by Lucy Monroe
“That is not possible.”
“Aye, it is.”
“No.”
He frowned down at her, clearly wanting to argue further.
She forestalled him.
“I hated every moment the baron touched me, but I love my daughter. I can no more forget her origins than I could Eadan’s.”
And if Caelis could not tolerate that, then there was truly no hope of a future between them. No matter what his Chrechte law said about sacred mates.
“She is mine,” Caelis claimed fiercely. “Just as you are, if you were not too stubborn to admit it.”
“You cannot undo her parentage just by willing it to be so.” Any more than he could simply will Shona to be his mated wife.
“He is dead. I am alive. I am her father, now and forever.” Utter conviction rang in his voice.
She shook her head in disbelief. “You’re a very possessive man.”
“I was not possessive enough six years ago, but I cannot regret that fact now.”
“You can’t?” Shona asked, shocked and more than a little dismayed.
“Marjory is meant to be ours, however she came to be. Can you regret your daughter?”
He’d asked her this once before.
She understood his motive better for doing so now. “Never.”
“Aye.”
“Making a family takes more than just claiming everyone belongs together.” It required more than mere legal documentation as well.
“Aye, it takes some cooperation on your part.”
And his, if he would but acknowledge it. “When a motte sinks, the wall joints loosen and eventually, the entire keep will come down.”
“We are back to mottes again?”
“Listen to me, Caelis. I will not be the keep that crashes under the burden of my sinking foundation.”
“You are not a building,” he said, exasperation thickly lacing each word.
“No, but our mating is like the keep that seeks to protect those who live within it.”
“You admit we are mates.”
“I have never denied it.” Not once.
He spun away, slamming his open palm against the thick stone wall. “How can our mating protect our family like this fabled keep you go on about when you live on Balmoral Island and I live with the MacLeod? Keeps do not straddle two holdings, much less an entire sea.”
“Six years ago, you denied me before my family, withdrawing your courtship formally to my father.”
“To my shame.” His proud head dropped, his shoulders sagging.
It was not her intention to make him ashamed. “That is not my point.”
“What is your point?” he asked with barely suppressed impatience as he spun to face her again.
“That our mating now needs you to recognize me before my family once again.” She put her hand on his forearm, imploring him with everything in her to understand. “If I have value in your eyes, then you will acknowledge that before others.”
“Is not a mating and wedding enough for that?”
Talk about fabled entities. He kept talking about theirs as if it were already planned, but she’d not yet even agreed to marry him.
Not that he’d asked.
Because he had not.
“Thus far, your Chrechte ways have been naught but annoying to me, if you want the truth. I can put little faith in a mating; even less can I trust in a marriage after what I experienced with the baron. Standing before man and God, speaking vows of fidelity and honor in no way ensures a man will value his wife.” Or that he, she and their children would live together as a family in harmony.
“He was a poor husband.”
“There are much worse.” Audrey’s father and the current Baron of Heronshire, to name a couple.
“Not all mates are exemplary, either,” Caelis offered as if doing so pained him.
“Knowing what I do now about the Chrechte, I am well aware of that. Uven’s first wife must have been his true mate for him to have begot a child from her.” They had been both married and mated, but that had not turned out well for the poor woman.
“Aye.”
“My father always considered the circumstances of her death suspect, though I wasn’t supposed to know.” She’d overheard her parents talking.
“After learning how easy he found it to murder my own parents for disagreeing with him, I have no difficulty believing he would kill his human mate.”
“The old laird was still alive when it happened, but my father never voiced his concerns. Now, I understand the old laird would probably not have criticized or even disapproved if he’d known his son killed his mate. Because she was human and they were Fearghall.”
Caelis nodded, his expression grim.
“Believe it, or not, I do understand that the clan needs you.”
“Good.”
“But that does not mean I will disregard my own concerns.”
“I am not trying to do that, either.”
It was her turn to nod and say, “Good. You want me to have faith in institutions when I need to be able to trust you.”
“You do not trust me?” he asked with every evidence of not actually knowing the answer.
Did he think the past twenty-four hours had changed everything?
From the wounded expression on his handsome features, she thought he may very well have done.
“Am I to snap my fingers and all is forgotten? How am I to trust you?”
“I revealed my Chrechte nature to you.”
She thought that must mean a great deal more to his race than it possibly could to her, particularly when he had waited so long to do it. “After hiding it our entire lives, including when you were convincing me to share your furs without marriage.”
The knowledge others had held it from her as well still hurt, but she was doing her best not to hold him accountable for her parents’ actions, or Thomas’s and Audrey’s.
“I could not help myself. I believed you would be mine as well. It was no lie when I promised you marriage.”
“Your wolf wanted its mate.”
