TWELVE
The men had been busy in the week since her injury.
Chrissi stood in the center of the chambered cairn, a flickering candle in her hand. Her ankle had loudly protested the crawl through the long entrance tunnel, but she simply could not remain in the castle a moment longer.
Not with Alis hovering so solicitously.
Not with her own heart slowly cracking in her chest.
Not with the pain of their past racing toward her like a runaway locomotive.
Losing herself in work seemed the wisest course.
Lifting her lantern, she studied what Alis had uncovered.
Corbel-vaulted, the chamber rose to well over fifteen feet in the center, but the sides were sloped and low.
Square holes were cut into the perimeter at regular intervals, suggesting niches or side chambers.
The weight of the turf overhead and the tight fit of the stones ensured that, unlike the entrance tunnel, this part of the cairn remained free of mud and debris.
Setting the lantern atop a jutting stone, she bent to brush dirt from one of the possible niches, regretting that she had not thought to place her trowel in her pocket.
A noise and dimming of the daylight from the tunnel had her turning her head.
Alis emerged from the entrance, stooped and crouching.
Of course he would run her to ground. Alistair Maclagan watched over those in his care.
The cracks in her heart trembled.
“I thought I might find ye here, lass,” his voice reverberated around the small chamber.
He stood, crossing to join her, rimmed in sunlight from behind and flickering lamplight in front.
How odd, Chrissi mused. The chamber had felt large enough just moments before. But now . . . it suffocated her, the walls too close and confining. Alis saturated the space, the potency of his large body setting hers to vibrating.
Enough.
How could she continue to play this doomed dance?
“You have been hard at work here,” she said. “The space appears—”
“Ye shouldn’t be venturing so far afield.” He frowned. “Your wee ankle won’t heal if ye abuse it so.”
“I had to see the progress myself. Surely, you know that no twinge in my foot would stop me.” She pivoted away as she spoke, needing to avoid his gaze. To prevent him from seeing the anguish in her eyes.
But she turned too quickly, and her ankle faltered. She teetered to the left, but his strong hand around her waist quickly righted her, pulling her spine against his hard chest.
“A minor twinge,” he groused in her ear from behind. “Ye be barely mobile, Chris.”
Chrissi closed her eyes, trying to swallow past the delectable feeling of him wrapped around her. The press of his pectorals to her shoulder blades. The heat of his palm branding her stomach.
I will not survive this, a dry part of her mused.
Helpless to resist, she sagged into his strength. His grip tightened around her, feeling her capitulation.
“I . . . uhm . . .” she began, voice far too breathless for her liking. “I was contemplating the purpose of this chambered cairn.”
“Were ye now, lass?” This time, his breath brushed over the sensitive shell of her ear, sending a shower of reciprocal goosebumps flaring down the backs of her arms.
“Y-yes,” she replied on a warble. “Other similar monuments have burials in them.”
“Mmmm.” Soft lips pressed to the hollow just below her ear, before trailing down her neck. His beard provided a delicious counterpoint to the slide of his mouth.
She gasped.
Her eyes fluttered shut and her knees loosened, sinking further into him.
Only his firm grip around her waist kept her upright.
“Tell me more,” he rasped.
More?
What had she been saying?
“Uhm . . . I . . . I imagine the cairn aligns with s-sunrise during the winter solstice and—”
She broke off as he spun her effortlessly in his arms, crushing her body to his.
Helpless, her arms looped around his neck, fingers threading into his hair as if they instinctively understood where they belonged.
It was simply . . . too much. Too overwhelming.
Her mouth found his. Or perhaps he reached first?
Regardless, Chrissi nearly moaned at the contact. At the feel of his fevered lips on hers once more.
She rose upward, heedless of the ache in her ankle, eager for more, more, more—
Over the past weeks, Chrissi had wondered from time to time what kissing him again would be like.
Would it feel like kissing a stranger? Or perhaps like donning a cast-off gown, one that didn’t quite fit any longer—familiar and yet not?
But no.
Kissing Alis sent fireworks bursting behind her eyelids.
He felt like silk and electricity and happiness.
Like homecoming.
As ever with them, a simple kiss turned into three . . . and then twenty, lips and teeth nipping along jaws and throats.
Her body undulated, seeking somehow to draw closer to him, to subsume herself into him. To allow the shocks of sensation skittering along her skin to somehow merge them into one.
Her name was a litany of synonyms on his tongue: “Chris. Love. Darling.”
She swallowed them down with her lips.
This closeness could not—would not—last. It might be the last time she felt his arms around her, the approving rumble from his chest, the delicious weight of his palm skimming her spine—
Something of her desperation must have communicated itself to him.
“Hush, love,” he murmured softly, attempting to quell her urgency. “There is time. All the time.”
But there wasn’t.
He didn’t know. He didn’t understand.
And once he did . . .
Tears swelled upward from her chest, an ocean of sorrow for what might have been.
As ever, Alis heard the words that she did not say.
Pulling back, he pressed his forehead to hers. “I haven’t felt this happy since we were last together, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for yourself. What am I missing, lass?”
“Alis—” Chrissi attempted to back out of his arms, but he stopped her.
“Don’t retreat, Chris. I love you. I’ve never stopped loving ye. I see that now. Please. Love me, lass. Be with me.” He searched her face, eyes tracking the tears falling in earnest now.
“I don’t think there is enough f-forgiveness for that.”
“Ye truly can’t forgive me? I was young and thoughtless and—”
“No, y-you misunderstand.” Her fingertips skimmed his beard.
He turned and pressed a kiss to her palm.
How Chrissi had wanted to avoid this. Anything but this.
To witness his love turn to hatred before her very eyes.
But now . . .
The reckoning had come.
