by Jessi Gage
He meant the bodies. Wilhelm was being delicate about it, but he didn’t want delicate. He wanted Wilhelm to rage at him, to condemn him as a murderer. He wanted to be punished for what he’d done. If no one would punish him, then he had to at least see to Hamish and Gil as the kin they were.
“’Tis my responsibility. I willna find solace unless I lay them to rest myself.” Mayhap not even then.
Wilhelm slipped the bridle over his horse’s ears, then turned to him. Though the man stood several inches shorter, the laird of Dornoch had a way of looking at him so he felt small. “’Tis not your solace I’m concerned with. You’re bleeding all over the place. You need to be sewn up, and I dinna wish to answer to your wife if ye put it off and fall over dead while ye see to men who would have killed ye for protecting what’s yours.”
Wilhelm’s hard expression softened. He lowered his voice. “If ye hadna slain them, man, I would have. I’d have tracked them down and done it myself, and I’d not have been as quick about it as ye were. They trespassed on my land, threatened what was mine to protect, and besmirched my name. ’Tis only because they were kin to ye that I dinna burn their bodies where they lie. We’ll bring them back and ye can witness their rights come morn’. Now go to your wife and let her tend to ye, and I willna hear another word about it.”
Without giving him a chance to respond, Wilhelm led his horse from the stable and mounted up. Five of his men accompanied him, two of them in a cart equipped with blankets and shovels.
As the dust of their departure rose up along the road, the weight of too many losses crushed him. Rand. Gil and Hamish. Ackergill. Edmund, Fran, and wee Jaimie Darcy. No miracle could give him back his home now that he’d taken the lives of two of his clansmen. Steafan would see him as an enemy forever and more, and with just cause.
How much heartache could a soul sustain before crumbling?
He’d lost everything that had mattered to him most except Malina, including a large part of his honor, and yet he hadn’t crumbled. It was because of her. Somehow, in the short time she’d been his, the woman had infused his heart with enough love and strength to sustain him through this most dire of trials.
Turning his feet toward the keep, he determined to make a home for her in Dornoch, a home worthy of the treasure she was. Starting now.
* * * *
As Melanie paced the bedroom, her emotions teetered like a stone on a precipice. A single jostle in any direction and she’d tumble over into tears. Relief at Darcy’s return to Dornoch tipped her one way, while the shock of seeing him sticky with blood tipped her another way. Elation at his pronouncement that she was his and he would not be letting her go tipped her yet again, only to have the wounded horror in his eyes tip her in the opposite direction.
Not knowing what he’d been through was killing her. Had he run into Steafan’s men? Had he fought them? How bad were his injuries? Had Rand been injured or worse?
“A few scrapes, my ass,” she muttered, wringing her shaking hands.
Constance shoved a bulb of garlic at her. “They’re Highlanders, dear. They’ll get themselves stabbed, dragged through a briar patch, thrown over a cliff, and punched in the face all before breakfast and call it ‘a fair interesting morn’.’ Now, peel those and put the cloves in the hot water.” The older woman nodded toward the steaming kettle a maid had deposited on the hearth. “Garlic water cleans wounds better than plain water and keeps infection away.”
She latched onto the competence Constance radiated. While calming her with brisk assurances that all would be well, the older woman deftly deployed a small army of castle servants on various missions relating to “doctoring a bone-headed Highland husband.” She’d set the kitchen staff to boiling buckets of water and the maids to preparing a hot bath for Darcy in front of the unlit fireplace. A footman hurried in with an armload of medical supplies from a room behind the kitchen that Constance said was the late-medieval equivalent of a field hospital. The Lady of Dornoch herself laid out clean bandages and spread blankets on the bed to protect the linens. Melanie focused on the garlic, and as she plunked clove after clove in the kettle, her hands shook less and less.
Slowly, the scent of garlic thickened the air. Two nights ago, this room had been a lantern-lit haven of intimacy for her and her husband. Now it was overly bright with late-afternoon sunlight and unseasonably warm with too many bustling bodies and vessels of steaming water. The biting odors of garlic and witch-hazel obliterated any romantic vibes that had lingered in the long-lost scents of honeysuckle soap, saddle leather, and sex.
