“Oh, no. Never think that. That's not... that's not what we're like. I'm only sorry that you met them first. I would wager that there are people like them in every land you could care to name, however.”
“And they called you MacTaggart. The MacTaggart whelp. What does that mean?”
It took her poor frazzled brain a moment to remember that Reade had introduced himself to her under the name Fitzpatrick, but he had answered to MacTaggart as if it were his own name. Perhaps it was.
He hesitated, and in that moment, Elizabeth remembered the pact that they had made, to avoid asking each other about their pasts. This was a direct violation of that rule, but Reade's past had come looking for them
“It's what my name used to be,” he said at last.
“What does that mean?”
“I was the son of the clan chief, but ah. Not with his wife.”
“You're a—” The word felt too cruel suddenly, and Elizabeth tripped over it the way she would trip over a rock in the road.
“A bastard, yes. You get tired of being called MacTaggart's bastard all the time, so when I left home finally, I picked a new name. Just my luck that the moment I return to the North, I find some of the ones who knew me before.”
They sat in silence for a long moment, and Elizabeth took a deep and steadying breath. She felt less as if she were going to freeze from the inside out, less as if she were just a spectator watching everything from a few feet above her.
“I'm sorry. I should not have asked you that.”
Reade shrugged uncomfortably, and she felt her heart crack a little for him. To tell her what he had couldn't have been easy. She had heard that the stigma against bastardy was lesser in the North than in the South, but it was no easy time to be an unclaimed child, even if the man who should have done the claiming was noble.
“It's no matter to me,” he said shortly. “I only wanted to make sure that you were not hurt.”
“No one laid a hand on me, I promise. You saw to that.”
He looked at her as if he were taking his measure, and she smiled a little at him.
“That is what I really am,” he said finally. “You must understand, Elizabeth, that you hired a man paid to end lives.”
She swallowed hard.
“I understand that now. I am not sure that I understood it before, but now...”
“Are things different between us?”
“No. I don't know how I am so sure about it, but no. You are the same man you were before today, and if I was mistaken, it is, after all, my own fault. You have been nothing but honest with me.”
He flinched as if her words stung him, and she took his hand more tightly.
“Your birth does not matter to me, and it is your business if you do not wish to shout it from the church steps. You are the man who protected me, who kept me safe.”
On impulse, she brought his hand up to her lips, kissing the back almost reverently. It was a strange gesture, like one a supplicant might make to a bishop, but there was something right about it to her. She wanted to show him that the work of his hands did not disgust her, did not frighten her.
He drew a sudden breath when he felt her lips across his knuckles, and then he brought his hand up to run his fingertips down her face.
“How can you be so lovely?”
She didn't know how she was meant to answer that, but then he brought her hands up to his mouth. At first, she thought he meant to mirror her kiss, but instead, he turned her hand over, nuzzling her palm. His touch, his lips, sent a jolt through her that made her think of lightning, of the blazing strikes across the sky that could tear an ancient tree in two.
She knew in her heart of hearts that she should pull back. Whatever this thing was between her and Reade, it was something that could destroy her if she were not careful. She was already more attuned to him that she was to any man in the entire world, had allowed him more, had trusted him more, and now there was this.
Elizabeth wanted to pull her hands away, but it was as if some great lassitude had come over her. She felt suddenly drained from the battle that Reade had engaged, that she had witnessed. She was too tired to do more than lean toward him, murmuring softly.
Reade looked as if he could sense her warring emotions. He looked up at her, eyes clouded with concern. She could see the desire there, but it warred with the need to keep her safe, something she knew to be the core of their interactions. Above all, Reade wanted to keep her safe, and she felt something in her heart open to him as it had never opened to anyone.
“Elizabeth... If you want me to stop, you must stop me. I want you, and...”
“I want you.”
The words came out soft as a Lowland breeze, and Elizabeth felt as if she were drifting through the air as she said them. It was as if the least breath would send her reeling through the sky again, and the only thing in the world that offered any safety, any security at all, was Reade.
“Elizabeth...”
“I want you, Reade.”
She felt at once heavy and light. The words slipped from her lips, and she couldn't raise the energy to call them back. All she knew was that they were true, and that tomorrow, when all her chickens would come home to roost, felt very far away indeed.
Reade started to say something, but she saw the change come across his gaze. The desire overwhelmed the rest and now he was reaching for her again.
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chapter 15
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Reade felt a surge of need run through him. He’d thought that he knew what desire was. He’d thought that he had known what it was to want a woman before this. What he felt for Elizabeth, sitting by the side of the road that spring day, left it all in the dust. He needed her like a fire needed wood, like the rain needed the ground, and he dragged her into his arms.
He wanted to take his time kissing her, but it felt as if he had deprived himself for too long. Once her slender body was pressed against his, he needed to kiss her, or he was afraid that he might go mad.
