Plaid to the Bone

by Mia Marlowe

  “I’ll no’ hurt ye, Cait. We’ll go slow, aye? In fact, ’tis best that way.” He stretched out on the bed beside her, propping himself on one elbow. “But a wedding calls for a bedding and that’s just what we’ll have.”

  She seemed to shrink down under the covers a bit.

  “Does it no’ seem odd to ye that we’re almost strangers and yet we’re to do this thing?” she asked in an odd voice.

  Adam didn’t have it in him to tell her most men didn’t even need to know a willing lass’s name before shagging her silly.

  “We’re no’ strangers.” He traced along the edge of the pearl necklace with one finger. Gooseflesh rippled over her skin. “We’re husband and wife.”

  “In name only.”

  “Time will settle that. By morning, we will be joined in truth.”

  “But . . .” She looked away from him. “I dinna love ye.”

  “Nor I ye.” That jerked her gaze back to him. “But I promised that I will love ye and I am a man of my word.”

  “And ye think that’s all there is to it?” She sat up straighter and folded her arms over her chest. “Ye just decide ye’re going to love someone and that’s it?”

  “Of course. Love isna about flutters in the belly, no matter what the poets say. It’s about honoring and preferring another over your own self. ’Tis no’ about feeling. Feelings can change. Love is about doing.” He was surprised she didn’t know this already, but he was learning quickly that women had strange ideas sometimes. “How else do ye think so many made marriages have flourished over the years? Ye purpose in your mind to love someone and ye do it.”

  “But what about your heart?”

  “The heart is a tricky thing, Cait. Desperately wicked, the Good Book says. Who can know it?” He reached up and cupped the back of her head. “Trust me, lass, ye’re safer with my will than my heart. I will myself to love you till I’m dust. That which I’ve promised, I’ll deliver.”

  Gently lest he spook her, he pulled her close and kissed her. Given the way she’d kissed him last night, he was surprised at her tremble now. Perhaps she really was afraid of the act itself.

  He reached around her slender neck and unhooked the necklace.

  “The box for it is in my chamber,” she said.

  “Then I’ll put it in my sporran for the night.” He rolled off the bed and stashed the heirloom in the capacious badger-skin pouch. Then he walked back toward the bed. “Have ye ever seen a man, Cait?”

  “Of course, I have. I’m no’ a helpless ninny. After my mother died, I served as my father’s chatelaine. I’ve nursed some of his fighting men when they were injured or sick, but . . .”

  “But a sick man’s parts are no’ like a healthy one’s,” he finished for her. “Ye’ve never seen one angry before, aye?”

  Her eyes flared and she flicked her gaze back at his groin. “Are ye angry?”

  “No, I just mean . . . I’m no’ always in this state ye ken.”

  “I should hope no’. Ye’d look as if ye had a tent pole under your kilt.”

  Adam laughed. “I’ll no’ say that’s the finest thing a lass has ever said to me, but ’tis no’ the worst either.”

  He lifted the covers and slid in next to her. She sidled away only a little. The heat of her body had warmed the space she vacated, but her feet were icy when they brushed against his shins.

  “Brr, woman. Your feet are cold.”

  She shifted them away from him. “I canna help it.”

  “Weel now, there’s where ye’re in luck, because I can.”

  Adam ducked under the blankets and found her delicately arched feet. He rubbed them between his hands and blew his warm breath on them. By the time he planted a kiss on each of her insteps, her icy toes had thawed. For a moment, he considered kissing his way up her legs to the soft folds between them but decided that brand of love play might be too decadent for a lass who, by her own admission, didn’t love him.

  He couldn’t very well expect it of her this soon, and he’d always prided himself on being innately practical, but to his surprise, her words of denial had latched onto his heart with little barbed hooks. He wanted Cait Grant to love him, he realized. Not just to promise she would. Not just a vow to honor and prefer him, but to feel something for him besides this icy disdain.

  He worked his way back up and out from under the mounds of blankets to lie beside her. He tugged her close and she seemed to relax a bit as their bodies pressed together, bare skin against bare skin.

