4. ROSINA
Chapter four
ROSINA
She knew she shouldn’t be angry with him. She shouldn’t despise him as her mother had told her to. Yes, he had made her love him and then left her with his child in her belly, and that was the last time she had seen him until now.
But was that his fault? She had said the things that drove him away, although she had hoped he would see through her.
If he had sought her out before he left, if they had had some time alone without her mother’s ears and eyes, she could have told him then why she had behaved as she had.
She could have made him understand ... But he hadn’t come.
It only made her more convinced that he had been too immature for her.
Their union had been a game to him and he had quickly moved on to a new life and no doubt a new woman. He’d probably been relieved to do so.
When Ewen had climbed the tower wall to Elspit’s room, Rosina had been there, and she had heard from his own lips that he had lain with no woman since he’d left ten years ago.
He had kept himself for Elspit. Dugald had not done the same, but then she hadn’t expected him to.
She had rejected him in the cruellest of ways, and he had left her.
Being upset with his lack of fidelity was ridiculous of her, and unfair to Dugald.
Sometimes it felt as if her life was being lived under a cloud and she wanted so much to be free of it.
She wanted to laugh like Elspit, and love too.
She wanted to be the girl she was once long ago.
She wanted to be the girl she had been for Dugald because when he was with her the world had felt like a sunnier place.
“Mother, he is looking at you.”
Mary was seated beside her at one of the long tables in the great hall. The main meal was always taken there, and there had been times of poverty in the past when, if they did not eat with everyone else, they had not eaten at all.
Rosina looked up.
Dugald was watching her from across the room.
He was with his two brothers, Finlay and Callum.
Their father Hamish and Ewen sat at the table on the dais, but it seemed the three other Campbells had decided to share bread with their men.
It shouldn’t have surprised her. The Campbells had known what it was to be poor and badly treated.
“Mother,” Mary tugged at her sleeve. Rosina forced her eyes away from the man she had once loved so much that now she wondered if she had a heart left.
“What is it?”
“There are people saying ...” she bit her lip. “That that man is my father.”
Rosina went still. She had never spoken to Mary of the identity of her father except in the vaguest of terms, and whenever the subject came up she had simply said he had left, long ago.
Dugald returning had changed that. She should have been prepared but what with the overthrow of Tighe and then Ewen and Elspit’s wedding, she hadn’t thought.
Now she told herself that soon enough he would be gone again, and she would not need to worry that her daughter might grow fond of him.
“I ...” She shook her head. “We will speak of it later, Mary. Eat your food.”
The girl looked as if she might argue, but with a sigh picked up a piece of the coarse bread to scoop up the stew.
Rosina glanced up again and found Dugald still watching her.
She would have to talk to him and sooner rather than later.
Her heart fluttered and she refused to believe it was anticipation, or excitement.
Nothing like that. She could not afford to feel like that about him—there was too much at stake.
After the meal, when Mary had gone with Jeanette to their room, Rosina lingered, making some excuse about needing to speak to Elspit and the other ladies.
It was a lie and she felt guilty, but not guilty enough to respond to her mother’s suspicious gaze.
She had given up a great deal for Jeanette Gordon, and for many years she had burned with wrath and resentment, but she knew her mother had done what she thought best for her daughter and only child.
Being a mother herself, Rosina understood.
As the great hall emptied out, she saw that Dugald was standing by the fireplace, leaning against the mantel, the ashes from last night’s fire still mounded in the hearth.
The night was warm enough and they had not needed to light it.
Deliberately Rosina walked past him, catching his eye and nodding toward the curtain that led into a small ante room that was used for private meetings, or when they had an overflow of guests needing somewhere to sleep.
She wondered where Dugald slept at the Duke’s castle. Did he have a fine room of his own, where he had a different woman every night? Was he used to the best bed linen? Did a servant help him to dress every morning?
Rosina had barely stepped into the small room when he followed her, allowing the heavy swath of the curtain to fall after him.
They were alone, and he waited for her to speak.
That was something new about him—before he had always been full of words, teasing her, making her smile, keeping her mother’s bitter voice from invading her head.
When Dugald was with her there had been no room for anything but him.
Now, in the silence, her head felt full to bursting with so many memories, and she was struggling to remember why she was here.
“Breathe,” he murmured.
Startled she looked up into his eyes. “Mary has heard gossip that you are her father,” she said bluntly.
He raised his eyebrows. They were dark, like his hair, and the whiskers on his jaw had grown since yesterday.
He ran his hand over them with a raspy sound.
His eyes were tired, and his mouth was held tight as if he was keeping his feelings in.
This wasn’t the carefree boy she knew long ago and suddenly she missed him.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked in a clipped voice.
“Go back to your duke.”
He gave a laugh that wasn’t amused. “So you don’t have to face difficult conversations? I have a better idea. We will tell her the truth.”
