His new lady’s scent swirled around him, its crisp, clean lightness chasing away the dark of another, years-faded fragrance, and sweeping through him with all the wonder of a bright new day.
A new life, he hoped.
“Arabella…” She peered at him, questions filling her sapphire eyes, the smooth cream of her cheeks touched with just a hint of rose. “Will you tell me about her?” she asked, the words scarce audible above the wind whistling past the corridor’s shuttered windows. “Who was she?”
Marmaduke nodded, too thick-throated to speak, the iron bands around his heart both tightening their grasp and snapping free.
Tugged in two directions.
One beautiful and dark, but now cold as the sea battering Dunlaidir’s cliffs; the other equally lovely but awash with all the golden light and warmth of a sunburst.
Vibrantly alive, and calling to him louder than the fast-fading echoes of another time.
Another woman’s love.
“Aye, I will tell you of her,” he forced the words, “but not in this corridor.”
“Then where?” She tilted her golden head to the side and herarisaidparted just enough to tempt him with another sweet glimpse at the top swells of her breasts, luscious enough to rub the silver clean off his tongue.
“Have you a squint?” he heard himself ask, the fool-sounding question tumbling from his lips before he could better form his concerns.
“A squint?”
“A laird’s lug,” he clarified, using the more familiar Highland term. “A secret place where we can speak without prying eyes and straining ears.”
A safe trysting place where I might unburden my soul and where the dimness will flatter my ravaged face.
And keep my ghosts at bay.
“There is one,” she answered after a moment’s hesitation. “It’s built into the wall by the minstrels’ gallery and reached by a hidden stairwell.”
“Then let us go there.” He made to turn, but she stayed him with a surprisingly firm grip to his arm.
“I do not think that is wise,” she said.
“Indeed?” Marmaduke leaned one shoulder against the wall and crossed his ankles and arms.
Then he waited.
“Times are perilous, it is true,” she went on, lowering her hand. “But I do not see the need to seek out a hidden cranny to speak.”
“I would go there all the same,” Marmaduke said, pushing away from the wall.
She frowned.
The toe of her slipper edged from beneath her skirts to nudge at the stone flagging of the passage floor.
Marmaduke re-folded his arms.
“The door to the hidden passage is in my bedchamber’s ante-room,” she said, at last revealing her true reason for not wanting to take him there.
“That scarce matters, my lady,” he said, trying to keep the corners of his mouth from turning up at the advantage her revelation gave him.
Most especially since, as of this night, he intended to sleep in that ante-room.
And in a sennight, nearer still.
“But-”
