To where did they run?” Her eyes looked black in the shadows, even though he knew they were a gray-green like a mist-shrouded moor.
Grey leaned his arse against the table flanking the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “To the lass lying in the bedchamber next to mine.”
“Oh. Were you planning her demise perhaps?”
“Nay.”
She walked toward him. He held his breath until she veered off to fetch herself a tart. The sky was still black, and they were alone in the kitchen. Not even their maid would rise for an hour. Grey watched Evelyn take a bite of her tart, her gaze raising to his. She swallowed. “What then were you planning for this lass next to you?” she asked.
Evelyn, using the word “lass,” made him smile, and he reached forward to wipe a dab of blaeberry off her lower lip and lowered his fist to the high table beside him. “I lay abed all night,” he said, his voice low as his grin faded to seriousness. “Imagining how I would make the lass scream out her pleasure, the two of us against each other, carnal and wild.”
Evelyn’s lips parted as she stared at him, her arched brows slowly rising toward her hairline. “And yet,” she whispered, rubbing her two lips together. “You didn’t knock.” Her tone, once clipped and sharp like jagged ice, was soft. Had she waited for his knock? Did she toss and turn with pent-up passion?
Grey raised his fist from the table beside him and softly rapped his knuckles down on the wood. Knock, knock, knock.
Chapter Twenty-One
Evelyn stared at the rugged, wild Highlander before her, and the hunger that she’d been battling all night roared up within her. Their words before Finlarig’s new massive iron gate had reminded her of their impasse.
She’d spent the first part of the night trying to figure out a way around it. Would Grey consider letting her teach in his castle if she gave it back to him? But it wasn’t hers to give. Nathaniel had bought the property and had let her live in it only to try to save herself from an unwanted marriage. Would she sacrifice her school for a man’s honor? For he could still rule his clan from the fourth floor of the Highland Roses School. At least he’d been honest about the injury to his pride.
She’d been around and around about all of this until she’d forced her thoughts away. But then her mind had turned to Grey’s kiss and the feel of his hands stroking her skin, the strength of his muscled arms, and the fiery tempest he easily stoked in her. Three times, Evelyn walked to the door separating their rooms. Poised to knock, her body making demands that her own pride and mind tried to subdue. But now, as he stood in the darkness before her, the warmth of the hearth fire a mere glimmer compared to the heat building within, her body ruled.
Knock. Knock. His knuckles repeated as he stared into her gaze.
Her parted lips came together. “Come in,” she whispered.
She stepped forward at the same time he did, their hands reaching for each other’s faces. Her fingers slid into his hair as he held her cheeks, his palms warm against them. Their mouths met in an open, hungry kiss. Evelyn welcomed the wild heat flaring up through her, a heat that fed the ache she’d tried to tamp down all night.
Grey’s fingers loosened her hair, and the pins began to plink against the ston
e floor. Her long waves fell down past her shoulders, and he stroked her back, pulling her closer.
A moan funneled upward from Evelyn’s throat, and she rubbed her body against Grey, feeling his hardness between them. When the tip of her tongue slid into his mouth, Grey groaned and wrapped her up, kissing her fiercely, until Evelyn felt awash in sensation. Giving in to it all, she might float away in the flood of their passion and not care one wit. The only thing that mattered was Grey and the wildness between them.
Her fingers walked a path up his shirt, feeling his muscles beneath the fabric. At the top, she plucked open the ties. Swiftly, he threw off the shirt, leaving his chest bare, and she rubbed her palms down his corded abs to the low edge of his kilt.
“I would see ye, Evelyn,” he said, his voice thick. The sound of it, so full of desire, loosed another wave of molten passion through her body.
She pulled the ribbon at the top of her smock, and the knot slipped away. “These?” she asked, a hint of play in her breathless voice. With her cool hands, she scooped up under each breast, bringing them up to lay open to his view above her cinched bodice. Her nipples were already hard, pearls born from the war between chill and the waging fire within her.
