The Highlander's Return

by Marguerite Kaye

Ashamed and at the same time more than a little excited with the realisation that she wasn’t, as she had thought herself, immune to such needs, Ailsa dragged her eyes away, but her thoughts continued to race. She wanted him.

  Just him? Did his awakening of such feelings mean that she would want Donald? With the cold crystal clarity of a melting mountain stream, she knew then that she never would. This revelation would have to be dealt with, and dealing with it would be painful, but right now it felt like a release. Ailsa smiled and tipped back her head to the bright rays of the April sunshine. Today anything could happen. Anything. Tomorrow was another day, as Shona MacBrayne was always saying.

  Alasdhair sailed An Rionnag around the Necklace, weaving the little boat amongst the islets as if he were making a chain in the waters, enjoying the strain and pull on his muscles as he steered their winding course, taking pleasure in the occasional dexterity required to manipulate both rudder and sail at the same time as the wind direction changed. The tiller felt smooth and worn in his hand. The seat was hard underneath him. Sea and sky needed constant watching, for the weather could change in moments. He enjoyed it all with the relish of a home-comer.

  Ailsa sat in the prow like one of those figureheads that adorned the fancier vessels that plied their trade in the bustling harbour back in Jamestown. As the boat dipped in and out of the swell, the spray caught her face and the wind whipped her hair, making her laugh. She looked more carefree than he had seen her in the last two days, as if she had shed her woes into the sea, and like the sea she sparkled.

  He wondered what she was thinking. Remembering. It was strange, despite his coming out on the boat today being about exorcising the past, he had barely thought of it. Here she was, sitting where she had sat before, and here he was. But though the past flickered on the edges of his vision, it was ephemeral. It was now that was real. This day. This woman. This heady, harsh desire for her. Was he making a huge mistake? But Alasdhair, having set himself upon a course of action, now clung to it stubbornly. It would work. It had to work, because this was what he had come for. A clean slate. A sloughing off of the old.

  The middle of the little chain of islands was also the biggest, almost five hundred yards long and half as wide. It was as if An Rionnag remembered the way, so easily did he manage the tricky manoeuvre that brought her into the natural harbour formed by two craggy outcrops of rock. As the boat reached the shallows, Alasdhair dropped the sail, discarded his shoes and hose, and leapt into the freezing cold of the water to haul the little craft on to the beach.

  Ailsa jumped ashore, and of one accord they headed off to the far side of the island, their own special hideaway. Here there were pools filled with enormous crabs and colourful sea anemones. They sat on the flat rocks together, sharing the simple picnic Ailsa had brought. They were at ease and on edge by turns, inhabiting some shadowy land between who they had been and who they were now. After they had eaten, they wandered round the perimeter of the island, and the undercurrent of awareness that had never quite left them began to slowly twine itself around and between them, weaving a seductive insistent magic that threatened to cast them under its hypnotic spell.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Why did you decide to come here with me today?’ Alasdhair asked as they stood in the shelter of the stunted pine trees that fringed the shore, watching a seal diving for fish.

  ‘Because I wanted to go out on An Rionnag.’

  ‘And because you knew it would annoy your mother.’

  Ailsa laughed. ‘A wee bit.’ She worried at the shale on the beach with the toe of her boot, conscious of his watching her and the answering blush rising on her cheek. ‘You’ll think I’m silly,’ she said looking up at him, ‘but what I really wanted was to lay my—our—ghosts to rest.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re silly. I came here for the same reason myself.’

  ‘Is it working?’

  ‘Not really,’ he surprised them both by saying.

  She reached for his hand. ‘I didn’t want to hear it when you said yesterday that it wouldn’t have worked, but it was the truth. We were too young and too unsure of ourselves. You had a future to make, I would have been a distraction.’ She rubbed her cheek on the back of his hand. ‘It’s hard, admitting it, and it’s very sad, but maybe if we both accept it’s the truth, then the ghosts will be laid.’

  Her honesty, and the effort it had obviously cost her to say the words, touched him to the core. ‘Another thing that hasn’t changed about you,’ Alasdhair said with a catch in his voice, ‘is that you never lacked courage.’

