Page 4 of Midnight Honor (Highland Wolves #3)
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A nne hurried up the darkened staircase to the second floor of Moy Hall. She had removed her boots after squelching two or three steps inside the rear door, and her stocking feet made no sound on the waxed wooden floors. The ride from Dunmaglass had been without incident, though Eneas, who had elected to act as her escort on the way back, had periodically called a halt to look over his shoulder and study the gusts of swirling snow.
Shivering and red-nosed, Anne arrived at her bedchamber and released an audible sigh of gratitude when she saw a fire blazing high in the grate. She had half unwound her plaid, shedding clumps of ice and melting snow onto the floor all the while, before she stiffened and turned slowly to stare at the fireplace again.
“It is a cold night. I thought you might appreciate the heat. I even had your maid draw a bath, although I expect the water has cooled by now.”
Anne's hands clutched the woolen folds as she followed the voice. Angus was seated in the armchair in the far corner of the room. His coat and waistcoat had been discarded, his fine lawn shirt was loosened in a deep V down his chest, his booted feet were propped on a tapestry stool. Seeing her husband lounging in much the same position MacGillivray had assumed for most of the evening brought the tiny hairs along her forearms standing on end.
“Angus?”
“You were expecting someone else?”
“No. No, of course not, but—”
He held a crystal glass in his hand and began to swirl the contents round and round. To judge by the near-empty decanter of claret on the table beside him, he had been sitting there for quite some time.
“I… I thought ye would have stayed the night on Church Street,” she said lamely.
“My dear mother would not have thanked me for imposing myself on her hospitality.”
“I am certain she does not think upon it as an imposition.”
“It is if she is stockpiling guns in the wine cellar for Prince Charles or hatching plots to storm the citadel at Fort George.” He took a slow sip of wine and let his gaze wander speculatively over her wet and bedraggled appearance. “Besides which, I thought my wife might appreciate my company on such a cold and blustery night. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I found an empty house.”
Anne's cheeks warmed as she draped the heavy tartan over the back of a nearby chair.
“Granda' is in Inverness,” she said, having no wish to play any more games of cat and mouse this night. “I went to see him.”
The pewter gray eyes narrowed sharply. “Fearchar? He is here? What the good Christ is he doing anywhere near Inverness?”
Anne forced another measured breath between her lips. It was a rare occasion when her husband used profanity in front of her, even more rare than the times he presented himself with the ends of his cravat trailing unwound down his chest and his shirtfront opened haphazardly over the dark swirls of hair beneath. His manners were normally as polished as his appearance, and in four years of marriage she had yet to witness any major disruption in either. This—the gaping shirt, the mud showing on the soles of his boots, the disheveled lock of chestnut hair fallen over the brow, and the near-empty decanter of claret—evoked a sensation not unlike holding a lit fuse in front of a keg of gunpowder.
Nor did his eyes do anything to ease her apprehension. They were fastened on her like gun barrels, following her every move as she took off her bonnet and set it alongside her plaid.
“He came to tell me about the prince's army retreating from Derby. He was surprised I had not already heard the news from you.”
“Your grandfather's sources are better than the Lord President's. The army dispatch only reached Inverness late this afternoon.”
“And ye rushed right home to tell me?”
She saw his mouth tighten at her sarcasm and she could have bitten her tongue off at the root, for it occurred to her— too late to save the slow burn in her cheeks—that he might have done exactly that.
He held her in a fixed stare for a moment longer, then resumed swirling the contents of his glass. “You are aware, are you not, of the dangers involved with being caught in your grandfather's company?”
“He was careful, I was careful. No one saw me leave the house and I met no one on the road.”
His gaze flickered downward again and settled on the twin steel-butted dags tucked into her belt. “Please do not tell me you went out on a night like this … alone?”
“Robbie met me at the bridge. Eneas brought me home.”
That almost brought forth a groan. “Sweet Jesus. Your cousins are here, too?”
“All three of them.” She paused and some reckless inner demon could not resist adding, “Eneas sends his fondest regards.”
Angus's mouth tightened further, for he and Eneas Farquharson of Monaltrie were not exactly the best of friends. Eneas had waited for Angus outside the church the day of their wedding and pinned him against the wall by a fistful of his fine grogram jacket. He had pressed his lips to the blade of his dirk and sworn a solemn oath to personally carve out The MacKintosh's heart should there ever be a whisper of mistreatment against his cousin Annie. Angus had heard him out, had suffered the double threat of brute strength and glittering steel without a word, then had coolly straightened his clothes and walked into the kirk. To Anne's knowledge, they had not spoken since.