And the beast’s needs would have made the younger Caelis convinced of his future plans. Shona could understand that a little better, especially considering how very much those same needs influenced her and she was not even Chrechte.
“Aye. And I was younger; I didna have the control. We had already waited so long.”
She nodded, understanding and mayhap even accepting. “But what is there in that for me to trust?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it again, no words coming forth and the most interesting expressions coming over his face.
First shock, then consternation and finally enlightenment.
“Last night, I didna put my sex inside you.”
She’d wanted him to. He’d known it, too, probably as intimately as she had. “You did not risk pregnancy and I thank you, but you did not leave my bed, either, and allowed Audrey to find us together. You cannot tell me you did not hear her stirring in the next room.”
“Stone walls are thick. I did not hear her until she was outside your chamber.”
“And then it was too late.”
So he had not compromised her on purpose. Another mark in his favor.
“Aye. Do you want me to apologize for staying with my mate?” The frown he gave her said he’d do it, but wouldn’t like it.
Clearly he thought that title gave him all sorts of rights and privileges. She wasn’t sure it didn’t, not with how strongly she felt the pull as well.
“No.”
He stared at her expectantly. She simply looked back, waiting. Either he would come up with better arguments and convince her she could trust him, or realize how little he’d actually done to bring that about.
“I shifted into conriocht in front of you,” he said after several seconds of silence, with the air of a man who should not have had to draw attention to an obvious fact.
“You shifted in front of others as well.”
“I did it for you, to protect you and our children.”
If he but knew it, every time he referred to both Marjory and Eadan as his own, Caelis added to the sturdiness of the foundation for their mating-marriage she was so concerned about.
And this was a point she found easy to concede. “I am convinced our physical safety is paramount to you now.”
“But it wasn’t before. That is what you are thinking.” He turned away again, his body now rigid with tension.
“Is it?” she asked, not so sure that was the way she thought any longer.
“It never even occurred to me that you and your parents would leave our clan. It was your home.”
“But not one where we were welcome, and you knew that better than I.”
His jaw taut, he jerked his head in acknowledgment.
“And yet you believed we would stay, that I would remain with the clan. Unmarried.”
Again that single jerk of his head.
He had said so before; now she believed him. Couldn’t help herself, really. It explained too many of his actions and attitudes that could only otherwise be justified by believing him the monster she’d imagined for six years. Whatever Caelis was, conriocht or human, he was no monster. His assumptions six years ago had been arrogant, poorly thought out and bordering on the idiotic, but he had believed them.
“You thought you could watch over me, but by leaving with my parents, I took that option away from you.” She was now absolutely certain that was how he’d seen it.
But he shook his head. “You would not have left if I had done right by you.” His hands fisted at his sides. “I could have gone with you. I should have left the clan with your family.”
And now he wanted her to return. Could he not see the irony in that?
She could, just as she could see the irony in what she was about to say. “I love you.”
“What?” He turned back to her so fast it was a blur of movement in the glow cast by the single candle burning beside her bed. Absolute shock written over his features and in the very way he held his big body. “What did you say?”
“I love you. I never stopped.” She’d wanted to, saints above had she wanted to, but she’d never been able to turn off her emotions.
She’d tried so hard, to protect herself, to protect her children, but the love and desire burned brighter inside her now than it had six years ago. Which was why she would not, simply could not, marry or ceremonially mate with this man if she did not trust him to do right by her.
She had more to lose than he did, though he would never understand that. His wolf had named her mate before she’d even known what desire was. They had waited for her, Caelis and his wolf, but he had not loved her.
If he had loved her, he would not have repudiated her. Whatever he felt for her, it was tempered by his duty to the Chrechte and always would be.
She could accept that because she had no other choice to do otherwise, but she would not accept that she would always come last.
Oh, Shona had no doubt that he needed her, but he would survive losing her. He’d more than survived these past six years; he’d thrived and found a destiny he could never have dreamed of.
She, on the other hand, had come close to losing her mind and only the love and determination to protect and raise her children had saved her.
He had spent six years celibate. And while she was sure that had been a trial for him, she had spent those same years submitting to the touch of a man who killed a little bit of her soul every time he used her body to slake his lust. She had spent every one of those days until their individual deaths reviled by parents she loved with her whole heart. Each day, she’d stoically suffered slights big and small for being the Scottish upstart married to a man three times her age.
And none of it had compared to the ragged-edged wound in her soul that bled daily from Caelis’s rejection and absence.
Terrible love had terrible power.
“You love me, but you do not trust me?”
“I cannot,” she replied starkly.
Caelis swallowed convulsively, his hands fisting and releasing at his sides like he wanted to reach for her but would not let himself. “You do not believe I love you.”