  “Thank ye, Adam,” she said softly. “That feels better.”

  He smiled at her. “We’ll both feel better hereafter, I’m thinkin’. I ken ye wish for me to feel something for ye. I understand as it’s important to ye, but I’ve noticed something over the years. When I was feeling gloomy, if I acted as if I were happy, I started to feel that way.”

  “So the feeling follows the action, ye think?”

  “I do. And now,” he said, “I’m going to act as if I love ye, Cait.”

  He covered her mouth with his in a kiss. Long. Slow. Questioning.

  When he finally drew back, they were both short of breath.

  “That was acting?” she whispered.

  “It was, lass,” he said and nipped her bottom lip. “When it stops being mere doing and becomes love in truth, I’ll tell ye, aye?”

  She nodded.

  “And ye’ll tell me when ye love me,” he said.

  She gulped and nodded again. “I will. Adam?”

  He paused as he nuzzled the satiny skin of her neck and raised his head. “Aye?”

  “Act as if ye love me some more.”

  Chapter 9

  “Love isna about sonnets and nosegays. It doesna reside in the giving and receiving of a ring. It happens when one person sees another person’s soul clear through, warts and all, and then, by some mercy of God, doesna turn away.”

  From the journal of Callum Farquhar,

  unlucky in love, romantic at heart, and still

  waiting for my own private miracle.

  Cait had nearly drowned once. She’d chanced swimming in her selkie cove and got sucked out to the deeper, colder water by a wicked current. No matter how she struggled, she could make no progress back to the shore. The sea was merciless. It tossed her from one trough to the next, washing over her, sucking the breath from her lungs and the strength from her limbs. She’d been almost ready to give up and let the waves take her when a fisherman in a skin coracle happened to see her and hauled her, blue-lipped and convulsing, into his tiny boat.

  It was some time before she felt her body was her own again and even longer before she trusted herself to simply wade in the shallows. She’d been overcome by a force more powerful than herself and she was wary.

  She had the same sense of being totally overwhelmed when Adam kissed her, but she hadn’t been wary this time. She invited him to claim her.

  Cait knew she had to become Adam’s wife in truth, but she expected to be able to maintain a wall around her inner self, even when their bodies came together. That wall was an illusion. Adam smashed through it the first time he suckled her breasts and a wave of tenderness and longing rolled over her.

  When he put his hands on her, she was swept into the deep. He led her through intense peaks, but the taut valleys were no respite for she couldn’t wait to see what came next. She’d never guessed her body could be so filled with pleasure, so driven to alternating frustration and relief by a man’s mouth and hands.

  He gave and gave, with no hint of taking. Each kiss, each caress, sent her deeper into his power. When he kissed down the length of her body, spread her legs and put his mouth on her most sensitive spot, she could have no more freed herself than she could have swum out of that pitiless current.

  There was a measure of freedom in being so controlled, so given over to another’s will, she discovered. She knew what was required to consummate a marriage and the things Adam was doing to her weren’t strictly necessary. Surely such plea
surable, such lovely, dirty things had to be wrong, but she could let his wicked fingers and blessed mouth drive her to bliss without a particle of guilt over it. If what they were doing was sinful, the sin was Adam’s.

  The second time he sent her spiraling to that dark place where her insides unraveled and her body bucked in time with the deep pulses, Cait ached so deeply, she nearly wept. She was so empty, so drawn out. It occurred to her that it was time she did a little giving.

  Cait climbed on top of Adam and kissed him, open mouthed and ravenous. She was rewarded by a feral male growl. He grasped her buttocks and kneaded her flesh with no gentleness at all.

  Good. I dinna deserve gentle.

  Adam rolled her over and pinioned her wrists together above her head with one hand. He used his other one to torment a nipple. The roughened calluses on his palm set her skin tingling.

