“Chocolate,” he casually corrected. “Scotch-laced chocolate.”
Rose felt some of the fire return to her. She no longer felt lethargic. She didn’t care what the stuff was. “You should have warned me.” She frowned as the floor seemed to move up and down in a curious manner.
He laughed. “And would you have heeded my warning.”
“Go away,” she murmured. “Your chocolate has poisoned me.”
She reached out to put the cup back on the table. But for some reason she misjudged the distance and the cup dropped to the carpet and bounced against his boot. “Aye,” he agreed much humor in his tone as he bent to retrieve the cup. “You have the most delicate constitution of anyone I know who can hold a dirk to a man’s throat.”
“I should have known that a man who by his own admission and actions is a smuggler and a libertine would trick me.”
He set the cup behind her, leaning into her until he had her pressed her intimately to the table’s edge, half sitting and near to sliding the dishes off the table. “I never claimed to be a libertine, love.”
And they remained thus thigh to thigh, the thrum of her pulse in her ears. The scratch of his cheek against her tender skin as he slid his lips to the soft shell of her ear. “And I have no reason to trick you, Rose.”
She closed her eyes, her heart hammering. Sister Nessa had once warned her about the temptations of the flesh and warned her that she was too free and impenitent with her wild ways. Rose had never appreciated the full import of that lecture until the other night in the glade and the darkness, for she had always considered herself above the inanity that had ruined many a foolish maid in Castleton. But being so close to Roxburghe and remembering his touch like the hottest fire, she recognized temptation in its basest form. Like that sip of scotch-sweetened chocolate. One taste was not enough.
And it frightened her. She was too weak. Or not too weak.
She was beginning to feel much invigorated. She had but to ease her legs apart, she thought, and he would be pressed against her.
Murmuring something inexplicable beneath the hot caress of his breath, Roxburghe pressed his mouth to her ear. “I have no’ slept,” he said. “You have no’ eaten. I can tell ye,mo leannan falaich, neither of us is in our right mind.”
His dark-lashed eyes were riveting and direct. She had never heard a brogue in his voice or Gaelic from his tongue, and now that she had, she knew that for all his Scot’s blood, he had learned the ways of the English very well.
“Is aught amiss, Ruark?” The housekeeper’s voice asked evenly from behind them.
Rose looked around Roxburghe. She stood in the doorway behind them, arms akimbo, steel in her eyes as she eyed the laird’s back.
“I was just leaving, Mary.” He pushed from the table. “Lady Roselyn and I were merely clarifying the terms of her arrangements while she is a guest here.”
“Arrangements indeed!” Mrs. Duff snapped at him, the shell earrings she wore bobbing against her cheeks. “Since when have ye behaved yourself less than a gentleman? Out with ye. Now.”
Roxburghe spread his arms in surrender. “Who am I to argue your wisdom, Mary Duff? As the dear aunt of my mother’s distant cousin, I have always allowed you certain liberties over my welfare and moral education.”
“Pish-posh, Ruark Kerr. I swaddled ye when you were a babe. Certain liberties indeed.” Mary sniffed. “Out!”
“Is Jason in the corridor?” He asked Mrs. Duff.
“Aye, he is.”
He turned to Rose, his manner infinitely courteous, one corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “Mary willsee that everything is provided for you. You need only ask. But know the boundaries I have set, Rose. You have free rein outside this room but never alone.”
The cool heat of his eyes held her. “Now if you will excuse me. I am to my own bed to sleep.”
Chapter 9
Sleep was the farthest thing from Rose’s mind as she finished the fruit Roxburghe left on the table. She discarded the cheese and bread, but ate the shelled walnuts. If his visit did anything, it galvanized her to fight. She might currently be helpless but her situation was far from hopeless.
That evening, with her ear pressed to the door, she overheard Jason telling Mrs. Duff that Roxburghe left Stonehaven to go to Hawick, all hush-hush whispers. His lordship’s solicitor and banker resided in Hawick, and they concluded that his reasons for leaving must be important or he would not have gone. Jason and Mrs. Duff werenotto let Rose leave her chambers alone. Not for a moment.
His lairdship was right not to trust her. But if she was to have any chance at all, she first needed to heal the wound on her leg and for that she needed proper food, rest, and light. Not only did she fully intend to recover but also she fully intended to escape. Or if she could not escape, she would meet her father standing tall and proud, not walking with a limp.
To that end, Rose set about facilitating her own recovery, beginning the next morning with a long written list of required items she would need from the kitchen, whichincluded a boiling pot, marigold heads, black willow and wild yam, raw carrots, and meadowsweet, to name a few. Uncooked brown eggs in the shell and honey would also do twice a day and mixed in a glass for her consumption; if the staff would not mind the inconvenience, she would crack the eggs herself.
The fact that Rose merely asked yet demanded nothing of anyone put the onerous burden on the staff to choose whether to comply with her wishes. She had learned through years of managing much of the abbey’s internal affairs that people were more apt to cooperate if one merely treated them with respect and honesty and made it seem as if your needs were their needs. Lord Roxburghe wanted her healthy, after all.
Mrs. Duff supplied her with a pot to boil water in the hearth to make a decoction from elm leaves and bark to cleanse the wound, and an infusion from other herbs to ingest for strength. Rose praised the cook’s strawberry tarts as the most wondrous ever and sent down a recipe for the strawberry pie that had been Sister Nessa’s favorite. Soon the elderly housekeeper and cook were keeping time with her and bringing Rose various garments and apparel, much that needed altering, but a job that Rose did not mind doing.
