Page 52 of A Tartan Love (The Earls of Cairnfell #1)

This is why I left , he had said, indicating that she deserved more than the simplicity of life here at Cairnfell Castle.

And how had Isla responded?

I don’t think that lass would have cared. All she wanted was you.

How dreadful to come full circle seven years on. Because Isla was rather certain she still felt the same.

Perhaps, in the end, love was a sort of madness, as Shakespeare claimed.

Not because of youth or stupidity or derangement, but because it was love , pure and simple—wild and blinding and all-encompassing.

She didn’t care what life they led—she just wanted Tavish to remain at her side. Wherever he was, there she was happiest. The past few days had proven that.

But what about Malton Hill and her responsibilities there? How would her tenants fare without her oversight ?

Yet even as she voiced the thought, her time at Malton Hill morphed in her mind’s eye.

When there, Isla was her own mistress. No Gray peering over her shoulder and telling her what to do. No governess to correct her speech or pronounce judgment on her comportment.

Her determination to keep Malton Hill partially stemmed from her love of its people. But another significant part came from her longing to build something of her own. To have a sliver of the world that was hers alone to manage and oversee.

And Tavish had always allowed her that freedom. He would never clip her wings. It was one of the thousand reasons why she adored him.

She had loved the girl she was with Tavish, and she loved the woman she was at Malton Hill, because in every real way, both scenarios permitted her to be her fullest self.

And now . . .

She loved him anew. Fully. Completely. Just as she had loved him then.

Only this time, she loved the man he had become, not just the memory of a boy.

And that was most terrifying of all.

Tavish woke the next morning, his body fevered with longing.

He had reached the end of his tether. The tension between himself and Isla felt nigh to snapping.

This simply would not do.

Fortunately, the rain of the day before had melted away, leaving warm sun in its wake.

He rolled off his makeshift pallet, stretching as he wiped sleep from his eyes.

His gaze drifted to Isla’s bedchamber door, shut to keep in the heat .

It had taken almost superhuman strength to refuse her offer last night. He wanted nothing more than to sleep at her side for the rest of his life.

Even now, it would be simple to turn the handle and step inside her bedchamber.

Lift the coverlet and slide in beside her.

He had spent the entire night imagining it.

Her breathy sigh as he pulled her to his chest, pressing all her glorious curves to his body.

Only in his dreams, her back arched in invitation, and he bent to kiss her mouth, and everything exploded into uncontrolled passion.

He turned away before temptation got the better of him. Instead, he pulled on a shirt and belted his kilt around his waist. Leaving a wee note for Isla so she wouldn’t worry, he slipped out the door.

Tavish dove into the River Northcairn, the frigid water sluicing over his body, cutting and sharp. He welcomed the unpleasant jolt, letting it blessedly dampen his ardor. Surfacing, he shook water out of his eyes, swimming for the opposite bank.

The cold felt heavenly against his skin. If he came down here every morning and night, shocking his system into obedience, perhaps he could survive the next few weeks.

He stroked across the pool, back and forth, lazily rotating like the otters who plied these same waterways.

A swish of sound or snap of a twig—some shift in the very air—alerted him to her presence.

Treading water out into the open, Tavish watched as Isla set down a basket on the grassy bank, white Turkish bath towels and a brush spilling out.

He stared, eyes not knowing where to land.

Her glorious hair was down, unbound and cascading around her shoulders. The golden strands shimmered in the sunlight, haloing her head .

Her clothing was in a similar state of dishabille, a dressing gown tied just under her bosom. The same dressing gown she had been wearing that last fateful night at Kingswell. The sight of it recalled the memory of her curves under his palms.

“I liked your idea, and I thought I might bathe.” Isla lifted a bar of soap.

Bloody hell.

Had the woman no mercy?

“Here? Now?”

Even buried to the neck in snow, his body would still feel overheated.

She laughed. “Of course here and now. Unless the thought makes you uncomfortable?”

Uncomfortable ? Absolutely. Just not for the reason she supposed.

She misread his hesitation. “You can turn around if the prospect offends your sensibilities.”

“It wasn’t my sensibilities I was considering. I am rather . . .” He glanced at his legs, treading water. “. . . unclothed, at the moment.”

She lifted an elegant eyebrow before pointedly looking at his shirt and kilt folded beside her basket. “Yes. I noticed.”

Damn.

Was he . . .

Was he blushing?!

Truly, Tavish couldn’t remember the last time he had blushed.

“I do believe a state of undress is assumed when one bathes,” she continued, voice wry.

“Aye.”

Their gazes met and tangled.

Her eyebrow lifted higher, and her hands went to the ties of her dressing gown. Was she even wearing a chemise underneath?

Tavish turned around before finding out. Seeing her disrobe would shred what remained of his control.

Even as it was, he had to endure the rustling of her dressing gown falling to the ground. Her tentative footfalls into the shallows of the pool. Her stuttering gasp and faint splash as she plunged into the cold depths.

Torture .

Pure and simple.

