Chapter 21

After more nights than she could enumerate, Melinda stopped trying to fool herself. The punishment she had devised for Rob was as much a punishment for her as for him. Day after day she watched him work himself to the bone, as weary when he left their bed as when he came to it, and it wasn’t through making love, as it had been when they had lain in the same bed at Wolfsdale. As for her, she lay beside Rob every night, listening to his restless sighs with the scent that belonged to him and no other swirling around her head.

Aye, that was her punishment.

It made no difference that she had been taking the wild carrot seeds Morag had explained would make it very difficult to conceive, for hadn’t it worked for her all these long years? And a more loving couple than Morag and Euan she had yet to meet.

She had solved one problem but not them all, for she lacked the courage to make Rob aware she still desired him, lusted after him.

Deep inside when she watched him, she felt as she had at sixteen—young, breathless, stunned by the beauty of him. It had not mattered that he was a Scot—the enemy—no she had taken one glance and thought: mine . She had had enough sense not to let her father see the heat in her eyes, or the fervour of intense longing coursing through her veins at her first sight of Rob, she had learned that if she wanted anything too much, her father would take it away. She had seen him feel really pleased with her but once—the day she gave him twin grandsons, heirs to Wolfsdale—and even all of that had come to him through Rob, through the lover she had refused to name.

Her father had held a McArthur for ransom, but what might he have done had he known the young Scot in his power had more right to Wolfsdale than he ever would. Rob wasn’t stupid; she could always tell that about him. The truth was, her father would have executed him as a threat to his barony. Even now, if her father laid hands on Rob, he would kill him—not for stealing his daughter, no, because he had abducted his heirs, the little La Monts that had both been baptised Henry and Ralf McArthur within days of Rob marrying her, giving Harry his full name, Henry, for the baptism day, but he would always be Harry to those who loved him, and that was a lot of folk. If asked to point out the biggest difference betwixt Wolfsdale and Cragenlaw, she would have said that here the bairns were loved by family and friends who expected naught for the love they gave—unlike her father. Aye, she couldn’t ask for more for her sons.

And how did that make her feel? It had taken a few days and nights to get over the shock of what had happened to her, to realise that both to her father and to Rob and his father, she was simply a receptacle for their heirs. It hadn’t taken her many months after the twins’ birth to arrive at the conclusion that the snatch of remembered conversation was real, that her father had truly said, “Never mind about Melinda; make certain the child is safe.” A memory overheard while she was in the midst of giving birth to Ralf that would come into her in the quiet moments of the night and make her heart turn over in her chest.

Afterwards, while the midwife did her best to stanch the blood flowing from betwixt her thighs, her father had strode from her chamber, his arms filled with her newborn sons, saying, “Our heritage is safe; the La Mont line will go on.”

He paid no heed to the midwife’s words, “That’s as may be, yet every son needs a mother.” She supposed he would simply have paid for two wet-nurses. The mind was a funny thing, hiding those moments it realised would hurt until it felt she was strong enough to survive the truth.

Around the time she discovered Rob’s true heritage, she had deduced that to secrete Harry and Ralf away without anybody seeing, he needs must know Wolfsdale and its estate far better than she did.

As for her loss of sanity, the moment she screamed, ‘Bastard,’ in his face? No matter which excuse she came up with, it would never ever be good enough. The truth of his birth was another secret he had withheld from her, one she did not mind as much as he appeared to. She had pondered over it on yon nights when she couldn’t sleep and decided his reasons had to be deep-seated and were unlikely to be just in the common way.

Yet she refused to demean her explanation for her outburst by mentioning she had been verging on hysteria after being bundled up in the dark for days, but then he had probably decided that was only to be expected of a woman—a Norman one.

That night she dreamed...

She was young again, and eager, scraping her fingernails on the door of the chamber where her father had housed Rob in the days before Henry left for Winchester and William Rufus’s court.

On bare feet, she had shuffled impatiently in the dark arch of the doorway for him to answer her silent call, and why not? He had come to expect her visits, but maybe not the thin shift she wore under her knitted wrapper.

Melinda might have opened his unlocked door, but she wasn’t confident enough to presume being the daughter of the house gave her the right to barge straight in. As soon as it did open, she was immediately pulled into his strong arms, clasped against his strong chest, and she let his warmth seep into her, soothing her unease over appearing over-forward in her yearning for him. It was as if she had been let loose in a drapers amongst rolls of silks and velvet yet was unable to be satisfied while there was so much more to indulge her senses with.

She pushed her lips against the hollow of his shoulder, dragging them across the curve of his hard chest, savouring the taste of him, the sharpness on the tip of her tongue. Taking a deep breath, she drew in the scent of hot male skin. She had never known another, yet was certain nae one but Rob could smell this good. “I’ll miss ye when ye leave.”

“What makes ye certain the McArthur will send the ransom?”

