Chapter Seventeen #2
Robert was beside her, his arm about her waist as he steered her to a seat in the lee of the main mast. She sat down on a coil of rope and fixed her gaze on the distant horizon where the sea rose and plunged like a dizzying ride on an unbroken horse.
It was cold out here and already her gown and cloak were soaked through, but it was far preferable to being inside.
“Would you like some soup?” He was smiling at her. She wanted to slap him for being so at ease when she felt quite the reverse.
“No, thank you.” Food would be a step too far.
“Then if you wish to stay here I shall fetch you a blanket to keep you warm.”
“You are all consideration.”
His smiled widened to a grin at her frosty tone, but he returned with two thick ship’s blankets that smelled fishy but were blessedly warm.
“This part of the crossing is called the roost,” he said. “It’s where several currents meet. That’s why it is so rough and takes so long.”
Lucy did not much care as long as it stopped, but instead it got progressively worse, the rain falling like a shroud over the sea, the sails cracking overhead, the boat creaking alarmingly, battered by each wave.
Eventually, with the clock creeping around to eight in the evening, the cliffs of Golden Isle reared out of the fog and the little boat slipped into the harbor.
Robert helped Lucy as she climbed stiffly ashore.
There was no one to greet them. McCall, the man who had come to Findon the previous night, muttered something about letting everyone in the village know that they had arrived and disappeared into the mist. The harbormaster provided a trap, pulled by a small horse that appeared to be in a bad temper.
“It is three miles to the village,” Robert said, handing Lucy up into the trap and settling her on the hard wooden seat.
He had turned dour again. His face was set in harsh lines and Lucy could feel the tension in him.
After so many years, to return to this godforsaken place and be greeted by nothing but the blanketing mist and the gray moors.
.. Her heart shivered to think how he must feel.
There was silence between them for the first mile.
The track was rough and the pony was singularly uncooperative, stopping frequently for no particular reason.
Lucy, cold and soaked through to the skin now, huddled down on the seat as a brisk little wind whirled down from the hills.
She watched Robert’s hands on the reins and his set face, and thought he looked like a hard-faced stranger.
“Isobel said you had not been back to Golden Isle for many years,” she ventured.
“No, I have not.” His face was stubbornly uncommunicative. His tone warned her to ask nothing further. He turned up the collar of his coat, perhaps to shield himself from the rain, perhaps to hide his expression from her.
“You care so much for your estates and your people. It seems surprising to me...” Lucy faltered. She could hear the nervousness in her own voice. “It’s so beautiful here,” she added, hoping he could not tell that she was lying and thought it the most godforsaken place on earth.
“Aye, it is.” He was staring moodily at the road as it unrolled before them.
It was clear he was not going to answer any other part of her comment.
She began to feel annoyed. Damn men and their inability to communicate.
Or rather damn Robert’s deliberate attempts to keep her out.
He must know that Isobel had told her about Gregor and the quarrel with his grandfather.
But perhaps the events of the past were too painful for him to broach. She understood that. She had felt that too, after Alice had died. She had folded the pain away deep inside. And grief had no time limits.
She put out a hand and touched his sleeve.
She was scared, but she wanted to be brave enough to broach this with him.
She wanted him to know she was here by his side in whatever it was he had to face.
She felt lonely and alone. She could do with his support in her new role as his wife, but one of them had to make the first move.
He had been so gentle and patient with her when she had voiced her deepest fears to him.
It was hard to understand the change that Golden Isle had brought about in him and to see him become this stern and uncommunicative stranger.
“Sometimes it is hard to go back to a place that holds so many memories,” she said carefully. “It helped me to talk to you about Alice. Perhaps if you talked to me—”
“The cases are not the same,” Robert said. His tone was as hard as flint. “I do not want to talk about it, madam. Have I not made that plain?”
With an abrupt jerk of the hand, he stopped the cart and jumped down. His gaze, dark blue and brooding, rested on her. “As you have so many talents, I am sure you can drive the trap down the road to the house.”
