A Promise of Love (20 page)

"But, I am ready."

"But, I am not."

"Oh." That one word was brimming with relief.

She pulled away from him and would have left the bed had he not grabbed one arm and restrained her.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"To my bed. To sleep. Or, had you not decided that?"

"From now on, Judith, when you wish to sleep, it shall be here, in this bed." There was a pause during which she measured his intent. He knew it, remaining silent, a figure of shadow and stubbornness.

“With me.” It was an answer to a question she’d not asked.

"I am the oldest of five girls," she said stubbornly, as she reluctantly allowed him to tuck her close again. She did not like the feeling of his hairy skin next to hers. It gave her the strangest sensation, as though her skin were shivering inside. "There is no history to our family’s line," she continued, resolutely ignoring the pounding of his heart so close to her ear, and the warmth of his skin next to hers. "Our manor house is drafty and cold even in summer, although it is a pretty place."

"What do you like best about it?" he asked his chin nuzzling her hair. She wished he would stop that. She also did not like the fact that she was so close to him that she could again feel his voice, in addition to simply hearing it.

"I have a secret spot, which is hidden to all but the drovers. It is tucked up in the hills, a small cave, really. I used to go there, when I was sad or lonely."

"It seems a strange thing to seek solitude when lonely," he said, brushing his lips against her forehead. She wrinkled her brow against the tickling sensation.

"Loneliness is worse, I think, when you are surrounded by people."

He thought of the feeling he had experienced at Culloden. In the midst of thousands of men, he had felt horribly alone. "Were you a lonely child?" he asked softly, touching his finger to her lips in a darting, teasing gesture.

"I was a strange child, my mother used to say." She turned her face away from his touch. "Always wanting something I couldn't have."

"What did you want, Judith, that was denied you?" He pulled her back into his embrace, tucked her close so that her lips brushed against his chest. She nuzzled there for a moment before she realized what she was doing. Once more, she pulled away and this time he allowed her to keep a little distance between them.

How could she put into words what she had felt? She had wanted to belong, but amidst her chattering sisters, the noise of her home, she had felt strangely out of place. She wanted some place where she fit it, where she would not be thought of as strange, or difficult, or different. But most of all, Judith wanted someone to accept her as she was and find that good enough, after all.

That dream was impossible, now. She could not even accept herself.

Alisdair wished, not for the first time, that he could penetrate her silence.

He had been right in sensing dimensions to her. Although she had fought against their marriage, she had not complained since about her situation. Each day saw her laboring as diligently as any other inhabitant of Tynan, yet she did not protest the volume of her duties. Not once had she mentioned her lack of clothes, the state of her hands, the deprivation of life at Tynan. She hoarded her feelings and her observations with a miser's care.

Judith had come to Scotland with a doubtful dowry. Instead of coin, she brought memories and assumptions and pain. Although life at Tynan was comprised of a series of struggles, Alisdair recognized that there would always be problems even in the most perfect of worlds. Yet, with joy and laughter and love, the sun was still worth greeting each day.

In the darkness of the room, with Judith cuddled up next to him, yawning, Alisdair MacLeod admitted to himself, finally, that maybe it was a good thing Colonel Harrison had come to Tynan.

CHAPTER 18

Judith awoke to a feeling of being caressed by a sea of flesh. Her nose was pressed up against Alisdair's underarm, her arm was thrown across his wide chest, her leg bent and draped over his hard and muscled thigh. She cocked open one eye, enough to see that her knee rested too close to the juncture of his thighs, to the living reminder that her Scots husband was all male.

She drew back slowly, as if afraid to awaken him, but his eyes were open and watching her intently. He said nothing, nor did he move as she slowly slid one long leg from beneath the covers. She would have left the bed then, had she not been naked. She glanced down at herself, wondered when she’d lost the nightgown she’d gone to sleep in, then spied it hanging like a flag of surrender from the one remaining poster of the bed. She frowned at him, but still he made no comment, nor explanation. Nor did he move to free her from the prison of his long and intent stare.

