When he pushed her chemise over her head and put his mouth to her breast, to her abdomen and between her legs, Margot groaned with desire, dragging her fingers over his buttocks and his back as he kicked free of his boots and buckskins. He incited a fire the moment he thrust into her, thick and hard, and carried her away on a cloud of physical pleasure so intense that it clawed at her throat, releasing in a soft growl of delight.
They were moving together, his breath hot in her hair. They were each of them desperate to have that primal release of ecstasy...
But then Arran did something Margot did not anticipate in that frenetic coupling—he stroked her face. It was a clumsy stroke at that, as one might try to caress a moving child. But she knew instantly it was a caress of true affection. It startled her; she opened her eyes and looked up at him, wide-eyed.
Arran stopped moving. He gritted his teeth as if he was holding himself back. “Turn your head.”
“Pardon?”
“Turn your head,” he said, and pushed her face away from him, so that she was looking now at the windows. She felt his scorching gaze on her as he began to move in her again.
Margot’s heart was racing dangerously hard. She was confused and inflamed, suspended between wild desire and the realization that he did not want to see her face. Something in her womb fluttered. A rush of breath escaped her. Her body simmered with the touch of his hands and the stroke of his body, her heart racing too far ahead of her thoughts. She was losing the game already; she was no match for him. He knew how to make her mewl, cry out, laugh. He could ask her anything now and, with a stroke of his tongue, force the answer from her.
And all he wanted from her was that she turn her head. Don’t look at him, she commanded herself. Don’t show him your face.
His arousal pressed hard and long into her, and the prurient sensations unfurling in her body numbed her to her misgivings. She tangled her fingers in his hair, scraped her hands across his shoulders and the muscles in his back, moving with him. She burned everywhere he touched and slid deeper into that fog of pleasure.
When he slipped his hand between them and began to stroke her in time to his body sliding inside her, Margot arched into him. She groped for an anchor, her hand hitting a bedside table. She heard something clatter to the ground as she surged up on that pitch to the release of intolerable pleasure.
Arran growled, thrusting hard into her as his own release came.
For several moments afterward, neither of them moved. Both of them sucked air into their lungs until Arran slowly rolled off her and onto the bed beside her.
Margot was stunned. She swallowed hard, then pushed herself up and gathered the bedclothes around her naked body.
Arran had no such bashfulness. He lay sprawled on his belly, one arm hanging off the bed, his face turned away from her. She admired his physique, made hard and lean by his youthful thirty years and his lust for life. She had long appreciated his good looks and his strength, and had felt that flame of attraction from their first meeting when he appeared at Norwood Park with hair that was too long and muddied boots.
Yes, the spark had always been there. But the marriage had been wrong. Surely, in his heart of hearts, he knew that was true.
Margot leaned over him now. His hair had come undone from its queue. She could see a nick or two in his skin, as well. Fresh scars, undoubtedly earned in training his men for war. That was part of their marriage bargain—he would provide the renowned Highland soldiers for the British army. He would have lands in England, and she would have lands in Scotland, belonging to each of them outright. He was made a baron, too, and she...she was made the chattel by which two men had feathered their nests. She was the shiny bauble that had brought Mackenzie to the bargaining table.
How could such a glorious specimen of a man be a traitor? She touched one of the scars.
Arran instantly pushed himself up, coming off the bed. He ignored her and walked to the hearth, squatting down to build a fire. When he finished, he refilled his goblet and drank thirstily. He glanced at her over his shoulder, quite at ease with his nudity. But his hand, she noticed, was gripping the goblet. “Why?” he asked gruffly.
It was curious how two people, separated longer than they’d been together, could still understand one another. Margot knew very well that he was asking why she’d left. “You know why.”
“Was I unkind, then?” he asked impatiently. “Did I mistreat you?”
Margot sighed wearily. Her reasons had felt so sharp and urgent at the time, but had dulled with the years. “Not unkind. Indifferent. We were so different, you and I.”
He stared down at her for a moment, then looked away. “Aye. We still are.”
“You had no use for me, Arran.”
“No use for you? Was it no’ enough that you were mistress of all this?” he asked, gesturing around him.
“In name only,” she said. “I had no society, no friends.”
“Only because you’d not allow it,” he countered. “There are women in my clan who would have befriended you with the slightest bit of encouragement, aye?”
“That’s not true,” she said. “I tried to make Balhaire what I thought it ought to be, but they resisted me at every turn.”
“You wanted to do things in an English way.”
“What other way could I possibly have done them? I am English.”
He looked away, to the windows. “My own cousin Griselda was your friend.”
“Griselda!” Griselda Mackenzie was quite possibly the most unpleasant person Margot had ever met in her life. “She could scarcely tolerate me! She hated me for being English—you know that is true. Can you not see that you had what you wanted from our marriage, but I had nothing? I was miserable, Arran.”
“What I wanted,” he repeated. “Pray tell me, what the bloody hell did I want?”
Margot snorted and pushed her hair from her face. “The barony. Entry into England. Power, like every man before you and after you and around you now.”
Arran merely shrugged. “Aye, it’s what every man wants. But did you no’ want the same? Did you no’ want your own lands and a title, and all the trappings that come with it?”
“No,” she said, appalled. “I wanted a good match. A companion. I wanted a husband who wasn’t gone all day every day. I wanted someone who cared for finer things, who would take tea with me, perhaps bring me to Edinburgh—”
“This is the Highlands of Scotland, aye? No’ a bloody London or Paris salon.”
Margot could feel her hackles rising and checked herself. “You’re right. But that was the crux of it—I needed a more civilized existence.”
“Mind your mouth, woman,” he said, looking genuinely offended.
“You came to my chamber fresh from the hunt with blood on your shirt!”
“Aye, and I took it off!” he shouted. “Do you think it was easy to be wed to you?”
“Me!”
“Oh, aye, little lamb, you,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “You were so timid and disdainful of everything. Haughty! Aye, you were a haughty one,” he said, flicking his wrist at her. “Nothing was good enough for milady, was it?”
Margot looked away. There was some truth to that, she couldn’t