Chapter 34

They let Becky have the bairns’ chamber to herself for the night, and Melinda would ask no questions if she chose to share it with another—a little comfort after the fright she’d been given earlier, believing Ralf was in danger from the Baron.

Melinda wouldn’t blame her if she did indulge. Aught had to be better than continuously reliving the moment La Mont sliced Brodwyn with the sharp blade of his sword while Ralf, all unaware, peeked around her skirts thinking it was a game. That was the part that had lodged in Melinda’s brain, startling her when she would rather remember something less scary, less heart rending.

All in all, it had made the day seem long—never ending. Even now with the lads curled up together on a bed Rob had made up on the floor. Melinda felt so tired she could just tumble into bed in her kirtle, yet so tired that she couldn’t sleep for the way her mind kept going round in circles like a millstone.

Rob stripped off his plaid and shirt and fell onto the mattress beside her, as if his legs wouldn’t hold him. “Today felt as if it would never end, wife, and tomorrow’s not likely to be much better.” He rolled onto his side and gathered her up, his leg sliding betwixt hers and his hard erection pressing against her belly, yet without his usual urgency. They simply lay tangled together, touching and petting, arms, chest, breasts, smoothing, comforting, breathing.

“What’s been said? What’s going to happen to my father?” It was a question that had floated around her head since they had taken Henry La Mont away and locked him up in the guardhouse—a new experience for a man who had always known his own worth.

“Last I heard he was sleeping like a bairn. Whatever herb Kathryn gave him did its work.”

“She didn’t poison him?” Melinda sat up in his arms as the dread notion penetrated her brain like a knife wound, which was rather appropriate. No matter what he had done it was hard to put aside the fact that he was her father.

“Nae, lass that’s not Kathryn’s way, hush now,” he murmured quietly so not to wake the bairns, pulling her back into his arms—her place in this world he had brought her to. “She’s a healer. She uses herbs. I’m told she gave the same tisane to Brodwyn while she worked on the wounds in her hip and thigh, and she said it wouldn’t harm the bairn Brodwyn is carrying. Ye realise she and Kathryn are cousins?”

Tucked back into his body she began to relax, starting with the sigh that left her lips to graze the strong cords that stood out on his neck. “And that her bairn will be my brother or sister.”

“Aye, it will, if the bairn lives; naught is certain.”

“Naught but confusion. How do I cope with everything that has taken place—from discovering the truth about my father to discovering I’m not the only family that he’s had?” Her breath caught in her throat, grabbed by the emotions coursing through her. “He called Rowena a monster, abandoned her in the forest, and killed my mother—our mother. Rowena and I are full sisters.”

When he said naught to that truth, she pinched him on the arm to make sure he was awake. “Do ye realize the bairn Brodwyn carries will have Comlyn blood as well as La Mont. Do ye know how weird it sounds? That little one will have the same bloodlines as any bairn born to Nhaimeth and Rowena.”

“That I do, and for the bairn’s sake, I hope it gets the finest of both of them, not the worst.” Rob rested his chin atop her head and his words echoed inside her skull. “In their diverse ways, the one unholy attribute both Brodwyn and yer father have in common is that both of them are wicked.” He muttered his telling conclusion frae under his breath.

Something about the timbre of his voice as he uttered the word ‘wicked’ caught at her senses, her imagination. Turning away, the huskiness her ears picked up into a moment’s sensuality that shouldnae make her want him, yet she did. She placed her hand at his waist, slid it over the slope of his hip, felt the strength of it as a curl of heat began to waken, bloom, low in her belly. For her it had always been so, from the moment she first saw Rob, his hands bound behind his back, a prisoner, beaten yet defiant.

“How foolish, na?ve, was I that I never realised how … how wicked my father is. To me he was a stern, yet benevolent father, and I seem to remember imagining I was spoiled, though I had naught to gauge it by.” She placed the palm of her hand in the centre of his chest above the solid thump of his heart, sighing, remembering. “Why else did I see ye, Rob, and decide I had to have ye for my own?”

Melinda slid her other hand behind him and pulled him closer, as if cleaving her body to his. “I thought all I had to do was reach out and take ye.” Her chin dipped into the crook of his shoulder while she confessed. “Now I wonder, has all of this, the circumstances that led to what has happened here today, been my fault?”

Rob chuckled. He had a hearty laugh, and when she lay close to him, as she did now, she loved to place her hand against the deep muscles spanning his chest and feel his happiness rumble through him. Already she could tell the twins would sound just like him when they grew up, and that took the sharp edge off her grief. How dreadful to think of two braw lads ending up as wicked as her father. As she closed her eyes, she pictured him standing over Brodwyn, sword in hand, control gone. And Brodwyn doing her best to stop him, protecting Ralf, blood gushing from a wound that Henry La Mont had sliced into her flesh. A blow meant for Ralf.