He smiled finally, a particularly lupine expression she’d not seen before. His eyes were still dusted with sleep, his hair unruly, the morning stubble made Judith want to reach out and see if the skin of his face was as abrasive as it looked. He was strangely appealing in this guise, if a little frightening, like taking a puppy to raise only to discover that you’d petted and cooed to a wolf.

She eyed him suspiciously, but he continued to grin at her, a promise of incipient mischief.

Alisdair extended one arm and flung back the sheet. Judith moved to cover herself, but he only chuckled, grabbed one arm and propelled her out of the bed. Before she could flush, before she had time to become embarrassed and barely before she could glimpse more than a flash of tanned skin and delightfully curving white buttocks, Alisdair had dragged her through the room and down the stairs.

He passed Ian’s room, ignoring her whispered protests as he pulled her down the next flight of stairs and into the great hall. He opened the door to the courtyard, now brightly lit by a dawn sky. With her hands, Judith was desperately trying to cover parts of her body, but even that was a futile attempt with him gripping one arm so tightly. It was not a harsh grasp, just one filled with maddening resolve.

"MacLeod, we are naked!" she hissed frantically, looking around for signs of early morning activity. She tried not to notice his bare body, but it was difficult when pressed against his naked back and buttocks. She thought it unfair that he looked as magnificent without clothes as he did with them. Nor did it seem right that his backside had an alluring dimple at the top and curved so entrancingly down to his legs.

He tugged her onward, discounting the increasing volume of her voice and her pleas. Her nakedness was intentional, not accidental. He’d spent the night dreaming of the taste of those luscious breasts, the feel of her skin rubbed against his in affection and not simply comfort. He’d edged her nightgown off as she slept, one inch at a time, creating for himself an agony of restraint and delight.

Alisdair had finally slept, only to awaken to find her curled around him like a very warm and replete kitten, stroking him in her sleep with one insistent knee. Such a friendly gesture had made him hard as an iron staff.

And determined that this English woman be made wife.

"MacLeod! We have no clothes on! Someone will see!"

Alisdair pulled her into his arms, raised her high to protect her feet from the sharp stones of the shore and waded into the waters of the cove. Twenty feet out, the bottom dropped, and it was here that Alisdair MacLeod threw his new wife.

Judith descended like a stone into the icy water. She emerged in a desperate bobbing motion, shouting for him, for air itself.

"MacLeod," she sputtered, "I cannot swim!"

He suspected as much with the care she avoided the cove. He extended his arms, brought her to rest against his chest, her hands curled over his shoulders as if he were the only way to avoid drowning.

He wanted her dependent upon him, wanted her mind active and alert, filled with possibilities and promises, but he didn’t want her to forget that she needed him to stay afloat.

MacLeod was hard all over, an observation she’d made to herself many times. Her nails gripped his shoulders tight enough to leave marks, but he didn’t flinch. The mischief in his eyes had been supplanted by something else, serious and somber.

He was taller than she, and had no trouble touching his feet to the rocky bottom. But he didn’t bother telling her that safety was only a few feet away. He wanted her clinging reluctantly to his shoulders and glaring at him with her blue eyes turned dark with storm clouds.

The water was chilly, the tide had come in and washed the beach clean. Although the water was crystal clear, it looked Stygian due to the ebony rock beneath his feet. Over Judith’s shoulder, the rising sun heralded the dawn in pink and yellow and coral. To the left, the towering pines seemed colored black, as if needing the filtering sun to change to emerald green. Eerie cries of nature surviving itself sounded through the forest; birds chattered and sang the approach of a new dawn. It was a newly created world, harsh, starkly beautiful in a way that tore the soul to shreds.

“Shall we pretend, Judith, that we are creatures out of time? Shall we be newly discovered, each of us? No husbands for you, no Anne for me?” He smiled at the look of confusion which crossed her face.

