Chapter 30
Afternoon sun was pouring into the bedchamber when Clara woke from a nap a week later. The castle was quiet. Hopefully no one would see her tangled hair, wrinkled gown, and missing stays.
Blissfully, the kitchen was empty. She pottered about, pushing baskets of vegetables in the pantry into a straight line. Three large tins of tea stood on one of the shelves, and freshly baked bread was wrapped in a snowy-white cloth. A rich lamb stew was bubbling on the stove.
She cut herself a slice of bread and cheese and went out the courtyard door. Caelan was sitting at the table, so concentrated on his writing that he didn’t hear her footsteps.
“Hello,”
she said, walking over to him.
He looked up and smiled. His expression was heart-soothing as he pulled her down to sit next to him on the stone bench, leaning over to take a big bite of her bread. “Turns out Maisie the scullery maid knows how to bake.”
“Have they left for the day?”
He nodded. “I promised Elsbeth that I’d braid your hair at bedtime.”
“Do you know how?”
she asked, startled.
“I learned when my sister was six. After Mother died, Fiona used to crawl into my bed and sleep with me. If her hair wasn’t braided, I’d roll on it and wake her up.”
“Didn’t you have a nanny?”
“On and off. My father was difficult to live with and had trouble keeping servants. Luckily, Fiona began escaping over to the McIntyre estate.”
“Before she married Rory?”
“Long before, by the age of ten. Sometimes Fiona wouldn’t come home for weeks at a time, but my father scarcely noticed. Or he noticed,”
Caelan corrected himself, “but he didn’t care much. She was a girl who would never bring in a big dowry because she wasn’t beautiful, to his mind.”
“That’s awful,”
Clara said, putting down her bread. “She is beautiful. Her mouth looks as if it was made for laughing. Plus her hair is gorgeous, and she’s so tall and strong.”
He wound an arm around her waist, picked up her bread, and had another large bite. “My father was a fool.”
“I’d be sorry to agree, but the evidence seems to suggest you’re right,”
Clara said.
“When our children come along, they will all be beautiful, no matter if they have turnip noses.”
“Or hair that resembles a cat hit by a lightning bolt,”
Clara agreed.
“Did someone say that about your hair?”
She shook her head. “My hair was always pinned to my scalp, with just enough curls showing to allow me to collect compliments about angels. That is what I privately think about my hair. I’m not very elegant when I’m by myself.”
She pushed it back over one shoulder.
He tipped up her face. “I adore your catlike hair.”
His lips ghosted down her cheeks, slipped sideways to her lips. The kiss was not gentle and not slow, and yet Clara didn’t care; the moment his tongue caressed hers, heat burst over her body, and her breath became a gasp, then a whimper.
Caelan turned sideways and brought her onto his lap, pulling her back against his chest before he spread his legs, pulling hers apart at the same time.
“What are you doing?”
Clara whispered, shifting her hips because she could feel him throbbing against her arse.
He laughed, the sound rough and joyous, floating freely. “No one is here but us, so we can do whatever we want.”
Clara registered that her husband would never want servants within shouting distance.
“Someday we’ll have children, and we won’t be able to do this in the courtyard. We should enjoy it while we can.”
Caelan tugged up her gown until they could see her pale legs on top of his bronzed ones. His hands closed around her inner thighs and slid upward, slow and caressing.
“Oh my goodness,”
Clara whispered. She couldn’t look away from his brawny callused fingers lingering on her legs.
“How can you say you’re not elegant?”
he asked in her ear, his voice a rasp. “Your thighs have the most sensual curve I’ve seen in my life. And here—” He ran a hand under her bunched-up skirt and tapped her intimately. A surprised cry escaped her lips as his simple touch sent warmth down her legs. He did it again, and again, until she was breathing hard. Her bones felt as if they’d curved into his body.
She could dimly hear a bird in the apple tree singing itself to sleep, but mostly she was focused on the delicious heat that was flickering to her toes with every tap.
“I can’t believe you’re doing that,”
she said, dizzy with desire, arching back against his chest, her legs easing wider, head against his shoulder. “More,” she whispered.
His whole hand licked between her legs, and then he stuck a finger in his mouth and sucked. “I love the way you taste. The way you sound. The curve of your thigh. The way you throw yourself into pleasure.”
He put his other hand on one of her breasts, and the first returned to languid strokes. Clara stopped thinking altogether, her body chasing a glow that began in her legs and spread from the pressure of his fingers. One minute she was incoherently feeling as if she were drowning in sensation, and the next fire rushed up from her toes until she cried out and jerked against his hand.
