Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
The room smelled of peat smoke, rain-damp stone, and her.
Fergus felt her everywhere. In the thick warmth woven through the linen bedclothes. In the heavy, copper-gold curls spread across the down pillow beneath Margaret's head. In the lingering, white-hot heat pulsing against his skin where her thighs still pressed intimately close to his.
The heavy oak shutters had been left half open to the night.
Moonlight spilled through the narrow gap in pale silver ribbons, cutting across the bed in long, uneven bands of light and shadow.
It touched her shoulder first. Then the soft indentation of her waist. Then lower, tracing the heavy curve of her hip beneath him with an unbearable gentleness that made his blood run slow and thick.
Fergus stayed entirely still.
His breath hitched, dropping low against hers.
He could feel the quick, rhythmic rise and fall of her chest beneath his calloused palm.
She was steadying now after the storm of moments before, though her pulse still leaped erratically under his thumb.
Neither of them was calm. The air between them carried too much raw, heavy heat for that.
Margaret looked up at him through the dark. She didn't speak.
There was a flush of deep color in her cheeks. Her lips were swollen and slick from the intense pressure of his mouth. One thick curl had fallen across the long curve of her neck, resting directly over the swell of her breast, dark gold against her pale skin.
His gaze caught there. Locked.
God.
Something deep inside his gut tightened so much it ached.
He had already touched her. More than just touched her.
He had felt her whole body tremble violently beneath his, heard the raw, desperate sounds she made when she forgot her Lowland pride enough not to hide them.
He had felt her short fingernails dig into his shoulders as if she did not know where to put the sheer agony of her wanting.
And still, it did not feel like enough. Still, the hunger clawed at him.
Not greedily. That would have been easier to manage. This was something worse. It was hungry in ways that had nothing to do with mere possession and everything to do with a clean, total undoing.
His hand slid down her side. His skin was rough against the silk of her waist.
Margaret inhaled sharply. The smallest, ragged catch of air escaped her wet lips. His jaw tightened until the bone clicked. He felt every minor reaction she gave him as though the nerve endings existed inside his own flesh.
The realization unsettled him more than the fiercest skirmish ever had.
He had spent twenty years training his mind against weakness, distraction, and dependence of any kind.
Desire was a manageable beast when it stayed simple—physical, a primitive need like hunger or exhaustion, acknowledged and controlled.
This was not controlled. This was a free fall.
His fingertips brushed the scatter of freckles across her shoulder. He had noticed them before. He remembered thinking then that she looked warm. Not merely beautiful.
Warm.
Now, he traced one distinct freckle with the pad of his thumb. Then another.
Margaret's hazel eyes softened, turning smoky in the moonlight. The sheer vulnerability in her gaze nearly undid him. No fear. No carefulness. Only trust, heavy, blind trust given to a man who had left her on her wedding night.
He did not know what to do with that kind of grace.
His hand slid into her hair instead, his thick fingers catching gently in the tangled curls around her shoulders.
"So much hair," he murmured. His voice was a low, rough rasp in the quiet.
A faint, mocking smile touched her mouth. "Ye sound surprised."
"I think ye hide half of it out of spite."
"Perhaps I do."
Fergus looked down into her eyes and felt something massive shift inside his chest with a slow, terrifying certainty.
He had known attraction before. Camp women and noble daughters had looked at his height and his shoulders all his life.
A soldier learned quickly how to separate physical warmth from emotional need, affection from convenience.
But this, this had driven roots into the dark spaces he kept guarded even from himself.
He lowered his head, pressing his forehead briefly against hers. Their breaths mingled, hot and fast. Margaret's fingers slid up along the back of his neck, her touch so light, so electric, that she could not possibly know the tight coil it wound in his belly.
Or perhaps she did. That possibility burned hotter.
"Ye are a distraction," he said quietly.
The words settled heavily between them. Months ago, they would have landed like a weapon, a declaration of his resentment. Now, there was no cruelty in them. Only an exhausted, stripped-bare honesty.
Margaret searched his face, her gaze unblinking. "And what am I distractin' ye from?" she asked softly.
Meself.
The answer came too fast, too unfiltered. He looked away first, snapping his eyes toward the narrow opening in the shutters where the midnight wind stirred the dust against the stone.