“I know you do not and I accept that.” Need was not love, nor was the mating pull.
As he’d pointed out, not all mates loved one another. Uven could not have loved the mate he’d killed; he certainly had not loved the daughter they made together.
“Am I meant to be grateful for that?”
“I do not know.” Was gratitude better than mere duty and lust?
“I am.” He sighed, the expression in his blue eyes unreadable. “Very grateful.”
Tears she did not expect burned at her eyes. She blinked, trying to dispel them, but the moisture continued to build.
He said another one of those Chrechte curses and closed the distance between them. Gently cupping her cheeks with his big warrior’s hands, he brushed at the drops spilling over. “Dinna cry mo toilichte. Please.”
“I do not mean to.”
He bent forward and sipped at the moisture, pressing small, infinitely gentle kisses over her face. “Let me take the pain away.”
“I can’t.” She would not risk another pregnancy and having her choices taken away from her now that she had acknowledged her love for him.
It made her far too vulnerable and he needed no further advantages between them.
He nodded, as if expecting no other response. “There are many ways for me to bring you pleasure to shatter the pain without copulation.”
She did not know what he meant. Her experiences of joy in a man and woman’s joining had all happened with him and other than the night before, she had never known the ultimate pleasure without him ending up inside her. “I…”
“In this, at least, will you trust me?” he asked.
He was giving them both an opportunity to move forward. She didn’t know how to build her trust in him except through time and him showing the willingness to rectify the past as far as he was able.
But he was offering her another opportunity to build trust in him. If she let him do this and he kept his implied promise not to breach her body, that would be more solid rock in the foundation for their relationship. Wouldn’t it?
The instincts that had been screaming at her to keep him out of her room earlier, were now telling her that sharing intimacy with him would help in ways little else could do.
“Please,” he said again.
And she could not deny him. Did not want to deny him. She needed this opportunity to build trust as much as he did.
“Yes.”
His huge body gave a violent shudder and a low growl of approval rumbled in his chest.
Caelis bent and lifted her into his arms, high against his chest, her shift flowing down his near-naked body. “I will overshadow every memory of the touch you did not want with pleasure. I alone will ever again caress your body.”
“Promise?” she demanded though his words had sounded as much like a vow as anything she’d ever heard.
He looked down, a pain in his own gaze matching the wounds in her heart if she could let herself believe it. “I do.”
“Never again.” She would never submit to the unwelcome touch of another.
His mouth set in a grim line. “Only me.”
“Only you.”
“This is my vow to you.”
She nodded, accepting his words as much as her damaged heart would let her.
“Never again will my promise to you be set aside because of my loyalty to another.”
Her breath stilled in her chest. “You do not mean that. Do not say that if you do not mean it.”
From the look on his chiseled features, there could be no mistaking the seriousness with which he took their words.
He laid her on the bed, making no move to remove her shift, and then stepped back. He placed his right fist over his heart. “I vow it.”
�
�On your honor as a warrior?” she asked, unable to help the frisson of doubt prompting the words.
“On my honor as a Chrechte and conriocht.”
And he had promised her that no other man would ever touch her intimately. Fear that had been such a heavy burden, she hadn’t even acknowledged it anymore, lifted off her, lightening her heart in a way she did not know was possible any longer.
“Percival cannot have me,” she said, joy ebullient in her heart and tone.
Caelis fell to his knees beside the bed, his hands grabbing her own tightly. “No one. I will protect you with my life.”
“Not just your son.”
“I could not have my son or daughter without the gift of their mother. Never doubt it, you are of primary importance to me.”
She wanted to believe his words. So much.
And she realized the choice was hers to make. Just as his had been six years ago.
Was she any less responsible for her own decisions now?
In that moment, she chose to believe.
She believed Caelis would not reject her again, that he would protect her with his life. Not by giving it away on her behalf, but by giving it to her.
“Thank you.”
His face contorted with some great emotion. “You unman me, Shona. Dinna thank me for what I cannot help any more than I can stop my own lungs from breathing.”
She brushed her hand down his face, loving the feel of his masculine stubble against her skin. “I will love you forever.”
That was her vow to him.
And she considered it well worth making when his smile took over his features as he stood. “Thank you.”
“Dinna thank me for what I can no more help than my own breathing,” she said in imitation of his voice.
“I’ll ever be grateful for it all the same.” The smile warmed his voice, reaching out to touch and heal her heart.
“You look like a bride.”
She wanted to be his, more than he could possibly understand. “Tonight I am only a woman in love.”
“You are never only anything.”
“Am I not?” She could not help her own grin at his claim.
He shook his head. “You dinna understand, but one day, you will.”
She put her hand out to him in invitation. “Caelis…”
