Chapter 15
He laid her down on the great bed as if she might shatter in his hands, and she let him, which she would think on later and be ashamed of.
The room was warm. A fire had been built up high in the hearth, and the bed was vast and dark and smelled of him, of leather and cold air and the particular clean warmth of his skin.
She lay in the middle of it in her ruined wedding gown and watched her husband of three hours move around the room, taking care of her.
He brought water. He found a cloth, wet it, crouched at the side of the bed, and pressed it with a gentleness that did not suit his great scarred hands to the bruise blooming purple on her arm where Dougal Ross had gripped her.
He drew the torn shoulder of her gown closed and pinned it with his silver brooch so that she was decent. He did all of it without one word, his dark head bent, his jaw clenched tight.
“Why…” Olivia said into the quiet. “Why are ye bein’ kind to me?”
He looked up. The firelight caught the scar, and the dark eyes, and the grim, tired, beautiful ruin of his face.
“Ye’re me wife, lassie,” he said, as if that were the answer to every question that had ever been asked since the creation of the world.
And some wall in Olivia, held up with both bare hands since the day a letter dropped from her fingers in a hall at Blythe, simply gave way beneath her.
And then it came unbidden.
The yard at Blythe. The gray morning. The wet, dreadful ease of it.
A blade going into a man the way a knife went into fruit, and her father folding down into the mud, and this man standing over him with the same face and nothing on it.
Nothing at all. She had built six months of hatred on that nothing.
She had seen it again tonight. The very same nothing.
He opened a man’s belly in his own hall, and his face didnae change.
He passed the dirk to Alastair and asked for the fiddles.
That is what he is. That is the thing I swore I’d never forget, and I have been sittin’ in a warm room lettin’ him wash the blood off me arm as if he were a different creature entirely.
Olivia made herself look at him. At the tired ruin of him crouched at her feet with a bloodied cloth in his hand.
He isnae a different creature. He’s the same one. He killed me faither with that face.
And the thing that ought to frighten me, the thing that ought to send me screamin’ from this room, is that I ken exactly why he did it that night. He did it because a man put his hands on me.
God forgive me. God forgive me, I am nae frightened at all.
That was the whole horror of it, and the whole truth.
The monster had come out of him again, in her defense, with her name on it.
And instead of running from the room, she had let him carry her up the stairs, and let him kneel, and let him tend her, and something in her that she did not recognize and had no name for had gone quiet and warm and unafraid.
She was not appalled by him. She was appalled by herself.
The wall came down.
She reached up and cupped his hard jaw in both her hands and kissed him.
For a moment, for one burning moment, he let her. His mouth opened under hers, and a sound broke out of him, low and helpless and wanting. His hand came up to fist in her loosened hair, and she felt the whole leashed strength of him strain toward her like a hound come to the end of its chain.
And then he tore himself back.
He was breathing hard. So was she. He had taken just a step back from the bed and stood there with his fists clenched at his sides, terrible longing written plainly all over his face.
He shook his head once.
“Nay,” he said roughly. “Nae like this.”
“Ye…” Olivia’s face flamed. “Ye stopped.”
“Aye, I stopped.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Ye’ve had the worst night of yer life. Ye’re frightened and grateful, and ye arenae thinkin’ straight. If I take what ye are offerin’ me now, ye’ll hate both of us come mornin’, and ye’ll be right to.”
“Ragnall…”
His eyes burned into hers. “When ye come to me, lassie—and ye will—it’ll nae be in thanks for a thing any decent man would have done. It’ll be because ye want me. Me. The man, nae the rescue. I will have all of it, or I will have none of it. I am a greedy bastard that way.”
The tenderness of it was unbearable, and so was the shame, and the two of them together were more than she could carry.
She had kissed him with a dead man’s blood still on his cuff. She had known it and done it anyway, and he had put her aside as if she were a cup he had decided not to drink from.
So she did what she had always done with what she could not bear. She went for the jugular.
“Ye killed a man tonight,” she said. “At yer own weddin’.
Ye opened him up like a fish, and ye didnae even flinch while ye did it.
And ye stand there talkin’ to me of wantin’, of decency, with his blood nae yet dry on yer hand.
” Her voice was shaking. “Killin’ comes awfully easy to ye, does it nae?
It’s always the first answer ye reach for. ”
His face hardened. “Is that what ye think of it?”
“It’s what I’ve seen.”
“Then hear what ye’ve nae seen.” He came back to the bed, not gently, and braced a hand on either side of her so that she was caged between his arms and the firelight, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from him.
“Killin’ the man who broke me sister was justice. Killin’ the man who put his hands on me wife, before me whole clan, on the one night when all of them were debatin’ whether ye’ll live or die under this roof, was a message. If I had to do it again, I’d do it slower.”
“I am nae sure this is true.”
“Olivia, listen to me.” His voice dropped low. “Ye come from a clan they’ve been taught from the cradle to hate. Do ye ken what becomes of ye in a hall full of drunk and grievin’ men if their Laird lets the first hand laid on ye go unpunished? Do ye?”
Olivia’s mouth had gone dry. “They’d… they’d think of me the way I think of ye,” she whispered.
“Worse,” he said. “Far worse. And ye’d nae have lived out the month.”
“I didnae think of that,” she admitted, her voice very small.
“Nay.” The hardness cracked, and a look almost like a smile, terrible and tired, tugged at the scarred side of his mouth. “Because ye only ever think on the one side of yer story, lassie. It’s yer worst habit. And yer dearest.”
They were too close. She became aware of it all at once, the cliff-edge nearness of him, the drop and the pull of it both.
He was braced over her, caging her in, and she could feel the whole long, hard line of him where his hip pressed against her thigh, could feel exactly and undeniably what holding himself back was costing him. Her breath went ragged in her throat.
His eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there.
“Olivia,” he said, and the sound of her name in his rough, low voice nearly undid her.
He bent his head. She felt his warm breath fan her lips, felt him hovering on the very knife-edge of it, and she did not pull away, God help her. She lifted her chin that last small fraction to meet him.
“Ye must be me punishment,” he breathed against her mouth, “for every sin I’ve ever committed. I swear to God, lassie, ye’ll be the one who finally breaks me. I will lose me mind over ye, and go gladly.”
He suddenly pushed himself up off the bed and turned away from her, his shoulders tense and rigid, trying to master his emotions through sheer force.
“Sleep.” His voice had flattened back into the Laird’s voice, the one that gave away nothing at all.
“I will go down and show the clan that their Laird hasnae been struck dead by the sight of his marriage bed. Bar the door behind me if it eases ye. There’s nay one left in this castle who will trouble ye until I return. ”
He was gone before she could find one single word, the heavy door clicking shut behind him.
Olivia lay alone in the vast dark bed that smelled of him, in her torn wedding gown with his silver brooch holding it closed over her heart, and pressed both hands flat to her chest.
She understood, with a dawning horror that was nearly worse than any grief, that she had wanted him to stay.
God forgive me, I wanted me own enemy to stay. What in the world is happenin’ to me?