“Does Fearchar know the countryside is swarming with militia?”
“'Tis not the first time Granda' has been named on an English warrant,” Anne said. “He knows who his friends are … and who would sell him out for a few copper pennies.”
“A thousand pounds is hardly a few coppers.”
“Nor is it thirty pieces of Judas silver.”
The barb struck home, for Angus had been apportioned somewhat more than thirty pieces of silver to form up a regiment of MacKintosh men to serve under Lord Loudoun's command. According to Duncan Forbes, the compensation was intended to provide the men with uniforms and weaponry as well as the half shilling a day they earned in pay, but few Highlanders saw it as such. Not when most wealthy lairds insisted on several thousand pounds sterling over and above any expectations of costs.
Anne did not wait for a rebuttal—not that one appeared to be forthcoming. She walked toward the dressing room instead, dragging the sodden ribbon out of her hair as she went.
“I am cold and tired. Can we not talk about this in the morning?”
“Actually, no. Since I have been sitting here for the past three hours with all manner of imagined and creative explanations for your late-night absence running through my mind, I would rather talk about it now.”
She paused at the door and cast a small frown in his direction. Although his voice was as smooth as satin, there were fine white lines of tension bracketing his mouth, and while the hand that held the wineglass was no longer swirling it, the contents continued to shiver.
Her gaze flicked involuntarily to the neatly turned sheets on the bed. The bedchamber itself was half of a four-room suite, the largest in Moy Hall, with two suitably well-appointed dressing rooms that divided Anne's bedroom from his. In the first three and a half years of their marriage, they had slept apart only a handful of nights; most of the time they had shared—and enjoyed—the massive canopied bed in Angus's room.
In the last six months, however, the opposite had held true, and the strain between them had become so obvious, even to the household servants, that the maids had begun to turn down both beds.
“Surely ye could not have been thinking I was with another man,” she said softly.
His hand curled around the stem of the glass and his mouth formed a small pucker before he met her gaze. “Frankly, no, that was not my first thought, but I admit it was one of them. And in truth, it might have been preferable over some of the alternatives. The mind … conjures all manner of things on a dark, windy night.”
“I'm that sorry if ye were worried. But I truly thought ye would stay the night in Inverness.”
“And that makes it alright to gallop around the countryside with loaded guns in your belt?”
“I was hardly galloping about the countryside. I was at Dunmaglass.”
“Ah.”
There was enough innuendo in that one little sound to make her search his face a second time. The exercise proved to be futile, as it always was when his guard was up—which seemed to be most of the time these days. When he chose to retreat behind his well-groomed mask of indifference, regardless of what he was thinking, regardless of whether he was in a rage or the height of despair, his eyes, his expression gave nothing away. There were occasions when Anne envied his ability to detach himself so completely, and others—such as now— when she resented it with all the passion of her Highland blood.
The notion that he might have thought…
But that was foolish. The very idea that he would even suspect she had gone to see John MacGillivray …
“I went to Dunmaglass to see Granda',” she said evenly. “He was the one who set the place for the meeting, not I.”
She watched him empty the dregs of his wineglass, then reach for the decanter to refill it. “If you were so sure I was not coming home tonight, you could have invited him here. You have done it before, have you not?”
Anne chewed on the edge of her lip. Indifference might be the mask he wore, but ignorance was never a question, and not knowing how to answer the charge, she merely evaded it. “He is my grandfather. He wanted to see me; I obliged.”
“I am your husband. I expect to see you when I come home.”
“Perhaps if you were at home more often,” she retorted, “those expectations would be more happily realized.”
She went into her dressing room, and when she was out of sight, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She heard a sharp sound as the base of the glass hit the table, but when he did not appear in the doorway as she half expected him to, she covered her face with her hands and slowly shook her head, cursing her tongue for its impetuousness.
But Angus had indeed pushed himself out of the chair and was halfway to the dressing room before he thought better of it and stopped. He could see her through the lighted crack between the door and the frame, and his jaw clenched hard enough to set the muscles in his cheek shivering.
“I have never forbidden you to see your grandfather— or any member of your family, for that matter,” he said after a long moment. “I only hoped you would see the need for discretion.”
