by Julia London
The only one who seemed to be enthralled with Somerled’s droning was Miss Hainsworth, who sat on the edge of her seat, rapt with attention, as if she had never heard the tale of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.
Cailean didn’t know how long Somerled read, but his droning did the trick—it got them through the worst of the storm. Sun began to break through the clouds just as the Israelites reached Mount Sinai—or somewhere in the desert, as Cailean had lost track—and he said quickly, before Somerled could draw a breath, “The storm is done, then,” and nodded at the window.
“Hmm?” Lady Chatwick said, rousing from a nap. “Oh! Look, Ellis,” she said, and shook her son awake. “The storm has passed. Let’s have a look—there might be a rainbow.” She hopped up and led him to the window, thereby signaling the end of the Sermon on the Mount.
Mr. Somerled seemed slightly wounded that she offered no commendation for his reading. He put the Bible aside.
Miss Hainsworth was happy to offer it. “Thank you, Mr. Somerled,” she said gravely. “I was comforted by your reading during that dreadful storm.”
“Oh, look! It’s blue sky,” Lady Chatwick said. “How fortunate, Mr. Somerled,” she said and turned about. “You’ve such a long ride home, do you not? But with the sun now, you should reach your home by nightfall. Won’t you?”
Somerled looked confused. “Ah...aye,” he said uncertainly. The man didn’t know which way to turn because he was a poor little mouse and Lady Chatwick was a cat. A cat that had just chased the mouse away.
“Oh, good, I’m so relieved! I’d not like to think of you riding in a storm. Belinda, dearest, will you take Ellis and inform Mr. Green that Mr. Somerled’s horse should be brought round?”
Of course Cailean followed them out onto the drive. Of course he took pleasure in watching Somerled shuffle about, clearly wanting a private moment with Lady Chatwick, which Cailean refused to grant him.
Somerled began to realize he was defeated. He mounted his horse. “Good day, Mr. Somerled!” Lady Chatwick said brightly.
“Good day,” he returned curtly and spurred his horse on.
Cailean and Lady Chatwick stood side by side and watched him ride away. “Well,” she said. “Thank goodness that is done.”
“Aye. Latha math, Lady Chatwick.”
“What?” she exclaimed, spinning around to him. “You’re leaving?”
“Aye. I’ve carried your boat. I’ve waited out the storm, and I’ve heard enough scriptures for the day.”
“But there’s something I want to show you!”
Behind her, Mr. Kimberly wandered out onto the drive. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Lord Arrandale means to take his leave, but I want to show him our new potting shed.”
“Don’t waste the man’s time,” Mr. Kimberly said gruffly. “It’s not worth the attention. The man has no talent for it.”
A potting shed? What man?
“It was very kind of Mr. Somerled to have come all this way to build it. That’s a good neighbor for you, for I hadn’t realized how desperately I needed it until he appeared to build it.”
“You did realize it, Daisy. I told you,” Mr. Kimberly pointed out.
Daisy? Her name was Daisy? She was named for a sunflower? Diah, but the English were barmy.
“Well, yes, you did, Uncle. But Mr. Somerled arrived with the materials.”
Cailean’s head was telling him to walk on, but he couldn’t help himself. “He built you a potting shed?”
“He did!” she said, as gleefully as if Somerled had brought her a pony. “Come and see.”
“Go on, then. I’ve seen that upright coffin too many times as it is,” Mr. Kimberly said, and, with a flick of his wrist, he retreated into the lodge.
Lady Chatwick—Daisy, the sunflower—clasped her hands behind her back and rose up on her toes. “Well?” she said, sinking down again.
Cailean groaned. “Aye, go on, then—make haste, make haste,” he said, gesturing for her to walk.
They rounded the corner of the lodge, where Cailean nearly collided with a barrel.