  Ailsa shook her head sadly, thinking that it was precisely this she had lacked over the last few years. It had been eroded, along with her self-confidence, as she surrendered herself to the life her father had decreed for her and her mother had prepared her for.

  She was still holding his hand against her cheek. He remembered her doing the same thing all those years ago. He touched the corner of her mouth with his thumb. A tear trembled on the silver tip of her lash. He leaned down to kiss it away before it fell. An aching tenderness filled him, and a regret that was for the first time bereft of anger and hurt. He brushed his fingers through the little halo of curls that clustered on her brow, as if he would free her from the lingering ghosts, free them to float off on the breeze, and in doing so free himself, too.

  She smiled up at him shakily and something inside him melted. He took it for the release he had sought, that they both wished for. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to kiss her then, a kiss to free them both. With no thought other than that, he did. He felt her lips trembling on his. He wrapped one arm around her back to draw her just the tiniest bit closer.

  Ailsa sighed. The tension that had tightened across her shoulders, around her neck, giving her a permanently lurking headache, eased as she nestled into the shelter of Alasdhair’s body. A letting go, that was what they needed, and this was it. A true farewell, with no regrets nor recriminations. Coming to their island had been right after all. She sighed again as his lips met hers, as he put his arm around her, and he kissed her, softly, regretfully.

  Except the kiss did not stop. Alasdhair licked her bottom lip, his tongue seeking out the soft flesh on the inside, and little bubbles of desire began to rise in her blood. She would stop in a minute. Or he would. She did not want the moment to be broken. He licked into her mouth, easing it open, deepening the kiss and she softened for him. The bubbles inside her increased. A different kind of tension began to build, lower down. She stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck, to pull his head down towards her, to stroke the silken raven’s-wing hair, and stopped thinking.

  How did it happen? Just as before, he had no idea. One minute their kiss was tender, the next desire flared between them and it was something infinitely more dangerous, much more difficult to control. One minute their kiss was a finale, the next it was a prelude, a vital, vibrant prelude, fired hot with a passion that seemed to come crashing down on them from the sky.

  He kissed her deeply, plundering like the Norsemen who had taken Errin Mhor from the Highlanders many centuries before. She surrendered willingly, her little moaning cries urging him to take more. They sank together on to the ground, kissing, licking, kissing, touching, stroking. Ailsa was so soft beneath him. Her mouth so sweet. Her kisses set him on fire. Her fluttering hands trailed a tortuous path, her touch so light as to be not enough, yet somehow more than enough, too much. He kissed her mouth, her eyelids, her nose, her cheeks, her chin. Her mouth again. Her lips, pink and full and tender.

  Ailsa felt as if she had been lifted clean into the middle of a maelstrom, held helpless, suspended, mindless. He was on top of her now. So solid and big and overwhelmingly male. She did not feel safe, yet she did not feel afraid. She was out of her depth.

  She would drown, but it would be a drowning so darkly enticing that she craved it. His mouth on hers incited her. His hands, too, hinted at dark pleasures.

  Skin. Hot skin and cold air. Her waist
coat flapping open, her sark undone to expose the mounds of her breasts above her stays. Goosebumps. A stillness and a sharp intake of breath. Not hers. His eyes smoky with the secrets she would have him tell, looking at her in a way that made her feel exposed, raw and vulnerable.

  She was hot and then cold, and chilled enough to shiver. Unnerved. Ambivalent. It could not really be her lying here like this. She could feel the weight of his arousal. She thought it must be that. Heavy. She hadn’t expected that.

  His kisses slowed. She thought they would end and pulled him to her, but instead they became languorous, lingering on her mouth, then down, tracing over her neck, her throat. The outline of her breasts through her sark. Her nipples hardened against the constraints of her stays. She wanted him to touch them. The brazen wanting shocked her.

