Page 113 of The Scot Beds His Wife

“Hermia’s a bit too old to be chasing cattle all over the moors of Erradale.” He approached Eleanor like he would any skittish animal. With enough noise for her to always be aware of him, but an even voice and no sudden, loud movements. “So she gets to enjoy the comforts of home.”

He stood behind Eleanor, patting Hermia’s brindled neck, careful not to allow his fingers to touch the daintyones rhythmically smoothing down the animal’s glossy coat.

“She’s lucky to have you. So many men would sell her to the slaughterhouse once she’d become useless to them.”

“Well, she may be a bit older, but she’s not useless at all. I still put her out in the pastures while I’m teaching Great Scot’s Ghost to take to a rope. She helps remind him how to behave.”

Slight twitches of Lady Eleanor’s sightless eyes and a change in her posture told him how aware she was of his proximity. She knew he stood beside her, their shoulders almost touching. Though, for the first time, she didn’t flinch away.

“Why come to the stable, my lady, if you didn’t think to find any horses?” He swallowed his heart when she turned to him, her face lifted as though she would study him.

Christ, he burned.

He burned with the memory of holding her limp, bleeding body in his arms as he carried her from Ravencroft, vowing that Hamish would have to walk through his bones to get her back. He burned with a helpless, barbaric rage each time she looked up at him and saw nothing.

But he was grateful, too, in a dreadful way. That she couldn’t discover what seared in his eyes when he looked at her.

For he was certain it would frighten her away. And he wanted nothing more than to be in her presence, for however long she could stand it.

“I did not properly present myself, Mr. Monahan,” she noted. “Good afternoon.” Reaching between them, she offered him her ungloved hand, high and bent in an obvious invitation to be kissed.

She’d been doing this quite a bit lately. In fact, every timehe’d seen her since Sam had arrived and he’d dared to kiss her hand that first time.

“At your service, my lady.” He rubbed his rough palm on the thigh of his trousers before taking her incomprehensibly small fingers and planting a lingering kiss on the backs of her knuckles.

He about fell over when she didn’t let his hand go right away, but gave it a soft squeeze—one he’d wished to call reluctant—before she released him.

“I remember the first day the late Laird Ravencroft hired you to look after Inverthorne, Mr. Monahan. I remember thinking your eyes were the most extraordinary shade of dark gold.”

She’d remembered the color of his eyes? All these years? He tried to swallow. To speak. But, it seemed, none of his faculties were in order at the moment.

“You were a recent widower, if memory serves. I didn’t believe I’d ever seen anyone so sad before, except when I looked in the mirror.” She was silent a moment, long enough for all the words he’d never said to her to spill into his mouth at once.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Thankfully, she summoned an amused smile. “You… you didn’t have a beard back then, but I recall a wealth of unruly hair the color of beechwood.”

“There’s more gray, and less hair these days.” He croaked out an attempt at levity, his hand self-consciously finding a hairline that had retreated from where it had once been.

She lifted an elegant shoulder. “A great deal has changed since then, hasn’t it?”

“Aye.” He scratched at his whiskers. “You don’t like my beard?” He’d shave it today. Right now.

Fluttering her lashes in a shy suggestion of delight erased decades of sorrow from her face. She could have been any unsure young lady experiencing her first flirt with a stable boy. “I like it very much,” she whispered. “It tickles when you kiss me—my hand,” she amended quickly.

Heart stalling, he cast about an empty head for a reply. “My late wife never let me have one. She thought it too bristly. Said it made her sneeze so I shaved every morning without fail.” He winced with every bone he possessed. Should have said anything but that. Any green idiot knew you didn’t speak to the woman you hadn’t kissed about a woman you had. Christ, that’d been one of the first lessons he’d taught the boys about the fairer sex.

Suddenly, he wished the herd would return, so he could let one of them gallop over his head.

“Let you?” Her brow furrowed with bewilderment. “Did you not do as you please? Were you not her master?”

“Her master?” His bark of laughter shocked them both, and he sobered as quickly as he could. “Nay, my lady. My marriage… it was not anything like yours.”

She nodded, as though accepting something she’d already suspected. “How was it?”

“I don’t think you want to discuss—”

“How was it?” she repeated.