He swore under his breath and raked his fingers back through his hair. “It’s nothing.”
“Then why won’t you let me see it?”
He didn’t answer her directly. Was he embarrassed? Was that what this was about?
“It’s just something I did awhile back. It’s a marking.”
Her brows drew together. “You mean a tattoo?”
He nodded. “It was something some friends of mine did.”
Was it some young man’s lark? Something he now wished he hadn’t done? Good lord, what did he have tattooed on himself? Her mind filled with all kinds of silly possibilities.
“May I see it?”
He drew off his shirt and she gasped—not even looking at the tattoo. Good gracious. Seeing him in the shadows was nothing like seeing him in the light. Her eyes gorged on the impressive display of bulging muscle before her. He was so big. Strong.
His chest...
His arms...
God in heaven, he was beautiful. She wanted to run her hands over every inch of those sculpted muscles, she wanted to—
He cleared his throat, clearly amused, reminding her of what she was supposed to be doing. Not that looking at his arm was any hardship. He’d bent his arm to show it to her, and the flex of muscle made her breath quicken and her body warm with unmistakable arousal.
Truth be told she barely noticed the lion rampant and strange weblike markings that surrounded his upper arm like a cuff. She did, however, notice the same words that were engraved on his sword—Opugnate acriter—since they were right on the edge of the biggest bulge of muscle, the sharp demarcations of which had herquitefascinated.
“Keep looking at me like that, sweetheart, and Eachann is going to get a very different kind of education when he walks in here in a few minutes.”
She blushed. “What do the words mean?”
“It’s Latin. The rough translation is strike with force.”
She thought for a moment. “It’s what you do on the battlefield.”
He seemed surprised. “In a manner of speaking.” He bent over to kiss the top of her nose. “Now, if your curiosity is appeased for the moment, I should go.” He stood and reached for his sporran. “Will you hand me that?”
She picked it up, feeling some kind of small, hard object inside. “What do you have in here?”
“Nothing.” He tried to snatch it from her, but she was already pulling the object out.
Realizing what it was, she held it in the palm of her hand and stared at it in disbelief.
“Bloody hell, Maggie. Can’t you follow any of my rules? I told you no snooping.”
She ignored the reference to his ridiculous rules (he couldn’t honestly have thought she would really follow them), feeling her chest swell with emotion as she took in the chess piece that she’d stolen all those years ago from Stirling Castle.
“You kept it.” Her eyes met his. “All this time you kept it.”
He may have hated her, but he’d loved her, too. He’d kept a part of her—a symbol of their love—with him always.
He grumbled something, clearly embarrassed by the sentimentality, and then, as if in acceptance, shrugged and dug something else out of the sporran. “And this. I read it every time I went into battle.”
She recognized the wrinkled parchment right away as the note she’d left him. Glancing at the crude writing and misspelled words, it was her turn to be embarrassed. “You should have thrown that away.” She tried to laugh it off. “Or perhaps it was a reminder of the ignorant girl you mistakenly married and how fortunate you were to be rid of her.”
His reaction was both instantaneous and fierce. He took her chin in his hand and turned her face to his. “It was a reminder of what a damned fool I was. It was a reminder of the girl who’d loved me so much that she’d withstood rumor, gossip, and innuendo to learn to write and read because she thought it would please me. Because I made her think she wasn’t good enough. But I was wrong, Maggie. You were perfect just the way you were, and I hate that I made you think you needed to change for me. Reading, writing, none of that mattered. It was never what was important.”
She looked away, cringing at the memories. “I was a wild, backward little heathen. I don’t know what you saw in me.”