  Ailsa closed her eyes. If she could not see, this could not be her, this fairy-like creature all sensations and nerve-ends, moaning and writhing and squirming and panting. Behind her lids was a world of new colours. Illicit colours. Pulsing colours of crimson and rose-petal pink, glistening moistly and glittering dangerously. A world of icy heat that made her shiver and tremble, a dangerous country for which she had no guide, where someone forbidding and forbidden demanded things from her she should not give.

  Alasdhair opened his eyes. The carefully pleated folds of his filleadh beg fell loosely about him. His erection pressed urgently against Ailsa’s thigh. Beneath him she lay, her eyes fast shut, her face flushed, her hair tangled and spread like a river of gold on the bare earth. Her lips were swollen. Her skirts were rucked up. One of her garters had come undone, her stocking slipped down to show him the sweet curve of her calf. She never used to wear stockings. He had not seen her without them since his return.

  It hit him then, with a force that made him flinch, that it really was over. No matter how much things seemed as they had been, they were not. The world had turned and turned and turned, and they were both irrevocably changed by the passage of time. It was over.

  ‘Ailsa.’ Gently, he kissed her lips one final time, pulling her into his arms, holding her close, tight, stroking her hair as if soothing her after a bad dream.

  ‘Ailsa.’

  She opened her eyes. Such beautiful eyes. She looked dazed. ‘I …’

  ‘Shush.’ The tenderness was back again, desire fading, though he knew the memory of that would haunt him, a new ghost for him to take back to Virginia.

  Did he regret it? No. He would not hurt her. He cared. It would never be anything else, but it was something, something else new. Part of the healing? The thought gave him courage.

  Reluctantly, he let her go, setting her down on the ground beside him, pulling down her skirts, straightening her stocking, retying her garter, every movement, such intimate movements, another little ending.

  ‘Listen to me for a moment, Ailsa.’ Alasdhair shook his hair out of his eyes, rubbing his hand over his brow. ‘I want to explain.’ And he did. He did want to explain, and that surprised him. He wanted her to know, and to understand, and it would be nice, for a change, to have that. No one had ever understood him. ‘You asked me why I came back here, not just to the island, but to Errin Mhor. I came because I wanted answers. At least I thought it was what I wanted.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But, I’ve realised what I really wanted was to be at peace with myself and who I am. I’ve been.’ He searched for the right word, and it came to him with simple clarity. He could admit it now, now that he was well on his way to the solution. ‘I’ve been unhappy,’ he said, surprised at how easy it felt, here on the island with Ailsa, to say it. ‘At least, not really unhappy, but not happy either.’

  Ailsa pressed his hand. ‘I know about that.’

  ‘I know you do. Today has helped a lot. What you said to me has helped a lot; I think the ghosts have been laid to rest after all. So thank you.’

  His words should have reassured her, but they made her feel unutterably sad, and she could see by the way he was fidgeting with the pleated folds of his plaid that he had not finished yet.

  ‘You know I care about you, Ailsa.’

  For one tiny fraction of a second, the time it took for a wave from the incoming tide to roll over one of the flat red rocks on the shore, she thought he was about to declare himself. She hadn’t expected it, hadn’t allowed herself even to imagine it, but just for that moment, she did and her heart did a little flip of excitement. Then she saw, from the way he was watching her, anxiously, that she had got it all wrong. Again. She forced her mouth into a smile. ‘But?’

  ‘But that is all it is. I am not capable of anything else and I’m not looking for it, either.’

  ‘Don’t you ever get lonely, living such a solitary life with no one to share it with?’

  ‘You can’t miss what you don’t have. I am accustomed to being alone. It is safer to be so. My independence is hard won. In my time growing up here I gave, or tried to give, my love to three women— my mother, your mother and you. In each case, for different reasons, it brought me nothing but heartbreak. I vowed then never to put myself in that position again.’

  She managed a wan smile, fearing he would see the remnants of her foolish hopes in her eyes. ‘You need have no fears, you are safe from me, if that is what you are worried about.’

  ‘I am worried about you. You deserve more from life than an arranged marriage to a man you are, at best, indifferent to.’

