Page 23 of Claimed by the Obsessed Laird (Highland Bride Hunt #1)
“I will,” she murmured as she slipped her hand to his face again. “In a moment…”
And, as she kissed him once more, the warmth inside her cast some light, some clarity, on everything that she had been feeling.
This was not the mad, fiery, all-consuming need that had coursed between them before, borne from the extremity of their physical passion.
This was something else, something entirely new, something…
Something that felt dangerously close to falling in love.
They ate together at the edge of the pool, and she reached out to trail her fingers over the surface of the water, watching as the fish skittered this way and that before her.
She leaned against his chest, the solid strength of him grounding her, reminding her that she had a place here.
As much as this place was new to her, he was showing her sides of it that only a local would know.
It was granting her that warm sense of belonging, one that she had not known she had needed so badly until she had made it this far in.
They rode back to the Keep together, taking the long way round so that he could show her the old cairn that he and his mother had laid rocks at whenever they had climbed the hill.
It was weathered now, and the stones clung together with moss and plants that had sprouted between the cracks.
It clearly still meant a lot to him. She hopped from her horse and scanned the area around the cairn, searching for something, and he frowned at her from where he still sat astride his saddle.
“What are ye?—”
“Ye said you added a rock to it every time ye came past,” she replied as she finally stooped down and weighed a smooth stone in her hand. “We shouldn’t come by without putting another one on the pile, should we?”
A grin cracked over his face, and he jumped down to join her.
“That one will slip straight off,” he told her. “We need to find one wi’ a little more crag to it, something the moss can cling on to.”
Once he had located a rock that seemed to match his description, he stooped down at the edge of the small cairn and laid the rock at the top.
She felt a sudden twist of emotion in her chest at the sight of him like that.
She could almost picture him as a young lad doing the same thing so many years ago that it must have felt like another lifetime.
Perhaps she could help him find that part of himself once more, no matter how distant it might have been.
Once he was sure the rock was balanced, he rose to his feet once more, dusting off his hands, and turned to her with a grin.
“Come,” he told her, jerking his head towards the horse. “The clouds are starting to gather, I dinnae want you to get drenched.”
“Even if it would mean ye could get me out of my clothes?” she replied, before she could consider how scandalous her words might sound to him.
His eyebrows raised, but, to her surprise, he chuckled. “Aye, even if,” he replied, and he grasped her around the waist, hitching her back onto her horse so they could make their way back to the Keep.
The rain had just started by the time they reached home, and the maids drew her a bath. Camron exchanged a heated glance with her, a secret flirtation meant just for the two of them, but promised to give her the space she needed to rest.
And, after her bath, she asked for some parchment and ink from one of the maids, who seemed, much to her relief, rather happier to tend to her than she had before.
Isla could not help but feel a little ashamed about the way she had treated the maids here when she had first arrived, even if it had been in aid of keeping herself from getting too comfortable.
She supposed she’d have to prove to them that she was worth such kindness, but now that she had less intention of fleeing at the first opportunity she got, she would have the chance.
By candlelight, she hovered the pen over the page, a splotch of ink dropping from the tip before she so much as put pen to paper.
Writing had always helped her sift through her thoughts, and she knew that her sister would be expecting to hear from her any day now, to read some missive about her life in the new Keep and how much she despised it, as she had written to her before.
But, instead, as she finally began to write, she found something entirely different spilled in ink on the page.
She wrote to Catriona about what they had done that day, about how they had ridden out together and spent the day with one another; about how Camron had shown her places that he had visited with his mother when he was young.
About how, when he kissed her, it was softer, slower, and sweeter than it ever had been before.
That she didn’t know what she was feeling, but if she’d had to guess, she would have called it falling in love…
Even if she did not know that he felt the same way.
Some part of her wished to believe that he did, or at least, that he could.
But was a man like him capable of loving her the way she needed to be loved?
Was there too much of his father in him, like Archie had said?
Robert was still at the Keep, after all, not cast out as she would have liked him to be.
There were parts of his old life that he was still clearly beholden to, and whether he could leave them behind or not remained to be seen.
Folding the paper and dripping the wax on it to form a seal, she found that she had quieted at least some of the worry in her mind now that she had laid it all out like that. It might not be easy to make sense of what came next, but she knew that she would do it at her husband’s side.
Because she had fallen for him. And the only way she’d know if he felt the same way about her was if she gave him a chance to prove it.