Chapter 22
Loki shied nervously at the darkening clouds and the brilliance of a distant crack of lightning.
His gloved hand keeping a firm grip on the reins, Ruark soothed the horse as he awaited a man to catch up to him.
He’d seen him from a distance, a small speck against a turbulent sky.
Ruark had been twice to the gatehouse looking for Duncan and thought the rider might be he.
Duncan’s continued absence weighed heavily on Ruark, and he was not in the most restrained of moods, having spent the last three days searching for his uncle to talk about what Hereford had told Ruark, which was beginning to prove a fruitless endeavor.
Yesterday, Angus told him that Duncan was not with the others bringing in sheep from the northern pastures as he had first thought. Today he had sent Colum to Hawick to speak to the coroner who supposedly had viewed the bodies of both Ruark’s father and Kathleen’s husband.
Angus approached and, seeing Ruark, reined in his horse. “A bit restless are ye, lad,” he quipped as his eyes narrowed on the sky. “Out on an evening like this.”
Ruark looked beyond the wild glen, then across the fells. “Aye, that I am. Are you not supposed to be escorting McBain and my wife to the village today?”
He scratched his heavy beard. “They returned some hours ago. Ye have no’ been back yet?”
Ruark told Angus to return to Stonehaven and thumped Loki into a gallop. He would be late returning home that night. Aside from the quick trip to look over the new foals yesterday morning, Ruark had spent little time at Stonehaven.
For the last three days, Ruark had settled into a routine of normalcy as much as was possible with Rose in the adjoining chambers and him playing the celibate monk.
His wife had gone about her business as mistress of Stonehaven, overseeing Mary’s duties during her absence. He barely saw her unless it was late at night and he stood in the doorway between her chambers and his, trying to remember all the reasons why he should turn away.
And so he kept himself occupied learning what it meant to be Stonehaven’s laird.
Yesterday he had gone with Angus to look over the new foals and discuss next year’s acquisitions.
Before that, it had been the barley fields that occupied him, and learning that some of the fields had not seen crops planted last spring.
Tomorrow he would go south to the mill on the river and meet the foreman.
After a while Ruark quit thinking. The air was cool and crisp, as heady as rum punch as he rode Loki across the field.
He rode up on the lodge, his gloved hands keeping a firm grip on the reins as he dismounted in front of Rose’s school.
The scent of larkspur and juniper mixed with the smell of earth and rain and familiar memories as Ruark looked up at the high roof.
All but the watchman had left for the evening, leaving Ruark to walk the empty rooms in the fading light of the day, freshly painted with whitewash and windows newly glazed and the smell of plaster in his nostrils.
He was impressed with his young wife’s accomplishment.
The building would make a fine school, and he felt pride knowing Rose was responsible.
Ruark walked around the grounds. The wind caught his hair.
Dusk had left the countryside bathed in the deep magenta that mixed with the swirl of dark clouds as if the tempest came from within him.
His head came around at the sound of a horse.
He looked to where he had left Loki hobbled and grazing on a patch of grass.
It wasn’t until he was nearly upon the stallion that he saw the second horse hobbled nearby.
Rose stood beneath the branches of a large oak looking at him, her hand gripping her copper hair to keep it from whipping the air around her.
She wore a cloak over a gown, the color of the surrounding tempest.
And he walked to where she stood, the sudden sharp stab of desire worse than when he had seen her dancing at the bonfire.
Worse even than last night, when he had returned home late to find her asleep on the settee in his library, the lamp burning low on the table beside her, a book upon her chest as if she had been trying to stay awake and wait for him.
He had carried her to bed and she had not even awakened when he set her beneath the covers.
He stopped just beneath the branches.
“Angus said he saw you coming this way,” she said.
“You were following me.”
She made the smallest nod. Neither took a step toward the other though he could feel the pull between them.
“I have always considered myself judicious and balanced in my outlook,” she said. “Quite above it all. I do not know about the kind of love hailed by poets. No one in my life has ever born witness to such.”