“I forgot it was here,” she said. “Therein lies my uncle’s fish, all properly salted and bundled,” she said, gesturing to it. “We’ve no room to store it in the larder, and he has not yet decided where he will keep his treasure.”
They carried on, turning another corner, when Lady Chatwick suddenly stopped and swept her arm grandly. “Here it is!”
There it stood, a rough-hewn shed that, as Mr. Kimberly had said, looked only slightly larger than a coffin. “It’s a bloody box,” Cailean said. He stalked forward, threw open the door and stepped inside. Lady Chatwick stepped in behind him and closed the door. Somerled had cut an opening in the door and in one wall, presumably to use as windows. “It’s ridiculously small,” Cailean muttered, annoyed with Somerled.
“Mr. Somerled said it’s cozy,” she said, smiling up at him, always smiling, as if she knew that spark in her eye made him uncomfortably, acutely, dangerously aware of her.
“All right, I’ve seen it, aye?” he said. “What else have your many admirers given you?”
“Only this,” she said, glancing around. “Mr. MacDonald showed me a drawing of a ship he’d like to build. He’s very talented.”
“A ship he wants you to fund,” Cailean said. “Och, it’s worse than I thought. You donna seem to know a thing about fending off fortune hunters.”
“Of course I do!” She laughed. “I’ve been surrounded by them for nearly three years. You must think me a silly little fool, Lord Arrandale.”
“I’m no’ a lord. I’m a laird. Laird of Arrandale. And I’m no’ a dandy in some London drawing room that you must address by his title, aye? I’m Cailean.”
“Yes, but I—”
“If we are to be friends, you may use my given name. It is Cailean. Say it.”
“Cailean,” she said obediently. “Does this mean we are to be proper friends? I rather thought you were quite firmly against it.” She lifted her chin.
“I’m quite firmly against a courtship. And I donna offer friendship lightly, but you are clearly in need of it. Tiugainn, open the door to the box you charmed Somerled into constructing for you, aye?”
“I didn’t charm him—he quite insisted,” Daisy said, making not the slightest move to open the door. “I still maintain you are jealous of him.”
“That is preposterous,” he said gruffly.
“You are,” she said, her hands finding her waist. “I clearly saw the envy in your expression today.”
He brushed dirt from the sleeve of his coat with a vengeance. “Are you barmy? I didna look at him at all, aye? I scarcely kept my eyes open during his sermon.”
“You must at least admit he has a fine voice,” she said. Toying with him, another mouse. He knew what she was doing, and it rankled that he was powerless to walk away from it. “And then you accuse him of fortune hunting.”
“Aye, that he is,” Cailean said flatly. “You’re a bloody fool if you donna see it.”
Her smile only deepened. “Perhaps you are the one who seeks my fortune and you mean to have it by maligning others.”
“Look at me, leannan,” he said, gesturing to himself. “Do I seem to you a man in need of a widow’s fortune?”
“I’m looking,” she said, her voice suddenly very seductive—or did it just seem so to him? Her gaze casually slid down the length of him, then just as casually came up again, taking in his buckskins. His coat. His neckcloth, which he’d untied and had allowed the ends to hang down his chest. “No,” she said at last. “But the lust for power and fortune is not always evident in one’s countenance.” She quirked a brow.
Ah this woman, this barmy woman. How had she taken hold of his senses as easily as she had? One corner of his mouth
tipped up, and he slowly shook his head. “You’re a wee diabhal, aye? You seduce with your eyes, with your words...and your bloody bonny smile,” he said, his gaze drifting to her mouth. “But are you fully prepared for the consequences of your games?”
He thought she would laugh in that sultry way she had. But her expression turned cool. “Games?” she repeated, sounding offended. “Men are drawn to my fortune. What am I to do with that attention? Swoon?” She snorted and folded her arms. “You want to advise me? Then please, sir, shower me with your sage advice,” she said irritably. “Tell me what I am to do with the vultures that surround me. Tell me how to find a man to marry when I can’t trust anyone, because I must choose someone.”
