“I’m about to be very happy, Mr. Cromarty.”
Liam granted himself a moment to gather his thoughts, to breathe, to take stock, and be present. This felt right, felt like moving forward, like trusting in life again.
He positioned himself against Louise, then laced their fingers against the pillow. “Hold on, and tell me if I’m gettin’ it wrong.”
Louise closed her fingers around his. “Same goes, Cromarty. Hold on, and tell me if I’m getting it wrong.”
They got it right. Liam joined them slowly, pausing to savor and kiss, and breathe together, to nuzzle and rejoice. Louise matched his rhythm beautifully, untangling one hand to anchor on his bum, her ankles locked at the small of his back. The sheer pleasure of her eagerness, the glory of her sweet heat, the sense of shared desire swamped Liam’s entire awareness.
He sent his mind in search of words. “Say when, Louise.”
“Liam.”
He took that for a when and picked up the tempo to slow, hard lunges. Louise clutched at him with gratifying desperation and when became now, and then, for a moment, forever. Pleasure cascaded up through Liam, bringing light, joy, and a sense of well-being so profound he could have wept.
And laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
When he’d stopped heaving like a racehorse, he settled for a smiling kiss to Louise’s ear. “God bless America.”
She chortled, her belly bouncing against his. “Now look what you’ve done.”
He’d slipped from her body, though the way she patted his backside won her a place in his heart. Gentle, firm, proprietary, protective, and bit scolding.
“No worries,” he said, heaving to his hands and knees. “I’ve another frenchie in my sporran.”
She brushed his hair back. “A french—oh. We have other names for them. Only one?”
Lovely woman. “You’ll find more in the drawer, but we’ll have to replace those. Jeannie would notice.”
Louise began carefully unrolling the condom from Liam’s softening cock. “At least she doesn’t go through the trash.”
Morag might. Liam made a mental note to take the trash to his house. “I could have done that, Miss Cameron.”
“I’ll let you get it the next three times,” Louise said. “For now, I need a cuddle.”
Liam’s tushy was sufficiently adorable that Louise tried to memorize its contours as he moved from the bed to the bathroom. He left the door open, so she could watch him standing at the sink, washing his hands, then rubbing at himself with a damp washcloth.
He was a man in his prime, gloriously healthy, and an inspiration to anybody with a visual/spatial imagination.
“I want to sketch you,” Louise called.
“First you want to cuddle, then you want to sketch,” he groused, drying his hands. “Next I suppose you’ll be raiding my sporran for a bite of tablet. Fickle is woman.”
“You brought me tablet?” Thoughtful of him.
“I usually have some with me, and you seem to enjoy it.”
Liam was no boy, and thus he had wounds and scars, parts of himself he kept guarded. Louise would not ask if he always had condoms in that sporran, because he’d already told her—
“Did you check the date on those French whatevers?” she asked as he climbed back into bed.
“I bought them last night,” he said. “Had to buy more cat food and grabbed them on the same trip.”
Louise wrestled Liam against her side, or pushed and tugged until he figured out where she wanted him.
“You’re a friendly sort,” Liam remarked, his cheek resting on the slope of her breast. “Though a simple, ‘Liam, may I hold you?’ might get the job done faster.”
Liam, may I fall in love with you? Louise would scare him off if she asked that, and she’d scared herself by even thinking it. They lived on opposite sides of an ocean, for criminy sakes.
She traced the contour of his ear, a more complicated appendage than most people realized—on many levels.
“Liam, may I interrogate you?”
He heaved a seismic male sigh. “I married while I was at uni, her name was Karen. She thought I had ambition, I thought she had a nice laugh. She was an accountant, though she also enjoyed cooking.”
Louise waited, because these were the introductory recitations, the ones that not only didn’t hurt, they comforted a little.
“We married,” Liam said, “and then, I fell in love. With Caravaggio, with Vermeer, with Canaletto, the Venus of Willendorf, the Lascaux cave paintings, Fabergé eggs, and early medieval manuscripts. With all things beautiful and profound and interesting. What my wife thought was ambition was merely passion. I didn’t figure that out until it was too late.”
