One Night with the Laird

by Nicola Cornick

  “Jack,” she said. “I think we should put an end to this. It will suit neither of us to be dragooned into marriage. I will explain to Lord MacLeod—”

  “And will you also shoot Wilfred Cardross and deal with Michael Innes?” Jack demanded. There was a hard edge to his voice now. He strode across the room, repressed anger in every line of his body, and turned abruptly to face her.

  “If I have to,” Mairi said. “I have always managed to deal with problems on my own.”

  “So you keep saying.” Now Jack seemed even angrier and Mairi was at a loss to understand why. “It does not suit my purposes to end this engagement now,” he snapped.

  “Oh.” Mairi hesitated. “Well, if you can stall your grandmother for a little, then I will be very happy to break our engagement as soon as it is convenient to you,” she said stiffly. “I have no intention of trapping you into marriage. I don’t wish to wed.”

  Jack’s lips lifted into a slight smile. “I am aware,” he said coolly. “You have made your feelings on that matter quite clear.”

  The silence between them buzzed with frustration.

  “I don’t understand!” Mairi burst out. “You have no more desire to be married than I do, so why are you being so difficult? You did not want to help me in the first place—”

  “I changed my mind,” Jack said. He drove his hands into the pockets of his jacket, turning away from her. All she could see was his broad, uncommunicative back. She felt violently irritated.

  “You changed your mind because you wanted to sleep with me,” she said.

  He spun around so quickly she almost flinched. “I am trying to defend you from varying degrees of danger,” he said. His tone was pleasant, but there was a dangerous glint in his eyes. “The least that you can do is accept my protection.”

  “But I did not ask—”

  He grabbed her, jerking her hard against his body. “It is less than a week since Cardross’s men almost killed you.” His tone was harsh. “Until that danger is past and the threat from Michael Innes too, you are my responsibility.”

  Mairi’s mouth fell open. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You are betrothed to me,” Jack said with deadly softness, “and therefore I have responsibility for you. Until we sever our agreement, that will be the case and I am not prepared for it to end until I say so.” He released her as though the matter were quite settled.

  “Now you are being absurd,” Mairi said furiously. “I am an independent woman. I will not be told what to do.”

  Jack shrugged. It maddened her that he seemed so unconcerned. “I do not seek to limit your independence,” he said. “Unlike many of my sex, I don’t feel threatened by a strong woman. But the truth is that you need this engagement, Mairi, and therefore you must be prepared to compromise a little to society’s demands.”

  “And to yours!” Mairi said. She marched out of the study, infuriated that Lady Methven and Lucy were in the library taking tea and that they smiled indulgently at her as she passed, as though she had been thoroughly kissed rather than thoroughly annoyed. She stalked out into the hall and started up the stairs, uncertain where she was going or what she was going to do next. It was one thing to walk out in high dudgeon but she had given no thought as to what happened afterwards. It was too early to retire for the evening and she felt too agitated to settle calmly with a book and a cup of tea. She cursed Jack vehemently under her breath. It was a show of pure male bravado to posture around insisting that she accept his protection until he had dealt with the threats to her.

  There was a step behind her and she spun around to see that Jack had caught her up on the top step. Their eyes met and she caught her breath. He looked absolutely furious.

  He waited while a housemaid slipped past them, eyes averted, her arms full of clean linen; then when she had disappeared from sight down the curve of the stair, he caught Mairi’s hand and almost dragged her behind an enormous marble statue that stood in the doorway of the portrait gallery. He spun her around to face him.

  “You will not walk out on me like that again.” His tone was clipped.

  “Then do not treat me like a possession!” Mairi snapped. She was shaking.

  There was a tight, tense silence and then Jack smiled ruefully and raised a hand to touch her cheek. “Why are we quarreling,” he said, “when what we really want to do is make love?”

  Mairi’s heart was thudding hard against her ribs. Longing fizzed in her blood like moonlight. His words crystalized the need in her. She did want him and she did not want to have to deny that desire.

  “I do want to make love with you,” she whispered, lifting her gaze to meet his. “But I won’t be tumbled and dismissed like a lightskirt.”

  She saw him smile again briefly. “That was a mistake,” he agreed gravely.

  “Yes,” Mairi said. “It was.”

  His smile faded and his gaze was very direct, intent, unsmiling now. “I cannot offer more than an affair,” he said. “Just so that we are clear.”

  Mairi did not reply immediately. Her throat felt drier than sand. Her heart still beat an urgent tattoo. She knew she had to be certain because Jack was being brutally honest and she had to be honest in return. She did not know if she was able to separate out physical love and emotion, did not know if it could be so simple for her. She had no desire ever to remarry, but that did not mean that she could not explore the world of her senses, a world that had been closed to her before she met Jack. It did not mean she should turn her back on that lovely seductive passion.

  The voice of reason whispered to her that she should not do this again, but hearing it did not change anything. Not when her stomach was already knotted tight with the lovely pain of arousal and when she wanted him more than anything she could remember wanting in her life.

  She swallowed hard. “I understand,” she said.

  * * *

  AT LAST.