Sweat trickled down her back and caused fringes of hair to stick around her face as she finished peeling the garlic and wiped her now steady hands on a damp rag. Constance, also looking pink in the cheeks, told a maid to open the window. Then she addressed the room at large. “Thank you all for your help. Now, everyone out. There’s no room in here for the poor Keith. Shoo, out.”
As the room cleared and a spring breeze stirred the drapes, she breathed easier. But her stomach was still in knots. Only laying her eyes on an ambulatory Darcy could fully ease her anxiety.
At last, the sound of approaching footsteps in the hall trained her attention on the door. Her heart hammered. Her arms ached to hold her husband and never let him go.
Darcy ducked into the room. Blood and dirt streaked him from head to toe. His right arm was caked with blood from the wound in his shoulder, and she suspected he had a wound in his left leg, too, judging by the criss-crossing streams of blood matting the hair on his shin. But it wasn’t his physical state that tore a cry of sympathy from her and sent her hurtling into his waiting arms; it was the haunted weariness in his eyes. Something had broken inside him. Something had chased away what little of boyhood had remained.
“Oh, Darcy,” she breathed into his neck as he bent around her. “What happened?”
“’Twas Gil and Hamish,” he said, his voice tight with pain. “They set a trap for me, and it took Rand.” His chest heaved with a repressed sob. “I fought them. I was worrit about ye, and I fought hard. They are dead. I’ve killed my clansmen.” In the shudder that wracked his body, she felt his grief and guilt.
“I’m so sorry, baby.” She’d take his pain into herself if she could. “So sorry.” She stroked his hair, giving him what comfort she could.
Constance cleared her throat. “You did what you had to do.” Her voice was firm and compassionate, a combination she was learning to appreciate.
Darcy nodded against her cheek. He held her locked in his arms as if she were all that stood between him and breath-stealing sorrow.
“Which are the worst wounds?” Constance asked. “Let’s get this done with and then I’ll have an early dinner sent up for you both.”
Hidden behind the fall of her hair, he wiped his eyes on her shoulder and straightened. “My leg and shoulder need sewing up. The rest are just lumps and scratches.”
For the next half hour, she did her best to ignore her frayed emotions and concentrate on the crash course in stitching sword gashes. Constance sewed up the deep wound in Darcy’s thigh, and then Melanie did the seeping cut in his shoulder, wincing more than him with every poke of the needle.
Wiping her hands, Constance led her to the door and nodded at the linen bandages draped over the chair in front of the dressing table. “Rinse the wounds with whisky when he gets out of the bath. Then use the poultice and bandages to bind them. I’ll have your dinner left outside your door.” With a wink, she added, “I know food isn’t your highest priority, hon, especially once you get him out of that plaid, but he’s going to be starving. Make sure he eats well and drinks plenty of milk and tea. Go easy on the wine or he’ll get a terrible dehydration headache after all that blood loss.”
“Thank you.” She gripped the older woman’s hand, knowing she wouldn’t have made it through the past hour without her cool-headed friend.
“It’s nothing, dear. I’ll see you when I see you.” With another wink, Constance left.
> Clicking the door softly closed, she turned to find Darcy sprawled on the bed with one arm over his face. A tuft of soft brown hair shaded his under-arm. His tangled locks lay limp across the blankets protecting the bedding from his grime. His long limbs rested on the bed with the fleshy bulk of relaxed muscle.
He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever laid eyes on.
She went to the foot of the bed and wiggled one dusty boot from a long foot.
“I love ye, lass,” he said quietly. She looked up to see him watching her from under his arm. “More than I thought a man could love.”
Her stone tumbled off its precipice. Tears heated her eyes and moistened her cheeks as she pulled off the other boot and let it fall to the floor. Happiness infused her, making her body warm and heavy with longing. “I love you too.”
“Enough to forsake your home?” He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, waiting for her response wearing a much more jaded version of the vulnerability she was used to.