Louise stroked her fingers through his hair. “You haven’t told this story to anybody, have you?”
“My family knows some of it. That feels good.”
So, no. He’d carried these regrets and memories around for years rather than entrust them to another.
“I’ll tell you a story when you’re through,” Louise said. Liam wouldn’t laugh at her, wouldn’t tell her to stop overreacting and feeling sorry for herself.
He kissed her shoulder. “I’ll listen, and there isn’t much more to tell of mine. I wrote some articles, comparing porcelain to cave paintings, Vermeer to Warhol. I was too inexperienced and cocky to understand that wasn’t the done thing. The galleries loved those articles, the academicians didn’t know what to do with them, and in short order, I was Dr. Liam Cromarty, PhD, attending the openings, speaking at the conferences.”
“You’re not telling me all of it. You got into some pissing contest with another hotshot, you failed to spot a forgery, you stepped in doo-doo somehow.”
Liam might be the expert on Vermeer’s influence on Fabergé, but Louise had four PhD’s in how to step in doo-doo.
“I’m not sure what a pissing contest is,” he said, “but suffice it to say, I was so busy racking up frequent-flier miles and being witty and insightful at gallery openings, I lost track of my wife.”
“Was she ill?”
Liam wasn’t ill, but he was ailing, with regret, with old grief, and with the loneliness those burdens caused. Louise could feel them in him the way she could feel cold at the center of a ball of clay.
“Karen was not ill. She was sick of me, and my silly little academic self-importance. I was growing tired of it myself, tired of being the infallible expert on everything, and the one expected to debunk popular theories and pass judgment on all the new talent.”
The bedroom felt cozy rather than gloomy, though the rain was coming down in earnest. Dougie strolled into the room and hopped up on the bed, settling in along Louise’s other side.
Good kitty.
“The new talent never ends,” Louise said. She’d been new talent once, to the extent the small world of ceramic art had new talent. “And most new talent shouldn’t quit the day job no matter how good they are or what the work is selling for.”
“I should have stayed home,” Liam said, reaching across Louise to pet the cat. “I should have taught my classes and given my wife the children she wanted. When we married, we agreed children were not a priority, and Karen didn’t bring it up until I’d finished my doctorate and landed the teaching post. And then…”
The cat’s purr added a comforting touch to the gathering.
“Then?” Louise prompted.
“Then she brought up children again. We argued, we made up, we argued again. I wasn’t ready, she wasn’t getting any younger. We separated off and on for two years. She said the ambition she’d so admired in me had become selfishness and a thousand other faults, and of course, when that’s the reception a man gets, he finds reasons to present papers at conferences all over the globe.”
The rain gusted, a spatter of droplets rattling against the skylight. Louise fished around in the Magic Man Purse and found the bag of tablet.
“Have one,” she said, holding a cube up to Liam’s lips. He nibbled obed
iently. When she kissed him, the flavor lingered, though so did his regret.
“We were separated,” he said, softly. “The longest separation so far, and I had made up my mind that if it would make her happy, we’d try for a baby. I loved her, she was my wife, the rest of it—the gallery openings, the keynote speeches, the growing list of publications—they weren’t making me happy. They’d made her miserable, and that was no reflection on me or the vows I’d taken.”
This would have been easier to hear if Liam had cheated with any woman besides the squat little Venus of Willendorf, if he’d asked for a divorce, if he’d done anything but turn up decent when it really counted.
Louise drew the covers around his shoulders. “Tell me the rest of it.”
“We agreed to spend the weekend together at the same cottage where we’d honeymooned. The plan was to talk. I thought I’d come up with the surefire scheme to save the marriage and recover a bit of my self-respect. I’m not sure what Karen had in mind. She listened, she cried, she told me she loved me. Then as we walked around the loch, she collapsed. By the time I’d carried her back to the cottage, she was gone.”
“Heart attack? Stroke?” What other sudden death claimed an otherwise healthy young woman?
“Ectopic pregnancy, and before you ask, no. The child could not have been mine.”
