Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

“ Y e look fine in Blackmuir colors, if ye daenae mind me sayin’ it, Yer Grace.”

Grace looked up from patting her hair nervously at Mrs. O’Mailey’s words.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked.

Mrs. O’Mailey blinked innocently, something she did not even remotely pull off convincingly.

“Oh, did ye not realize that yon brown and blues are the color of the Blackmuir family tartan? His Grace’s maither’s family, ye ken.”

Grace had not realized this, as Mrs. O’Mailey transparently knew.

“Thank you so much for mentioning this right as I’m about to leave for the banquet,” she said sweetly. “I had thought that the evening was incomplete without another heaping dose of nerves.”

“I live to serve, Yer Grace,” the woman said dryly, looking highly amused and not even bothering to hide it.

Grace thought she even heard a laugh as the woman hurried to busy herself with putting away a packet of hairpins.

Well, this was going to drive her perfectly insane, wasn’t it? Was sending her off in his house’s colors a matter of marking his claim on the wife he’d bought himself, or was it more than that? Except, of course, they were not his house’s colors, they were his mother’s house’s colors. What did that mean? Given the whole debacle with the portrait gallery, not to mention her husband’s overall secrecy about his past, there was clearly something between him and his Montgomery forefathers, but what?

Did he have the same issue with his mother’s family? It seemed not, but she didn’t know .

Questions , she thought, drumming her fingers irritably against her dressing table. I have so many, many questions, and there are no answers in sight .

Mrs. O’Mailey hummed through the end of Grace’s toilette, entirely unperturbed by Grace’s scowl. Though, Grace supposed, the woman would have to be entirely immune to dour expressions by now, given that she’d known Caleb nearly all his life.

Tonight, she resolved, she would not think about any of it. Tonight, she would enjoy the company of the various local people, eat, drink, and be merry. And if anyone shot her curious looks or asked why she was attending alone? Well, Grace would contract a very convenient case of temporary deafness.

And surely, surely various gentry, merchants, or other well-to-do locals would not be sufficiently up to date on Scottish clan tartans to recognize that the colors of Grace’s dress meant anything? Grace hadn’t even put together when she’d looked directly at the wool blanket every night for the last nine days (not that she was counting).

She would be fine. Fine. Absolutely fine.

“Why do ye look like ye’re suckin’ on a lemon?”

Grace blinked. Caleb was, as usual, scowling. But why was he scowling here , in the front entrance of their home?

“Um,” she said. “Good evening. I am going to the banquet.” She gestured down to the dress.

His scowl intensified. “Aye. I know. That doesnae account for why ye look so sour. Ye needn’t go if it makes ye so miserable as all that.”

“Um,” she said again, because dear Lord above, her husband was fully decked out in formal wear, including a kilt in the same colors of the gown that she herself wore. On top, he wore his crisp red military officer’s jacket, which was partially obscured by another drape of plaid over one shoulder. He looked immense and sturdy and strong, and it put Grace horrifyingly in mind of the way he had slung one of her knees over his broad shoulders while he had…

“You’re in uniform,” she finished, feeling like an utter idiot.

“Aye,” he said, like he, too, considered her the biggest fool north of London. Then he glanced down. “Well, mostly. I’d nae wear my plaid like this. That’s fair askin’ for disaster when ye’re facin’ battle. But otherwise aye.” His eyes flashed. “And if ye’re about to say that I’m out of the army now, and a duke, well then ye’d just best shut yer pretty little?—”

“No,” she said, startled into speech rather than truly intending to interrupt. She cleared her throat. “I mean to say… You look very nice. Are you coming to the banquet, then?”

Again, his look questioned her intelligence.

“Aye,” he said—for the third time now, Grace realized with a flush. “Where else?”

Where else indeed?

There was no chance now, Grace thought with a note of hysteria, of people failing to notice that she wore her husband’s house colors. They were a matched pair, after all. Such a thing would look foolish in London but here, among the wind and the trees and the sea…

It just felt right, in a way Grace was pointedly not thinking about.

Nor could she manage to look directly at her husband, resplendent in his formalwear—more formal, she noted, that what he’d worn for even their wedding, which did sting a bit—until she was at the banquet and with a cup of punch in hand.

She gulped a large swallow, then fought back a cough. Apparently, hosts were far more liberal with spirits at entertainment in the North than they were in London. As a relaxed, warm feeling coursed through her, however, Grace decided she didn’t mind all that much. She took another gulp.

“Your Grace!”

Grace turned to see Lady Fenwick approaching, looking so round that it was a miracle that she didn’t topple directly over. Despite this, Lady Fenwick was surefooted and pink-cheeked as she approached Grace.