For a long moment, he said nothing. Margaret did not press. That, too, had become dangerous, the way she waited for him instead of demanding.
He exhaled slowly through his teeth.
"When I was young," he said at last, "there was never much question about what I was meant to become.
" His voice sounded foreign in the quiet room.
"Alasdair's father trained us together from the time we could hold wooden swords properly.
Every mornin' before dawn. Riding until our thighs bled.
Fightin'. Strategy. Discipline." A faint, humorless breath left him. "Mostly discipline."
Margaret listened, her body perfectly still beneath his weight.
Fergus stared up at the heavy timber ceiling beams overhead. "I kent what mattered then. Loyalty. Usefulness. Becomin' someone strong enough to stand at Alasdair's left shoulder and protect what belonged to him." His mouth tightened slightly. "I was damn good at it."
"Aye," Margaret said quietly. "Ye were."
The absolute certainty in her voice drew his gaze back to her. She believed it. Not because he was the Laird of Clan MacKenzie, but because she could see the boy he must have been—the fierce, lonely child trying to earn his bread. The realization sat oddly in his chest, expanding painfully.
"Nay one ever looked at me and saw a laird," he continued. "Nae then. I was simply Fergus. The bastard foundlin' raised in another man's keep. The sword at Alasdair's side." He paused, his throat dry. "It suited me."
Margaret's fingers moved slowly against his shoulder, neither comforting nor distracting him from the memory. Merely there.
"It was enough?" she asked.
"At the time." His jaw shifted, the muscle hardening. "Then one night I rode south huntin' Jacobites and returned to find out I was someone else entirely."
The old, cold feeling returned as he said the words. Not grief. Displacement. As if the ground itself had split open beneath his boots and never settled back again. He looked down at Margaret. The moonlight silvered her eyes, turning them to glass.
"I learned me parents had been murdered. That me clan had been stolen. That I'd spent me entire life servin' another house while me own lands belonged to men who had no right to them."
Margaret's hand stilled against his skin. Fergus felt it instantly. Every small reaction from her reached him now.
"It should have felt like justice," he said, his voice dropping an octave.
"Like reclaimin' somethin'." Instead, it had felt like being torn in two.
He swallowed once. "I didnae ken how to be that man.
A laird." The word came out rough, like gravel.
"Men looked at me, waitin' for certainty.
Waitin' for leadership. Waitin' for me to become someone I hadnae been raised to become.
" He gave a short, bitter breath. "And all I could think was that they had the wrong man. "
Margaret frowned immediately, her brow furrowing in the silver light. "They didnae."
"Aye?"
"Aye." Her voice sharpened softly with an intense, unyielding conviction. "Ye think because ye were afraid of it that ye were unsuited to it. But fear and unworthiness are nae the same thing, Fergus."
Fergus looked at her.
Christ.
She spoke to him as if she expected him to listen, as if she saw a strength in him he had never fully trusted himself to have. It made him desire things—dangerous, forbidden things.
He shifted slightly above her, his thigh sliding between hers.
Margaret inhaled sharply, her nostrils flaring. Her fingers tightened on his shoulders, her knuckles turning white. That small movement brought their bare bodies flush again. Too close. Not close enough.
Heat surged through his groin like a sudden, violent fever. He closed his eyes briefly, fighting the urge to pin her wrists and take her again.
"Ye do that deliberately," he muttered.
"What?"
"Breathe like that."
A slow, dark flush spread across her face and down her neck. "I wasnae aware I was breathin' incorrectly."
Despite himself, despite the ancient burden inside him, the corner of his mouth tugged briefly upward. Margaret watched it happen. Her expression shifted instantly—wondering, soft—like she had uncovered something rare and precious in the mud.
Fergus felt unexpectedly exposed beneath that gaze. He looked away again, his voice dropping into the shadows.
"The decree arrived nae long after. Marriage. Responsibility. One more thing expected of me before I'd even learned how to carry the first." His hand drifted unconsciously down her waist, his palm tracing the heavy curve of her hip.
Margaret shivered beneath his touch. His thoughts nearly broke apart at the sound. He steadied himself against the black tide of his own desire.