Without another word he leaped over the stone dyke and headed off across the fields and left her sitting there, outraged and utterly infuriated. She was so angry she thought she might just explode like a kettle left boiling too long on the hob.
She was even more bedraggled and furious by the time she had coaxed the recalcitrant pony to start moving again.
Clearly it knew where it was going, which was far more than she did.
The little trap rolled past a series of crofts by the side of the road.
Lucy kept her chin up and nodded and smiled at everyone she saw.
They passed a kirk and a school, and the clouds lifted sufficiently for her to see the southern end of the island spread out ahead of her—more high cliffs and rocky buttresses with a lighthouse standing tall.
Finally the trap clattered through a gate and into a yard, and a groom ran out to the horse’s head.
Lucy waited. No one came to help her dismount.
By this time if she had had the chance to turn around and head back to the mainland, she would have taken it and damn Robert Methven and his inheritance.
The house was a substantial size, L-shaped and built of stone.
It was painted white with the prettiest stepped gables she had ever seen.
And now the door had opened and someone was hurrying toward her, a housekeeper, as warm and welcoming as the light that spilled out onto the cobbles behind her.
Lucy felt her knees almost buckle with relief.
“Mrs. Stewart,” the woman said, curtseying. “Please to come in, my lady, and welcome to the Auld Haa and to Golden Isle. I hear the master has gone over to the village to see the factor.”
The master, Lucy realized, was Robert. It seemed everyone knew where he was except her.
But at last she did not care, for the house was warm and dry and there was hot food and a bath and a soft bed beckoning to her.
Mrs. Stewart offered to act as maid, but Lucy wanted to be on her own for a little.
Mairi had promised to send Sheena to her, but until the maid arrived she would manage.
For now she wanted some peace and quiet in a room that did not move up and down and she wanted some time to think.
As she washed away the smell of fish and the weariness of the voyage, she reflected that she had learned plenty about her husband today.
She had learned that he could be infinitely tender and patient with her and yet not prepared to expose his own feelings and emotions in the same way. She wondered if he ever would.
She was sitting before her mirror, brushing her hair before she retired to bed, when she heard the front door bang and Robert’s voice greeting Mrs. Stewart and then his footsteps on the stairs.
Her heart bumped against her ribs. He knocked at the door and came in without waiting for her invitation.
Once inside, though, he hesitated, resting his broad shoulders against the frame.
Lucy put the brush down. Otherwise there was a danger she might throw it at him.
“You managed to get the horse to move,” he said, with the ghost of a smile.
“By tomorrow I will have trained it to jump and gallop,” Lucy said, “and next time you walk away from me like that I will run you down.”
His smile grew. “Aye, I do believe you would.” He came across to the table. His eyes met hers in the mirror.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I behaved badly. I apologize.”
It was a start. And she had already learned there was a time to pursue certain issues, and this was not it.
If she tried to get him to talk about Gregor’s death and his breach with his family, matters might end badly again.
Even so, she was still angry with him and was not prepared to let him off easily. She looked at him straight.
“Thank you.” She intended to sound cold and she did. His smile turned rueful.
She dropped her gaze from his—let him take that as a dismissal—and picked up the brush again.
But instead of leaving, he took it from her and started to draw it in long, slow strokes through her hair.
It felt delicious. She wanted to tell him to stop out of sheer annoyance with him, but the sensation was too good to resist. She fought the urge to close her eyes and revel in the feeling.
Robert’s lips brushed the side of her neck. Her eyes flew open and she fixed him with another hard stare. He smiled again and resumed his brushing.
“I hope your chambers are comfortable,” Lucy said coolly above the hot beat of her blood.
“I have no idea,” Robert said. “I am staying here with you again tonight.”
“You are too presumptuous,” Lucy said, looking down her nose at him. “I have not invited you to stay with me.”
She saw a flicker of amusement in Robert’s eyes. “So you want to punish me,” he said.
“You deserve it.”
“I apologized—”
“Which was good, but not sufficient.”
The flare of amusement and heat in his eyes grew brilliant. “What else do you want of me?”
“I have not yet decided,” Lucy said.
