“You believed it was because of what happened during our ride?” he inquired softly. The corner of his mouth was turned up in a beguiling half-smile.
She was acutely aware of how close his body was to hers, and felt as though they were silently reaching for each other, trembling with their shared desire. She was seized with an irrational yet overpowering urge to grab him, to pin him against the shelves of books and kiss him again and again until neither of them could breathe. She wanted to shove him down to the floor and climb atop him, to ride him with the same gleeful and abandoned fervor with which she rode Thistledown through puddles of mud. She wished to claim him as her own right then and there, wedding ceremony be damned. She had never been so possessed by passion for anyone before in her life, and now it was like a wave sweeping her helplessly out to sea.
Her own fantasies made a blush creep into her cheeks. It was as though she was barely recognizable to herself!
“I suppose I did, aye,” she replied.
His smile grew wider. “‘Twas an unguarded moment, nothing more. And quite a delightful one, at that.”
He took a step closer to her, and her resolve weakened all the more. Her hands craved his body. Her skin demanded his caress. She was parched, and he was the rainstorm she needed.
She was sick with love, and only he had the cure.
“I meant what I said before, in fact, with every fiber of my being,” he continued. “It made me all the more eager for our wedding night.”
Those words broke the spell.
The old panic returned, the uncertainty regarding whether he would still want her if he knew the truth about her.
“I seem to have come over rather faint,” she told him, and it was no lie, for the sudden rush of anxiety had nearly brought her to her knees. Her face felt flushed, her heart punched against her ribs with a rusty gauntlet, and she knew that she would not be able to control herself if she remained in his presence much longer. “I hope you will allow me to excuse myself? Perhaps some water and a bit more rest…”
“Certainly,” he answered, looking concerned. “I shall send Moira up to see to your needs. Might I expect you at supper tonight?”
“I hope so, aye.” With that, she opened the door and fled up to her chamber once more.
As she sat on the edge of the bed and tried to control herself—willing her breathing and her heartbeat, to slow to something manageable—her mind’s eye presented her with a thousand terrible visions of the look of betrayal that would be on Alex’s face on their wedding night when he learned the truth.
Would he yell at her? Curse her? Take her by the arm, drag her down the stone steps of the castle, and throw her out into the night?
She feared his anger, but strangely, she discovered that she feared his disappointment and pain even more.
For despite his temper, he seemed to be a good man.
And she was, to all intents and purposes, lying to him with every day—everymoment—of this engagement. Lying about the true nature of the person he’d agreed to marry.
Isla was disgusted with herself. Oddly, she caught herself wishing Kenneth were nearby; not because she longed for him—she never had, really—but because he’d always been a good friend and a sympathetic ear.
Even if, in this specific instance, he represented a substantial part of the problem.
There was a knock at the door, and for an absurd moment, she thought the heavens might have somehow answered her prayer and sent Kenneth to her room. But of course she knew it was Moira, just as Alex had promised. “Come in.”
Sure enough, Moira stepped in, looking concerned. “Laird Alex told me you were ill, my lady?”
“Oh, nothing too dreadful, Moira, I’m sure,” Isla sighed. “Just feeling a bit weak, that’s all. I’ve nae been sleeping well these past nights.”
“Well, one can hardly fault you for that, eh?” Moira giggled. “If I had a wedding of my own tae look forward tae, I doubt I’d be sleeping much either from the anticipation! Particularly if it was a fellow as fetching as Laird Alex,” she added, “though my Lachlan would do just as well.”
An idea occurred to Isla. A way she might extricate herself from this thorny problem, without giving herself away in the process.
“Moira,” she began tentatively, “when servant girls marry, are they generally… intact for their wedding nights?”
The servant girl tilted her head, confused. “‘Intact,’my lady?”
“That is, er…” Isla flailed for the right words. “Are they usually still, um… in possession of their… maidenhead?”
Moira blushed a deep scarlet. “Do you mean tae ask if they remain unspoiled until marriage?”
“That’s it exactly, aye,” Isla confirmed.