“Hello, Lady Fenwick,” Grace said. And then, because that punch had been potent indeed, and her tongue was suitably loosened, she said what she’d been thinking for days now. “And my given name is Grace, did you know that? Being called ‘Your Grace’ seems maddeningly redundant. And confusing. Bordering on stupid.”

Lady Fenwick smiled, amused, though the expression froze on her lips as Caleb let out a grumbling sound that might have been a hastily suppressed laugh.

“You shall have to forgive me, then, Your Grace, for formal redundancies,” Lady Fenwick said, eyes darting nervously to Caleb. “For the sake of propriety. But do excuse me. I think my husband is calling me.”

As the woman bustled away, Grace let out a disgruntled sound of her own.

“You scared her away,” she accused her husband, who looked like a mountain of a man in his regalia. “Do you intend to scare off everyone? All evening?”

He paused very deliberately. “Mayhap.”

“Mayhap!” she cried, outraged, though the comment died on her lips as her husband put one very large, very warm hand to the small of her back and used it to steer her more deeply into the banquet hall.

When Caleb frightened off the second person to come speak to her, she was infuriated. At the third, she drained her punch in a fit of pique. By the fourth, she realized that she had never seen her husband ever look so entertained.

“You’re doing it on purpose!” she exclaimed. “Just to devil me!”

“I daenae know what ye mean,” he said, straight faced.

“Liar!” she hissed—because even with a full cup of the strong punch muddling her head, she knew better than to insult her husband audibly while in public.

No matter how quiet her words, however, for a second she thought she’d overstepped. He bent down very close to her until she could feel his breath against the shell of her ears. Instead of scolding, however, or promising retribution he muttered two words.

“Prove it.”

When he pulled back, he was fighting a smile, though his glower was perfectly fixed by the time the next couple, a successful wool merchant and his wife, came over to greet them.

If he could have fun, Grace decided then, so could she. So as the merchant, face white with nerves, bragged that he only ever used Scottish wool in his trade—as he was a big fan of Scotland, he was, and the Scottish, and scotch, of course—Grace looped her arm a little more tightly through her husband’s. And then she stepped a little closer to him, and then a little more, until she was just on the far side of improper.

And then she just sort of leaned , so that she was, to put it bluntly, pressing her breasts against him.

The merchant, lost in raptures about sheep, did not notice. The merchant’s wife, who squinted as though she was dreadfully nearsighted, did not notice.

Caleb noticed.

He glanced down at her, gaze startled, though he quickly covered it up. Grace fluttered her eyelashes at him like the worst coquette.

This time he could not hide his grin entirely.

Things got, Grace would later admit, a bit…messy from there.

“What are ye doing, Grace?” Caleb growled at her when the merchant and his wife finally left them, no doubt to tell someone else about the wonders of wool. From the way she was still pressed against him, she could feel the way his voice made all of him rumble, the way it made arousal shoot through her.

“Me?” she said, drawing back just enough so that she could press her hand to her chest…which was to say, to her decolletage. He was so much taller than her that he had a direct view down her neckline from this angle. The muscles in his arm tensed in a way Grace found highly intriguing.

“I’m not doing anything,” she insisted in a decidedly breathy voice, one that, on its own, would have been enough to risk her reputation in a London ballroom.

Her reputation, she realized with a flash of delight, was something she no longer needed to fret over.

Oh, very well—she couldn’t go dancing naked in the woods or jump up on the tables and start flinging insults. Some things were bad form everywhere, obviously, and she had no desire to make a fool of herself.

But flirting a bit dangerously with her husband? That she could do—and nobody would run off to the gossip rags about it. Indeed, she could see at least three other married couples—including the Fenwicks, bless them—leaning toward one another with increasingly amorous glances as the night went on and the wine flowed.

No, none of these people would care if Grace made eyes at Caleb.

Nobody, alas, except for Caleb himself.

And her husband gave as good as he got. When they sat at their places of honor at the front banquet table, while the room buzzed with happy conversation around them, Caleb hooked his boot around the back of her calf, pulling it toward him just enough that the side of his leg pressed warm and hard into hers.

“I’m so sorry,” Grace said to Mrs. Moody, a local woman with whom she’d been conversing. “I didn’t catch that.” She hoped the woman took her flushed cheeks as due to the heat of the room.

Grace retaliated by dropping her napkin after the second course—directly into her husband’s lap. Quick as a snake, she snatched the fabric back, not quite touching him, but letting the possibility of that touch remain an implication between them.

“I do beg your pardon,” she said sweetly.

