Chapter 10 #2
“Yes and no. I mean, I’d known since I was young that I was most likely destined for a political marriage, but no amount of knowing can prepare you for the moment your brother bundles you up on a horse and tells you it’s time to go meet the man you’re going to marry.
To fulfill your—your duty. I was nervous,” she confessed.
“You weren’t much older than me, but you were a stranger, and your reputation preceded you.
You’d taken over as clan chief several years before and were known to be ruthless in battle, and I didn’t know how that ruthlessness would translate to our relationship.
If it would. If you even wanted to marry me or—” She swallowed hard.
“We were supposed to meet for the first time at a formal welcome dinner, but you were headstrong and stubborn and not to be denied and adamant that you greet us as soon as we arrived. You even brought me flowers. A little posy of bluebells. Only, sick to my stomach with nerves and two days of riding, I dismounted my horse and threw up on your feet.”
Finn sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth, wincing.
“Yeah.” She grimaced. “Everyone was horrified, my brother mortified. He and I were both sure I’d ruined everything, that you’d call off the wedding and send us home, our alliance dashed.
But you didn’t. You came to see me that night, after my brother had gone to bed.
You wanted to talk to me, not him. It was untoward, asking to talk to me outside with only the stars as our witness, but I figured, what harm could our talking do that I hadn’t done already?
You made me a promise that night. Even though we had a duty, a responsibility to our clans, to our families, you swore that if it was my wish, we could remain married in name and name only for the year and a day we were to be promised to each other, and after, consequences be damned, you’d send me back to my brother if I wanted.
You and you alone would shoulder the blame.
Of course, I asked why you would promise me a thing like that, knowing what a failed alliance could mean for our clans, and you told me that you wanted me to have a choice.
That was important to you. More important than anything else. ”
She paused, stealing a glance at Finn from beneath her lashes.
He was rapt, hanging on her words, leaning in, his eyes locked on her.
A shiver skittered down her spine, making her back arch, her feet slipping against the rung of the barstool.
It was surreal, being the object of his undivided attention like this.
Finn had always had a way of staring at her so that it felt like he was looking right into her soul.
She might not have a soul anymore, but the effect was the same.
“We married the next day in front of our families. Though the MacDonalds were embroiled in a feud with a neighboring clan, the MacLeans, your uncle, who still acted as your advisor, let us know that our only concern, our only duty, was to get to, uh…get to know each other. The peace between our clans was predicated on their merging, and our marriage wouldn’t be official until I gave you a child, so you and I had little else to do but—”
“Get to know each other?” The corner of his mouth dimpled, drawing up in a wry smile. “Biblically, I’m guessing.”
“The intention was not for us play a rousing game of twenty questions and learn each other’s favorite colors, no.
” She exhaled a small laugh. “I should preface this all by saying you made it very clear to me that you wouldn’t lay so much as a finger on me unless I wanted you to.
Could I have said no and returned home in a year and a day, and would you have protected me and taken responsibility?
Yes. But I’d have known the truth, and I couldn’t do that, not to our clans and not to you, either.
At the end of the day, the choice was an illusion, but what mattered to me was that you wished for me to have a choice, and I…
I didn’t want to say no. So I said yes. And then I said yes again. Many times. Enthusiastically.”
Finn laughed, and she could practically feel it against her skin, velvet soft and cocoa warm.
“Once we started, we, uh, we kind of couldn’t keep our hands off each other,” she said, squirming. “You know how it is.”
“Do I?” he asked, setting his mug down so he could rest his arms on the counter.
She stared at him, mouth agape. “We were two recently deflowered twentysomethings with literal permission to—to fuck whenever we wanted. And we wanted to. A lot. So we did. A lot.” She tried to ignore the heat creeping up her jaw.
“I—I shouldn’t have to explain this part to you.
You know how it is when you want someone so badly all you can think about is them.
The way they smell, the sounds they make, how they taste.
When”—her breath went a bit ragged—“any amount of waiting to be with them again feels like too long, and close never feels like close enough.”