  She strained against his grip, trying to free her hands. She wanted to explore, to caress, to give to him as he’d given to her. “Let me . . . please, Adam . . . I want to . . .” she gasped between kisses that threatened to turn her to water. “. . . to touch ye.”

  “Next time, lass,” he said, his voice passion-rough. “I’ve need of ye now and I canna wait.”

  He settled between her legs and she felt the tip of him brushing against her opening. Cait went still as he entered her, sliding slowly in with surprising ease considering the size of him. Then he stopped at the barrier of her purity.

  “I dinna wish to hurt ye, Cait, but there’s no help for it.”

  And then with no more warning, he drove his full length home.

  Cait gasped at the shock of pain, but it faded in a few heartbeats, leaving only the pleasantly full feeling of holding him inside her. His face was fixed with a look of such intensity as he gazed down at her. The raw-boned lines of his features were divided into light and dark planes in the flickering light of the fire.

  “Are ye all right, lass?” His voice was taut as a bowstring.

  She drew a ragged breath. He looked feral, dangerous. But if he didn’t finish what he’d started, she’d die on the spot.

  “Dinna stop now.”

  In answer, he pulled out and then pushed in again, filling her with his rock-hard erection. She groaned, awash in the pleasure of slick, hot flesh joined in a give-and-take rhythm. It was like the roll of a tide and just as unstoppable.

  Cait cried out again, but not with pain this time. The gasp torn from her throat was the sound of feminine triumph as she engulfed him completely.

  Adam moved inside her, his urgency building. Each time she moaned, he thrust deeper, harder. Hands joined in a white-knuckled grip, they strained against each other, surging toward some unseen destination.

  There is surrender in bliss, a kind of dying that the body welcomes. They teetered for just a moment on the brink of that abyss, then plummeted over the edge together. Cait wrapped her legs around his waist and hooked her ankles at the small of his back to keep him close. Her insides contracted around him as his seed pulsed into her.

  Spent and gasping, they clung to each other. Cait willed her heart to stop galloping and tried to measure her breaths into some semblance of normal. Finally, she and Adam fell into a somnolent rhythm as they shared her pillow.

  “Is it always like that?” she asked as she unhooked her ankles and stretched her legs.

  Still fully seated inside her, Adam propped himself on his elbows and looked down at her. “Nae, lass. It’s never been like that.”

  Her mouth formed an “oh” but she couldn’t put breath to the word.

  He smoothed her hair back from her face and pressed a kiss on her forehead. “And that was just our bodies and our wills speaking, as it were. Think what it’ll be like once our hearts are engaged and we love each other in truth.”

  “Ye think it will be better then?”

  His flat belly jiggled in a rumbling chuckle. “If it is, it’ll be like to kill me.”

  His words were a blade to her heart. Killing him was exactly what she was charged to do. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him close, careful not to let him see her face lest he read the horror of what her father had laid upon her in her expression.

  “But I’d die a happy man, Cait. I’d die a happy man.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. A single tear left a salty trail down the side of her face and slid into her ear.

  Chapter 10

  “A few things I’ve noticed about deals with the Devil.

  He’s always more than ready to give a body his heart’s desire, be it wealth or power or love unending. But ol’ Black Donald never presents his bill until he’s certain ye have no wherewithal to pay.”

  From the journal of Callum Farquhar,

  haggler to the last farthing and still

  always in debt to the Dark One.

  Days slid into weeks and somehow Cait managed to hide the way her heart tore in two a bit more with each sunrise. She nearly worshipped her father, but nothing he’d told her about Adam had been true. Not about Adam’s politics and certainly not about his character. He’d gone out of his way to woo her and make her feel, if not loved, certainly cherished. Each time they came together, he taught her some new breathtaking bed play that, while it should probably be counted a sin, felt more right than wrong.

  A hot lump of caring for her new husband settled into her chest and, try as she might, she couldn’t will it away.

  Adam Cameron was a kind, albeit firm, laird to his people, and while he still advocated the Duke of Albany as regent for young King James, no one could doubt his fealty to the crown. He wasn’t trying to supplant the true king as her father and Morgan had claimed.

