Chapter 9
The moment she had gone, Norah rounded on Tearlach, her eyes blazing with fury. "I hope you are happy with yourself!" she growled. "You selfish swine!"
Tearlach was completely taken aback by the change in her mood, and even more so when she turned around and made to follow Caitrin out of the front door.
He was too quick for her, however, as he rushed to get in front of her and stood with his back firmly pressed to the wood, making his body a solid and impenetrable barrier. Norah stopped, knowing that any further effort to leave would be futile. She glared at him in rage and frustration.
"Please tell me what the hell ye are talkin' about," he demanded, spreading his hands in exasperation. "What have I done to upset ye so much, Norah?"
She laughed bitterly and turned away to sit by the fire. She picked up her knitting, which was lying on the chair where she was about to sit, not in order to work on it, but to finger the points of her needles in a sinister and deliberate way.
Tearlach regarded her warily, seeing the look on her face. The needles almost looked like weapons in her hands, although it was her eyes which looked deadlier as she gazed at him unflinchingly.
He had never seen her look so angry, but then he had not really looked at her as a woman till very recently; they had only become re-acquainted in the last few hours. He had a lot of new things to discover about her, and he had been looking forward to the journey of exploration, but now he was not so sure that it would be as enjoyable as he had first anticipated. Her pale grey eyes were dark with rage, and it was all directed firmly at him.
Tearlach's feelings were conflicted. He should be feeling angry too, he thought, but instead her fury was making him uncomfortably aroused. The woman who was sitting before him now was far removed from the girl whose eyes had met his as she rode past in her carriage all those years ago. Neither was she the determined little miss who had come to introduce herself to him at the forge.
Now Norah was a fully grown, sensual woman who was clearly not afraid of him. He intimidated most people, but although Norah had more often been a watcher than a doer, she had never shrunk from him, and she had always been honest with him. She was being honest now; brutally so. In fact, she was beginning to scare him a little. What had he done?
"When you ran away to join the Jacobites," she began, "did you have any kind of plan? Did you even know where to find any of the soldiers, or did you just hope to stumble across them? Shall I tell you what happened to your family then?" She glared at him, her eyes challenging.
"Your father spent weeks looking for you. Your mother stopped eating for a while and nearly starved herself to death. Your brothers and sisters asked everyone they met if they knew you, or had seen you. They were frantic with worry. I took some cake and pastries from the house to try to tempt your mother to eat, but she could not, because she was consumed with anxiety. Everything she swallowed came back up again.
I spoke to my father to see if he could hire some riders to find out what had happened to you but he laughed, and said you were not important enough." She gave a bitter laugh. "But you were very important to your family! And to me - you were my best friend, then one day you kissed me and ran away. Or did you forget that you kissed me?"
Tearlach shook his head. "I could never forget that," he said huskily. However, he looked away from her, avoiding her eyes. "Never."
"When you were not available the next day I thought you were busy working for your father, and then everyone started talking about your absence." She stood up and paced to the window, anger in every line of her agitated body.
Tearlach squirmed uncomfortably in his chair as he watched the sensual way she moved. The way her rounded hips swayed from side to side and the memory of her soft breast pressing against him when she was bending over him were conspiring to make him almost painfully hard. He felt ashamed. How could his body react this way at a time like this? When she turned to face him again she licked her lips to wet them before speaking again, and he looked down at his lap as he pulled a blanket over the front of his body.
"Eventually someone claimed to have seen you and told your family you were still alive," she told him, her voice grating with fury. "I don't know if they had seen you or not, but I think the news came just in time. It pulled your poor mother from the brink of death, although she spent a couple of weeks in bed after that. When I left she was better, although I don't think she will ever fully recover. I hope you are pleased with yourself!"
She was standing with her hands on her hips glaring at him accusingly, and this made his anger rise to meet hers. He leapt to his feet, heedless of the state of his body, and took two strides across the small space between them.
"You wee madam!" His voice was almost a snarl. "How dare ye judge me? I did what I did because I believe in Scotland, and because I dinnae think English soldiers should be settin' their filthy feet on our good Scottish soil! I am young an' strong, an' while I am in good health an' sound mind I will keep on daein' what I can to keep Scotland for us Scots! I was doin' it for them! For all of us! Do ye understand, Norah? Do ye?" Then he flapped his hand at her and turned away, disgusted. "Of course ye don't. How could a woman possibly understan' what a man has to dae for his nation?"