“I forgave you years ago, Alis.” She told him the spare truth. “It is you who will not be able to forgive me.”
He stilled at that, brows drawing down. “Pardon? What do I have to forgive?”
Chrissi stepped back, and this time he let her go.
His brow drew down, his expression turning wary.
Her heart fractured into pieces.
A sob tore from her lungs. And then another.
Anguish and loss and grief . . . long buried and yet, somehow, never far.
Alis took a step toward her, but she stayed him with an uplifted hand.
Her ribs heaved. A terrible shivering wracked her muscles.
“What is it, Chris? Tell me.”
It took two more spasms of her lungs to get the words out.
“I was increasing, Alis. When I left Italy, I was with child.”
Alistair froze, his body cemented into place as immobile as the stones around him.
“Pardon?” he whispered.
Chris had covered her face with both hands, hiccupping gasps lifting her chest.
Surely, he had misheard.
She would never have kept something so vital from him.
“Chris?” he asked, voice rising along with his agitation.
She lifted her head at that, expression so anguished. “I-I was pregnant . . . with your babe.”
Alistair staggered back, the impact of her words like a horse hoof to the chest.
They both knew what had occurred between them . . . the anticipation of their marriage vows. He had loved her so much, so dearly. And they were betrothed. Handfasted.
Why are we waiting for a signature in a parish record? she had whispered to him on a sultry Tuscan evening. Can we not become husband and wife now? We have plighted our troth and handfasted one another, after all. Your ancestors married in such a way. Why can’t you and I?
He had needed no further encouragement.
She felt like his wife. And he wanted her—the life that they would have together.
Their coming together—clothed only in moonlight and the hum of cicadas—had been a first for each of them. A glorious promise of the awaiting future.
Somehow, he had never once considered that their indiscretion had incurred consequences.
Perhaps because he had supposed that Chris—his beautiful, forthright Chris—would never have kept a secret of such magnitude from him.
“I didn’t realize, not until I was on a ship bound for London. My seasickness simply would not abate. And then my courses didn’t come. I d-didn’t know . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
“Me!” He pointed at his chest. “Ye return to me, lass! That is what ye should have done!”
She leaned back against the rocks of the cairn, sobs shaking her shoulders.
Pivoting, Alistair faced the entrance tunnel, hands coming up to clasp the back of his head.
His heartbeat pounded in his ears.
And yet Chris’s words still reached him, clogged with tears and heartache.
“Return to you? I was angry and hurt. It felt like a betrayal of my very self to return. And so I continued to Oxford, assuming you would write. That you would perhaps be on the boat behind mine, apologetic and remorseful. That I would receive something from you other than silence.” The word emerged on a knife’s edge—a heartbreak of syllables.
“Ye should have written regardless.” Alistair turned back to face her.
“I know that now . . . I have been granted many, many years to ponder the folly of my actions.”
But where is the child? he thought. What happened to our babe?
The thought of it nearly broke him. That he had a son or daughter wandering the globe, unaware of Alistair’s paternity. That he had missed so many years of a child’s life.
“Not hearing from you, I assumed the worst,” she continued. “I supposed that you had stopped loving me, that our love had not meant as much to you as it had to me—”
“Lies. I never stopped loving ye.”
“But how was I to have known?!” She pinned him with her gaze, red-rimmed and anguished. “You didn’t write!”
“Again, ye should have written me!”
“Well . . . I didn’t. I hadn’t the courage to beg.
My maid—a gossipy thing from Bristol—began to spread the rumor that I appeared to be increasing.
And I simply . . . I panicked. What was I to do?
I understood only too well the fate of women who bear children out of wedlock.
It was unbearable to think that all my dreams of archeology would be dashed.
That my father would be shamed. Not to mention the child itself, born a bastard.
Dr. Stephen Newton—a family friend who I had always viewed as a sort of kindly uncle—stopped in on a particularly bleak day.
I ended up confessing the whole sordid tale to him, and he offered to marry me.
His wife had passed a few years before, and he longed for companionship.
And so I accepted—anything to give myself and my unborn babe a normal life. ”
Alistair stared at her, part of him surprised that she hadn’t morphed into a different woman—one he had never known—the words and sentiments coming out of her mouth were so foreign.
“Ye married another man, knowing he would claim paternity of my bairn? Ye denied me a relationship with my child?!”
“I d-didn’t—” Chris pressed shaking fingers to her forehead. “I don’t know if I would have truly gone through with the marriage had I—”
He stalked toward her. “Chris, where is my child?”
Her palm, flexed outward, stopped him.
“I m-miscarried.” She licked tears off her lip. “A week before the wedding, I began bleeding. The midwife said it was likely due to nervous attacks from . . . everything. Our babe was born months too early to survive.” She stifled another sob. “A boy.”
A son.
He had nearly had a son.
Pacing away, he walked from one side of the cairn to the other.
“And then ye married Newton anyway,” he said, tone scathing.
“Yes,” she gasped. “I didn’t know what else to do. I was ruined and—”
“Were ye ever going to tell me?” The question emerged nearly at a shout. “If ye hadn’t accidentally ended up here, would ye have ever told me?”
Her crumpling expression was his answer.
No.
She would never have told him.
In fact, she had already had weeks to disclose the truth.
And she had remained silent.
He didn’t . . .
He couldn’t . . .
He and Chris had made a bairn together.
And instead of writing him, instead of permitting him to step into his rightful place as her husband and father of her child, she had cut him out.
Excised him as precisely as she wielded the sharp edge of her trowel.
Yes, he had betrayed her, but this . . .
It was simply too much.
Alistair’s feet strode out of the cairn, across the stone circle, past the castle, and into the forest of Scot’s pine beyond.
His thoughts tied into such a fankle, he doubted he would ever untangle them.