Well, hell. “This is the bad breakup you mentioned?” The worst breakup imaginable, for what woman conceives another man’s child when she’s intent on salvaging her marriage?
“Aye. I was so bewildered, and angry and guilty. There’s most of a year I can’t recall and probably wouldn’t want to. I turned mean and condescending, to my colleagues, to my students, to my family. Heavy drinking turned into stupid drinking.”
He fell silent for a moment, maybe sorting between bad memories, awful memories, and periods of no memory at all.
“If I’d been a dog,” he went on, “somebody would have shot me out of simple kindness, but I was the brilliant young scholar who hadn’t the sense to do his grieving in private. I had keynote speeches to give on important topics such as romantic elements in post-modern commercial art.”
Louise blinked, hard, because tears would not help. They wouldn’t help a wife who’d hit the end of her rope. They wouldn’t help Liam. They wouldn’t help anybody.
“I’m sorry, Liam. I’m so very, very sorry. For you, for her. No wonder you went into a tailspin.” Louise pushed him to his back and climbed over him, blanketing him with her body. “Does your family know?”
“Jeannie or Morag might suspect the baby wasn’t mine. My younger brothers were certainly concerned. They were all friends with Karen, of a sort. They’ve never said, and I haven’t asked.”
Liam was beyond tears, which was sad in itself, but also a relief. Louise would have lost it if he’d been able to cry.
“Who was the father?”
“What does that matter? I failed my wife, left her to loneliness and frustration, and the one thing she asked of me, I denied her. I suspect she was involved with one of the fellows from the art history department, a quiet man who listens well but doesn’t publish much.”
Louise sat up and brushed Liam’s hair away from his brow. His gaze held sadness, but also resignation, and that…that was wrong.
“Liam Cromarty, you are entitled to your grief, to your bad year, to your tailspins and bad days, and regrets. But you’ve punished yourself long enough, and you’ll listen to what I have to say now.”
“Listen to this email,” Dunstan Cromarty said to his wife as he joined her on the sofa near the wood stove. “It’s from Liam, and he may finally have finished going daft: ‘Chauffering your spinster lawyer friend about for the next two weeks as a favor to Jeannie. Miss Cameron likes tablet. Dougie likes her. What do we know about her, other than that she’s a Cameron? Love to Jane, Liam.’”
Jane pushed an indignant Wallace off her lap and curled up against her husband.
“If your cousin thinks Louise is a spinster, he’s a few drams short of a bottle, Dunstant. At least he e-mailed you.”
While Louise had yet to e-mail Jane. Wallace hopped back up and appropriated Dunstan’s lap. Atop the piano across the room, Blackstone was busy at his bath.
“I think Liam means the word spinster as a compliment,” Dunstan said, scratching the back of Wallace’s neck. “Liam is a spinster too.”
A mighty handsome one, though Liam was also shy, and married to his job. “How long ago did his wife die?” Jane asked.
“Nearly five years. Liam and Karen were having a rough patch, and he did not cope well. I almost moved home, but my practice was finally starting to take hold. Do you think Louise will come back to the practice of law? She’s damned good.”
Jane could feel Wallace purring, though he did so quietly. She purred when Dunstan petted her too.
“Louise was damned miserable, Dunstan. She’s not… Louise has no mean streak, no competitive edge. One of her art professors stole a glazing process she’d developed as an undergrad. She’d been working on it for years, since high school, and he was her adviser. I suspect he was also wooing her, and when he took credit for her work, she just slunk off to law school.”
“Don’t the senior academic types often take credit for the work their students do?” Dunstan gently unhooked Wallace’s front claws from his jeans. “This cat is determined to draw blood.”
Wallace had become more territorial since Blackstone had joined the household, though Blackstone was like his owner: very pretty, very self-contained, never imposing, never asking anything of anybody.
“Louise should have raised a stink,” Jane said. “Her pottery takes your breath away, and it’s simply pottery. This Hellenbore guy was some big deal at the art school, and Louise found out he’d done the same thing five years earlier with another female student’s use of mixed media.”
