Without a word, he stood.
Heedless of his nakedness. Uncaring if she and all the sons of Beezlebub laughed at his plight.
“You care for me too much to wear my ring?” He forced himself to push her, the gruffness in his voice a thin shield for his vulnerability. “Fair lady, I do not comprehend your logic.”
“Upon my word, I do care. Far too much.” She pushed to her feet as well, a bed cushion held before her as she slipped past him, making for an iron-bound strongbox at the foot of her bed.
“Your ring rests here,” she said, indicating the large chest. “I put it there because I will not do you the injustice of claiming it so long as I cannot give you my heart as freely as I’d share my body with you.
“That is the way of it.” She lifted her chin, stared right at him. Not from coyly lowered lids as a more saucy maid would have done, but with the level-eyed look of a woman who never lied.
“You are too worthy a man for anything less,” she said… or so he thought.
He could barely hear her for the hoots and howling of his demons. They’d returned en masse and from the racket they made, it sounded like they’d brought a whole regiment of reinforcements with them.
Chapter 40
Too worthy a man for anything less.
The words sat heavy in his heart as, a good while later, Marmaduke stood high on Dunlaidir’s ramparts. Gripped by freezing winds, he gazed out across the open sea. Slate-gray and cold, its endless expanse stared back at him.
Uncaring of his woes, or those of any man, its ceaseless roar muffled by pale, low-hanging clouds and the first snowfall of winter.
Too worthy, she’d said.
Too blighted, his own doubts amended, for they, too, had rushed back to torment him.
And so he clenched his jaw against the biting wind, the bitter irony of his life. Sir Marmaduke Strongbow, once the sought-after ladies’ man, dashingly handsome, his mere kisses coveted, stood here now, suffering the injustice of having hands skilled enough to make an angel sigh, passion that never failed to please, yet a face too marred to win a woman’s heart.
His own lady wife’s heart.
Turning into the gusty wind, he let the swirling whiteness cool the frustration searing his cheeks. His left cheek – the scarred one – still sticky with Linnet MacKenzie’s ragwort salve.
Herbeauty treatment.
A fool’s delusion he’d recently discovered.
He hadn’t even known he’d smeared on as much as he had until Ross had commented on it, blessedly mistaking its yellow coloring for a smudge of grime.
His lips twisted in a bitter smile.
The only smudge on his face was anything but grime, and couldn’t be removed as easily.
Couldn’t be removed at all.
Drawing his fur-lined cloak tighter about him, he peered down at the little golden-brown dog that, for a reason he couldn’t fathom, had tagged along with him to the battlements. The wee creature pressed its small body against his boots, and met his stare with round, unblinking eyes.
A gaze as frank and assessing as Caterine’s.
“Well?” Marmaduke spoke above the whipping wind. “There is nary a spot of beauty in this ravaged face is there, my little friend?”
To his amazement, Leo cocked his head and he would’ve sworn the dog’s brown eyes held a wealth of understanding.
No, not understanding.
Pity.
“That is not the answer I’d hoped for,” he said, bending to scoop the dog into his arms.