Even in his need, something in the back of his head reminded him that he needed to go easy. Elizabeth was a virgin; he would have staked his life on it. She wasn't going to be ready for the onslaught of passion that he could feel whenever they were close.
Her mouth was as perfectly sweet as he remembered it, and this time, she opened for him even more readily. His tongue delved past her lips, frantic to taste her and claim her. He realized with a complete and utter certainty that no man had ever kissed her like this before, and the idea sent a bolt of pure lightning through him.
Mine. Mine, always mine.
Roughly, Reade pulled Elizabeth into his lap, dragging her so close that he could feel the way she trembled and how small she was.
Her delicacy made him slow; she was built so differently from him. When he touched her, it felt like handling something lovely, rare, and precious. If he did not heed her soft murmurs, did not pay attention to the way she moved against him, there was a chance he could hurt her, and that was the last thing he wanted.
Slowly, tantalizingly, Reade moved his mouth to her neck, and then the sweet spot at the base of her throat.
"You taste so very good, pet. Nothing in the world has ever tasted better on my lips."
He could feel Elizabeth gather herself for some sort of reply, but before she could find her words, he cupped his broad hand over her small breast, making her gasp instead.
"No one's ever touched me there before."
"Oh, aye? And how many people have touched you here, hm?" He let his hand trail to the rounded curve of her bottom.
She squirmed a little, which was playing merry hell with his own desires, her so very close to the core of him.
"A few, I guess? Boys who grabbed at me when I left the house. Things like that."
And her master, too, no doubt. Reade kept his hands from curling into fists with only the greatest of efforts.
"Don't let me do anything
you don't want, Elizabeth. I swear to you that is not what I want..."
"I know. I know. I want... what you want."
The sudden image that flashed through his head, Elizabeth as bare as the day she was born and sitting right where she was now, almost made him groan.
"You don't even know what you are asking for," he murmured, and he pulled her down to kiss her again, his hand back on her breast, his thumb starting to stroke the hard nubbin of her nipple through her coarse dress.
She felt so good, so insanely good that Reade knew he was close to the brink. If she didn't stop him, if she didn't offer some kind of protest, he was going to lay her down on the grass and have her underneath him, as if they were pagans or animals in the field. It should have made him ashamed to think of ill-using a young maid that way, one on the run from her abusive master no less, but she felt so good...
Reade paused, all of that need still thrumming through him. He ached for her, he wanted her as he wasn't sure he had ever wanted anyone, but there was a small bell ringing in his head. He heard that bell when fights were going to get really serious, when the English were right around the bend, and when a horse he had thought was as placid as a cow instead turned out to be a man killer with its own thoughts of where to go.
Now that bell was ringing again, and it made him look at Elizabeth more closely.
“Elizabeth?”
“What?”
Her tone made him finally push back. Elizabeth's voice was always layered with an alert sweetness or a sharpness or even just a playfulness that made it uniquely her own. Her voice now sounded as flat as a board and as colorless as porridge, and that alarmed him in a way that he didn't think he understood.
“Darling, look at me properly. Did one of those men manage to hit you while I wasn't looking? Did you hide it from me?”
If one of MacRae's men had laid a finger on her, Reade was going to go and start torching their crofts, but he fought back his temper so that he could stay as still and calm as Elizabeth needed.
“No... no, of course not. Why did you ask me that? Why did you stop? I just wanted...”
Comprehension flooded through him as tears welled up in her eyes. She looked as if she had been trying to hold them back, but now she couldn't help herself.
When the tears came, they were fast and merciless, streaming down her face like rain and making Reade feel as if his heart would break.
All thoughts of gaining revenge and setting fire to crofts went out of his head, and he gathered Elizabeth close to his chest.
"Oh, lass, it's all right. It will be fine. I am right here, I promise you."
Where she had been strangely blank and unresponsive as they kissed before, now he could tell that she was truly back in her own body now, clinging to him as her hot tears soaked his shirt. She was crying as if her heart was broken, and he suspected that it was not all for the death she had seen on the road or what might have become of her if the MacRae men had had their way.
Poor little mite. She's come a long way from what she's known. She has suffered so much, and today was by no one's lights a good day.
She cried so long that he feared she might be sick, but slowly her tears and her sobs stopped, leaving her hiccupping but calm. He thought he would have to speak to her to make sure she was ready to move, but she was the one who spoke first.
"You must think me a dreadful ninny."
"I never could."
"But you must. You are who you are, and... and you told me that. I knew that. That was why I hired you. It should not have shocked me to see you doing what I should have known you to do."
"Ah, but it's a different thing when you are only thinking of it against when you actually see it, is it not?"
"I suppose so. But I should have known better."
"Had you seen any violence like that before today? Not a bar fight or some kind of street tussle, but something like this on the road?"
"Never."
"Aye? What a sheltered little chick you must have been. but it makes sense. You were not ready to see that, and sorry I am that you had such a harsh experience."