Dunstan wrapped an arm across Jane’s shoulders. “I don’t know what mixed media is, but Louise’s cross-examination has taken more than one judge’s breath away. You could call her, let her know the family’s been fretting over Liam for years.”
And make it obvious that Jane was fretting over Louise?
“What then, Dunstan? A half-dozen guys went gaga over Louise in law school, and I think most of the State’s Attorney’s Office of either gender would love to ask her out. She couldn’t be bothered with any of them. Once bitten, twice shy.”
“I rather like it when you nibble on me,” Dunstan murmured, shifting the cat to the floor. “And I adore nibbling on you.”
He demonstrated his adoration on Jane’s shoulder, while Jane tried to hold on to her train of thought.
“What if Louise takes a bite out of Liam?” she asked. “Loves him and leaves him? She could do that—no chance of things getting messy if you’re packing a round-trip ticket.”
Which Jane had insisted on—like an idiot. .
The cat hopped up again and marched across Jane to resume his place on Dunstan’s lap.
“Jane, my dearest love, I’m every bit as worried Liam will avail himself of Louise’s charms and then wave her on his way. Jeannie says for a year or so, he occasionally dallied, but never gave his heart away, and then he stopped even dallying. This e-mail is not from a man smitten by true love.”
“They’re adults,” Jane said, scratching the cat’s chin, which provoked more soft rumbling. “They’ll sort it out.”
Dunstan was quiet for a moment. He wasn’t a loud husband. He was a hardworking and calm husband—also cunning.
“What are you thinking, Dunstan Cromarty?”
“I’ll tell Liam if he hurts Louise, you’ll kill him.”
Well, that was honest. “And if Louise hurts him?”
“You’ll have to kill her, my dear. I’ll be too busy worrying about my cousin.”
Louise Cameron in a stern mood—when naked—was an imposing, alluring sight. Liam’s mind filled with images of Nike, goddess of victory, fierce and lovely, both.
“I�
��m listening, Louise.”
“Karen could have fought for you.”
Liam resisted the urge to get his mouth on Louise’s nipples, which were one shade darker than her lips. That color, a delicate, rococo blend of pink, cream, and—old gold, maybe?—would forever after be “Louise” to him.
And the daft woman wanted to lecture him. “Karen and I fought. I didn’t enjoy it.”
“She probably didn’t either, but I’m saying she could have fought for you.”
“Come here,” Liam said, urging Louise down to his chest. “I’m a visual thinker, you see, and my concentration isn’t up to the strain presented by your many charms.”
He’d made her laugh, which led him to hope she’d leave off nattering about Kar—
“She was your wife, Liam. Did she ever read the papers you wrote?”
Liam traced his way, bump by bump, down Louise’s spine. “She wasn’t an art historian.” As a young husband, he’d been baffled by what seemed to him an indifference to beauty. Karen hadn’t been indifferent to beauty. She’d been indifferent to Liam’s passion for it.
“Anybody should be able to grasp the substance of whatever you wrote for the galleries or general readership magazines.”
“I suppose.” Liam had written enough of those articles. Pointless, all of them.
“Did Karen ever join you for a conference?”
“What would she have done at a portraiture conference, or a conference on Dutch Renaissance masters?”
“Liam, if I took you to Amsterdam for a long weekend at a legal conference, you’d find a way to entertain yourself. Same with New York, San Francisco, Rome. Even an accountant has leave, and you had frequent-flier miles.”
Liam’s sense of well-being ebbed, leaving his old friends weariness and bewilderment in its place. Louise made the same arguments Liam had made—for the last two interminable years of his marriage.
Come with me, please. To the opening, to the conference, to the reception.
“She could have gone to counseling with you,” Louise went on. “She could have suggested a second honeymoon, audited one of your courses. She could have waited. She could have done foster care for older children. When people come to me for a divorce, they’ve often been struggling for ten years, in and out of counseling, changing jobs so they commute less or make more, trying a different neighborhood, or taking ballroom dance classes. They try anything, and they fight for their marriages. Karen whined for a couple years about a baby when she knew children weren’t a priority for you.”
Must Love Highlanders Page 7