  Wallace Grant was misinformed. There’d been a gross misunderstanding. The chieftain of the Grant clan and her husband both wanted the same thing—protection of the child king by a nobleman who had young James’s interests at heart until such time as he came into his own.

  If she could only send a message to her father and explain matters to him, perhaps he’d release her from her awful vow.

  She’d written several versions of the note, wasting precious paper and ink. Even if Cait could pen the words that would make her father understand, there was no one she trusted to deliver the message. Barclay and Fife were under orders to remain at her side no matter what. Even if she begged, their loyalty was to Wallace Grant and only he could rescind that command.

  She’d never liked Morgan MacRath. The man made her uncomfortable in her own skin. Now, as the days sped by and the time drew near when Morgan would expect her to accomplish her appointed task, she trusted him even less than she liked him. He wouldn’t do for a courier.

  Grizel would attempt the journey if Cait asked, but her rheumatism was acting up. The wolf ’s bane poultice Mr. Farquhar made for her only gave temporary relief. Cait wouldn’t subject the old woman to the long weary road back to the Grant stronghold by the sea.

  Callum Farquhar had pledged his service to her, but since he was unknown to her father, any message he bore would be discounted. Wallace Grant was ever a suspicious soul.

  There was no one she could send.

  And no words to convey what was really happening.

  Please, Father. Dinna make me murder the man I fear I’ve grown to love.

  He’d think her a weak-willed ninny.

  Cait rose from the small desk and scattered the tattered remains of her letter-writing efforts on the fire. She abandoned any thought of sending a note to Wallace Grant. She was on her own. She’d have to figure a way out of this tangle without his help.

  A brisk ride would clear her head and help her think. If she could only see Adam, everything would seem less daunting. He’d left early that morning to see about a problem with the mill near one of the estate’s outlying crofts. If she headed that way, she was likely to meet him returning. She left the solar and made her way down to the stable.

  Adam had decided the hill pony she came to him on wasn’t fine enough for her, so he’d gifted h
er with a spirited bay mare with lovely conformation and a sweet gait.

  “Hold up, milady, and I’ll bear ye company.” As she crossed the bailey, Barclay appeared by her side.

  She sighed. He meant well, but she’d rather ride with Adam alone once she found him.

  The homely scent of fresh straw and warm horse greeted her when she entered the stable. There was something reassuring in the earthy smell.

  “Saddle Epona for me,” Cait ordered one of the boys who worked there.

  “Nae need,” came Morgan’s voice from behind her. He waved the lad back to his other duties. “I’ll see to milady’s mount. Ye may go, Barclay. I’ll ride with Lady Bonniebroch.”

  She’d rather have had ten Barclays dogging her. The older man narrowed his eyes at MacRath, but when Cait gave Barclay a slight nod, her guard grudgingly turned away.

  “Ye dinna have to accompany me, Morgan.”

  “I know,” he said as he hefted the fine saddle of Spanish leather onto the mare’s back. Then he lowered his voice. “But I must needs speak with ye and the subject is no’ fit for anyone else’s ears.”

  He glanced around the stable. The boys had retreated to the distant stall where the Brabant stallion was kept. Since the big dray horse wasn’t at all happy about the lads mucking about, he was fetching up a ruckus that should cover their conversation.

  “Ye’ve yet to deliver on your oath,” he hissed.

  A cold shiver washed over her, though the day was fair. Cait checked Epona’s girth to hide her tremble and gave it a tug to make sure MacRath had cinched it tight. “I havena had the proper opportunity.”

  “Weel, that’s debatable, but ’tis no mind. I have one for ye.” MacRath reached into his sporran and pulled out a dirk with a distinctive Celtic knot carved into the hilt. “Use this to dispatch your husband.”

  Cait knew how to use a knife. She’d been taught to find the spot beneath a man’s last rib that would drop him like a stone, though she’d never had cause to use the training. Stabbing a man’s living flesh was no doubt much different from practicing on sacks filled with meal.