Chapter 34
Caelan stared at his wife in perplexity. He was bolloxing it up; he wasn’t making himself clear. Clara was smiling, but he saw pain deep in her eyes. Why was her heart aching now, when he was telling her that she’d been wrong about Isla?
That the world had been wrong about his relationship with his first wife, and that Clara wouldn’t live in her shadow?
“How have I hurt you?”
he asked. “I did something wrong . . . What?”
Her smile wobbled. “It isn’t your fault.”
“You must tell me so I don’t do it again.”
“It was merely you thinking about Isla while having sex with me,”
she whispered.
“Making love,”
Caelan corrected her.
“It was entirely natural of you to compare us. It’s a shock to hear that you weren’t in love with Isla. Everyone thinks . . .”
As her voice dwindled away, Caelan couldn’t help scowling. “Sometimes I loathe living in this neck of the woods, and that’s a fact. The villagers think they know everything about me. They watch like hawks, waiting to winkle out an emotion they can chew over for a few months.”
“I’ve given them plenty to think about,”
Clara said. “Throwing myself over a cliff and all.”
“I threw myself after you,”
he pointed out.
“Thank you for saving my life,”
she said, as if prompted.
“I will always save your life, if I can,”
Caelan told her. “Always.”
“I heard you, up on the cliff, shouting to all those men that I was yours.”
She dimpled at him. “I was never happier to be a possession.”
“You were climbing down to me, not to save me, but because you thought I was dying.”
He swallowed hard. “You were coming to be with me so I wouldn’t be alone while I breathed my last.”
“Foolishly,”
she muttered. “Since you were safe and sound on the road.”
He couldn’t bear not touching her. He gathered her up and tipped them both backward on the bed so that he could prop himself on one elbow next to her. “Do you know what that means to me, Clara?”
“You’re honored,”
she said obediently. “You are flattered, and now you know how I feel about you, which is embarrassing, but I suppose—”
Caelan groaned low in his throat and cut her off with a kiss. He slung one of his legs over her hips, propped his elbows on either side of her head, and cupped his hands around her head . . . Telling himself all the while that she was safe and well and exactly where he wanted her to be. Their tongues lapped and lingered, a smoldering kiss that made desire spark in his blood.
“Open your eyes, darling,”
he whispered, his voice ragged. Butterfly eyelashes opened. “Terror roared through me when I saw you down on that slope. I’ve never felt that. Ever.” He captured her mouth again, trying to tell her everything without putting it into words.
But Clara being Clara, she kissed him for a minute, drew away, and said, “What do you mean?”
“My marriage was lived out within the myth of a perfect love story,”
he said bluntly. “It was important to Isla that everyone around us continued to believe. But here? In the castle? We had nothing in common. She spent her days dreaming of being Marie Antoinette, and I’m a simple Scottish laird, when you get down to it. I had the money to make the castle over the way she wanted, but I couldn’t change myself.”
“Let me guess: she wanted you to wear clothing while fishing,”
Clara said, obviously trying to make him feel better.
He refused to smile. He wanted to get the truth out and never discuss it again. “After a month or two of marriage, Isla confessed that she had decided to marry me at the age of nine not because she adored me—which would have been absurd at that age anyway—but because I was the highest she could achieve, since her parents didn’t have the money or bloodlines to give her a Glasgow debut.
“We may have slept in the same room, but we rarely talked,”
he continued, voice even. “Sometimes she would tell me details about the French queen, usually after she managed to find a new book. I would ask her for advice with the crofters, but she didn’t care for them.”
“‘Let them eat cake’?”
Clara asked, eyes large.
“She didn’t care what they ate, as long as they didn’t come too close, or smell too strongly, or appear too needy. My father was a tight man who had left the crofters with crumbling houses and little to wear. I was trying to make things right. It didn’t interest her.”
Clara buried her hand in his hair, but what helped most was the sympathy in her eyes. Not sympathy for an emotion he didn’t feel, but sympathy for his wretched marriage, to call a spade a spade.
“When Isla fell ill, I put my head in to say goodbye, but frankly, she often enjoyed a day or two lounging in bed, complaining of feeling weak, bathed in perfume and sipping French cognac but never Scottish whisky. I left for Inverness, and by the time I returned two days later, she had slipped into unconsciousness.”
He paused for a moment. “I was deeply sorry that Isla died, and I was very moved by her parents’ grief. I never claimed to be heartbroken, but people awarded me the label and pointed to my every action as evidence. If I rubbed my eye, I was fighting tears. If I drank a glass of whisky, I was drinking away my sorrows. We’re a nation of overly dramatic people.”