His lids lowered, his eyes dropping her to mouth.
Like maybe he was thinking about it. About kissing her.
She was thinking about it. Whether the resemblance between her Finn and the one standing before her went any further than likeness.
If this Finn would kiss her the same way her Finn had, if his mouth would move against hers the same, if it would feel just as right.
More right, maybe, like coming home after so long away. How badly she burned to find out.
“You know.” She grew even hotter under his gaze. “It’s…consuming.”
“I’m no stranger to sex,” he said, and it was pathetic how her breath caught at the way that three-letter word sounded rolling off his tongue, shaped by his lips. “I like sex. But I can’t say I’ve ever felt consumed.”
“Maybe you’re not having the right kind of sex.” She shrugged, reaching for her drink, wishing she’d asked for an ice water, too. With a single look he had managed to stoke a fire under her skin. “Or maybe you’re not having sex with the right people.”
No sooner had the words left her mouth than she faltered, whiskey lifted halfway to her lips. For all that sex was awesome—she was a big fan—the only person she’d ever felt consumed by in the way she’d just described had been Fionnlagh.
That first brush of his lips against hers had been like striking a flint.
Sparks caught, sparks that required next to no coaxing to burst into a full-blown flame, burning hot and bright, never dying, only banked, smoldering embers that with a whisper, a look across a crowded room, a touch of his fingers against the back of her hand, reignited, as easy as breathing.
Desire like she’d felt—that bone-deep, feel-it-in-your-soul need, which she knew with every fiber of her being had been mutual—was rare.
Maybe once-in-a-lifetime rare, and she’d only gotten to experience it for a blip in time.
But she’d remember what it felt like forever; its absence was an albatross she’d never quite be able to shake.
“Maybe you’re right,” he agreed, studying her for a moment, eyes scanning her face, his gaze dropping to where her flush had no doubt bled down the front of her throat, then lower to her hand, where her knuckles were white against her whiskey.
Thank fuck she’d ordered it neat, otherwise the ice would’ve been rattling against the glass. “Maybe I’m not.”
Not for the first time, she was struck breathless at how unfair this was.
To be sitting in front of this man she’d once wanted more than anyone or anything, a man she’d have done anything to keep, a man she was now trying her damnedest to convince to let her go.
To let her let him go. God, if she hadn’t lost count of the number of times she’d argued that this Finn wasn’t her Finn.
But she was tired of lying to herself and pretending that, whether he had memories of her or not, she didn’t still feel a—a pull.
A pull that had little to do with what he looked like and everything to do with how he made her feel.
Not attraction—though there was that, too—but something more.
Something in him called to something in her.
But no matter how badly a part of her wanted to answer it, a part of her that she’d long thought was dead, she couldn’t. For both their sakes.
“It’s not like we spent all our time fucking,” she said, trying to steer the conversation back to safer, or at least less tempting, terrain.
“You wanted me to know you, and not just in the biblical sense of the word. And you wanted to know me, too. The things that made me me. So we learned each other. And somewhere along the way, in between laughter and secrets and dreams and silly arguments about snoring and stolen bedsheets, we fell in love. I don’t know when exactly it happened for you, but for me, I—I don’t recall ever thinking, I’m falling in love.
I just remember waking up one morning, and you…
you were backlit by the sun, and it looked like you were glowing, and at that moment you opened your eyes, and you looked at me and smiled, and I thought, Oh, this is what it feels like. Being in love.”
“What did it feel like?”
She made a frustrated noise. What did he think she was, a poet?
It was love. And love was one of those feelings, complex and powerful and—and transformative, a feeling that was greater than a sum of its parts.
Just like heartbreak was death by a thousand cuts, love was a million little moments that together made the feeling what it was.
“I don’t think words can do it justice. Poets have been trying for eons, and—”
“I’m not asking for a sonnet,” Finn said. “I want to know how it made you feel. Not Shakespeare or—or fucking Chaucer. You.”
She sighed. For him, she’d try. But only because she’d agreed to help him understand.