“I don’t—”
“Too bad.” He took a step closer and he was so big, she only just prevented herself from backing away, but she refused to let him see she was intimidated by his size and his manner. This was Dugald, she reminded herself. Somewhere inside this man was the boy she had hand fasted and then sent away.
He leaned down and spoke quietly, but with that same authority she had heard in his voice when he insisted she move out of the cottage and into the castle.
“As my daughter and Ewen’s niece, Mary will have opportunities in life that the bastard daughter of a lady in waiting would never have had. Do you want to keep them from her?”
His words were brutal and Rosina swallowed. “I am a Gordon,” she began, repeating her mother’s words.
“You are a lady in waiting without lands or fortune, Rosina,” he said. “Whatever your family once was is long gone. In the past. You need to accept that and move on, or you will end up like Jeanette, old and bitter before your time.”
She knew he was right, she often thought the same herself, but she wasn’t going to admit it.
Instead Rosina returned to the subject they were here to discuss.
“You talk about all the things you can do for Mary, but I want to know if she will become a pawn. A chess piece in a game to be played between powerful men. I remember when I was her age I was already betrothed to a boy I barely knew. I don’t want my daughter to suffer such a fate. ”
Dugald scoffed. The sound made her so angry. Swiftly the heat in her blood rose to boiling point and she knew her face was flushed and her eyes glittering.
“Do you really think I would allow such a thing to happen to her?” he said, moving in, his voice dropping to a low growl. “Is that the sort of man you think I am?”
“I don’t know you,” she blurted out, anything to stop his advance. She couldn’t look away from his eyes.
“Don’t you?” he mocked. Dugald had never spoken to her like this.
Sometimes he had been bossy, it was true, but he had also been respectful and loving.
This Dugald confused her, and her heartbeat ratcheted up even more.
He reached out, his palm closing over the side of her face, his thumb under her chin, and his breath was warm against her lips as he swooped in. “Remember this?”
His mouth closed over hers. She lifted her hands to shove at him but then his tongue swept into her mouth, finding hers, rubbing against it, and when, despite herself, she followed, he sucked on her until she moaned.
Her fingers tightened on the front of his jacket, clinging on now instead of pushing him away.
His hand tangled in her hair, the other cupping the back of her head as he slanted her mouth to give him deeper access.
“Remember me now?” he groaned, stopping for a breath, before diving back in again.
Her fingers tugged at his hair as she pulled him closer, her body pressed to his.
She could feel his cock now, a hard length against her belly, and knew that the place between her thighs was wet as she ached for him.
When he reached to lift her, her legs automatically closed around his waist, bringing him exactly where she wanted him.
He threw his head back, staring upwards, and groaned aloud. Rosina pulled his head back down, her mouth finding his again, beyond thought now. In an instant the whirling doubts in her brain had been drowned with desire and heat, and the need to take Dugald inside her. Nothing else seemed to matter.
He stumbled forward, clumsy for such a graceful man, and pressed her against the wall.
There was a chair but he knocked it aside, making more room.
His hand slid up her thigh, beneath her skirts, and found bare flesh.
“Please,” she begged, not sure what she wanted, only that it was more. More of him. More of this.
She palmed the bulge in his kilt, and then found the fastening to his belt, and a moment later the covering fell open. He shrugged it off. His bare flesh was against hers now, hot and desperate, and when the tip of his cock brushed through her wet folds, she thought she might faint.
He drew back, eyes on hers, and once again she found herself unable to look away. “Rosina,” he said in a voice that sounded as if he was in pain, and then he slid inside her, as deep as it was possible to be.
Her eyes fluttered closed. She clung to his shoulders, feeling the fine cloth beneath her fingertips, the hard wall behind her, the hair at the base of his cock abrading her own sensitive flesh.
Heat was rising inside her, and a drumming in her blood, and then her climax came rushing at her. Unstoppable as a runaway horse.
He thrust hard and she cried out, pushing back, and as she came, so did he, clumsy again as his hips jerked in uneven strokes, his warm mouth against her throat, mumbling words that made no sense.
There was a long moment when neither of them could move.
Her breath began to slow, her heart beat began to even out, and she realised she was crushed against Dugald Campbell, her cheek against his chest, her fingers clenched in the cloth of his jacket, her thighs still tight around him and the stickiness of his seed running down them.
“Oh God,” she whispered, suddenly panicked.
She began to struggle against him, pushing away, and finally he seemed to come to his senses.
He lowered her down to the floor, gently, and reached for his kilt.
She was already smoothing down her skirts, attempting to push back her hair which had come loose from his fingers.
“Are you going to accuse me of forcing you now?” he demanded, suddenly eyeing her as if she might fly at him with fingers like talons.
Rosina took a breath and swallowed. “No. You didn’t force me,” she admitted. “I wanted it too.”
His mouth curved up and she wondered when his smile had started to make butterflies take flight in her belly.
“Good,” he said, “because this won’t be the last time, Rosina.”
Her eyes narrowed and she knew she was a moment away from beginning to shout at him, when the curtain behind him was pushed open.