Every coherent thought fled his overheated brain. All he could do was listen—the slosh as she washed, the soft humming under her breath, the cascade of water as she rinsed off soap.

Finally, she laughed.

“You seem rather distracted,” she said from behind. Closer than he might have supposed.

The fact did nothing to cool the fire in his veins.

“Ye be naked and bathing only a few feet from my spine. A man would have to be dead and cold in the grave to not be preoccupied in such a moment, Wife.”

She said nothing for a moment.

And then, on a whisper, “Wife.” She cleared her throat. “You have never once called me Wife .”

“ Och , ye are.”

“Indeed, I am . . . Husband.”

The word landed with an almost exquisite pain.

Husband.

Tavish closed his eyes.

How he longed to be that in truth.

She splashed behind him again.

It was simply . . . too much.

He couldn’t remain in this water another minute. Not with his yearning so close to the surface and so poorly contained. Calling him husband and deciding to keep him as such were two rather separate things.

“My fingers have gone rather pruny,” he said. “Ye might want to turn your back as I get out.”

“Concerned for my missish sense of modesty?”

More like my own sanity , he thought grimly.

“Something of the like.”

He swam toward the bank, eyes focused on the grass there and nowhere else. And even so, he still caught a glimpse of her bare shoulders as her arms circled in the water.

He couldn’t say if she watched him get out. Pondering it sent lightning crackling along his skin .

Snatching up one of the towels she had brought, he dragged it over his body, the soft cotton engulfing him. He dried off in quick movements before pulling on his kilt and belting it.

At first, he thought to return to Cairnfell Castle—remove himself from sure temptation, as it were—but he could scarcely leave his wife bathing in an outdoor pool where any stranger could happen upon her, no matter how unlikely.

Instead, he sat on the grass beside her discarded clothing—his back to the water—trying not to ponder the fact that only her dressing gown and a pair of shoes rested on the bank.

No chemise or any other sort of undergarment.

Hell and damnation.

He pinched the bridge of his nose.

Certainly, this was one of Dante’s circles of Hell. The one where a man desired his wife but could never have her.

A few minutes later, he heard the sound of water sluicing off a body. Her body. That of his wife . Helplessly, he imagined her rising from the pool like the birth of Venus from sea foam.

“Could you hand me my towel and dressing gown?” she asked, far too close for his comfort.

He nodded. She had rendered him mute. Eyes shut tight, he stretched the items behind, her fingers brushing his as she took them.

His arms trembled with the force of holding himself back.

He couldn’t bear this. They should return to the keep before his control splintered. He cleared his throat, intending to propose just that, when she sat down beside him.

Reflexively, he glanced at her.

She was, thankfully, dressed.

However, water droplets clung to her fair skin and his locket glinted around her neck, dangling just above the swell of her bosom.

Lord help him.

Oblivious to the crisis consuming him, Isla tipped her face toward the sun.

“Mmmm,” she moaned. “The sunlight feels divine.”

She had no mercy. His sweet, naive lass had no idea how torturous every sound and movement had become. How she was unraveling him bit by bit.

The rustling silk of her dressing gown, gaping open at the neck.

The lift of her chin exposing the smooth column of her throat.

The gooseflesh pebbling the skin over her collarbones.

Unaware, she tilted her head toward him and used her towel to wring more water out of her hair, causing the open collar of her dressing gown to sag, exposing a wee glimpse of her creamy bare shoulder.

Och.

He needed to leave.

Tavish lurched to his feet.

“I’ll just . . .” What? Return to the castle without her?

“Leaving?” she asked.

He made the mistake of looking back at her.

She sat upon the grass in a disheveled heap, hair pulled to one side. Never had she looked more lovely.

She raised a hand, an unspoken request to help her up.

Swallowing, Tavish grasped her hand, still cold and slightly damp from the water. Her touch seared.

Something flickered in her gaze. A ripple of awareness. Of want. Her eyes dropped to his bare chest, as if unable to help herself.

And he knew.

His bonnie wife was every whit as affected and yearning as himself.

Her actions had been a provocation.

A deliberate seduction.

The knowledge landed in his brain with all the subtlety of cannon fire.

With a quick tug, he pulled her to her feet . . .

. . . and then kept right on pulling until she was flush with his chest.

Just as before, their bodies touched and everything combusted.

Her fingers dove into his hair, and his mouth found hers.

Theirs was less a kiss and more a collision of two fiery objects intent on incineration.

Tavish drew her tight against him, a groan shuddering his lungs.

He couldn’t get enough of her—of her delectable mouth, of her breathy sighs .

Her wee hands left his head and were suddenly everywhere—skimming his chest, his shoulders, his spine—as if she were frantic to touch every inch of him at once.

She bit his lip and laved away the sting. Tavish nearly saw stars.

Just as before, some quiet part of him pleaded for sanity . . .

Ye need to stop. She doesn’t want ye as a husband.

But she had called him husband not fifteen minutes past. And she had gazed at him as a wife gazed at a husband. Wanting—no, needing, demanding!—his touch.

And now, that was all he could picture.

Husband. Wife.

The two of them together.