Cailean was startled by her frankness. “So it’s true, then? The rumors?” he ventured. “Your husband’s last testament has decreed—”
“Ah so you’ve heard all of my humiliating secrets,” she said and pressed a hand to her stomacher. “Of course it’s true. Do you think that sort of gossip is completely fabricated? If you want to know the truth about me, you shall have it. My dear late husband left my fate in the hands of Bishop Craig. He feared I would squander my son’s inheritance if left without a firm hand to guide me, and therefore made allowances that I would lose all of my son’s inheritance if I did not follow the bishop’s celestial advice and remarry in three years’ time.”
Cailean didn’t speak right away—he was too taken aback.
“And now, because more than two years have passed, and I have been quite unable to separate the fortune hunters, as you call them, from the gentlemen who might truly esteem me, Bishop Craig is increasingly determined to settle a match on me, for clearly I cannot be trusted to choose one myself!” she said bitterly. “Have you any idea how difficult it is to try to discover some fond feelings for someone when you’ve only just buried your husband? Or when you know what everyone else in all of London knows—that every gentleman is in want of a fortune?”
She twisted away from him and rubbed her nape.
Cailean felt how this pained her in his own heart. “Did you love your husband?” he asked with quiet curiosity.
“Did I love him?” she repeated angrily, then sighed. “I came to care for him,” she admitted. “Before he took ill, he was a good man, a good father.” She paused, running her fingers over the rough wood of the single shelf in the shed. “But I never loved him the way I loved Robert Spivey,” she said in a voice only scarcely above a whisper and glanced at him sheepishly. “Will you think even less of me if I tell you I was in love with another man before I married my husband? Robert Spivey was my one and only true love.”
That admission struck Cailean like a soft blow. He didn’t think less of her—he knew that women born into her situation had little say in who they would marry. His own mother had been a political pawn in her marriage to his father. What struck him was that her feelings for Spivey were so...deep. “Why did you no’ marry him, then?”
She shrugged. “He wasn’t suitable.”
Those words twisted in him, seeping into a wound that had been made nearly fifteen years ago.
“Does that astonish you? My father was a baron, and, therefore, I was destined to marry a man of standing, and certainly not a parish vicar’s son. I understood my duty, but when I was seventeen, a proper match seemed desperately far away, and Robert was so very handsome,” she said, looking down at her hands. “I could have used a bit of your advice then, for I was quite naive. And so...blind,” she added, frowning.
“And he loved you?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “He loved me deeply. In my memory, our love was beyond reason.”
“What happened?” he asked, not fully understanding. Perhaps he was naive, too.
“Oh, utter disaster, naturally. I rather thought I might convince my father that a match with Rob would be ideal...but before I could do so, my father announced to me that he’d agreed to a match with Lord Chatwick, and all there was left to do was for me to consent. The match I thought so far away was upon me.”
“Aye. What did you do?”
“What did I do? I married Lord Chatwick.”
“But—”
“Rob understood, you know. He said that perhaps we’d reached too far into our dreams. He understood,” she repeated, her gaze still on her hand as she stretched her fingers apart. “He was a gentleman, and he let me go as he ought to have done.”
She dropped her hand and looked up at him, and for the first time, Cailean saw uncertainty in her eyes. Spivey might have been a gentleman, but what sort of man was he? “I donna understand a man who doesna have the brass to fight for what he wants, aye? For who he loves. No’ a word of protest from him?”
Daisy colored.
“Your cousin said you were to marry him,” he said flatly.
To that, she laughed. “I hope to. He wrote me recently. He had heard of my husband’s death and hoped to reunite. That’s why I came to Scotland. Not to find a husband, but to give Rob time to reach London before the bishop is pounding on my door.”
Cailean stared at her, trying to imagine this tale of two young lovers reunited after all these years. Something about it seemed a wee bit off.