“Dia math,” he breathed, and the awe in his voice pressed her boldness to the surface.
She plumped her breast with one hand while the fingers of her other hand rucked up her full skirt and smock. God, how she wanted him to touch her like the night before.
He stepped in to her, his rock-hard staff jutting against the confines of his kilt, and bent to kiss her, his hands sliding up under her skirts. He murmured against her ear in rough, raw Gaelic, the tone causing gooseflesh to spread down her neck. Evelyn sucked in a sharp breath as he touched her. “Ye are so hot, lass,” he whispered against her ear, and Evelyn threw her head back, giving him access to kiss her throat down to her breasts.
Feeling the high table at her back, Evelyn shifted, turning away from him so he was at her back. He kept his hands under her skirts, cupping her backside with one hand while his other worked up his kilt. She glanced back over one shoulder, and the sight of him made her insides melt and tense like an undulating wave. “Tha thu cho teth, lass,” he breathed against her ear. He pressed his hard body against her from behind as he stroked her.
Evelyn had never before felt so willing to surrender herself to another being. She was flying, her body poised on the edge of heaven, and she knew that when she swooped over, falling in sensation, Grey would catch her. His body curved around her, and she felt him close, so close. He brushed her hair to one side, kissing the back of her neck, moving forward to her throat and ear. She reared back as he brushed and teased her while his other hand cupped a breast, tweaking her until a moan escaped her throat. Evelyn reached forward to hold the back edge of the table, her fingers curling over the wood.
“Aye, lass,” he said, his voice as rough as a raging river. “Hold on with your fingers.” His lips teased her ear. “And surrender everything else to the fire.”
…
“Someone has been playing with tarts,” Molly said as she whisked into the great hall.
Evelyn nearly spit her tea back into the small tea bowl in her hands. She sat opposite Scarlet and Alana. The morning was well underway, and they expected students after midday.
“Are they all eaten?” Alana asked, alarm in her voice as she stood to show Ceò where a blanket, for her and her pups, lay before the hearth.
“Nearly,” Molly said, “and there were crumbs everywhere, and streaks of bilberries across the table, like someone was grappling with them.”
Blast. Grey promised he’d clean the kitchen when he sent her to wash the berry juice off herself before the others woke.
Scarlet shivered and glanced under the table. “Rats perhaps?”
Molly set a plate down with the four tarts that Evelyn and Grey had left untouched in their wild, passionate play in the kitchen before dawn. “Only if the rats were battling with them instead of eating them.”
Evelyn breathed slowly, keeping a cool expression as she reached for one pastry. “Perhaps Isabel got into them and left a mess. I will talk to her about it.” Of course, she wouldn’t, but now no one else would. She took a bite, and the sweet juice instantly brought back the taste of Grey. Heat spread from her cheeks down her neck.
“We will need to bake some more if we are to feed the girls who come for training today,” Molly said with a huff.
“I will help.” Evelyn rose, turning toward the kitchen. Although she wasn’t quite sure how she’d get through baking all morning without losing herself in her memories. She was liable to be flushed and aching the whole time.
“Evie?” Scarlet pointed at her. “You have a purple stain on the back of your skirt.”
Evelyn yanked her skirt around, twisting to stare down over her shoulder. A smear of purple bilberry juice stretched across her backside. “I must have soiled it while baking last,” she said. “Aprons should wrap completely around me. I’m so untidy in the kitchen.”
Scarlet quirked her lips to the side. “If you are untidy, then I am a filthy boor.”
“Has anyone seen Izzy this morn?” Alana asked. “She wasn’t in her chamber when I stopped by with the dogs before coming down.”
“See,” Evelyn said. “She probably ate a bunch of tarts before running outside.” No one answered her. “I will talk to her. No one should chastise her or question her for eating the tarts.”
Scarlet stared at her sister, a crease in her brow. “You’ve already said that.” Damn. Scarlet always knew when she was lying.