“I saw a greater need to take some food and warm clothing for the children. Do ye know they all fear for their lives and must live in a cave now? Eneas says the little ones are brave and they do not complain, but it's bitter cold most of the time and they both have heavy chests and … and Mairi suffered a miscarriage last month. She slipped on some rocks …”
Her voice trailed away and Angus watched her lower her hands. She folded them over her belly as if she were feeling the tearing loss herself and her face crumpled to expose a terrifying vulnerability. He took a halting step forward, then another, but by the time he had convinced himself she would not slam the door on him, the opportunity was lost.
“I am … genuinely sorry to hear about Mairi,” he said gently. “But at the moment, it is your health I am more concerned with. The water in the bath should still be warm. Hardy has been adding fresh buckets every half hour or so. I can have him bring more, if you require it.”
“No. Thank you. It will be fine.”
He looked up as she passed before the narrow slice of light again, her hair streaming down her back like a red silk curtain. As he watched, she gathered fistfuls of the curls and twisted them into a haphazard pile on top of her head, catching all but a few straggled wisps between a pair of mother-of-pearl combs. That left her neck and shoulders exposed, and, when she turned slightly, the pale white swell of her breast.
Anne emerged a short time later, her body rendered shapeless in a thick chenille robe. Risking a glance into the corner, she saw that her husband was still there. His head was leaning back against the upholstery and he was staring up at the ceiling, seemingly engrossed with the patterns the firelight made on the ornate plaster moldings.
She unfastened the combs from her hair and started working out the tangles. It was still damp from the melted snow, and the first few strokes of the hairbrush proved stubborn as always, but she was grateful to be doing something that did not require conscious thought. The long ride to Dunmaglass and the meeting with her grandfather had left her more exhausted than she cared to admit, and she was down to her last reserves of strength. She had half hoped Angus would have retired to his own chamber by now, for she was as confused as she was tired, and did not think she could withstand any more confrontations.
More important, she had never deliberately lied to Angus and did not particularly want to start now, so she prayed he would not ask her for any more specific reasons why Fearchar had called her out on such a cold, bleak night. She could scarcely believe the irony of it herself, being asked to lead a rebellion within the clan when she had worked so hard to dampen the rebellious streak within herself.
Anne's hand faltered in the middle of a brushstroke.
She had tried, she had really tried hard to be a good wife, to learn the manners and demure behavior that would not embarrass her husband in the company of his peers. She struggled daily, without benefit of a birch switch, to erase the harsh edge from her brogue, to behave with the proper decorum required of a laird's wife, not because she was expected to do so, but because she wanted to do so.
Before all of this trouble with clan politics, she used to laugh a great deal, the sound hearty enough that it often won a reluctant smile from her more reserved spouse—and not just the smile he gave out so freely and falsely in company, but the slow, lethally sensuous smile he usually reserved for the privacy of their bedroom.
Sighing, she rested the brush in her lap for a moment.
Despite the circumstances surrounding their wedding, he had never given her any reason to question her ability to please him as a woman, nor had she ever given him any basis to suspect she went to his bed each night merely to fulfill her wifely obligations. There were times she could have wept from the sheer pleasure of feeling his hands, his mouth on her body. And there were times, when the lights were low and he was deep inside her, she imagined she could sense a longing for intimacy that went beyond the physical act of their union. Times when the urgency of his whisperings and the hungry roving of his hands and mouth were as contradictory as they were confounding. He was a skilled, generous lover, and his body betrayed his pleasure in ways no amount of mental discipline could control. In turn, he awakened needs within her that made her more than willing, and often shamelessly eager, to go to his bed at night.
The very notion that he had sat in the dark and suspected her of having a lover was ironic enough to almost make her smile. There were countless times over these past six months when she had sat in that same chair and wondered the same thing about him.
Angus had never given her any reason to believe he had been unfaithful, but men were inherently sly creatures when it came to such indiscretions. Married men, especially handsome, worldly men accustomed to the courts of Europe, were expected to keep mistresses. It was as commonplace as keeping two sets of plate in a household, one for special occasions, one for everyday use. Few of his peers would have understood a reluctance on his part to sample the less inhibited beauties who seemed to arrive by the shipload each time the English garrison was reinforced. Wild Rhuad Annie was the kind of woman a man took behind the stable to toss her skirts above her head for a sweaty romp. She was not the kind men married or to whom they remained faithful.
Angus had not touched her, sweatily or otherwise, in over a month, and she suffered a genuine melancholy for the lack. The tingling in her body now had less to do with her quick scrub and proximity to the fire than with the heat in his eyes as they watched her every move. His shirt being carelessly unfastened did not help her powers of concentration either, nor did the movement of his fingers as he absently stroked the stem of the wineglass.
