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Ian’s mouth gaped open a bit, then he snapped it back shut. “You’ve no place to be asking such a thing.”
“Your mother says that you harbor some depth of feeling for me. The laird insisted upon the same. I’ve never seen any evidence of even a fondness for me, but perhaps I am a clot-headed fool. I refuse to continue on in ignorance.”
Ian threw his sword down. Threw it, with a clatter. His eyes narrowed in something akin to fury and he pointed to the still-red scar of the wound on his ribs. “No evidence of fondness, she says! Won’t this do for evidence?”
The wound he’d taken defending me from the enemy. And the memory of it washed over me. Donald clan warriors been trying to grab me and make off with me as they’d done with Arabella. One of them had their hands on me.
Ian Macrae landed a staggering blow to drive him off. Ian had defended me with his body and taken a chop of the sword for his reward. I remembered the spray of blood—the hot, sticky feel of it as I tried to staunch his blood with my pretty gown…
And as I remembered it, Ian continued to rant. “I s’pose you will say that I took it for duty, and that much is true. But what of the wounds I’ve taken for you that you can’t see? Like the one you’ve given me just now. To have been inside you with the laird—to have made love with you in his bed—and not only watch you turn back into his arms, but then tell me you’ve no evidence of my feelings!”
I swallowed audibly. “But you never said—”
“What was I to say? You don’t want me. You don’t belong to me. I’ve too much pride to say such a thing and see the pity in your eyes after it. We might have gone forever together, you and I, without this added humiliation of speaking about it, but you’re like him, aren’t you? You enjoy tormenting me.”
“No, no!” I cried, swiftly, reaching for his hand. “Of course I don’t.”
“Then what is it that you’re about?” he asked, his chest heaving.
“I—I don’t know. I don’t understand how it is between us. Your mother thinks I am your mistress.”
“Och! My bloody mother,” Ian cried, pulling his hand from mine to tear at his hair. “That woman is a meddler of the first order.”
“Am I your mistress now?” I asked, because I felt as if I must know.
“Well, you’re not my wife, are you?”
That made me shrink down a bit into myself in shame.
I went silent, and so did he. And in that silence, he yanked off the rest of his shirt and threw it to the floor. Then he climbed into his side of the bed with a crisp military precision, and brooded in silence.
I broke the silence with a whisper. “I never thanked you for saving me.”
“It was my duty,” he said, gruffly. “It is evidence of my feelings for you, but it is not a debt that must be repaid if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, but it was the first and only thing you ever did for me without sourness or complaint, as if it were easier to take the cut of a blade than to teach me my letters…”
“T’was a thousand times easier than teaching you to read, and not because you’re a slow student. To the contrary, the plainer it became to me that you’ve a fine mind beneath all that glorious hair, the more irritating it became to teach you. And not touch you…”
“You’ve wanted to touch me all along?” I asked, curious.
Without looking at me, he murmured, “I’ve been in a sweat of desire for you ever since you came to this castle and I saw you put the laird into a fever-lust. I stand shamed for it.”
“Because of what I am?”
“Because of what I let him make you,” Ian replied.
I bit my lower lip, wondering how differently my life would have been if the laird had never made me his harlot. Then I realized that it was not the laird who made me that. “I wanted him, Ian. The laird would’ve never put a hand on me if I had not wanted him. You saw for yourself how much I wanted him.”
“But he hurt you,” Ian said. “I watched him beat you with a belt.”
“You also watched me beg him for it.”
“If you were my woman, I would never do that to you.”
That, too, was a tragedy. Because I believed him. And it meant that I would never feel the way with Ian Macrae that I felt with the laird. “I was happy to have him do it. It gave me pleasure. I am suffering for its lack. I can’t explain it, but I wanted to make him take pride in me. Wanted to do anything for him—and I can never explain to you how miserable it feels not to be able to serve him.”
“I think I know exactly how it feels,” Ian said, and at first I thought he interrupted me because he didn’t want to hear of it. But then he added, “I know how it is with him. To feel as if he will let you inside, only to be shut out at the end. Feels like being put outside the castle walls, alone and in the cold.”
