Chapter 24
So, he thinks he can placate me with a party, does he?
Agnes fumed as she wandered the overgrown path through the gardens, kicking at the weeds that crept through the thinned-out gravel. A light drizzle misted down from an overcast sky, suiting her mood perfectly. The gloomier the better, as far as she was concerned.
“Can you believe the gall of the man?” she mumbled to Lizzy, who was strapped to her in a newly fashioned sling, the material supplied by the housekeeper after Snout’s toothy destruction.
Lizzy babbled, though it was unclear whose side she was on.
“I am not some vapid lady who can be won over with a soirée,” Agnes continued to grouse, her heart and mind still aching with the sting of Gordon’s injurious words.
However, she did feel somewhat guilty that she had not shown quite as much enthusiasm as Iona had clearly been expecting when she had come to inform her of the ‘good news.’
“We’re to have us a cèilidh here at the castle, Miss Agnes!” the housekeeper had gushed, bursting into the nursery. “I’ve just this minute come from the Laird’s study, and he’s agreed. I didnae think he would, but it seems ye’ve had a rare effect on him, miss.”
“A what?” Agnes had replied coolly, cursing as she had pricked her finger on a needle while trying to repair the wrap that Snout had savaged.
Embroidery, or sewing of any kind, had never been her forte. That had been Christine’s arena, as with so many things that required patience, talent, and a bit of creativity.
“A gatherin’, miss. A… um… a party. There’ll be lairds and ladies here, as well as the commonfolk.
And I daresay there might be an English lass or two!
” Iona had replied brightly, a note of uncertainty in her voice, as if she wasn’t sure she was conveying the message properly.
“It’ll be a grand occasion, and I’m to help ye choose a gown.
Goodness, we havenae had a cèilidh here in years! Och, ye’ll love it.”
“I don’t think it would be wise for me to attend such a public spectacle,” Agnes had replied, feeling that first twinge of guilt.
“The Laird and I have discussed that already. There’ll be guards aplenty to keep ye and the wee one safe. The wee one doesnae even have to come along. She can stay up here in the nursery, with soldiers at her door.”
Agnes had sighed. “I never much cared for gatherings back home. I may keep to my rooms with a good book instead.” It was only the sight of Iona’s crestfallen face that made her add with some reluctance, “But I suppose it would not hurt to be prepared with a gown and such, in case I feel compelled to attend when the event comes.”
After all, she owed the old woman a great deal for showing such kindness.
“Och, I promise ye’ll nae want to miss it,” Iona had urged, grinning again.
But now, away from the sweet housekeeper, Agnes’s anger had returned with a vengeance, her wounded heart festering a little.
Indeed, she could not escape the feeling that this was all some sort of trick to try and get her to share the same air as Gordon again, when she had every intention of avoiding him for as long as possible.
What she could not discern was whose trick it was. Iona’s or Gordon’s?
“Well, it is not going to be Gordon’s, is it?” she mumbled, shaking her head.
No, he had made his stance perfectly, brutally clear: last night had been a terrible mistake and was to be forgotten swiftly.
As if it was that easy to just erase it from her mind, from her body, from her very soul, when he had been the cause of her enlightenment.
She could not go back to who she was before.
It was impossible. It would be like lighting a flame, then snuffing it out and expecting the candle to remain intact.
“Perhaps I will find someone else to protect me,” she mused, her feet crunching across the gravel while blackbirds chirped in a bramble-smothered hedge nearby.
If many lairds would be in attendance, perhaps there was one who would snap her up. Her and her niece. Security that Edwin would not be able to break through.
Indeed, before the night itself, she figured she ought to take another long, hard look at that almanac of Scottish lairds. For she had not minded the idea of a cruel, warrior laird when that ruthless nature was turned on other people, but she did mind it now that it had been turned on her.
The very reason she had chosen Gordon had become the reason she didn’t even want to glimpse him at a distance.
Yes, maybe there will be someone better at this cèilidh.
Someone who would not show her new worlds, comfort her so expertly, listen to her and make her feel seen, and teach her wondrous things, only to seal himself off from her the following morning with a cold admonishment. As if he had been replaced with a changeling in the night.