She didn’t answer him, but then, he’d not expected her to. When she was confused or wary, Judith took refuge in silence.

“If I were a new creature, come upon you in my self-discovery, I would marvel at the sameness of you to me.” He placed his hands upon hers where they rested on his shoulders. “You have hands like mine. And arms,” he continued, as he traced two fingers down each of her arms. “Your shoulders are not unlike mine, but they are so much more rounded and soft, as if to entice a kiss upon their surface.” Suiting actions to words, he dipped his head and tasted her, brine and Judith, warm flesh and cold water, bare essence of life itself. His hands dipped beneath the water to encompass her waist, his fingers brushing against her like a mischievous sea urchin, fingers creating rivulets of sensation wherever they met her skin.

“Your waist is so much more narrow than mine, your hips curve where mine do not, although your legs are formed for the same purpose, and your feet designed to walk the earth. But there our differences end, do they not? If I were newly created, filled with curiosity as to this Eden, I would think that our Creator had erred in the pattern.”

“What are you about, MacLeod?” She was filled with puzzlement as to this man, who would induce whimsy on a chilly dawn.

“Call me Adam. And you shall be Eve. And together we will be the first inhabitants of this world, with minds aglow with curiosity and memories like empty baskets, ready to be filled and stuffed with happy times. There is no past, Eve. No yesterday. Only this moment, and as many futures as we could wish.”

She would have demurred, refused to play his game, but for the look of something in his eyes, a hint of pain as he glanced back at the ruin of his home. A second, that was all it took, and it told her too much of the vulnerabilities of this man who would parade through his home without a stitch of clothing upon his nakedness, but who bared his soul with as little ease as she did herself. Perhaps, he too, wished to deny the pull of memory for just a while.

She had no doubt what would happen here, what would be, despite pretense or nonsense, his claiming of her. It was ever such with men and women; his restraint did not mask his intrinsic maleness. He thought her husband brutal and wished to ease her knowledge and experience of this act. Brutality she could have forgotten, it was other actions more difficult to forgive. He was not unkind, this MacLeod who would be Adam. Yet she could never be innocent enough to be his Eve.

Long fingers of dawn light lit the crown of Judith’s head, her shoulders, revealing the pale milky whiteness of her skin. Alisdair wished he could banish the look upon her face, one of resignation, stoic acceptance. He wondered if she knew how deeply he’d studied her over the last weeks. Her expressions, the fleeting pleasure which lit her eyes, the anxiety she was so careful not to show to others seemed to him to be so easily discernible on her mobile face, in her deep, lake eyes.

Nor was she aware that he had, for days, sought to acquaint her with his touch. When she handed him his porridge in the morning, he thanked her with a soft smile which held promise in its gentle curve. As he passed her, he casually hugged her, a gesture which no longer caused her to flinch. Those nights when he worked late, and was not at their meal, Granmere told him that Judith's eyes would stray to the door as if seeking his presence.

Aye, there was promise here.

Alisdair turned his head to the briny wetness of her wrist and licked gently.

He was amazed at his own restraint. He’d wanted her with a fever since he’d awakened to find her burrowing next to him. Her inadvertent touch had done things to him no dream had ever accomplished, and his dreams of her had fired his nights.

His hands remained on her waist, supporting her, but his eyes were focused on the alluring sight of her breasts bobbing in the water like white, pink tipped islands.

“I think the Creator has crafted an intriguing delicacy here, do you not think, Eve?” One hand cupped a buoyant breast, lifted it free of the water. Droplets ran down, caught, sparkled on the nipple. He seemed fascinated by the sight, entranced by the pink pearliness of her flesh puckering as he watched. “I have never seen such a thing before, the symmetry of this plump flesh, the darkening of the skin here,” he said, touching the areole growing darker in the cold water. “I am but an innocent in this raw world, but I am of a mind to taste it, and this cold little nubbin here.”