Her own fingers fought the urge to press down into the junction of her thighs to stop, if she could, the ache that seemed to be growing there by the second. But having discovered there was more to marriage than arranging dinner parties and keeping track of seventy household servants, Anne could not simply command her body to go cold. Nor could she act as if the patterns thrown by the firelight were more intriguing than the remembered feel of his breath on her neck or the sensation of his fingers skimming across her breasts.
No, she did not want to argue with her husband. She wanted to throw off her robe and sprawl naked on the hearth rug like a harlot if that was what it took to bring him out of that wretched corner.
Anne looked down at where the brush rested in her lap. According to the rules of polite society, it was considered très gauche to actually be in love with one's own husband. Was it also wrong to want to feel his arms around her, or to enjoy the physical pleasure of his flesh moving inside her?
“Here, let me help.”
Startled, Anne looked up and found Angus standing beside her, his hand outstretched. She had not heard him get up or walk across the room. And because, for the moment it took him to lean over and gently prise the hairbrush out of her hand, she had no idea what he was offering to do, she remained wary and still, only following him with her eyes.
“You look as if your arms are ready to fall off. ”
“I can manage,” she whispered.
“I have no doubt but that you can.”
Without further ado he took up the brush and moved behind her. It was the first time he had ever done such a thing, and in her indelicately aroused state she was not all that certain she could bear him doing it now.
He began by dealing quickly with the fiery disorder, using a man's brusque, no-nonsense efficiency. But when the brush began to run smoothly from her scalp to the ends of the curls, his movements slowed as well, and the strokes became noticeably more deliberate. Before too long the tangles and the dampness had been banished and on each silky pass of the brush, the gleaming strands began to crackle softly. The surface of Anne's skin tingled with the same needle-prick sensations. She sat breathlessly still, her heart pounding like a blacksmith's hammer, wondering if he could possibly be aware of the unbelievably erotic sensations that were rippling down her neck, down her spine, and pooling in her belly.
The edges of her robe started to quiver where the chenille gaped slightly over her breasts. A particularly long, sensual sweep of the brush set off a corresponding wave of pinpoint implosions between her thighs, and her lips parted around an audible gasp.
The brush stopped.
She could not move, she could scarcely even breathe, and when he reached forward to run his fingertips along the curve of her neck, she very nearly climaxed then and there. He used the excuse of gathering up the errant ribbons of hair that had escaped his attention, but when she parted her lips and released a second nearly soundless whimper, he abandoned the pretense and the caress lingered. His fingers trailed across the warm, smooth curve, though there were no more errant wisps to catch.
The next challenge came as he split the one thick tail into three sections, and she realized he was going to attempt to plait her hair.
“I can do the rest,” she offered.
“No, no. I have started it, I will finish it. Besides, I have probably watched you do this a thousand times, how difficult can it be? ”
He made a few ineffectual twists before Anne smiled and reached around to relieve him of the task. Their hands met and brushed together, but he did not move away; he caught her wrist instead and held it a moment before raising it and pressing it against his lips.
“I lied to you earlier when I said that your being with another man was not my first thought. Reinforced by two bottles of claret, I thought I had arrived at a fairly obvious conclusion. Nor was the beast soothed overmuch when you said you had gone to Dunmaglass.”
“John MacGillivray and I have known each other all our lives.”
“Yes,” he said, tracing his fingers along the soft skin of her forearm. “And I have envied him that privilege all of our married life.”
Anne felt the heat of his breath against her wrist, his fingers skimming into the crease of her elbow, and it took her two attempts to form the words “Ye have?”
“I have envied every man who has known you longer than I have,” he confessed.
It was likely the claret speaking, Anne thought, but if that was what it took, she would arrange to have a gallon by his chair every night.
His lips were on her wrist again, and now they were following the tingling path already conquered by his fingertips. The cuff of her sleeve had fallen well below her elbow and when he reached the chenille barrier it was a simple matter just to turn and press his lips into the curve of her neck.
Anne could barely hold her head steady. His mouth was warm, his tongue hot and moist where it swirled up to flirt with her earlobe, then scrolled a provocative path down to the collar of her robe. His hand was gently peeling aside the chenille, causing rivers of new sensations to flow downward, and Anne feared she was so near the brink of an orgasm already, the seduction would end before it had even begun. Moreover, he would know at a glance how aroused she was, for the skin across her breasts had shrunk so tight, the buds of her nipples were like small, ripe berries.