Afterward, it took long moments for her heart to return to a steady rhythm. She put her legs together and turned to the side, registering that he was so hard. “Shall we make love?”
she whispered, amending the question quickly: “I mean, shall we have sex?”
“If you move your delicious arse off my lap, I’ll probably die.”
She giggled. “That’s oddly specific.”
She leaned her cheek against his chest and then wiggled her bottom, for the fun of it. Also because he felt good.
“You want me,”
Caelan said roughly. “You want me, don’t you? You want my cock. You want me to lick you and fuck you.”
His voice was so intense, and his words so vulgar, that Clara instantly thought a proper lady would demur.
“I—”
He didn’t wait for a reply. “You want me to spread your legs and take you to bed,”
he rumbled. “Or take you here in the courtyard, because I think you’re throbbing, aching, waiting for me to touch you.”
It was true, but also wildly irritating. She couldn’t figure out why. Was it because ladies weren’t supposed to feel this way? Or if they did feel this way, it should never, ever have been spoken aloud, let alone celebrated?
“You’re making me feel unladylike.”
She tugged her skirts lower on her legs.
“You aren’t a lady,”
he said. “Not you, Clara. You’re an adventurer, remember?”
Well, that was true, but something about all of this was making her uneasy, and the sensual excitement in her body drained away. She stirred and then made herself stand up, grabbing the edge of the table because her knees felt weak.
She shook down her skirts and sat back down on the bench beside him. Caelan didn’t seem cross because she had removed her bottom from his lap.
Instead, he looked sympathetic. “Is it hard to hear the truth aloud?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
She fiddled with her skirts and pushed her hair behind her shoulders again. “It’s the way you said it,” she burst out. “As if . . . You weren’t comparing me, were you?”
It was a stupid thought that had leapt into her head, but his eyes changed. His whole face changed, and her heart sank. “Oh, no,”
she whispered. “You were. To Isla.” It wasn’t a question.
Because of course she was a strumpet, and Isla had been a lady. Her face burned with humiliation.
Caelan swallowed so hard that she saw his Adam’s apple bobble. “I was thinking of Isla . . . Well, not as such, but—”
“You were thinking of her,”
Clara said curtly.
His face stilled, and his brows drew together. “I didn’t mean to.”
“But you did. You were comparing us. I understand that Isla was far more ladylike than I am.”
Clara smoothed her skirts over her thighs. She was desperately trying to be reasonable. Caelan hadn’t been criticizing her, after all. It wasn’t his fault that his comments aligned with her mother’s dismay at her eccentricity, her large breasts, her unruly hair, all the wrongness of her.
None of that was his fault.
Caelan’s eyes were so dark that she couldn’t read them. “It wasn’t meant as a criticism.”
“I understand,”
Clara said. “I gather you meant it as a compliment. Well, not exactly a compliment.”
“It’s about me, not you,”
he cut in.
“What?”
“Isla fell in love with me when she was eleven, and I was thirteen.”
“I know that,”
Clara said, desperate not to hear any more about the greatest love story of the Highlands. Maybe some other moment, when she didn’t feel so raw. “Mrs. Gillan told me.”
“She was very young and very ladylike. I had no interest—until I came back from university, and there she was, the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.”
Clara ground her teeth. Why hadn’t she held her tongue?
“My sister was in love with Rory, and Isla was her closest friend. Our parents had passed away, and before I turned around, everything had been settled. We were all in love.”
A breeze rattled over the courtyard, and a few blossoms landed in his hair and stuck there, like fallen stars. He was so handsome that Clara couldn’t breathe—or was she choked by the specter of Isla’s perfection, still haunting her husband’s heart? If she cried out “Please don’t go on, kiss me instead,”
he would know the truth: she was mortifyingly in love, easily as in love as Isla ever was—that is, if Isla felt as if every bone in her body would break if—
Well, if he died.
Her mind was rabbiting in circles, trying to imagine what he was thinking. Caelan was looking down at his hands. His bare hands. Had he worn a wedding ring after marrying Isla? After she’d died, what had he done with it? Was it hidden in a box somewhere in their home, or was it too painful a reminder for him to keep? Had he buried it with her ring or cast it into the loch? Clara felt so sick, she might throw up that bread and cheese that seemed so delicious a few minutes ago.