  It felt as if it had been an eternity. Jack knew he was not cut out for celibacy, least of all where Lady Mairi MacLeod was concerned. He had been on the edge of arousal for the entire day, for the entire week, if truth be told. Even as he had schooled himself to play the part of the perfect fiancé, he had been almost consumed with lust. And he had known that sooner or later he would fall.

  He drew Mairi into his arms and she came willingly, eager for his embrace, and his heart leaped.

  “I’ve waited all week for this,” she whispered as his lips left hers. “I wanted it. Wanted you.” She put a hand on the nape of his neck and pulled his head back down to hers.

  Right from the start Jack felt desperate, almost out of control. His hand cupped the back of her head as he kissed her, his fingers delving into the satin-softness of her hair. He felt driven, wilder for her than he had ever been for a woman, and yet almost afraid that in touching her he would unlock some emotion within himself that once free could never be controlled. For a second he almost drew away, but the need he had for her was too great. He kissed her again, pulling her deeper into the shadows of the portrait gallery, giving himself up to pleasure and undeniable lust.

  The neckline of her gown was low. That fact had been tormenting Jack throughout dinner. He was almost certain she had chosen the daring décolletage and the tight silk to tease him. So now it was time to pay her back for the provocation. He tugged; one of her breasts popped out very pleasingly from beneath the shimmering silver gauze, the nipple begging for the nip of his teeth. He bent his head to suckle. Mairi gasped, her head going back, her hair rippling down like a dark river over her naked skin. Briefly Jack considered pulling the bodice of the gown down to expose her breasts completely, but he thought she looked more wanton as she was, totally, deliciously rumpled, with one breast demurely covered and the other shamelessly bare.

  He lifted her. Her legs wrapped instinctively about his waist, her back came up agai
nst the paneling. The gauze of her skirts was slippery and he struggled to burrow beneath it, his elbow catching the nearby bust of Julius Caesar, which rocked ominously on its pedestal. Then his questing fingers found the slit in her drawers and the warmth and wetness beneath, and his shaft hardened to epic proportions.

  Mairi had realized he intended to have her right here, right now. Her body stiffened with shock and she pulled her mouth away from his.

  “Here?” Her shaken whisper sounded horrified, like a maiden aunt confronted by debauchery. “Jack!”

  Jack smiled, pressing his lips to the pulse that beat frantically in the hollow of her throat. Fumbling with the fastening of his breeches, he freed himself and thrust up into her, covering her mouth with his to smother her cry.

  “Right here,” he confirmed, against her lips.

  He broke the kiss and turned his face against the hot damp skin of her neck. He ran his tongue along it, tasted her, bit down gently, all the time driving up into her in long, hard strokes. He dipped his head to her breast again, pulling on the nipple, hearing her stifled cries and feeling her body flutter and close around his. There was no doubt that she was shocked that he had chosen to ravish her in a public place. This was taking their intimacy to an entirely new level of wickedness. Yet he could sense she was also wildly excited by the sheer wantonness of it. She never normally took risks and he had taken control and she was helpless.

  Almost on cue, a door opened at the far end of the gallery. Light flared. Voices. Had Robert and Lucy chosen this frightfully inconvenient moment to show their guests the ancestral portrait collection? The thought made Jack smile.

  He felt Mairi go rigid as she heard the voices too. She tried to pull away from him, but she could not move and he held her more firmly and simply allowed her to slide down deeper on his shaft. She gasped as he filled her to the hilt.

  “You must stop.” She sounded breathless, her words a whisper in his ear. “Please. They might—”

  Jack smiled against the hot bare skin of her shoulder. “They might see us?” He nipped her throat hard enough to make her gasp, then drove up into her again. She bit back a little keening cry. He bent his head to her breast and repeated the caress there, a nip of his teeth and a salve of the tongue. Her breath fractured.

  There were footsteps on the gallery’s wooden floor.

  “Jack!” She sounded frantic. She squirmed. He held her still, impaled.

  “Hush.” He continued to thrust upward into her, smooth and unhurried in his strokes. “You don’t want them to hear you. Think how shocked Angus would be. Think how jealous Dulcibella would be.”

  Mairi gave a little whimper. Her body clasped his; she arched upward, he rocked higher. Light bloomed closer. The voices were louder, Robert, Lucy, Lachlan, Dulcibella, the entire house party.

  “This is my great-grandfather,” Robert was saying. “He fought in the Jacobite uprising in seventeen nineteen, and along here...”

  Mairi gave a little moan. Her sweat-slicked skin clung to Jack’s.

  “They’ll all see you in a moment,” Jack whispered, “naked to the waist with me inside you.”

  The wicked words were sufficient to push her over the edge. She came hard, the violent pulse of her body taking him with her in so intense a climax that he staggered. They crashed back against the paneling, her body still gripping his whilst wave after wave of pleasure beat over him.

  “Who’s there?” It was Dulcibella’s voice, cutting through the bliss, sharp as needles.

  Jack straightened, lowering Mairi gently to the floor. He saw that he had knocked the portrait of the fifth Lord Methven awry and that it was hanging lopsided. Julius Caesar had tumbled to the floor, chipping his nose.