Elizabeth laughed, her voice quiet but as sweet as birdsong to his ears.
"Given that your first experience must have been far worse? You don't have to tell me that you're sorry for me."
Reade shrugged.
"It's different for me. I knew what I was not long after I could walk."
"Were they... that is, did you have anyone who cared for you back in your family?"
Reade blinked, because he had no idea what she was talking about at first.
"My... family?"
"Yes. You mentioned that you left and took the name of Fitzpatrick... I just..."
"What?"
"I just hoped that even as they were preparing you for war and the work that you do now, that they also saw fit to give you some love and some kindness as well."
Reade realized with a chill that he had all but forgotten himself again.
When he was with Elizabeth, all stories about who he was and who he was meant to be went right out of his head. He was no longer the clever spy or rogue agent. Instead, he was only Reade MacTaggart, brother of the laird, looking at a pretty girl and hoping she might be his.
A part of him refused to be quelled by that panic and only wanted to drag Elizabeth into his arms again until they forgot all about the past and the future, but the rest of him was too wary now.
"Kindness and love are not often the portion of bastards or blank-shield soldiers," he said, helping her to his feet.
"But—"
"We said before we would let our pasts alone, pet, and we should do just that. Come on. We'll have a roof over our heads tonight if the MacRaes have not delayed us too terribly."
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chapter 16
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Elizabeth hadn't been paying attention when Reade said that they would have a roof over their heads that night. So she was startled when they came around a bend in the road and instead of more forested hills, they found a small town nestled in a green valley. After a few nights under the open sky, any town would have looked welcoming.
“This is Briarlin,” Reade said, glancing up at her. “It's Scottish to the core, so perhaps you don't want to mention that you're from Ayr.”
“But... Ayr's hardly English.”
Reade laughed.
“Hardly good enough for them. Do you want a room at the inn tonight?”
Elizabeth glared at him.
“You must know that I do.”
“Thought so. Stay as quiet as you can, and don't look shocked when I tell them all that we're husband and wife.”
“Husband and wife? Are you serious?”
“It's what I told them when we were still in Ayr, so it's not even a new lie. But yes. That's what I'm going to say because my coin isn't going to last forever.”
Elizabeth wasn't sure that was all Reade was considering because she saw a slight grin whisk over his face, but then he looked as serious as he ever did.
“But... can't we just tell them we're brother and sister?”
At that, Reade turned to face her, a look of pure skepticism on his face.
“If that's what you truly wish to do, we can, but I'm going to leave the explanations to you.”
“Explanations—”
Elizabeth shut her mouth abruptly, because no matter what she thought about it, Reade was right. The truth was that she could not guarantee that there would not be another incident, another moment where she landed in Reade's arms and felt as if all the weight had gone out of her body. She couldn't plan for it, and that meant that she could not prevent it. That might mean that somewhere in the night to come, she would have to explain to some suspicious innkeeper or horrified maid why she and her brother were locked in what looked like a very un-sibling-like embrace.
“I see you take my meaning.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, I do. Husband and wi
fe, it is.”
Reade's eyes went soft, and he smiled up at her with a sweetness that was almost wistful.
“Does the idea of it horrify you so, lass? Would it be such a shocking comedown in the world for you?”
For a moment, it was as if all the breath had been knocked from her body. The answer that rose up in her was a bright and brilliant surge of pure need and wonder. Was there a world where she and Reade could be together, where things would be simple with no chasing uncles or politics to keep them apart?
Elizabeth swallowed, because there was no way in the world that Reade was being at all serious.
"You're making fun of me, and I don't like it. Just... just stop."
For a moment, she thought that Reade wouldn't, but then he looked at her a little more closely and nodded.
"All right. You're tense enough without my needling at you. I'll save it for when we're back on the road."
"Don't do it then, either!"
"Ah, lass, but what's life without some fun? Now pipe down on the squawking, or someone in town will hear us, and then they'll want to see me quiet you."
Elizabeth's shoulders hunched up, and she swallowed hard. She had been on the road with Reade, and he had been so kind. She had somehow allowed herself to forget the violence that might be employed between men and women, and she felt suddenly vulnerable.
"Just... just don't hit me too hard, all right?"
Reade looked at her with a mixture of shock and horror.
"Lass, I was only going to say that I was going to shut your mouth with a kiss. By heaven, what kind of terrible rookery did you live in before?"
She would have replied, but then they passed a couple with a trio of fair-haired children in tow, and they both quieted.
Elizabeth was relieved to see the inn, a slightly ramshackle but wholly respectable building, come in to view. It was called the Blue Lion, though the painting on the hanging sign looked more like a rather blueberry-colored dog.
They were greeted at the door by a shout of welcome from the innkeeper.
Claimed By The Highlander (The Highlands Warring Clan Mactaggarts Book 1) Page 8