She went to him and undid his belt, shaking her head. “I’ll never forsake my home.” When he closed his eyes to shield her from his disappointment, she let the undone belt fall to the blankets and framed his face with her hands. “My home is where you are. I will stay with you. Forever.”
He opened his eyes and searched her gaze with shocked wonder.
“I would have told you as much if you’d bothered to ask before leaving for Inverness.” She softened the rebuke with a smile. “But I understand why you went, I think. You were trying to keep your word to me.”
He nodded. His throat rippled with a swallow. Then he crushed her to his chest. His breath seared her neck as his kisses landed hot and urgent on her skin.
Joy washed over her. For the first time in her life, she felt complete. She hadn’t known she had been incomplete, but the sensation of her body molding to Darcy’s and her soul aligning with his filled her up in a way she’d never imagined possible.
“Malina,” he murmured, finding her mouth and taking her breath away with a desperate kiss. “My Malina.”
“My Darcy,” she said past a silly grin as she submitted to his ravishing mouth and roaming hands.
“I am yours,” he whispered between kisses. “I give myself to ye, lass, now and for all time. Your happiness shall ever be my greatest goal, your pleasure my greatest desire.”
That was the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to her. She could only kiss him back and hold on for dear life as he flipped her beneath him. His touch lulled her into a lust-hazed dream place where nothing mattered but need and love.
“My heart is sore with what I’ve done today,” he murmured as he kissed his way down to the neckline of her dress. He was already undoing the buttons marching down the bodice. “Your cries of pleasure can be my only solace.”
Yes, yes, her body said, but her brain retained a shred of reason. “Bath first,” she managed, tugging at his kilt and exposing the sweaty, warm skin beneath.
He growled. “Ye would make me wait to taste ye?” Moving faster than a wounded man should be able, he whipped her skirts up and buried his face between her thighs.
“Oh!” she cried as he began kissing her most intimate place with the same desperate passion he’d given her mouth. And then she had no more breath for speech.
He mercilessly licked and delved within her and sucked her sensitive bud, alternating between ravenous onslaughts and gentle lavings that were no less devastating for their softness.
Heat and desire swelled as she arched under the voracious tenderness of oral sex performed out of passionate love. As if his motivations weren’t apparent enough, he moaned in decadent proof that this was his heaven as well as hers. The vibrations penetrated her womb and sent her spiraling into ecstasy. Her vision went white hot like lightning. She clenched her fingers in his hair. She was flying. She was home.
While she tried to blink the world back into focus, her husband crawled over her like a lion with a fresh kill. “I will bathe now under one condition.”
She nodded, limp with satisfaction and drunk with love. If she could have roused her voice, she’d have asked what his condition was, but it didn’t really matter. After that enthusiastic performance, Darcy could have whatever Darcy wanted. She hoped her pathetic nod conveyed all of that.
Judging by the twinkle in his eyes, it did.
“My condition is that ye let me do that again, as often as I want. For the rest of our lives.”
A laugh bubbled up and out of her. “And here I thought you were a brilliant negotiator. You could have asked for me to return the favor. You could have asked for anything and I would have given it.” Her stomach leaped with anticipation as she realized he still didn’t know they could have intercourse. “I’ll tell you what. Because I’m feeling generous, I’ll agree to your condition and I’ll even give you a bonus.”
“I dinna ken what ‘bonus’ means.”
After a moment’s thought, she said, “It’s a boon. An extra special gift.”
“What boon can a man ask for when he already has all he wants?”
Her heart squeezed. “I’ll show you after your bath.”
* * * *
Darcy leaned his head back on the rim of the copper hipbath. With each stroke of Malina’s hands over his skin, the guilt that would overwhelm him lost ground to peace. How could he regret defending this precious treasure? She had never actually been in danger, but he hadn’t kent that. In fact, Gil and Hamish had convinced him of the opposite.
Thinking his wife had been captured and on her way back to Steafan had broken him the way nothing else could. And then returning to Dornoch to find her safe and hearing her say she’d never leave him had rebuilt him stronger than he’d been before.
