Page 44 of Devil Black

He drew a breath and thought, actually contemplating his words before he spoke them. “I appreciate your concern, but I cannot imagine any letter of appeal to your father that might change things now. We are wed, and naught can undo that.”

“No?” She looked at him, her eyes wide and filled with reflected firelight.

By the devil’s horns, she was beautiful, from the hair that tumbled down her back to her bare feet.

“Yet,” she spoke on, “Meg says you could lose everything if this, this war goes badly—this place that means everything to you, your ancestral lands, your life.”

He smiled. “Nothing means everything to me, save revenge. You might as well know that of me now. You had best believe it.”

She lifted her chin. “You could renounce me. Send me home to my father.”

“The marriage has been consummated.”

“So it has. Yet I would be no more shamed than I already was, in my father’s eyes. Make some excuse, say the priest was drunk when he joined us, or—”

“O’Rourke was, indeed, drunk. But that does not render the joining invalid.” He frowned at her. “Do you want to escape me so badly that you would rather choose shame beneath your father’s roof?”

She shrugged. “ ‘The devil you know,’ as the saying goes. At least, if I return home to a life of obscurity, it will not cost you all you value.”

“Allow me to worry about my costs, Wife. I am no bairn, unable to make my own choices.”

“Nor am I.”

Just as well, with the way he felt right now: enflamed, ready to push her to the hearth rug and take her there. Could she see the desire in his eyes? He had done his best to hide it these past days and nights, but it grew more difficult. Sleeping beside her proved tortuous, yet he could not keep away. And even when he did remove himself, pacing the battlements or riding the fields, she obsessed his mind.

He did not know what she saw in his eyes, but she reached out, her fingers barely brushing his sleeve, withdrawing and then grabbing hold, hard.

“You carry old wounds, deep ones,” she whispered. “I would not have you acquire more because of me.”

Astonishment touched him. “You are a merciful woman, I think,” he told her. “Just how much pity, Isobel, do you have in your heart? Naught can heal those old wounds of which you speak. Yet there is a fairly constant ache you might ease.”

He had never come closer to asking, but his blood fair burned inside him, and he found himself awaiting her reply with held breath.

Her eyes fell and then came up to meet his again, spilling over with wicked light. She tumbled forward into his arms and lifted her lips. “I feared, Husband, you would never ask.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Husband, are you awake?” The words came from Isobel in a whisper as she turned to the man beside her in the bed. Early dawn light crept over the windowsill and past the curtain she had hung to block the cold, barely lifting the gloom that filled the chamber. But she could see Dougal, and the sight caused a pain in her heart.

He slept on his side, turned toward her, his black hair tangled on the pillow with her own. In repose, his face looked almost beautiful, like something carved of ivory, all the wary cruelty gone. His eyelashes, sinfully long, made twin fans against his skin, and only the deep scar beneath his left eye marred his perfection.

Isobel’s fingers tingled with the desire to touch him, smooth his hair, which she knew felt like silk, caress the supple muscles beneath every inch of skin even as she had most the night long. No wonder he still slept, after their excesses—she doubted either of them had more than an hour or two’s rest, and she could still feel his touch everywhere.

Only a madwoman, such as she surely must be, would awaken early following such a night just to look at her husband. Yet that temptation, following all the others of the night, would not leave Isobel alone.

She had made a number of mistakes in her life, some of them disastrous: falling victim to the charms of a wastrel, trading places with Catherine and, quite possibly, marrying this man. Yet no mistake would be so disastrous as falling in love with him.

She lay gazing at him and prodding the tender regions of her heart as one might a fresh wound, testing its depth and risk. She had never been in love and did not understand the emotion. And what she felt toward Dougal did not resemble in any way what she had imagined love to be. This felt raw and wild, desperate and unbidden, yet it differed from the desire she also felt when in his hands. She had thought love a soft, comforting thing.

Yes, surely this was but some form of mad desire, never before experienced. After all, she had encountered many forms of desire at his hands—wicked, immensely pleasurable, and heretofore unimagined. She had never dreamed a man and woman could use their lips, their mouths on one another’s bodies the way she and her husband did, nor that the responses could be so shattering and miraculous. Just thinking on it now set her body throbbing again.

Surely, in light of all that, what she felt for him must be mere attraction. Yet the thought of her father journeying north with a household guard or, worse, help from his friend MacNab to reclaim her, caused deep pain. For whatever reason, she did not want to leave this man.

Could it happen? Could her father declare her marriage contract invalid, take her by force or persuasion and give her to Bertram, for his wife? The very idea made it hard to breathe. She would not survive a week, a day, an hour.

Was this love, or need? Need to see Dougal MacRae walk through a door in that arrogant, confident way he had, need to watch the intelligence flicker in his eyes when he spoke, to catch the rare, wry smile he tossed at her when the two of them found something humorous. Need to feel the warmth of his big body in her bed, and even when he slept drink in the feeling of safety brought by his presence, as if no harm could find her when she remained with him.

A lie, that. They were surrounded by harm, risk, and danger. The trouble was, she cared for none of that while he was within her reach.