Without removing his mouth from her body, he came slowly down on one knee before her. He pushed the robe off her arms and his hands smoothed over her breasts, cupping them in his palms. He wet each nipple with his tongue then watched, fascinated, as the firelight glistened off the blushed tips.
“Jealousy,” he murmured, “can be a terrible thing. Almost as terrible as pride.”
Anne might have had the wit to think of a response had his lips not parted wider and slowly drawn her breast into his mouth. She melted forward, her fingers twisting into his hair, and he obliged by suckling harder, chafing her flesh with his tongue until she started making small broken sounds in her throat.
But when she would have slipped off the edge of the chair and joined him eagerly on the hearthrug, he stopped her. His lips released her flesh with a soft, wet swirling sound and his hands went down to her thighs, coaxing them apart. A disbelieving heartbeat later, he was pushing that same warm and teasing mouth into the V of feathery copper curls, and Anne had to grip the edges of the chair to keep from lurching right off.
Her warning cry brought his hands around her hips to brace her through the first ungovernable rush of pleasure. His tongue prowled and probed. It thrust deep between the slippery folds and traced swirling patterns on flesh that shivered and tightened with each wave of gratification.
“Stop,” she gasped. “Ye must stop. I canna bear it.”
“You can,” he murmured. “And you will, for I have not even begun.”
He ignored her moaned protest and his tongue pushed deeper, joined now by the wicked skill of long, tapered fingers—skill that had her clutching at his shoulders, had her writhing so dangerously close to the edge of the chair that eventually he had no choice but to lift her and set her down on the rug beneath him. Once there, with nothing to hamper her pleasure or his, he hooked his arms under her knees and raised them until she was as open and exposed as the harlot she had craved to be only moments ago. This time, when her climax came, she had nowhere to go but up, up, straining into each shattering wave of ecstasy until she was in real danger of fainting.
Angus relented, but only as long as it took to kick off his boots and peel away his breeches. Anne watched through heavy-lidded eyes as he pulled his shirt up over his head and flung it away in the shadows. She sighed as he removed his smallclothes, for he stood thick and proud before her, his arousal bucking up against his belly. When he saw where her gaze lingered, he lowered himself between her thighs, but stopped just short of touching her. Instead, he brought her hand forward and bade her wrap her fingers around him.
"Yours," he whispered. "Only yours."
Anne let her hand glide over the hard shaft of flesh. The veins were prominent, the head smooth and sleek with the proof of his own intemperate arousal. She watched the response in the pewter gray eyes as she continued to pull and push, and she knew, when he was about as full and hard as he would ever be, there was no more time for teasing.
He came into her arms again and there was no hesitation, only hunger. She dug her fingers into the hard muscles across his back and welcomed the first powerful thrust with a cry of joy. As big as he was, she stretched eagerly to accommodate him, aware of every heated, surging inch of him. The pleasure shattered her again. And again. She could feel his flesh growing impossibly harder, thrusting into her with the full power and strength of his possession.
He gasped a ragged command and she raised her knees, locking her ankles together at his waist. He reared up, his face taut, the muscles across his chest and shoulders bulging, gleaming with his exertions, and she saw him give an apologetic little shake of his head, as if he could delay the inevitable no longer. He arched his torso and plunged his hips forward one last time, erupting hotly within her. She shared every shudder, every shiver, every liquid throb of his release before the sheer force of their expended energies brought them melting together in utter collapse.
Even then he continued to rock gently inside her, his flesh as unwilling as hers to relinquish even the smallest quiver of pleasure. From somewhere she found the strength to open her eyes and when she did, she saw the mirror image of their bodies twined together in the pattern of shadows on the wall, a sight that was more intoxicating than any ten bottles of fine French claret .
She ran her hands up from where they had been so urgently grasped around his buttocks and smiled faintly at the dampness she could feel on his shoulders and across his back. Angus Moy did not sweat, as a rule, nor did he pant or grin like a cocky adolescent who has just had his first taste of ecstasy.
“Forgive me,” he murmured, capturing her lips beneath his. “You said you were tired. I did not mean to keep you from your bed.”
“A bed would be nice,” she agreed. “Eventually.”
“Eventually?” He said it as if the word held a wealth of possibilities and Anne parted her lips around another sigh, feeling him stir inside her.
“I am still there,” he whispered. “God knows how, but I am still there.”
“Yes,” she gasped, curling her hips up to savor the delicious thickening. “And right there is where ye will remain, my lord, until neither one of us has the strength to say nay.”