This time, Caleb drained his drink.

He waited until her back was turned, then ran a sly finger over her hip. It was Grace’s turn to need more punch after that.

By the time the meal was being cleared away and the dancing was getting ready to begin, Grace’s head was swimming pleasantly, both with the constant reminder of her husband’s proximity and the strength of that wonderful punch. She felt lighter and more cheerful than she had in ages, buoyed by the exuberant, festive energy in the air.

Just as the musicians—a quartet who looked to be mostly local men, not the polished professionals one saw in London ballrooms—struck the first notes of a country reel, Caleb clamped an arm around Grace’s arm and dragged her out a back door.

There was, Grace hated to admit, one flicker of panic as old memories threatened to resurface. But then her husband was there, big, undeniable, pressing her against the wall.

“Ye’re playin’ a dangerous game here, leannan ,” he told her. One of his broad thighs pressed between hers, pinning her with her skirts.

She wiggled experimentally against him and liked the results.

“I want to dance,” she told him brightly, faintly surprised to find that it was true. She’d loved dancing, once upon a time, but her recent experiences in London had left her more of a wallflower than anything else.

Caleb tsk ed at her.

“Ah, well, perhaps ye should have thought of that,” he chided, the note of mockery oddly appealing. “For ye’ve been buildin’ yerself up a right debt all evenin’, and I’ve decided now is time for ye to pay it.”

Was she imagining it, or had his brogue grown thicker? She wiggled some more, then whimpered a bit at the sensation.

“What about you?” she demanded, struggling to maintain her pert facade. “Have you not the same debt?”

She expected him to deny it.

“Aye, that too,” he agreed. And then he took her mouth like it was indeed something he was owed.

If Caleb was playing the marauder, then Grace was the willing maiden, the one who put up a show of resistance merely for the sport of it.

“We shouldn’t,” she whined playfully between kisses, even as her hands clutched desperately at his collar. “Someone could see.”

“Hm.” He kissed his way down her throat, the hint of stubble that was already starting to grow back in scraping pleasantly against sensitive skin. “Did ye nae think someone might’ve seen when ye gave me a glimpse straight down yer frock?”

“They couldn’t,” she gasped, delighting in feeling scandalized.

“Are ye sure?” Her husband’s voice was cold, almost cruel, but Grace could hear the embers beneath, the ones that warmed her right up. The game, she realized, through her haze of liquor and lust, gave those embers room to glow. They could burn because he pretended that they did not.

Or maybe she was just foxed. Who could say?

“Are ye sure that no man caught sight of what is mine by rights?” His hands had been on her waist—a nearly proper way to hold one’s wife, if one did not account for how he was also kissing her senseless. Now, though, his palm slid up until he was cupping her breast, then pinching at the bud beneath the gown he’d chosen specifically for her.

Grace’s role shifted. She was now the repentant lover.

“No, never, my lord,” she assured him earnestly. “Only you.”

Caleb’s eyes flashed and Grace’s breath hitched. What was play and what was truth?

He leaned more bodily into her, his weight almost too much where it held her against the cool stone wall of the banquet hall. Like Montgomery Estate, this building was ancient, and Grace found herself semi-hysterically wondering exactly how many misses had found themselves ravaged against this wall over the long centuries that it had stood.

“Only me?”

“Only you,” she said again.

Maybe it was foolish of Grace, to feel so confident in these words. But she did not retract them, not when Caleb groaned and briefly, deliciously pressed his hips against her. Not when he rucked up her skirts with hands that seemed careless until she realized how carefully he was blocking her body from view. Even if anyone did happen upon them, off in this dark little corner of theirs, they would not see what, as Caleb had so gruffly put it, was for his eyes only.

So she did not retreat, did not deny him, not when he caressed her, higher and higher. She let her head drop back against the wall, a little whimper breaking out of her.

“Hush, leannan,” he said. He pinned her skirts with his knee, then pressed the other hand to her lips.

Grace had, in the past, felt a hand over her mouth in violence. But this was not that. This hand was an offer. It was a request.

Let me show you what I can do , it said. Let me pleasure you so that you cannot keep quiet on your own. Let me have you here. Now.

She nuzzled more deeply into the touch. He grumbled approvingly. Grace wanted to preen at the sound.

They couldn’t speak; they had to be silent, so when he needed both his hands to keep her skirts out of the way and to keep caressing, higher, higher, until he was skimming barely over the edges of her core, not touching her where she needed it most, but keeping enough contact to stop her ardor from dimming or even flickering.

With his mouth on her, his tongue against hers, she was so close to him, to all of him. His mouth on her, that evening on the dining room table, it had been intimate, yes. But this?

