Chapter 6
Arran felt as if he were approaching a wounded wild animal.
“Victoria?” he asked, but she seemed too absorbed in her crying to fully realize that he was there.
Och, lass, I didnae get to ye soon enough, it seems…
Her soft sobs struck him like a blow to the chest, wondering what might have befallen her if he had attacked the Earl’s manor a day later.
In the strangest way, it felt like failure to him, that he had not been able to stop another woman suffering at the Earl’s hands, even if she was free now.
He held up his palms to her in a gesture of surrender, but he knew that it likely looked rather strange to have a half-dressed Scotsman approaching her bath uninvited. He truly didn’t wish to distress her any further, but he worried that backing out of the room might have the same effect.
“Are ye all right?” he asked in a louder voice, just in case she had not heard him.
When Victoria finally looked up at him, he expected to see outrage, or horror, or any number of things.
Nothing could have prepared him for the deep sorrow that reddened those pretty blue eyes, her brow crinkled, her lips swollen with the salt of her tears, her expression so lost in despair that it knocked the wind out of him.
Is she cryin’ because of me? He worried he might have been mistaken about the source of her misery.
His eyes widened, feeling very much out of his depth. The women that he was comfortable with did not cry much, not around him, anyway.
His mother was far too composed a woman to bother with fretting and weeping and prided herself on her ability to take all things in stride.
Maybe she had not always been that way, but he was certain it was how she had been able to survive her marriage.
If she had cried over every tiny transgression and insult and argument, she could have filled a loch with her tears.
Lord knew that his father wasn’t an easy man to deal with.
Kristin, on the other hand, liked to weaponize her tears.
Until the baby, he had not thought that she had ever actually experienced sadness, and when she did cry, it was more often than not just to get him into trouble.
So this? This was wholly foreign to him, witnessing such immense sorrow. Feeling it radiating from her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Victoria shook her head, either incapable of speaking or not wanting to.
She looked so different with her hair undone, hanging in long, dark brown waves around her neck and shoulders before disappearing into the water, blurring out his view of anything beneath it.
Not that he was looking. In truth, it was taking a great amount of effort not to look, for it would have been wrong to admire such a beautiful woman in all of her bare glory while she was in such a sorrowful state.
Glancing down, he realized he had stepped on her wedding dress, which lay crumpled on the floor.
It would be too late now to fetch something more appropriate from the closest town, but perhaps he ought to have checked with the innkeeper’s wife to see if she had something suitable.
The two women were not at all the same size, but it would be better than her putting that dress back on, a reminder of the Earl of Ashbrook and the wedding she had narrowly avoided.
He sank to one knee beside the tub, eyeing Victoria carefully. “Can I get ye somethin’ to drink? Somethin’ strong, perhaps?”
It would take the edge off at least. He wouldn’t do her the disservice of assuming he knew how she felt. Until now, he thought that only his family would have reason to hate that bastard, but, clearly, he was wrong. Indeed, there was no telling how many women’s lives the Earl had ruined.
“I was dreading this stupid day,” Victoria finally said through her tears. She attempted to wipe them bitterly with the back of her wrist, but it did not seem to make much difference.
“I never wanted to marry him,” she continued. “Everyone said how lucky I was, how any woman would kill to be in my position, but… I did not wish to marry at all! I wanted to be happy with my books, and my home, and my sister…”
A fresh wave of sorrow seemed to rack her at the mention of her sister.
He reached toward her hesitantly, placing a palm on her back and rubbing softly just below the nape of her neck, beneath the drape of her damp hair.
There was an awkwardness to it; he could not deny that, but he felt compelled to at least attempt to comfort her for reasons that he could not explain.
He certainly did not need to do so to accomplish his objective.
In a good outcome, they would be business partners in eliminating their mutual enemy.
And yet…
Something about those light blue eyes, the color of a perfect, clear autumn sky, beautiful despite their puffy redness, called to him, pulled at his heartstrings, until he could not help himself.