  “It’s only one of the servants,” Robert was saying. “Now, over here is a portrait of Clementina, Lady Methven...”

  “Quick.” Jack opened the nearest door, bundling Mairi through. One of the benefits of being the previous marquis’s grandson was that he at least knew his way around the castle. He steered Mairi through a couple of antechambers, pausing only to kiss her on the way. She was panting and beautifully disheveled, laughing, with a hectic light of excitement in her eyes.

  “You are shocking,” she said. She kissed him, her lips clinging to his, her tongue sliding deep to tangle with his in a welter of heat and demand. Jack felt his body harden into arousal again. She was astonishingly responsive and it made him feel like a youth, impatient to have her all over again.

  “And you like to be outrageous,” he said, pushing her against the wall to kiss her again. “Who would have guessed?”

  It took them another thirty minutes finally to make it back to the landing, by which time he had taken her again on the table in the upstairs billiards room and he knew that the rest of the company would be assembling for supper and wondering where they were.

  “I’ve lost one of my slippers,” Mairi complained as they came out of the warren of antechambers. Jack adjusted the bodice of her dress, tweaking it back into place. She spun around to view her image in one of the long pier glasses at the top of the stairs, and her hands went to her hot cheeks.

  “Oh!” she said. “I cannot possibly go back down to the drawing room looking like this!”

  “No,” Jack agreed. “You look completely ravished.”

  She touched his cheek in a light caress. “I must go and make some repairs.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, very sweetly.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Come to my room later.” She disappeared down the corridor toward her bedchamber.

  Jack checked the impulse to follow her. He felt supremely physically satiated but at the same time dissatisfied in a way he could not explain. He had told Mairi that he wanted no more than an affair with no emotional commitment on either side, and then when she had treated the sex as a meaningless if pleasurable physical transaction, he had wanted to smash his fist down on the newel post in frustration. He had exactly what he thought he wanted, yet it seemed he did not want it anymore.

  There was an irony in there somewhere, but he was damned if he could appreciate it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT WAS THE morning of Ewan’s baptism. Jack woke abruptly, drenched in sweat and shaking. The room was dark and for a moment he had no notion where he was for the shreds of the nightmare still clung so tightly to his mind. With a groan he rolled over onto his back, shading his eyes with his forearm. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. Images still danced before his closed eyes; he was a small boy, standing in church, a huge church where the pillars soared upward so far that he could barely see the tops, as though they reached to heaven itself. His father was there, beaming, and his mother was smiling too with a tiny baby in her arms dressed in the most exquisite lace and satin christening robe. He was in his Sunday best; his collar was too tight and his jacket too small and he had been washed and polished, spick-and-span. No one took much notice of him. They were too busy cooing over the baby and his parents were too busy cooing over each other.

  “You are Averil’s brother.” His grandmother had enfolded him in her scented embrace. She smelled of violets and her silk gown was slippery. He struggled because he had to pretend he disliked being hugged, but actually he adored her. “That is a very important thing to be, Jack. You are the elder. You must look after her.”

  You must look after her....

  The sour taste in Jack’s mouth deepened. A vast desolation filled his heart. He rolled over and grabbed the tinderbox, but in his clumsiness he knocked it to the floor. Cursing, he got up and walked to the window instead, pulling back the curtains.

  Night still lay over the glens. There was no moon tonight. The clouds pressed low on the mountains. Jack let the curtain fall and reached again for a taper, managing this time to light the candle. It cast a golden glow into the room, the warm light only serving to m
ake him feel cold and isolated.

  He seldom had the nightmares these days. When he had first left Scotland to join Robert in Canada, he had been haunted by bad dreams, but the passage of the years had softened the edges of them and had almost smoothed them away. Which made the palpable sense of dread that hung over this one all the more disturbing. He suspected that it was coming back to Methven that had prompted it. A christening was a joyful occasion for most people, but for him it awoke bad memories.

  He decided to take a walk; dawn would be coming soon and he could let the fresh air blow away the last of the dreams.

  He dressed carelessly, not bothering to call for the valet Robert had lent him for the duration of the stay. A faint haze of rain was falling over the terrace as he went out of the conservatory door. Robert had a guard on duty at all the doors in case Wilfred Cardross decided to attack the castle itself. The man was yawning at his post and he nodded to Jack and let him through. In the gray morning light, Methven’s gardens spread out before him in elegant splendor. It was very different from when he had first come here as a child, in his grandfather’s time. The old laird had let Methven and all the rest of his estates fall into ruin, and while the tumbledown walls and neglected buildings had been an exciting playground for a child, the air of melancholy that had hung over the place had been dark and depressing. Robert had taken all of that and with Lucy transformed Methven into a family home alive and vibrant with life. He had brought love back to Methven. For a moment Jack thought of Glen Calder, his own estate, a few miles to the north. Glen Calder was equally as beautiful as Methven, an ancient stone castle with a view over the sea. The estate was efficient, it was prosperous, but it was not like Methven. It was not a home. It had no heart.

  The castle was coming awake. He could hear voices, the clatter of pots and pans from the kitchen, the sound of a door opening. Jack straightened his shoulders. He needed a wash and a shave if he was to appear even remotely respectable in church.