She printed a soft smile on his chest then licked, laughing when it jerked in reaction. “He will want ye back as much as I want ye to stay. Yer his son.”

“Son and heir,” he responded, his voice as dry as the moat that had once separated the old wooden manor house from the rest of the country. Now it was no more than a chasm that that added height to the curtain wall across the front of the Bailey, using rubble from the demolished Hall.

“Be thankful yer not a second son, or even a third, since the price might have been over-high for yer father. Be thankful yer not a daughter. I can’t imagine my father paying out good silver to get me back.” She slipped the now unneeded wrap down her arms onto the floor and, rising on tiptoes, stood on the wrapper to warm her feet, her breasts and belly aligning with his. She pressed forward until she felt the thick length of his erection, hard against soft.

“I would,” his voice sounded muffled as his mouth nuzzled her neck. “I would pay all the silver in the world to get ye back.” Then he began to laugh. She felt it pour out of him from low down in his chest, as if he were hollow down there. He managed to draw a breath and say, “Although I think my mother’s brother owns most of the silver in the world. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

She pushed back to stare up at him, convinced he was making a jest, then changed her mind, “In that case, if ever I get abducted I’ll tell them to send the ransom demand to Rob McArthur.” She pressed her mouth to his and bit down lightly on his bottom lip making him groan and bite back. His hands cupped her buttocks, lifting, carrying her to the bed, her shift riding up as her back hit the coverlet and his body covered hers, thrusting, filling her.

She moaned, lifting her hips as he had taught her when they first became lovers. He had taken hold of her like raw clay and moulded her, shaped her from a lassie into a woman—the woman he pounded into, thrust after thrust, until she lost her heart, lost her self and became what he had made her and rose to meet him. She became a quivering bundle of nerves at his command, fearing he might stop too soon, stop and leave her feeling lonely without him, as she had been before he arrived. Hardly had the thought formed before it floated away, ephemeral compared to the overpowering need to scream her release and the feel of Rob spilling his seed across the inside of her thigh.

Melinda awoke, sweating, though the fire had died and the room grown cold. Her every muscle tense, she could hardly move, yet her womb clenched madly in retreat of her dream.

Alongside her, Rob made no sound, no move. She began to breathe easier, believing she hadn’t been found out. How humiliating would it be for him to learn she had dreamt of him?

Melinda’s moans had wakened him, aroused him, for his prick tented the covers, making him roll onto his side facing out of the bed. Did she dream of him or St Clair—a man Rob couldn’t find it in him to blame. The birth of their sons and the passage of two years had made her more beautiful instead of worn down. She had gained a fullness to her breasts Rob longed to cup in both hands. Aye, she would fill his large palms these days, not that he hadn’t been content with the beauty he had discovered in the young, untried Melinda.

Did one fall in love in an instant? He had. Yet no matter what it cost him—the self denial of his bodily urges—he couldn’t find it in him to forgive her. She had flung that loathsome word at him like a curse. Not as bad, some might say, as the one the witch had put on his father, but equally potent. He didnae want his mother to die, he loved her; she was all that had got him through his early years at Wolfsdale. Ach, his Farquhar grandfather had treated him well. They had found plenty in common—hunting for one, the skill of bringing down a deer cleanly with but one arrow. He’d always had his own mount, found an affinity with horses, though he’d never been as obsessed as Jamie Ruthven had been with Faraday. Yet even in the stables, he hadn’t been able to escape his Uncle Doughall and his catamite, though he’d been too young to realise what it all meant. He was simply aware the pair of them called him bastard at every opportunity. He had hated them for demeaning him, demeaning his mother.

That last time had been the worst. It was not long after his grandfather was, to Rob’s way of thinking, murdered. Kalem had caught him at that period of the day when the sun was about to set, and the torches had yet to be lit, leaving the corridor at the back of his grandfather’s Hall laced with deepening shadows. He’d pushed him into a storeroom doorway, held him against the door with his loathsome body, whispering, murmuring low and rough, his breath putrid frae the spices he flavoured his food with. Even now the aroma of those spice frae the far side of the Mediterranean Sea made him feel sick. His hands had been everywhere, touching him, telling him that as a bastard he was fit for naught else, and when he laid his hand on Rob’s wee prick and it hardened, he had said, “See, what did I tell ye? This is all yer fit for, bastard.”

His panic had been such that even to this day he couldn’t remember how he’d got free, but escape he did. As soon as he told Morag, she had packed two sacks with a few of their clothes, taken what little silver she had managed to put by over the years, and they had run for their lives.

Just the memory of that dark corridor made him shake, not with fear but with shame at the reaction the man had wrought in his young flesh. If any man dared touch his sons that way, he had promised himself, he would cut off the offender’s hands.

With a sick sensation in his belly and the echoes of shivers rippling across his skin, Rob pulled the coverlet higher onto his shoulder and tried to wrap himself in both its warmth and the healing forgetfulness of sleep.