He arched a brow, and she could see the amusement in his eyes. “A visit to the holy kirk and a day in the peach grove? Enticing, but the only peach I want to pluck is standing in front of me.”
And just that fast, he rescripted their dialogue, redirected her emotions and made a mockery of her will.
His thumb stroked the line of her jaw, and with the gentlest of pressure, his other hand closed in her hair, pulling her head back, exposing her neck to his hot, moist mouth. Her nostrils flared wide and she inhaled the clean scent of him. Then he lowered his head and seduced her mouth with a kiss that invited her to wrap her body around his and let him take her down to the grass.
A kiss that reminded her of all the days he had been away. She resisted for a moment, because the simple pleasure of being in his arms was doing disastrous things to her heart and will. How easily she surrendered.
He raised his head to look at her, and with the pads of his thumbs, he traced the curve of her throat. “I want more than your surrender, Rose.”
He lowered his hands. Let her think about the words.
He bent around her to open the door. “Anaya awaits, love.”
Chapter 22
Loki shied nervously at the darkening clouds and the brilliance of a distant crack of lightning. His gloved hand keeping a firm grip on the reins, Ruark soothed the horse as he awaited a man to catch up to him. He’d seen him from a distance, a small speck against a turbulent sky. Ruark had been twice to the gatehouse looking for Duncan and thought the rider might be he.
Duncan’s continued absence weighed heavily on Ruark, and he was not in the most restrained of moods, having spent the last three days searching for his uncle to talk about what Hereford had told Ruark, which was beginning to prove a fruitless endeavor.
Yesterday, Angus told him that Duncan was not with the others bringing in sheep from the northern pastures as he had first thought. Today he had sent Colum to Hawick to speak to the coroner who supposedly had viewed the bodies of both Ruark’s father and Kathleen’s husband.
Angus approached and, seeing Ruark, reined in his horse. “A bit restless are ye, lad,” he quipped as his eyes narrowed on the sky. “Out on an evening like this.”
Ruark looked beyond the wild glen, then across the fells. “Aye, that I am. Are you not supposed to be escorting McBain and my wife to the village today?”
He scratched his heavy beard. “They returned some hours ago. Ye have no’ been back yet?”
Ruark told Angus to return to Stonehaven and thumped Loki into a gallop. He would be late returning home that night. Aside from the quick trip to look over the new foals yesterday morning, Ruark had spent little time at Stonehaven.
For the last three days, Ruark had settled into a routine of normalcy as much as was possible with Rose in the adjoining chambers and him playing the celibate monk.
His wife had gone about her business as mistress of Stonehaven, overseeing Mary’s duties during her absence. He barely saw her unless it was late at night and he stood in the doorway between her chambers and his, trying to remember all the reasons why he should turn away.
And so he kept himself occupied learning what it meant to be Stonehaven’s laird. Yesterday he had gone with Angus to look over the new foals and discuss next year’s acquisitions. Before that, it had been the barley fields that occupied him, and learning that some of the fields had not seen crops planted last spring. Tomorrow he would go south to the mill on the river and meet the foreman.
After a while Ruark quit thinking. The air was cool and crisp, as heady as rum punch as he rode Loki across the field. He rode up on the lodge, his gloved hands keeping a firm grip on the reins as he dismounted in front of Rose’s school. The scent of larkspur and juniper mixed with the smell of earth and rain and familiar memories as Ruark looked up at the high roof. All but the watchman had left for the evening, leaving Ruark to walk the empty rooms in the fading light of the day, freshly painted with whitewash and windows newly glazed and the smell of plaster in his nostrils. He was impressed with his youngwife’s accomplishment. The building would make a fine school, and he felt pride knowing Rose was responsible.
Ruark walked around the grounds. The wind caught his hair. Dusk had left the countryside bathed in the deep magenta that mixed with the swirl of dark clouds as if the tempest came from within him. His head came around at the sound of a horse. He looked to where he had left Loki hobbled and grazing on a patch of grass.
It wasn’t until he was nearly upon the stallion that he saw the second horse hobbled nearby. Rose stood beneath the branches of a large oak looking at him, her hand gripping her copper hair to keep it from whipping the air around her. She wore a cloak over a gown, the color of the surrounding tempest.
And he walked to where she stood, the sudden sharp stab of desire worse than when he had seen her dancing at the bonfire.
Worse even than last night, when he had returned home late to find her asleep on the settee in his library, the lamp burning low on the table beside her, a book upon her chest as if she had been trying to stay awake and wait for him. He had carried her to bed and she had not even awakened when he set her beneath the covers.
He stopped just beneath the branches.
“Angus said he saw you coming this way,” she said.
“You were following me.”
She made the smallest nod. Neither took a step toward the other though he could feel the pull between them.
“I have always considered myself judicious and balanced in my outlook,” she said. “Quite above it all. I do not know about the kind of love hailed by poets. No one in my life has ever born witness to such.”
Her voice wavered. “I only know that ever since I found the puzzle box in the abbey’s crypt with the ringinside, my life has not been the same, almost as if a hole opened in my heart. Mrs. Simpson warned me that I was tampering with something beyond my ken. Yet, I opened the box without fully understanding the power. My heart is like that box.
“Until you, I had never looked at a man and felt anything beyond a need to exercise patience. Even you have tried mine immensely.