Evelyn waved her hand in dismissal. “I will be in the kitchen.” She took two steps forward and stopped as the front doors banged in the entryway.
“He’s taken Izzy,” Cat said, her voice filling the rafters as she ran inside. She leaned forward over the table, fists set to brace herself, her chest rising and falling in a need for air. Ceò leaped up at the intrusion, her puppies yipping around her.
“Who has?” Evelyn yelled to be heard over the dogs as she rushed toward Cat.
Cat’s eyes narrowed, the worry hardening into sharp hatred. “Cross’s man, Burdock.”
Evelyn’s stomach clenched. “Oh no,” she said on a breath. “Did he…harm her?” Was the man so evil as to push his way onto a child?
Cat shook her head. “Not in the way your face says ye are thinking, though I wouldn’t put it past him. He was there for me, but I have a hiding place up in the trees. Izzy didn’t know that and tried to scare him off by throwing stones at him.”
Evelyn’s mind raced. “Good God.”
“He caught her as she ran off,” Cat said. “I’d left my bow below or the bastard would be dead cold by now and buried so no one could find him.”
“You didn’t yell for him to leave her?” Scarlet asked, her voice neutral.
Cat rounded on her. “If I had, neither of us would be here to tell Grey what the bloody English have done.”
“She’s right,” Evelyn said, her mind skipping forward to Grey riding headfirst into a line of muskets, his beautiful body being pocked with iron shot. “But we can’t tell Grey.”
“What?” Cat yelled. “Where is he?”
Evelyn came up to her. “They will kill him before he’s even had a chance to talk to Cross. He’ll ride in there brandishing his sword, and they’ll open fire.” She looked around the hall and grabbed her shawl. “I will go to Captain Cross. Tell him one of my students is missing and ask for his help.”
“Grey won’t be happy with that,” Alana said, shaking her head. “He doesn’t think any woman should go to the English stronghold.”
“Even a Sassenach?” Evelyn asked, her mouth tight.
“Well, you aren’t going alone,” Scarlet said, crossing her arms under her breasts.
“I’ll take James. He can drive the coach, he’s English, and he has a musket,” Evelyn said, signaling to Molly. “Go find him, please.” Molly ran out the front to the baile
y murmuring something about blood and bones.
“I’m better at dealing with slimy men than you,” Scarlet said and grabbed her shawl, though Evelyn noticed that she trembled.
“Stay here, Scar,” Evelyn said. “I don’t want to worry about you.” She strode to the door with Cat and Alana right behind her, the small herd of dogs running about their skirts. Out front, James was jogging to the stables, Thomas on his heels. Minutes ticked by while they waited, and Evelyn realized they had drawn notice from the watchtower.
“Act like you are enjoying the weather,” she said.
“What?” Cat asked, hissing.
“We are being watched,” Evelyn said and waved to Hamish as if nothing was wrong.
James drove the carriage up to the steps. He wore a grim face and held his musket across his lap.
“I’m coming with ye,” Cat said, and before Evelyn could open her mouth, the woman hiked her skirt up and hoisted herself into the carriage.
“She better stay hidden, or at least her mouth shut,” Scarlet said and traipsed past Evelyn to join her in the carriage.
Evelyn forced a calm smile at Hamish as he walked over, having climbed down from the tower. “We are going for a ride to see Cat’s cottage. James has his musket, so we are perfectly safe.”
Hamish frowned, glancing at the sky. “Hurry back if a storm approaches.” He turned and jogged to the raised gate.
“What about me?” Alana asked as Evelyn set her foot on the carriage step.
“Stay here with the puppies,” Evelyn said. “And if Grey comes back, don’t tell him where we’ve gone.”
Alana wrung her hands. “I can never hide things from him. He always pulls the truth out of me.”
“Then go visit Rebecca or Kirstin,” Evelyn said, and pushed inside the cramped carriage. She cut a glare to both passengers, arranged opposite each other. “And I would forbid you two to go, but I don’t want to waste precious time wrestling you out of the carriage.”
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