Clara stretched up to kiss his chin. “That sounds incredibly difficult.”
“I stopped having a pint at the pub to deny the crofters food for more rumors, but that gave rise to the claim that I was so hobbled by grief that I refused to leave CaerLaven. Whatever I did, they assumed I was a broken man, that I let the castle go to rack and ruin because I was broken.”
Her eyes met his, clear and direct, blue-green, like the loch in summer. “If you weren’t grieving, Caelan, then why did the castle become so dilapidated?”
He moved his shoulders uncomfortably. “I didn’t pay attention.”
“I have an idea.”
“Not the princess and the brambles again?”
“I think you were punishing yourself for not loving your wife enough. Which isn’t fair, Caelan, because I don’t think she loved you, either. Not the way you deserve to be loved—and desired.”
His breath caught. “The way you love me?”
Her smile nestled into his heart. “Yes, and desire you too. I came along, unable to hide my lust for your manly thighs—”
“It wasn’t just that, Clara, no matter what you think. You know what you feel, and you don’t disguise it, the way I’ve done for years.”
“There’s no disguising my emotions when you’re as impetuous as I am,”
she admitted. “If I had the presence of mind to think ahead, I wouldn’t have thrown myself off a cliff.”
“You weren’t the only one who pitched themselves off that cliff. We could have thrown ropes down to you, and you could have eased a loop over your shoulders, and we could have drawn you up. The slope wouldn’t have collapsed, except I crashed into it like a man possessed on the way down to you.”
“But perhaps it would have,”
Clara said, gulping. “How could I get a rope over my shoulders and hold onto that root?”
“You were holding onto a root?”
He felt the blood drain from his face.
She nodded. “Thank you for coming for me.”
“I came because I’m head over heels in love with you.”
He said it flatly, his eyes on hers. He had to make sure that she understood that Isla was far in the background.
“What?”
“Madly in love.”
He could hear the deep truth in his own voice. “When I saw you clinging to the cliff, I knew that I’d rather die with you than stay behind. If we had gone down in that mudslide, as long as I had you in my arms, I would have been—not content, but accepting. You by yourself? No. That was unacceptable.”
“Oh,”
she whispered, her beautiful lower lip trembling. “I felt like that too, but then I felt so reckless and stupid. If I had waited or asked, they would have told me you weren’t in the carriage.”
“If you weren’t so impetuous, you would never have claimed to be Mrs. Potts and jumped in a carriage to Scotland.”
“Or slapped the heir to the throne, which sent me on the way to that carriage,”
she said, one side of her mouth quirking up.
“I knew within a minute of your arrival at the loch that you were never leaving the Highlands. My decision was as impetuous as yours; I simply kept it to myself. You stated exactly what you wanted—a castle and books—and I decided on the spot that I would do anything to convince you to stay with me.”
“I do love the castle,”
she said, dimpling.
“And me. You wanted me, the man I am, not the perfect hero of some storybook, though you have arguably read more of those than anyone in this country. Even with all the sweet-talking men with smooth foreheads you’ve read about, you didn’t want that. You wanted me: naked, hairy, standing in a loch.”
She was turning pink. “Well, that’s true.”
Caelan dropped his head so he could kiss her neck. “Do you know what a gift that is? To be wanted for oneself? I was in a frenzy when you kept planning to jaunt around the Highlands with Mr. Cobbledick. I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking of some other Scottish bastard with a castle—there are hundreds of us—getting a glimpse of you.”
She began giggling, and it felt as if starlight was floating through the room. “You thought they’d see a cloud of tumbleweed hair and throw themselves at my feet?”
“I would have,”
Caelan said. “You know when I landed that fish and walked out of the loch, the first time we met?”
Clara nodded.
“I wanted to kiss you,”
he said, his voice aching. “I’ve never experienced such an impetuous desire in my life.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I knelt before Isla in her parents’ sitting room because that’s what she wanted: the laird at her feet. But you, Clara . . . I had the chance to marry you, and I leaped at it. I forgot about giving you a ring.”
He picked up her hand and kissed it. “It’s because I’m a fool who doesn’t think about jewelry, love, not anything to do with my vows. I meant every word of them.”
He thought he saw trust in her smile.
“We’ll go to Inverness and pick out a ring. I’d happily go on my knees. It’d be Caelan, not the laird, at your feet, begging for your hand.”