“Please don’t think ill of me,” she begged him. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”
“Aye, of course I have.”
Her countenance suddenly changed. “You have? Just as I was beginning to believe you a heartless scoundrel. Who was she?”
“A Sassenach, aye? Like you.”
“Like me?” She beamed, pleased with that. “Why didn’t you offer for her?”
“I did,” he said. “I courted her in earnest for two summers, but when I made my offer, she refused me.”
He said it so dispassionately that Daisy giggled. Cailean didn’t smile. “Oh,” she said quietly. “I beg your pardon. I thought you... I’m sorry, Cailean.”
“No,” he said brusquely. There was nothing more demeaning to him than her pity. “It wasna meant to be.”
She reached for his hand and squeezed it affectionately. “And there has been no one else,” she said. “Is that why you’ve never married? You love her still?”
Cailean chuckled and interlaced his fingers with hers. “No, I donna love her. Och, lass, there have been many others. I’m a man, no’ a priest. Never mind me—if you mean to marry this Spivey, why then did you kiss me?”
“Because my husband was ill for many years.” She toyed with the end of his neckcloth. “And neither am I a priest.” She smiled ruefully.
He understood her completely, and his skin began to tingle with anticipation. “You are no’,” he agreed, his hand finding her waist.
“I want... I need diversion. Do you understand?”
Her words shot through him, lighting him up, setting him on fire. The lady needed him, and he was helpless to deny her. He moved forward, pushing her back against the wall. “I understand. What sort of diversion?” he asked, cupping the back of her head, then sliding his hand to her nape. “Attention? A kiss in the larder?” He moved his hand to her collarbone. “Tell me what you need.”
“I’ve already had a kiss in the larder. And my name is Daisy,” she said.
“Daisy,” he muttered. “Aye, it suits you to be named for a silly, sunny little flower,” he said, and touched his nose to her temple.
“Do you mean to divert me?” she asked, lifting her face to his.
“That would depend,” he muttered and moved his hand to the swell of her breast, his fingers dipping into her décolletage.
She leaned back and pressed her hand lightly against his chest. “On what?”
“On how you behave.”
Her smile of pleasure deepened into the dimples, and Cailean felt his corruption was complete. He would give whatever this woman wanted from him. He dipped down to kiss her.
>
She slid her hand up his chest and around his neck, pulled him into her body, and kissed him back, arousing him instantly. Cailean squeezed her hip, then gathered her gown in his hand, reaching for the hem. When he touched her bare leg, Daisy gasped as if touched by ice and bit his lower lip. “Am I behaving?” she asked breathlessly.
Cailean responded by silencing her with another kiss as he slid his hand up her leg. Her skin was lightning to him, singeing every nerve.
She pressed against him. “Scoundrel,” she whispered, and bent her neck so that he might kiss it.
“Diabhal,” he murmured against her skin.
Her breathing shortened; he could feel her body warm, as if she was melting into him. He himself was hot with lust. He moved his hand again, now to the inside of her thigh, soft and smooth, and a shudder of ardor snaked through him.
“A Diah, resist me, Daisy,” he said into her hair. “Think of your future and resist me.”
“I won’t. I refuse,” she said, and drew the lobe of his ear between her teeth. It was a small thing, but it pushed Cailean over the edge. He slipped his fingers in between her legs.
She gasped, her body trembling at his touch. Cailean tried to hold himself above the desperate, urgent desire that was ballooning in him, but it was no use. He craved her body, craved the release he would give her, and when she sank against him on a sigh, he craved the release he wanted from her.
He slipped his fingers deeper in between the folds of her body as he caught her face with his hand so that he could look in her eyes, to assure himself he hadn’t gone too far, hadn’t taken this liberty without her consent. There was a prurient shine in her eye, unfocused with passion, a shine of sheer longing. He pushed the skirt of her gown up higher. He could detect the scent of her desire, and like an animal, his mouth watered.
