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~.~.~
‘Wash for dinner’ would not put him to rights, Taran concluded as he tramped to the loch. Only diving in icy liquid would bring him back to a semblance of sanity. A secluded place came into view, he shed his clothes and gave himself to the placid water, swimming in energetic strokes in the hopes of cleansing the memory of her. The aniseed scent, the intolerably smooth skin, the torturously delicious breast, the flaming passion matching his. Sudden amnesia would be unachievable. Their encounter kept replaying as his head plunged down the water and when it surfaced. When his arm pulled him forward or when his legs stayed him.
His attention had been divided between what she threw at him and her. Her hair piled in a practical bun. Her flashing eyes heating him, her curvy body alluring him, her illegal-thought-inducing lips turning him inside out. There had been no disguising her effect on him after that.
Their illicit tryst in the study had branded him. He found no escape. Even the guilt did not compel repentance. It reinforced the thirst for more. For total release. Multiple releases. Until they were so exhausted, there would not be guilt left. Nothing left. Only the torpor and the satiety. The sweat bodies and the sleep.
He could stay no longer in the loch or he would catch his death. Emerging, he dried taut large frame with his tartan, wrapped it around him and rushed to his chamber for fresh clothes.
Dinne
r promised to be a dragging event.
~.~.~
It was not a dragging event. The tension perforated the air so thick it might be called a fourth person at the table.
Taran observed Sam and Aileen trying at carefree conversation while he avoided looking at her as one avoided a forest of thorns. To no avail because her simple presence pierced him like the worst mediaeval instrument of torture. A torture he craved with so much desert-like thirst he was on the verge of exploding.
Sam took his knife to cut the meat and only now did he see a provisory cloth wrapped around his palm.
“What happened to your hand?” He found a hoarse tone to his son.
Sam looked at his hand. “I cut it when I took care of my plants. Aileen wrapped it and she will bandage it better after dinner.”
So, that had been the reason she took his son’s hand in hers in the drawing room. He concluded not the least proud of the way he reacted at the sight of it. And not the least repentant of what unfolded in his study. If he was the bomb, she was the gunpowder trail. That blistering kiss put fire to it and it stood on the verge of bursting in a million shards if he did nothing about it.
“I hope it does not hurt too much.” The platitude failed to cover his wrenchingly frustrated state.
“Just a little, father. But she knows of herbs which will relieve the pain.” Sam answered with an admiring streak to his voice.
He wished she produced any herb to relieve his pain as well.
How contrary his son should admire the diminutive witch. He seemed to have welcomed her feminine presence in his life. The whole manor seemed to have done it, to his annoyance. After such a long feminine absence. His bringing her here proved to have unforeseen consequences, one he was not prepared to take on, much less put up with now.
“Come, Sam.” Her voice uttered for the first time in the present meal. “Let us treat this cut.”
The sound punctured his ears and arrowed to places he did not want to remember right then. Neither did he want to remember what sounds that voice made not an hour ago, in his arms.
Bluidy hell!
~.~.~
Aileen sat with Sam in the kitchen completely off balance. It felt like there had been a stone in her stomach at dinner. Incapable of ingesting a single grain of food, she just shifted the it on the plate. Regret lumped in her with an unescapable heaviness. Regret and something else, an unsated hunger, incomplete. Unfulfilled. It nagged at her causing a foreign ache. She willed it gone. She wished she would be gone herself. Away from him and all the distorted, unrecognised feelings he triggered in her.
With a colossal effort, she tamped down the memories from the earlier hours and focused on the task at hand.
“It has not been a happy marriage, you know.” Sam broke the silence she had retreated to.
Her eyes flew to him. “Which marriage.” He could not possibly be talking about his—.
“My parents.” His eyes so like his father’s blinked with sadness.
She did not find anything to say to this, so she remained silent.
“Father strived to preserve her image for me, but servants talk.” His stare lowered to his hand.
“They should not.” Her comment came. How unfortunate that a boy so intelligent and sweet must face this.
