Page 64 of When the Laird Conquers

What she could not discern was whose trick it was. Iona’s or Gordon’s?

“Well, it is not going to be Gordon’s, is it?” she mumbled, shaking her head.

No, he had made his stance perfectly, brutally clear: last night had been a terrible mistake and was to be forgotten swiftly.

As if it was that easy to just erase it from her mind, from her body, from her very soul, when he had been the cause of her enlightenment. She could not go back to who she was before. It was impossible. It would be like lighting a flame, then snuffing it out and expecting the candle to remain intact.

“Perhaps I will find someone else to protect me,” she mused, her feet crunching across the gravel while blackbirds chirped in a bramble-smothered hedge nearby.

If many lairds would be in attendance, perhaps there was one who would snap her up. Her and her niece. Security that Edwin would not be able to break through.

Indeed, before the night itself, she figured she ought to take another long, hard look at that almanac of Scottish lairds. For she had not minded the idea of a cruel, warrior laird when that ruthless nature was turned on other people, but she did mind it now that it had been turned on her.

The very reason she had chosen Gordon had become the reason she didn’t even want to glimpse him at a distance.

Yes, maybe there will be someone better at this cèilidh.

Someone who would not show her new worlds, comfort her so expertly, listen to her and make her feel seen, and teach her wondrous things, only to seal himself off from her the following morning with a cold admonishment. As if he had been replaced with a changeling in the night.

Someone tough and strong and protective, certainly, but not someone who could very easily break her heart into a million pieces.

Curse you, Gordon. Her eyes prickled with hot tears. Curse you.

Two days had gone by, and it was as if Agnes was not at Castle Buchlann at all.

Gordon had not seen hide nor hair of her since she had walked into the nursery and slammed the door shut. He thought he had heard her out in the gardens once, but when he had gone to the window to look, there had been no sign of her anywhere.

A hallucination of the mind, no doubt, for he was finding it increasingly difficult to think of anything but her. As if her absence was a potent presence, nudging him toward a very particular kind of madness.

He couldn’t even find solace in his tower, for when he went there, the echo of her was all too intense. Five minutes in that round room and his mind was flooded with memories of him pressing her against the wall, feeling her kiss for the first time… and wishing he had not stopped when he had.

She had well and truly destroyed his peace, and now his duties were suffering.

“I cannae do this!” he snarled, hurling a fresh ball of paper into the fireplace.

The task was simple: design a new training regime for the men. Yet it strained his brain, as if he were trying to balance his ledgers at the end of a particularly chaotic month. He must have attempted to write the blasted thing at least twenty times by now, and he had not managed to get further than ‘sparring in the yard.’ Something that his men already did.

Just the faint scratch of his quill seemed to have the capacity to transport him back to Agnes’s bedchamber the other night, to the warmth of her skin, to the slick satisfaction between her thighs, to the taste of her, to the yearning for more that had burned in him, and still burned in him, like an inferno.

He closed his eyes and held his head in his hands, frustration crawling down the back of his neck and through his veins.

What if I wasnae so careful? What if I just decided to have what I want, for once?

He waited for more torment to come, but as he settled his breathing, it wasn’t Agnes’s image that flashed through his mind. Instead, he saw a woman with wild, flaming hair, her brown eyes mocking him good-naturedly. The crinkle of her nose and the furrow of her brow as she lay beneath him in the woods, on a mattress of moss, beneath a sky so full of stars it looked like glittering fabric draped to conceal them.

He had been younger then. But she… she would never get older. Nor would the baby born of that one night together, hidden in the woods, away from prying eyes and listening ears. In nature, where she had always been happiest, forever pointing out this plant and that herb, telling him everything there was to know about each one. A well of knowledge that would never be passed on.

All because he had been stupid enough to take her as a lover just once.

The vision shifted to a letter trembling in his hand, written by the abbess of St. Alban’s Convent, telling him everything. And then it was a blade in his hand instead of a letter, scarlet blood sprayed across the walls of his study and pooling across the floor, and a body at his feet, turning paler by the second, all breath gone out of him.

A reminder that he clearly needed.

“Never again,” he muttered, his mood darkening from stormy grey to pitch black.

That was why he could not risk his discipline again. That was why he had to be careful. This castle had seen the last of any bloodshed by his hand.

Just then, a noise snapped him out of his gloom, his gaze flitting to the door. It sounded as if someone was hitting the wood, sharp, excited yips raising his eyebrow.