  ‘I agree with you.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’ve decided I’m not going to marry Donald. And before you start loading yourself up with guilt, it has nothing to do with you. Well, only a little bit. You were right, about my procrastinating. I was fooling myself, thinking I could go through with it. I hadn’t thought what it would mean to—to—to be his wife—properly, I mean. Until now.’ She could feel the blush staining her cheeks, but forced herself to finish what she had to say. It was not so much the confession to Alasdhair, as to herself, that mattered. Saying it out loud would mean she couldn’t ignore it any more, and hopefully that would give her the courage she needed to say it to her mother. ‘It wouldn’t be fair on Donald, to land him with a wife who found the sharing of his bed an ordeal.’

  ‘Not fair, but not unusual,’ Alasdhair said.

  ‘Aye, I don’t have to look too far from home to know that,’ Ailsa said sarcastically, ‘but I refuse to be like my mother, I told you that yesterday. I have not the tendencies towards martyrdom she has.’

  ‘Nor her cold blood.’

  ‘No.’ She blushed more fiercely, digging her fingers into the pine needles that carpeted the ground on which they sat. ‘Though I had grown to believe that I had.’

  She looked so lovely and so confused and vulnerable that he wanted to take her in his arms again, to soothe away the raw pain of her confession. Though it was none of his business, his relief that she wasn’t marrying McNair was immense. He told himself it was because he wanted her to be happy and he knew that McNair would never make her so. ‘This is quite a turnaround from yesterday.’

  ‘It was having to defend myself to you yesterday that made me realise what a foolish stance I had been taking. You were right. If I’d really meant to go through with it, I would have done so by now.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  Ailsa shrugged. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead. I don’t know—maybe being an aunt is not such a bad thing.’

  ‘A waste. I think you would make an excellent mother.’

  ‘With my own as a role model?’

  ‘Rather as a warning.’

  ‘Don’t you ever want children, Alasdhair?’

  ‘My own memories of childhood do not tempt me down that track. I am content as I am.’

  ‘As am I.’ Recognising from his voice that the subject was closed, Ailsa got to her feet and shook out her skirts. While they had been talking, the sun had disappeared; the clouds that had been threatening had now gathered overhead with some purpose. ‘We should go back, befor
e the wind picks up.’

  They made their way quickly through the canopy of trees on to the beach where the boat was sitting on the shale. Rain began to fall in a fine mist, the breeze making a froth of the waves like a cream on a pudding. ‘Get in, keep dry, I’ll push her off,’ Alasdhair said, throwing his boots and hose into the boat.

  Ailsa did as she was bid. Alasdhair pushed An Rionnag back into the water and jumped in. As she lowered the rudder, he unfurled the sail, but when she went to take up her seat at the prow, he stayed her with his hand on her arm. ‘You do not regret that you came today?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Sit with me here.’

  For the last time. The words hung between them. So she sat with him. Her thigh pressing into his. Her booted foot beside his. Her arm on the tiller beside his. The little boat scudded along, back to Errin Mhor. Behind them on the island that was once their island, the ghosts settled with a mournful sigh into their last resting place.

  But there was one ghost that had not been laid. As they made their way from the jetty back up through the gardens of the castle, the shadow of a lone figure could be seen outlined against one of the long windows. Ailsa’s heart sank. ‘Mother. Standing sentinel, just like six years ago.’

  Alasdhair halted in front of her, protecting her from Lady Munro’s vision. ‘I’m glad she’s there, for it saves me the bother of seeking her out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Lady Munro and I need to have a conversation which is long overdue.’

  ‘I hope you have better luck than I did in getting answers.’

  ‘It is not a question of luck, but will.’

  Ailsa chuckled. ‘In that case, my mother may be about to meet her match, for I would not like to set myself against you, Alasdhair Ross. Do you really think she’ll be able to tell you anything about your mother?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but I’m sure of it.’ Over Ailsa’s shoulder he could see that the shadow had gone from the window. He would seek her out and get the answers he needed. ‘Go on in now. I am to sup with Hamish and Mhairi Sinclair tonight, but I will see you in the morning.’