Her voice wavered. “I only know that ever since I found the puzzle box in the abbey’s crypt with the ring inside, my life has not been the same, almost as if a hole opened in my heart.
Mrs. Simpson warned me that I was tampering with something beyond my ken.
Yet, I opened the box without fully understanding the power. My heart is like that box.
“Until you, I had never looked at a man and felt anything beyond a need to exercise patience. Even you have tried mine immensely.
“Until you, I had never gone to sleep dreaming of some handsome face I might have glimpsed in the village or awakened feeling lost and confused, wondering if my heart would stop in my chest, it beat so soundly and painfully in panic. Until you, I had never known what ’tis like to know I would lay down my body to protect yours.
I would do so for many, Jack, Mrs. Simpson, Friar Tucker—these people are my family.
But I do not awaken in the morning with this feeling that if anything should happen to one of them I would rather die than live another day alone. ”
She scraped the heel of her palm across her cheek.
“If this is love, then I love you so much it frightens me into wanting to run away as far as I can. Every time I look outside my bedroom window, I want to run back to the abbey where I once felt safe. To allow something so powerful into my heart and my soul scares me as nothing ever has. Does this manner of cowardice make me a self-contained, ignorant girl? Aye, probably. I am quite proficient in thinking only of myself.”
His hands flexed. He had no defenses against the surge of emotions that trapped his words in his throat.
“I have missed you,” she whispered.
His heart was pounding so loudly it sounded like an ocean’s roar in his ears.
Before she could say another word, draw another breath, his mouth covered hers.
His hands glided from her hips to her neck and cupped her face.
A low moan escaped him. In answer, her slender arms rose around his neck and she pressed her body against him, drinking in his kiss, and he never realized just how sensitive his tongue was, how it could distinguish so vividly the textures of her mouth.
Above them, wind gusted through the branches.
Closing a fist in her hair, he drew her back. The intensity of her eyes was a caress. “I have missed you as well, love.”
He looked up at the sky to measure the clouds and need to get the horses inside. “Come.” He grabbed her hand as the first plop of heavy rain fell. “We may not want shelter from the storm. But the horses do.”
The stable had stone floors and stone walls much like the one at Stonehaven. Straw littered the floor. A door and window balanced each end with stalls in between. The slatted window near the pitch of the thatch roof let in the early-evening air mixed with sounds of the storm.
Up in the hayloft, Ruark and Rose lay on her cloak in a cozy nest made warm by the rasp of their bodies and the measured tempo of their breathing.
Her dress was somewhere behind them in a crumpled heap, near his shirt and boots that lay like crumbs leading to where they had finally fallen in the straw.
“Have you ever made love up here?” Rose lay with her legs wrapped around Ruark’s thighs, his weight resting on his elbows as he pulled back to look into her face.
He chuckled against her lips. “Pray tell, why that question now?”
“You seem to be familiar with the stable and this loft in particular. And I find I am jealous of any woman from your past.”
Her petticoats cradled her head, pale against the spread of her hair. He brushed his lips against hers. “Nay, love. You are the first.”
With a subtle deepening of her sirenlike smile, she came back for a second taste of his lips and lingered. “I like being the first,” she said as he settled his hips more firmly against hers, knowing the tension inside him was because of her.
The inevitable effect of her words spread through him like liquid heat, and he was no longer content just to feel her. He drew back and thrust.
She gasped slightly when he moved. Their kiss deepened into a luxurious and mutual exchange that crowded all other thoughts from his mind, until only their breathing filled the small space in the loft.
Until it was she and him and the rumble of thunder above their heads.
He rolled onto his back, taking her with him, her body sheathing him, even as her hands braced her weight against his chest.
A low moan escaped her as he cupped her breasts, swirling his tongue around the sensitive ruched flesh of her nipples.
Instinctively, she arched her back so that her breasts rose to meet his caress.
He slid his hands into the silken tangle of her hair and brought her mouth down to his, parting her lips under the growing pressure of his, nibbling, seeking the response from her that was burning in him.
He found it. Her fingers wound in his hair.
He slid both palms down her shoulders over her waist and hips.