Norah moved around to confront him again. "We understand that real men do not abandon their mothers, fathers, wives and children then go off to war without telling anyone!" Norah was so full of rage that she could feel it thrumming through her veins. Her whole body was vibrating. "It takes no courage and very little effort to tell your family - or even write a note!"
She bent to pick up her needles again, and Tearlach took a step backwards, because Norah was holding them with the points facing him and looking more and more as if she was about to stab him. Later, she would wonder the same thing herself!
"You are a self-serving, stubborn oaf who will never admit when he makes a mistake!" Norah stepped up close to him again and raised her hand to strike him, but he caught her wrist and stopped her hand before it made contact. "Just like all men, always assuming you are right, even when you are completely wrong!" She wrenched her wrist out of his grasp.
"I am a man who wants to fight for his country and I willnae say sorry for it!" His voice was as harsh as stones grating together, and his brows overshadowed his eyes as he glowered at her fiercely.
For a moment, there was a stalemate, then, in the space of a second, all the fight went out of Norah, and he watched as her shoulders slumped and she turned away again. He reached out to pull her back but she shrugged him off and sat down, and after a moment he realized that she was weeping.
Damn! Why did women always do this? He told himself it was a ploy to make him do exactly what they wanted, but deep inside he knew he was lying to himself. Norah was not the kind of person who could or would feign deep emotions; she had never been anything but honest.
Then Norah turned around again, her silver-grey eyes streaming with tears. "When you went I thought it was something I had done. I thought that after you kissed me you thought it was so awful you had to get away from me. I thought you might have thought me repulsive.
Yes, I know it sounds very stupid and no doubt it is, but I was young and immature, and that really is how I felt. When I saw your family suffering I felt guilty and ashamed, and I hoped that they would never find out it was my fault for driving you away. I know now that these were the thoughts of a young girl who had been wrapped in lambswool for too long, and had no experience of the world, but it was all too real at the time."
They stood in silence for a long time, then Norah went to pour more ale, mostly because she needed something to do than because she wanted any. She handed a cup to Tearlach, making sure their fingers did not touch.
Looking at her face, the one he had thought about, dreamed about and longed for, he tried to put himself in her shoes, to imagine her bewilderment and pain, and a wave of shame engulfed him. He had hurt so many people; people he cared about deeply, whose lives he had spoiled or shattered. There might even be those he would never see again, family and friends who had died during his absence, to whom he would never be able to say a proper goodbye.
‘Tearlach McLachlan, ye are a poor excuse for a man,' he thought bitterly. ‘How could ye ever have done such a thing?'
He put his hands on Norah's waist to turn her around to face him, and once more she tried to move away, but he was not deterred. She glared at him mutinously, and suddenly he had to fight the urge to drag her into his arms and kiss her until she melted under the onslaught of his lips. However he held back, merely holding on to her arms, then he took a deep breath.
"Norah, I am so sorry," he said softly. "You are right. I have been selfish an' stupid. I thought that my reasons for goin' were the best, an' some of them were, but I realize now that it wasnae just that. I wanted to be a hero. The reason I didnae tell anybody was because I knew they would try to stop me. I wanted to come back like a conqueror that everybody would admire. I never thought that goin' away like that would cause everybody such distress, an' the thought that I might die -" He shrugged. "It didnae even occur to me." He looked down at the floor, shaking his head. "I am an eejit an' I should have some sense knocked into me."
"Yes, you should," Norah agreed. She was not quite ready to let go of her anger and hurt, but she recognised that Tearlach was making an effort to be contrite, even if it was too little and much too late. "But there is nothing you can do about that now. What's done is done and we cannot turn back the clock."
He nodded slowly, his gaze never leaving hers. At least her frown had gone, he thought, and she was no longer looking at him as though he was something that had crawled from under a stone.
Norah was now acutely aware of how close she was standing to Tearlach - close enough to feel the warmth of his body and smell the scent of it. She could count every hair in his red beard and see the flecks of gold in the apple-green of his irises. A deep longing sprang up inside her again, but she almost despised herself for it. How could she love a man like this? It defied all logic, yet she did.
Yet she had read many books, and she knew that love did not listen to reason, and the heart was a wayward creature that had a will of its own. Good people loved bad people, despite their character, and despite the fact that they knew it could only end in heartache. Was she doing the same? Was Tearlach a bad man?
By now, Tearlach's heart and his body had completely overrun his reason, and as he looked down at the woman he loved, her lips parted slightly and she looked into his eyes. A man could only stand so much, he thought, and he had reached his limit. He gave a soft growl, then, unable to help himself, he bent his head and pressed his lips to hers.