“Perhaps you could devise something to make me suffer.”
Lucy tried to repress the leap in her blood, but it was too late; he had seen her reaction reflected in her eyes.
In a moment he had thrown aside the brush, pulled her to her feet and was kissing her, deep kisses that stole her breath, demanding kisses that made her ache with desire and remembered pleasure.
He tossed her onto the bed and followed her down. It was very soft and yielding and it almost swallowed her up.
“I am still very angry with you,” Lucy said, holding him off, her palms against his chest.
“I know.” Lust flared in his eyes. “So now you have learned that like wine, anger can give lovemaking an edge that is entirely pleasurable.”
He kissed her again and she rolled over so that she was on top of him and he promptly tumbled her beneath him again.
Infuriated, she struggled against his dominance and succeeded in climbing on top of him again.
Again he tumbled her beneath him. She gave a little squeak of anger and frustration.
He kissed her. She bit him. He pinned both her hands above her head and ravaged her mouth.
This time they both shed their clothes urgently, hands bumping. She was trembling inside, eager yet afraid.
“I can’t—”
“I know.” His voice, his hands, both soothed her, stroking. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t even think about it.”
Despite their quarrel she found it was easy to trust him, in this at least, to give herself up entirely to his touch, his hands and his mouth on her.
This time she explored him too, the broad muscles of his back, the slope of his shoulders, the fascinating planes of his stomach and the roughness of his thighs, until he groaned and took her hands from his, pressing her back down on the bed and holding her still while he drove her to impossible heights.
Once again she trembled on the edge, then fell so quickly and easily into the dark vortex where nothing existed but the sensations of pleasure and desire.
She felt dazzled, almost despairing that he could demand so much from her and she was powerless to resist, yet hungry for the bliss he gave her.
He took her limp body and kissed her and she felt herself stir and quicken again for him and she cried out as she came.
Afterward they lay facing each other in the darkness. She was panting.
“That was entirely delightful for me, but for you?”
“It gave me pleasure,” Robert said.
She hesitated. “And yet it seemed a little...unfair?”
His laughter was shaken, as though he was in some discomfort. His voice was a harsh whisper. “I admit that I am so hard it would be the work of seconds to please me too.”
“Then it seems cruel to deny you.” She felt strange, as though she had moved beyond herself, had become someone extraordinarily voluptuous and sensual.
Yet she knew now that she had always been this way until fear had locked down her erotic desires and transformed them into something cold and intellectual.
Now that wildness, so long repressed, had been released.
She realized it was because she felt safe with him.
Here in this hot darkness she could indulge any fantasy she chose, knowing he would never force her to take the step to final consummation unless she chose that too.
“I don’t want to shock you.” His tone was a warning.
“I shock myself.” She reached for him, slid her fingers along his length. She had seen plenty of drawings, of course, in those books in her grandfather’s collection. None could have prepared her for how hot he felt, or how smooth, like the finest silk, or how hard.
She stroked. He groaned. She closed her hand around him.
“Like this?” She was suddenly afraid of hurting him.
“Too gentle.” His voice was strained. His hand closed about hers, showing her. “Harder.”
She tried. It felt alien, frightening and yet wonderful to have so much power.
Then, remembering the pictures, she wriggled down the bed and took him in her mouth.
His muffled curse, the way his body leaped to the touch of her lips and tongue, made her feel even more wickedly wanton and sensual.
Now it was no longer a case of him pleasing her.
Now she had seen the extent to which she could please him.
He tangled his hand in her hair and gently drew her up to kiss her, hot openmouthed kisses that were fierce and demanding. She reached for him again, stroking, and felt his body convulse and then he fell back still and spent.
It was a while before he spoke. His eyes were closed and his chest rose and fell with his harsh breaths. She hoped she had not damaged him. Inexperience and eagerness might be a fatal combination.
“Where did you learn...” He sounded exhausted.
“My grandfather’s collection of French pornography.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Of course.” A smile twitched his lips. “I forgot. All research and no practical application.”
She wriggled down to lie beside him. “Not anymore,” she said.