“My home is where you are,” she had said. “I will stay with you. Forever.”
Ackergill was lost to him, but he wasn’t without a home. Malina was his, as he was hers.
His heart swelled with contentment as her gentle fingers spread warm lather over his collarbones and shoulders, then dipped into the water to clean his chest. She seemed to take great delight in toying with the wee hairs that coursed down to his nether region. And when she washed him down there, he had to bite his lip to keep from begging her for more than her fleeting, teasing touches.
The vixen kent what she did to him. Her sparkling emerald eyes confirmed it, as did the blush in her cheeks and the sly smile curving her mouth.
She had him completely entranced, completely at her mercy. He’d do aught she asked to keep her fawning over him as she was, moving slowly around the tub in naught but her shift, pressing her breasts to his neck and shoulder as she washed him. The thin white linen was so damp he could see her pink nipples poking at the fabric, reaching for him.
Malina didn’t speak. Nor did she make him feel as though he ought to. She didn’t ask him to recount the horrors of his day. She didn’t ask about Inverness. Mayhap she never would. He’d tell her, of course, about Gravois’s odd tinker camp and about Timothy and how if ’twas his magic that brought her here, ’twas nowhere near sufficient at present to send her back.
He’d thought the news would destroy her. But now he looked forward to sharing his unusual experience with her the way a man talks to a trusted friend. But not until he’d loved her senseless. Not until he’d begun proving how much he needed her and what a good husband he would be.
Malina’s hands kneaded his neck and shoulders with surprising strength. The mound where her bairn grew cushioned his wet head. He tilted his chin to gaze up at her. So lovely she was, watching him with smiling eyes, her hair loose about her face, her breasts rising and falling with the tide of contented breaths. He wanted to see those breasts bare again. He wanted to see them tremble with sensual excitement as he loved her with his mouth again. He wanted her silky hair wrapped around his hands as she loved him with her mouth.
“The water’s growing cool,” he said. “Help me out, mo gradhach.” She truly was his beloved. His mo
st precious treasure. That which he would kill for. That which he would die for.
He stepped out of the tub, and water sheeted down his legs to pool on the hearth. Malina wrapped him in linens and dried him, her bare feet leaving small, wet prints on the stone. Done drying him, she stepped into his arms, and he held her tight to him. Her warmth chased away the evening chill wafting through the open window. She didn’t protest when he lifted her and carried her to the bed.
“I want you,” she said. “So badly. But you must be hungry. You should have something to eat first.”
“Aye. I’m famished,” he said, pulling her shift over her head. He laid her down and pressed their naked bodies together. His lips claimed hers in a kiss that would leave no doubt in her mind that she was the only nourishment he needed.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” she said.
He kissed her harder, smiling when she arched against him and gave up speaking in favor of those wee moans that pricked him deep in his belly and sent jolts of yearning straight to his cock.
His fingers found her dewy petals. She was so hot there, so slick with wanting him. So irresistible. The need to be inside her consumed him. It could never be his cock. But he’d be more than content to bring her pleasure with his hands and his mouth. ’Twas all he could think about. ’Twas his entire purpose.
He plunged his tongue into her mouth as he slipped a finger inside his wife’s tight heat. Her body welcomed him with silky openness before it clamped around that one lucky finger. Christ, feeling her like this, wet tongue to wet tongue, softness between her legs to his hard digit. Heaven.
His heart burst with love. A sense of belonging flooded him as she clung to his shoulders and pushed her hips forward, asking for more. He gave her more. He stroked her, slow and sure. He kissed her, deep and hard.
She broke away, panting. “Sit up against the headboard.”
He didn’t argue. The one glorious night they’d shared in this bed, he’d learned obeying his wife when her voice was breathy and demanding like that led to grand things for them both. What miracles of pleasure would she show him tonight? Would they come together all the ways they had that night? His cock jerked with hope, but he tried only to think of her, of how he could serve her and prove to her she would never regret staying with him.
