“What would you wish to forget?” she asked, wanting to know him better. She longed to know every last detail about his life.
“I would forget my wife’s death, and all the pain that followed.”
Catherine drew back in surprise. “You were married?”
“Aye.”
She could not believe it. Lachlan MacDonald, the charmer, the flirt, had taken a wife?
“It was more than ten years ago,” he explained, “and she died giving birth to our first child.”
All Catherine’s emotions flooded to the surface, and again she longed desperately to touch him. She reached out and cupped her hand around his arm. “I’m so sorry, Lachlan. I didn’t know.”
Catherine fought through the cobwebs of confusion in her mind. She had thought this man incapable of true intimacy or commitment, but it seemed he had once loved a woman deeply enough to marry her and had not been able to love again after the loss of her. In more than ten years, he had engaged in only superficial affairs, hence the legend of his reputation as a heartbreaker.
The details of the curse came hurling toward her suddenly, and she frowned. “Did my sister know about your wife?” The possibility turned sour in her stomach.
“Aye, it’s why she chose that particular curse. She knew how to hurt me in the worst way, and she did so on the tenth anniversary of my wife’s death.”
Catherine fought to control the effect of that horror on her heart. That anyone could inflict such cruelty upon another was unthinkable to her.
“You have indicated many times that my sister has a vindictive side, but this is very disturbing to hear. It is beyond malicious.” She inclined her head at him. “I am almost afraid to meet her now. You and everyone else seem determined to prepare me to meet a wicked hellion who might fly into a rage and put a deathly hex on me. Maybe it’s true. She sounds like a person without a conscience. Perhaps I should not go to Edinburgh.”
“Raonaid does lack a human conscience,” he replied. “At least from my experience.” His eyes slowly gentled, and his shoulders rose and fell as he took a deep breath. “But Angus reminded me tonight that she was his lover once, and that he genuinely cared for her. I could never imagine why, but if she is your sister, there must be a trace of decency in her. I will try to remember that when I see her again. I owe that to you, lass. I want you to know it, and I believe you must resolve this missing piece of your life.”
Catherine regarded him in the moonlight and felt as if she were falling from a very high place.
Lachlan looked away, toward the main gate, and his voice dropped to a hush. “You look beautiful tonight. I watched you dance, and all I wanted to do was find a way to be alone with you.”
“And here we are,” she replied with a seductive purr in her voice that came completely unbidden. “Together and alone.”
His dark eyes locked with hers, and she felt breathless, panicked under the sudden fever of his expression.
“I need to touch you,” he whispered.
A small involuntary whimper escaped her as he strode forward, took her by the hand, and led her across the bailey into the stable, where the scent of hay and horses was thick in the air. A startled groomsman looked up from his task of pouring water into a trough, and Lachlan pointed at the door.
“Leave us,” he said in a gruff, commanding voice.
The groomsman dropped the wooden bucket with a clatter onto the hay-strewn floor and ran out. Lachlan smoothly pushed Catherine up against the wall.
“All night I’ve been fighting the urge to kiss you,” he said, “and hold you in my arms.”
“Please don’t fight it anymore. It’s just a kiss. Surely there can be no danger in it.”
“There is danger in what it would lead to.”
She wet her lips, trembling with anticipation, while he kept her pinned up against the wall, his hungry gaze sweeping over her whole face.
Catherine’s voice shook with need. “Today, you said it’s been forever since you let a woman touch you. Why not letme? I will not ask you to make love to me, and I trust that you will not try.”
Something dark flared in his eyes, and he needed no further pleading. In a flash of heat and aggression he covered her mouth with his own in a deep, open kiss of extreme sensuality and slid his big hands down the front of her gown.
Oh, at last… At last…Her body exploded with pleasure and delight.
He wrenched her closer, so that his pelvis squeezed against hers, and her breath caught in her chest. With blinding need and trembling hands, she grabbed at his shoulders and clutched at his shirt, gathering the heavy linen in her fists and pulling him closer.
The damp, open pressure of his mouth upon hers sent a fresh flood of desire into the pit of her belly, and she raised a knee to rub the inside of her thigh along the outside of his.