“Mrs. Gillan was rightly punctilious, and the two of us were prudish,”
Caelan said, looking up. “Fiona was forever running off giggling to meet Rory in a barn, but Isla and I—weren’t. Which was fine, absolutely fine, because Isla was only sixteen and so delicate. I was fascinated by how different she was from me. How ladylike.”
“Ah.”
The comparison was there to hand; who could expect him not to make it? Would he ever wear a ring again, or had the chances of that died with Isla too? She looked down at her own bare hands. Caelan seemed to have forgotten about giving her one to replace the old one.
“Our wedding night was difficult for both of us,”
Caelan said, his voice tired.
Clara had to bite her lip hard because of surprise and sadness. “I imagine it’s a shock for many ladies,”
she prompted after he sat silently for a few minutes, shoulders slumped.
“I have chest hair, thick thighs, and large private parts as you noticed.”
Clara nodded. “Isla was shocked?”
“Revolted, more like,”
Caelan said flatly. “She kept saying that if only I looked like her, it would be fine. But of course, I didn’t. I wasn’t soft and pink and all the rest of it. There’s nothing soft about me.”
“Oh,”
Clara breathed. “I’m so sorry, for both of you.”
“We’d been married three years, and people were beginning to wonder why she never quickened,”
he said, looking away. “That would never happen if two people sleep next to each other like a marble couple on a tomb.”
Clara frowned, trying to imagine such a tomb.
“The husband is in armor, and the wife holds a prayer book,”
Caelan said, his voice a dark rumble. “I might as well have worn armor to bed for all the interaction we had after the first few months.”
Clara reached out and gripped his hand.
“Isla adored the story of our love. She clung to me and kissed me in public. But in private? She was never unkind, but you can sense revulsion, can’t you? She hated the way I smelled, and she thought my muscles brutish and my tongue fleshy.”
Clara loved the way he smelled, even when he was sweaty and fishy and had the loch in his hair. “I’m sorry.”
“When you desire me, it goes to my head,”
Caelan said flatly.
“I can imagine,”
Clara said. “It must have been awful for you.” She hesitated, and then said it. “Heartbreaking, and then your heart broke again when she died.”
“Aye. I did love her, and she loved me.”
When Clara managed a smile, it felt like one of the more triumphant achievements of her life, right along with slapping Prince George with her reticule.
“I think I should dress,”
she said, standing up. “I promised Mrs. Gillan that I would visit her in the village today, and it’s already afternoon.” She hesitated and then leaned over and kissed her husband on the cheek.
Inside, she felt sick. What had happened to Caelan and Isla wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was fate. Fate had given Clara to a mother who couldn’t help comparing her to the better, more ladylike daughter she wished she had. And then fate went ahead and gave her to Caelan, to a man who compared her to the ladylike wife who died.
No, that wasn’t fair. He liked bedding her, even if she wasn’t the prettiest lass in all the Highlands. She would not allow herself to lapse into a morass of self-pity.
“I’m so sorry that you and Isla weren’t suited in that way,”
she said, to make certain that he knew she wasn’t bitter.
He nodded. “Must you go to the village? Elsbeth left stew for us on the stove.”
“Just for an hour,”
she said firmly.
“It’s not because you’re hurt?”
“I’m a grown woman, and I was well aware of your feelings for Isla before we married. Making—having sex is a delightful part of our married life, which is good. Of course.”
Caelan’s eyes had tightened, but she couldn’t tell whether that was because he was remembering Isla or thinking about his married life with Clara. Either way, she didn’t want to know.
“I’ll fetch Elsbeth, and we’ll leave from the stables,”
she said. Then she left, because that was something a grown woman could do. When Lady Vetry used to be disappointed, Clara had never been able to leave.
But as a wife, not a daughter?
She could turn her back and walk straight out of the house, grabbing her pink pelisse from a hook. Naturally it began raining when she was on the path, but by the time she was climbing into the coach, the coin-sized drops of water on her coat were already drying, and she had stopped shivering.
“You don’t have a bonnet,”
Elsbeth said. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”
“I would be grateful if you would pin up my hair,”
Clara said.
Elsbeth had begun carrying hairpins wherever she went. She instantly moved to sit on the seat beside her and started twisting and pinning. At some point, Clara might have to hire a personal maid, but the castle was small enough that Elsbeth was comfortable being housekeeper and maid.
When they were rattling over the high pass, Elsbeth said, “So, are you beginning to train the laird, my lady?”
“Aye,”
Clara said, using that word for the first time in her life. She was a Scotswoman now. She almost sounded like one.