She stopped smiling, and tears welled up in her eyes. “Truly?”
“If you said no,”
he told her, “I wouldn’t accept it. Now that you’ve been down a cliff for me, and I for you?” He bent his head and nipped her bottom lip. “If you leave the castle, so do I. If you move to Inverness, my carriage will follow yours. If you find another laird, you can expect to see him dead in the square.”
Clara giggled. “You’d never kill a man, Caelan.”
It was just as well that she didn’t know what he was capable of. He would kill another man, and quickly, if that man injured Clara. Without remorse.
“If you hadn’t gotten the better of that feckless English prince, I’d have gone down to London and taken him out with one shot from a moving carriage.”
“Boastful,”
she said, her eyes loving him. The warmth of it spread over his skin like sunlight.
“You were so sick,”
he said, putting kisses on her cheeks, her eyelids, her forehead. “I cannae take it when you’re sick, Clara, I truly can’t.” His lips slid to hers, and she put her arms around his neck.
“You didn’t leave me when I was ill, did you?”
she whispered. “You do love me.”
“I couldn’t leave you in case someone made a mistake caring for you,”
he admitted. “The village doubtless thinks I’m mad. ’Twas a shock for Mrs. Gillan. She was stunned to hear I’d washed your hair.”
“I nearly died of whooping cough when I was a child,”
Clara blurted out.
He breathed a curse.
“My parents moved the whole household to the country after I was diagnosed so that no one else would catch it. My nanny and a maid stayed behind with me, but the maid ran away the next day.”
“But children die of whooping cough, not adults,”
Caelan said, astounded.
“I still remember how empty the house sounded, and the fact that everyone thought I was about to die. That’s one reason why I launched off that cliff. I would never leave you to die alone.”
Then she kissed him, and that kiss—that kiss was everything his first marriage wasn’t.
If Isla could see him now, not having bathed since the day before, lying naked on top of a woman, she would shudder. She had loved him, though. Perhaps she would smile and be grateful it wasn’t her lying beneath him.
But Clara? Clara pulled at him until their bodies aligned, and then her eyelids drooped, and their kiss turned frantic and hungry. Sometime later, he pushed up her right leg, and they both looked down to where they were almost joined.
“Please,”
Clara begged. “Please, Caelan.”
“You’re asking me to make love,”
he told her. “Not that we haven’t been doing it all along, but I wasn’t man enough to call it that before.”
“I didn’t mind when you called it fucking,”
his wife said, demure and wicked all at once.
His control snapped, and he thrust into her over and over until their bodies were sweaty and they were panting in unison. Finally he pulsed inside her, and she screamed. Loudly.
Thank God he’d banished the servants the night before. The thought was dim, because Caelan was still shuddering, both hands wrapped around his wife’s round arse so that he could hold her body up and make love to her in the way she loved best . . .
Take her.
Make her his.
“I love you,”
he said after he dropped back down to the bed, one arm around her sweaty body to stop her from going anywhere. “Don’t ever get a fever again. No more cliffs, either.”
“I promise,”
she said obediently.
His little wife was never obedient—more the opposite: forcing him to make beds and fall in love and swing down a rope like a maniac.
“I loved you at first sight,”
he told her, to make sure she knew the truth. “I didn’t want to accept it, because I’d gone off the idea of love. I told you on the way home from the pass, but you were already sick. Since you love literature, I told you by way of a poem. ‘So fair art thou, my bonnie lass.’”
“You said that after our wedding,”
Clara said, dimpling at him.
“I told you the rest on the way home five days ago. ‘So deep in luve am I, And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry.’”
After Caelan mopped her tears, he said, “I think we’ll stay in the tower for a few days. By ourselves.”
“I can finish reading you Jacqueline’s adventures,”
Clara offered.
“I never knew sweat could taste so sweet,”
Caelan said, licking across her breast to her nipple. “Yours is sweet and salty and tastes like Clara.”
Her knees came up on either side of his hips as if she was made for him. She was so wet that he slid home, his heart raw with emotion and splintered by feeling.
“You’ve broken me,”
Caelan said into her ear.
Clara’s hands slid down his back and landed on his arse. “You don’t feel broken,”
she said, laughter in her eyes, arching up to meet him. “I suspect you could pull yourself together long enough to . . .” Then she put her lips to his ear and told him about things that she wanted that had nothing to do with a castle or books.
Everything to do with him.