He grabbed a washcloth from the warming rack positioned close to the fireplace and dabbed at her face gingerly until she took it from him.
“Are we even far enough away?” she whispered.
“He will come for me. Like some prized possession that has been stolen, he will chase me, and what if I have to marry him? What if all of this is for nothing? What if I have to… and he…” Her eyes widened, and her chest hiccupped like she might be sick or could not catch a full breath.
I’d rip his hands from his wrists before I’d let him have ye, Arran wanted to say, sick at the very thought of that monstrous man taking her to bed.
Such a beast would not be gentle, would not be considerate, would not appreciate the beauty of her, enacting his violence upon her instead.
The Earl had already proven that by the injuries on her wrists.
It was not much relief that his sister seemed to have been spared that, for she had suffered in her own way.
Arran shook his head, saying instead, “Nay sense in worrying yer head about tomorrow and things that nay one can guess at with any certainty.” He had no intention of losing to a man like Charles Rowley.
So long as Victoria was with him, he would keep her safe.
“I will kill him, lass—I promise ye that.”
At those words, a strange thing happened.
Victoria’s eyes suddenly squinted up at him as if she had only just realized that he was in the room with her, kneeling beside her while she was bare in the bath.
She jerked to the side, her hands hurrying to cover what her hair had already concealed, bringing her legs up to her chest. Water splashed over the far edge of the tub, and Arran quickly withdrew his hand, averting his gaze.
He knew that he had not looked anywhere other than her face, but she did not know that.
“Are ye injured anywhere else, lass?” he asked the floor.
She hesitated in answering him.
“I didnae see anythin’, lass. I have nay ill intention. I heard ye cryin’ and I came in to see that ye were well.” Arran sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Now that he was saying it out loud, he felt silly for coming to check on her.
Hearing her in tears should have been a definitive reason not to come back into the room, where she probably wanted to weep in peace, not be clumsily comforted by the likes of him.
He had said that she could be alone, after all.
“I do not think that I have any other injuries… save for my pride,” Victoria muttered, her arms wrapping around her knees to hug them closer to her chest.
“Well, that’s good that ye’re otherwise unharmed. Now, find comfort in knowing that every injury that has been done to ye will be repaid tenfold,” Arran said and started to push from the floor, rolling upward in a fluid motion. “I’ll leave ye be, then. I have an empty hallway to stare at.”
He nearly made it to the door before she stopped him, her voice little more than a whisper. “Stay, please.”
Heaven help me…
It was the last thing he had expected to hear, and the one thing he had hoped she might ask, despite himself.
He turned to look at her, but he could not read her expression.
Throughout the day, with her riding in front of him, the swell of her buttocks stirring up a few things by friction alone, he had done his best to keep any feelings from showing.
But she was making things very difficult for him by inviting him to keep her company while she was naked.
Is this how they do things here in England?
He found that rather hard to believe when he had experienced how stuffy they could be on more than one occasion.
Then again, he had also encountered at least one who had pretended to be stuffy and upstanding, and he had left Arran’s sister with a baby and a broken heart.
“I’m nae that kind of man, lass,” he said tightly, not wanting her to mistake him for a version of Charles.
He would not deny that the thought had crossed his mind.
How could it not when she was such a beautiful woman, and her body had been pressed so close to his for most of the day?
She was not at all the type that he would have entertained before.
Victoria was fair and delicate, tall, and seemed to move with a preternatural sort of grace.
She spoke softly; even when she was enraged, she did not seem to raise her voice to him in the slightest. At least, not compared to the fiery tempers of the women back home that he was used to.
But what I am used to has never satisfied me.
The thought swept in, reminding him of dalliances that had scratched an itch but never more than that.
He had never wanted to protect them the way he wanted to protect Victoria.
He had never got on his knees for them to wipe away their tears, not that he had seen any of them cry; they were not the sort who would do that in front of him.