Page 24 of Wild Wicked Scot
“Did you have a look through her things?” Arran asked as Jock walked across the room.
“Aye,” Jock said with a sigh. He looked back at Arran. “We had to subdue her maid, we did. The lass bloody wellbitme,” he added, holding out his hand to show Arran. He gave a curious shake of his head. Poor Jock would always be confounded by women. “I found nothing but gowns and shoes and the like,” Jock continued. “Quite a lot of it, too—I’ve never understood why a woman needs so many bloody shoes. A lot of bother if you ask me.”
Jock quit the study, leaving Arran alone.
He looked to the small window.Why, Margot? Have you no’ harmed me enough?
The memory of her flight from him had dulled with time, certainly, but there were still moments that the pain still felt raw, an open wound exposed to bitter wind.
He hadn’t been surprised by her departure, not really. They had argued several days before, at an impasse once more about the course of their marriage. She couldn’t seem to find her bearings at Balhaire. She had expectations that did not fit their clan and, Arran could admit, his clan had expectations of Margot that she’d been too young and inexperienced to meet.
He’d thought long and hard about this over the years, and he realized now what he didn’t really understand then—Margot Armstrong had been pampered and served from the day she was born. She knew no other way. But at Balhaire, the clan was family—everyone contributed to the greater good. Arran had expected, had assumed, that she would adopt this way of life. Unfortunately, the very few attempts Margot made had been badly done, from a place of superiority. And his clan...Diah, but they would give no quarter.
It had been a fractious four months of trial and error, and yet Arran had seen a side to Margot that he’d come to adore.
He heard the door of his study swing open and turned his head; Old Roy had followed his scent and ambled over to Arran to have his head scratched.
Arran smiled down at the dog, suddenly reminded of a cold winter morning he’d coaxed Margot out of her rooms and down to the kennels, where a litter of weaned pups were frolicking in a box of straw. They would be herding dogs, but that morning they were just black-and-white balls of soft cotton, tumbling over each other and onto the straw that had been lain down for them.
He would never forget the look of delight on Margot’s face. She’d fallen to her knees, laughing as a pair of them had climbed up onto her lap. Arran, too, went down on a knee beside her, and the two of them had remained in that small space with the pups, laughing together at their ungainly attempts to play and move. They had playfully named the five pups. She’d told him about a small dog she’d had as a child, one that she would dress in clothes the housekeeper made for her and take about the garden in a perambulator.
There were other moments like that—unguarded, easy, companionable moments when Arran had seen the promise of their union. Moments when he’d felt things for his beautiful wife he would not have thought were possible only weeks before. He’d seen another side of Margot, and he had loved her.
Margot clearly had not shared his optimistic vision. Why they’d argued so vehemently that day, he could no longer recall. He’d been gone for a few days, hunting red stags. He’d been tired and hungry, and what he recalled most vividly were the tears streaking her face, another round of tears he despised and was helpless to understand. “I want to go home,” she’d said flatly. “I don’t want to live here like this.”
“Aye, then, go. We’ll all be the better for it,” he’d snapped, and he’d stormed out of her room, furious with her, with himself.
But he hadn’t meant it.
Those were angry words, spoken in a moment of fury. He had let them disappear into thin air with so many other angry words. He’d been careless, thoughtless—because he had believed that as they had sworn to each other and to God that they would stride forward in conjugal fealty, somehow they would forge a path in spite of their many differences.
Jock told him she was leaving a day or two later, and Arran still didn’t believe it. He went about his tasks that morning, disbelieving. He told Jock to let her go if that was what she wanted, because he never believed she would.
Diah, what a fool.
He didn’t like to think of that day. It still pained him—aye, pain, the sort of pain he’d never in his life experienced. He’d come riding up from the cove with a few of his men and had seen the coach pulling away from Balhaire. He had reined to a halt, had glared at her as she’d passed and as the agony of this reality had settled into his marrow. The burn was deep—he was humiliated before his clan and at the same time made to understand what an ignorant man he was. And the burn was accompanied by the ache of watching someone leave him, someone whom he had, against all odds, come to care for very much.
A fool. There was no other word for him.
Arran would never forget that pain, as it burned in him yet. And he realized, as he scratched Old Roy behind the ears, that the time for reconciliation had come and gone. He’d not be made a fool of again.
CHAPTER SIX
MARGOTWASAWAKENEDby a dour-faced woman who announced a bath would be drawn for her, then shoved the draperies aside with such verve that Margot cried out when she was blinded by the sun. “Thank you,” she said, turning her face to the pillow. “Would you be so kind as to send my maid?”
The woman muttered something on the way out. Margot waited until she heard the door close before she pushed herself up to sit and brushed back the hair from her eyes. She was exhausted. And deliciously sore. Andconfused.
Last night had not been the homecoming she’d expected. Arran had confounded her. The passion he’d shown her—raw, formidable anger and desire—had moved her. She’d been dangerously inflamed by it, her body wanting the coarseness of it all.
But then there had been that slender moment, that tender caress. It had hardly happened at all—but she had felt it. She hadseen it. And then he had made her turn her head.
What did it mean? Did he despise her? Was there a part of him that didn’t? Or had it been only a moment?
Arran seemed different to her now. Older. Wiser. Much more sure of himself than he’d been before. And whatever he’d meant by that touch, however truthful, it had awakened emotions Margot was not prepared to face. Such as regret. Buckets and buckets of regret for leaving him at all. For not having left sooner. Regret that she’d not known how to defy her father and never enter this marriage, regret that she’d allowed herself to be ruled by her emotions for the short months she’d spent here.
In the time she’d been gone from Balhaire, Margot had never forgotten what her husband aroused in her. But the actual physical sensations, so powerful in the course of the act, had dimmed with time. The animal attraction and unbridled pleasure he’d shown her in this bed last night had staggered her.
Before, with few words between them, she’d always felt cherished and beautiful. But the man who showed her that depth of passion was never the same man who rode out with his men the next morning. The man who whispered his devotion to her in this bed was not the same man who seemed inconvenienced by her beyond this room.