Someone tough and strong and protective, certainly, but not someone who could very easily break her heart into a million pieces.
Curse you, Gordon. Her eyes prickled with hot tears. Curse you.
Two days had gone by, and it was as if Agnes was not at Castle Buchlann at all.
Gordon had not seen hide nor hair of her since she had walked into the nursery and slammed the door shut. He thought he had heard her out in the gardens once, but when he had gone to the window to look, there had been no sign of her anywhere.
A hallucination of the mind, no doubt, for he was finding it increasingly difficult to think of anything but her. As if her absence was a potent presence, nudging him toward a very particular kind of madness.
He couldn’t even find solace in his tower, for when he went there, the echo of her was all too intense. Five minutes in that round room and his mind was flooded with memories of him pressing her against the wall, feeling her kiss for the first time… and wishing he had not stopped when he had.
She had well and truly destroyed his peace, and now his duties were suffering.
“I cannae do this!” he snarled, hurling a fresh ball of paper into the fireplace.
The task was simple: design a new training regime for the men.
Yet it strained his brain, as if he were trying to balance his ledgers at the end of a particularly chaotic month.
He must have attempted to write the blasted thing at least twenty times by now, and he had not managed to get further than ‘sparring in the yard.’ Something that his men already did.
Just the faint scratch of his quill seemed to have the capacity to transport him back to Agnes’s bedchamber the other night, to the warmth of her skin, to the slick satisfaction between her thighs, to the taste of her, to the yearning for more that had burned in him, and still burned in him, like an inferno.
He closed his eyes and held his head in his hands, frustration crawling down the back of his neck and through his veins.
What if I wasnae so careful? What if I just decided to have what I want, for once?
He waited for more torment to come, but as he settled his breathing, it wasn’t Agnes’s image that flashed through his mind.
Instead, he saw a woman with wild, flaming hair, her brown eyes mocking him good-naturedly.
The crinkle of her nose and the furrow of her brow as she lay beneath him in the woods, on a mattress of moss, beneath a sky so full of stars it looked like glittering fabric draped to conceal them.
He had been younger then. But she… she would never get older.
Nor would the baby born of that one night together, hidden in the woods, away from prying eyes and listening ears.
In nature, where she had always been happiest, forever pointing out this plant and that herb, telling him everything there was to know about each one.
A well of knowledge that would never be passed on.
All because he had been stupid enough to take her as a lover just once.
The vision shifted to a letter trembling in his hand, written by the abbess of St. Alban’s Convent, telling him everything.
And then it was a blade in his hand instead of a letter, scarlet blood sprayed across the walls of his study and pooling across the floor, and a body at his feet, turning paler by the second, all breath gone out of him.
A reminder that he clearly needed.
“Never again,” he muttered, his mood darkening from stormy grey to pitch black.
That was why he could not risk his discipline again. That was why he had to be careful. This castle had seen the last of any bloodshed by his hand.
Just then, a noise snapped him out of his gloom, his gaze flitting to the door. It sounded as if someone was hitting the wood, sharp, excited yips raising his eyebrow.
He pushed back his chair and walked to the door, opening it wide to reveal a ball of brownish-red fur that halted in the midst of charging the door, and the more surprising presence of one giggling baby.
Puzzled, he glanced down the hallway left and right, but could see no one around who might have placed Lizzy there in the company of a wild fox cub.
Could she have crawled here by herself?
He had no idea at what age babies did things, but he supposed it wasn’t impossible. Then again, if Lizzy had crawled all the way here, then who was supposed to be watching her, and had let her out of their sight?
Not having to think twice about it, he scooped them both up off the floor and, carrying one under each arm, took them back to his desk. There, with Lizzy on his knee and the cub climbing up onto his shoulder, he opened the ledger and pretended it was a book of stories.
Taking another look around to make sure no one was watching or listening, he continued the story from the other night.
“And the wee, fierce lassie glared up at the bewildered dragon and said, ‘If ye’re goin’ to eat me, ye neednae bother.
There’s nae a bit of meat on me bones, and I promise that if ye try, I’ll stick in yer throat out of spite, and ye’ll never be rid of me… ’”