“Then ye have nay reason not to come over here and permit yerself to be alone with me,” he replied, offering out the brandy to her again. “She’s not me wife, lass. And the wee one isn’t me daughter.”
Anna froze, her lips parted, her eyes wide and unblinking, as if time had stopped and only Jeremy remained unaffected.
“But she is… Mrs. Bolt,” she managed to whisper, still unmoving.
“I don’t know why she introduced herself like that,” he said. “She’s Lady McIver.WasLady McIver. Might be that she doesn’t want to call herself that anymore, since her home and her husband are gone.”
Anna staggered back as if she had been released from some invisible snare, her hips bumping into the edge of her writing desk. “She is…”
“Me sister-in-law. Me brother’s wife,” Jeremy replied. “Douglas made a hefty fortune in imports, bought the castle and title for himself and his family. He could have done well in English society, Edinburgh even, but he wanted his bairns to have the raising that we had, out in the wilds of Scotland, in a castle, in a place where community means something. We were welcomed. All gone now, of course.”
His throat thickened with the weight of too many memories as he spoke, and he sipped from the glass meant for Anna to try and wash it all down. He did not know why he was telling her more than he needed to.
Because they are here, and I can’t escape it.
“Sophie is me niece,” he added. “There will never be any more bairns. Not of his, anyway.”
He did not want to look at Anna, did not want to see the pity he might find there, but his gaze refused to wander. Her expression softened, and her hands gently gripped the edge of the desk, her head slowly shaking as her brow furrowed.
“I... I am so sorry, Jeremy,” she said, in a voice so filled with regret that he could not stand it.
It was the first time she had used his name, but he did not want to hear it like this, tarnished with sympathy. He wanted it whispered against his skin, gasped in a moment of pleasure, screamed from the tangled coverlets of her bed, breathed out as her ecstasy ebbed. Better yet, that she would be so overcome that she could not say his name at all.
But not this.
CHAPTER 17
Setting down the glass, Jeremy folded his arms across his chest and adopted an air of nonchalance, ignoring her unnecessary apology.
“Is that why ye summoned me in here, so angry ye were ready to rip me head off… because ye were jealous?”
He flashed her a dark smile, needing not to think of what he had lost, needing to distract her, divert her from the things he did not want to talk about.
He pushed away from the liquor table and stalked toward her. “Is that it, lass?”
Anna stared at him as if frozen again, though the shock in her wide eyes was different; it was not the look of someone who had been informed they were wrong, but the look of someone who had been caught.
He stopped in front of her and leaned forward, his arms coming down on either side of where she stood, trapping her against the desk. If she pushed him away, he would move, of course, he would, but he had a feeling she would not.
“Were ye raging mad because ye could not stand the thought of another lass having what ye want?” he whispered close to her ear, a delicious shiver running through him as he heard her gasp, saw the gooseflesh prickling across her smooth skin, felt her back arch so he could lean in closer.
Her breath tickled his ear in return as she whispered back, “You flatter yourself,sir.” Her hands came to rest on his chest, but she did not shove him; she just let them settle there for a moment. “Even if she were your wife, I would not be jealous; I would feel sorry for her.”
He pulled back, surprised, the fire in him blazing as he saw the defiance on her beautiful face, the smirk on those lips he longed to kiss until neither of them could breathe, and the triumph in her eyes, as if she thought she had already won this round.
“Why is that?” he asked, as curious as he was frustrated.
“Who would wish to be shackled to a man that cannot be trusted?”
He laughed in the back of his throat. “Ah, but ye are imagining it all wrong, lass.” His body pressed closer again, the arch of her back, her neck, her parted thighs, doing things to him that probably were not wise. “In the wee fantasy ye have, ye assumeme wife is another lass, oblivious, and ye are the temptress I can’t resist. I have never been married, aye, but I know that if I were… I would worship me wife.”
His arm slipped around her waist to hold her as she bent backward, his other hand sliding up the soft curve of her thigh. “I would not marry a lass I did not want to get on me knees for...” he purred, dipping his head to her neck, feeling the frantic rise and fall of her bosom against his chest. “I would not marry a lass who did not intoxicate me, who did not have such a hold on me that we would not leave the bedchamber… or any room where I could have her. I would not marry a lass who did not occupy me every waking thought, until I could not bear it anymore. A lass who would be waiting for me, eager for me tongue, me touch, me…”
He tilted his hips forward so she could feel the end of his sentence, the hitch of her breath letting him know that she had. The heat of her was a maddening thing that razed through his veins, the teasing knowledge of that sweet, hot well of pleasure—so close and yet guarded behind the thin fabric of his trews and her drawers—making his loins ache until he thought he would explode if he could not have her.
Anna moaned, and as his lips skimmed the curve of her neck, her hands slid up into his hair to pull him closer.
His mouth claimed hers, all patience and restraint giving way as he lifted her and placed her on the edge of the desk, a gasp escaping her lips. He did not want to dwell on all the bad thingsthat had driven him here; he just wanted to lose himself in the one good thing he had found.