She began to tremble, and thanked God that at least her father’s actions had brought her to her senses at last. Foolish young woman that she had been, she had placed the blame on Ralf for the pain she had gone through. She’d been so young—too young—had thought of her life as a tale that made everybody envious, had filled it with kings and princesses, knights and dragons—tales that did not take into account watching yer son about to be killed before yer own eyes.

“My heart leapt into my throat today when I saw Ralf hiding beneath the bench Brodwyn had fallen across. I do love the lad. It has simply taken me a wee while to realise the truth. I had hidden the truth under all my resentment and cast it over Ralf’s head. What kind of mother does that make me? Ralf too could have died at birth, yet fear made it impossible for me to forget what I had suffered. Yet he’s just a bairn—part of ye, part of me—it wasn’t his fault.”

She pushed back from him with the hand lying over his heart until her gaze encompassed the strong features, full lips, long nose and deep-set eyes that had captured her at first glance. Under her palm, she felt his heart leap as through the dim firelight in their chamber his eyes locked with hers. “It was our responsibility. Our feelings—lust, love, call it what ye may—put him inside me, squashed him against Harry; and that damned mark on his leg nearly cost him his life.”

“I can’t let ye take any of a blame that should be mine. I was aulder than ye, should have practised restraint, nae matter how my prick leapt up at the sight of ye. My shoulders are broad enough to carry it all.” He placed one large hand betwixt her breasts, over her heart, heating the flesh beneath with his palm until that tender organ felt it would melt into him as it beat hard enough to leave her chest—which mattered naught since she had forgotten how to breath.

“Here’s what I think, Melinda.” Rob’s breath licked across her lips, filled her nose with the taste and scent of him until she was aware of, heard, his voice, his explanations like a song in her ears. “Our coming together at Wolfsdale has to be but a small piece of a larger plan—part of Rowena’s prophecy. Whether we’ll ever live long enough to see it come true is debatable. We’ve probably always had this connection and the auld Celtic gods have been patiently waiting for us to be born, and then for our sons to be born and take our places. If ye bide here at Cragenlaw long enough, I’ve nae doubt the Green Lady will appear to ye and, truth be told, like me ye are but half Scots, the fierce half that would have like to split me asunder with a lightning bolt when ye discovered by whom and why ye had been carried off.”

She should feel miffed that he wouldn’t let her forget, but his touch, the smell of his skin mellowed her response. “And just how long would ye have me apologise for my wicked temper, the one I was never even aware of before ye appeared at Wolfsdale and carried me off?”

“Aye that was never the way I had imagined coming back to what I realised I’d harboured in my heart as home. Once I met my uncle Gavyn, the true heir to Wolfsdale, I had this vision of both of us returning together, a sort of triumphal homecoming—a jumble of childish dreams dashed to pieces the moment I walked through the gates of Wolfsdale on yer father’s heels. That was the moment I knew naught would ever be the same. Everything that had been left of my grandfather had disappeared with the auld manor hall.” She watched him smile at her, though some might inclined to call it a rueful grimace rather than the burst of pleasure a smile should convey.

She had to find that true smile again and reached for it by saying, “And then ye met me and I pestered the life out of ye until ye took me into yer arms and yer bed—and made love to me just as I’m going to do to ye now.”

Melinda laughed to lift the mood as she slid the hand resting on his hip across his belly and curled it around his hard length. His hand tightened on her shoulder as he jerked back with what sounded more like a grunt of pain than as moan of pleasure. It wasn’t the first time, and she would have questioned him on it but knew well he wouldn’t open up to her about the cause. It felt to her as if his reasons were too private to share.

Then all her doubts dissolved into nothing as he rolled her onto her back, his fists manacling her wrists afore raising them overhead. “After all ye just said about chasing me until I caught ye, oblige me by letting me take the lead,” he murmured against her neck, his tongue licking her frae shoulder to ear, making her moan for the sheer pleasure of his hot wet touch as, man-like, he took charge.

Rob stretched her arms high, wrapping both her wrists in one of his big fists while the other ripped away the shift hiding the rest of her bonnie breasts frae his view.

“That’s better,” the words were low, almost indecipherable, even to Rob’s ears—more a sigh of satisfaction than a statement. In this position, her spine arched as if to rise closer to his lips, and naught would do but to ravage her mouth.

Melinda tasted sweet, as sweet as she had the first day he kissed her. He thrust his tongue deep into that warm silk-lined cavern decorated with ivory, something he might have avowed were he a minstrel given to such poetic heights. Instead he moaned as her tongue fenced with his, then sucked him deep into her throat, writhing beneath him, pointed breasts pressing the wall of his chest, saying take me, suck me—so he obliged and it was Melinda’s turn to moan.