She opened her eyes, risking a glimpse. His own eyes were closed, thank the Lord, his lashes fanned out over the upper edges of his cheekbones. It made him look…not soft, but softer. Approachable. Human. Touchable.

And she wanted to approach. She wanted to touch. She ran her hands over his shoulders, down his arms, then back up again. Her movements only fluttered to a stop when he slipped a finger inside her, then another, then used his thumb to press against that sensitive spot.

Caleb, she said, the word silent against his mouth.

“Yes.” He hissed it into her skin.

She whimpered.

He pressed, rubbing and touching and cajoling, whispering hoarse Gaelic in her ear, until she tumbled off into ecstasy.

The pleasure was almost too much to bear when he kept moving his fingers inside her, kept rubbing that sensitive spot until the last tremors left her body. She hovered right on the edge of too sensitive and was almost, almost tempted to pull back, to put some distance between them.

But she wasn’t ready, wasn’t ready to be done feeling close to him. What if they were never this close again? What if this stolen moment was all they could have?

And what if she could keep stealing the moment, could pull them closer together? Could she do it? Was it worth the risk to try?

Maybe not, but she couldn’t let go.

She instead tried to press herself ever closer to him. God bless the British army and all that, but she absolutely loathed his thick woolen coat at the moment, as it hid him from her, made it impossible for her to get her hands on him.

“Please,” she moaned, scrabbling at the fastenings. Surely this could not be practical in battle, could it?

“Not here, leannan ,” her husband murmured, which was right bloody rich, in Grace’s opinion, given that her skirts were still about her waist. But she was too eager for him to argue. Her crisis had left one part of her sated, but not the part of her that longed to touch him, to feel his skin pressed to hers.

She let out another little whimper, this time frustration, when he stepped back enough to let the heavy fabric of her skirts fall to the ground. She was, absently, grateful for the thick brocade of the tartan-inspired dress, which withstood crinkling far better than would have any silk London ballgown or even a muslin day dress.

If not here, Grace decided, they needed to find themselves elsewhere. Ignoring the truly horrifying social lapse that was leaving a party thrown in one’s honor without so much as a by your leave, she grasped her husband by the hand—shooting him a poisonous look for good measure, lest he think this delay acceptable—and pulled him toward the hall’s front entrance.

If their coachman was surprised to see them emerge while the party was still clearly going on, the music echoing joyously outside, he was too well-trained to mention it. He merely chucked aside the apple he’d been chewing and clambered up onto the coach’s front seat.

Grace giggled as her husband hoisted her inside, apparently as eager as she was. The wheels crunched against gravel; the moment they were off, Grace deposited herself directly into Caleb’s lap.

They had nearly three quarters of an hour back to their estate, and Grace intended to make good use of that time.

Caleb, however, was not cooperating.

“Let me,” she urged, tugging at his clothes. She could feel his hardness beneath her, both in his muscular thighs and in other places, places she was not at all certain she was yet ready to explore. She had found herself, however, rather intensely intrigued by the way his shoulders pressed against the weave of his jacket, as if determined to test its seams.

It was unfashionable to be that broad, impolite to be so strong. But Caleb wasn’t polite, not in the least, and for now, Grace found she did not mind.

The only thing she minded was getting past all these idiotic layers so she could touch that rugged, impolite strength.

But Caleb wasn’t helping.

And this, she realized in a sudden, sobering flash, wasn’t merely part of their game. He wasn’t merely not helping , he was actively hindering her, was taking her hands and pulling them away from his body.

“No, leannan ,” he said. His words were almost soft, almost, but they were powerfully unyielding.

Grace felt a sudden flash of humiliation. She’d let him take his liberties as he wished—in a hallway of all the places—thinking that there was something to this attraction between them.

But maybe she’d been playing the wrong game. Maybe his game had been to see how far he could push the ruined little wife he’d purchased. Maybe he’d just wanted to test how far his control went.

“I see,” she said, though she didn’t truly. She didn’t understand why he’d bothered playing. Was it just for the joy of knowing this was one more element of power he held over her?

Her husband did not look joyous, however, as she straightened her crumpled dress and removed herself to her own side of the carriage.

“Grace,” he said, but she couldn’t stand to listen to whatever he was about to say. Could not bear, not just then, to hear his explanation of how this marriage was nothing more than an exchange of her womb for the protection of his name.

She turned her face out the window, determined to block out whatever horrid thing he was about to say…

And then immediately forgot about her husband’s presence entirely, when she saw what stood, menacing in the moonlight, outside her carriage window.