He chuckled. “Whist, love, dinnae enjoy yerself so much ye waken the lads,” he let the words fall into the hollow betwixt her breasts as he slid lower to taste every bit of her, laying a kiss on her navel. Just afore sliding lower, he mentioned a passing thought that slid into his consciousness. “Trying to imagine Nhaimeth’s wedding night is the last thing I want. I only hope he’s having as much enjoyment as I am and, come to think of it, why not, for we are married to sisters.”

Rob was still laughing as he rested his forehead against her soft belly while his tongue began a quest for honey. His mouth plundered and lapped up all the sweetness flowing frae within Melinda—his wife, his life. Her soft cries sounded like birdsong in his ears, coming with the break of day and the pleasure of still being alive to enjoy it.

She lifted closer to his mouth, begging for more as he slid the length of a finger into her heat, to ensure that he didnae leave it too long. “Now,” he breathed out in a growl, rumbling deep in his chest where his heart beat in time to the pulse he felt beating inside his wife. The woman he loved but didnae dare tell, didnae dare make his heart too vulnerable. Rearing up over her, he plunged his hard, desperate prick inside her waiting warmth.

The moan that rose frae his throat was long and deep and the need to hold the noise of his pleasure inside him for fear of waking the twins appeared to intensify his moments of extreme gratification. Thrust after thrust, plunge after plunge, she welcomed them all, holding him with her ankles locked behind his back until his release took him to heaven and hell, until he realised he hadn’t pulled out as he had vowed he would.

Christ’s blood, he had broken his vow.

She lay under him her legs spread-eagled in the aftermath of a delight that for him had turned to shame and self-hatred, her body still convulsing around his spent cock. He pushed up on his elbows and higher, pulling away frae the most pleasure she had ever brought him in a marriage that had hung on a thread for far too long, had been shaky in the beginning, and now he had done the very thing he had promised never to do again.

Taking his weight on his knees and elbows he looked down on his beautiful wife and wondered if she would ever share her body’s bounty with him again. Head hanging heavily on his shoulders, Rob, never one to put off what needed to be done, spoke up, “I’m on my knees Melinda, and I’m begging yer pardon, ashamed for the wrong I have done ye.”

Behind him he felt the heat of the fire dying in the hearth dying like an omen that his cause was already lost. Melinda lifted her heavy, sated eyelids to blink at him as if she had nae notion of the wrong he had done to her. “What’s amiss Rob?” She looked past him in the direction of the bed they had made up for Ralf and Harry. “Did we disturb the lads while we took pleasure in each other?”

“Nae lass, it’s worse. I was so far lost in the pleasure of ye, I spilled my seed inside yer body. I broke my vow to ye, and if ye must deny me now, I willnae blame ye. I lost control.” It was the only excuse he could muster. Climbing off her, he sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, his shame so great he couldn’t bear to look at his wife or even his bairns. What if his carelessness had robbed them of their mother?

Rob’s body stiffened as he felt her drape her nakedness across his back as she knelt behind him, slipping her arms about his neck, trailing kisses across his bent shoulders. “No, Rob, I will not let ye take all the blame this time. I had my legs tight round yer hips and did not want to let ye go. It was only once, and there’s a good chance it will not take. Yer big and strong but it would be a miracle if ye could get me with child every time.”

He kept his head bent, unable to look her in the face as she murmured, “Let us wait and see. Lets hope for the best.”

The sound of her voice trailed away, for he wouldn’t let her finish, couldn’t leave her with hope in her heart for a miracle since he only let his seed spurt inside her that one other time and she had ended up carrying twins. He could put nae faith in yon kind of miracle. “I willnae touch ye again. I’ll sleep elsewhere. Dinnae be scared to give me the bad news. Whatever happens, I will be there to see ye through it. Ye will have the best midwives—whatever ye need.”

He paused a moment to gather his thoughts and finally told her, “When I was but a lad and started venturing frae home, the McArthur warned me that a gentleman, a future Chieftain, never spills his seed indiscriminately. That’s twice I’ve been careless, and we both ken what happened the first time, we were blessed with two braw sons but it nearly cost them their mother. I can’t chance that happening again.”

When Melinda said naught, he glanced over his shoulder to read her expression. He expected to see her unhappy. It was the way she bit at her full soft bottom lip he that tore at his heart. It felt like this was the end of everything—happiness, their marriage; he could find nae more words to say but, “Let me ken whether yer courses arrive.”

Unsure whether the seeds would really work, she said nothing.

Wrapping his plaid about him, he left their chamber and took his dark thoughts away frae the place of this latest McArthur disaster.