Page 41 of Sinful Scottish Laird
He brushed dirt from the sleeve of his coat with a vengeance. “Are you barmy? I didna look at him at all, aye? I scarcely kept my eyes open during his sermon.”
“You must at least admit he has a fine voice,” she said. Toying with him, another mouse. He knew what she was doing, and it rankled that he was powerless to walk away from it. “And then you accuse him of fortune hunting.”
“Aye, that he is,” Cailean said flatly. “You’re a bloody fool if you donna see it.”
Her smile only deepened. “Perhapsyouare the one who seeks my fortune and you mean to have it by maligning others.”
“Look at me,leannan,” he said, gesturing to himself. “Do I seem to you a man in need of a widow’s fortune?”
“I’m looking,” she said, her voice suddenly very seductive—or did it just seem so to him? Her gaze casually slid down the length of him, then just as casually came up again, taking in his buckskins. His coat. His neckcloth, which he’d untied and had allowed the ends to hang down his chest. “No,” she said at last. “But the lust for power and fortune is not always evident in one’s countenance.” She quirked a brow.
Ah this woman, this barmy woman.How had she taken hold of his senses as easily as she had? One corner of his mouth tipped up, and he slowly shook his head. “You’re a weediabhal,aye? You seduce with your eyes, with your words...and your bloody bonny smile,” he said, his gaze drifting to her mouth. “But are you fully prepared for the consequences of your games?”
He thought she would laugh in that sultry way she had. But her expression turned cool. “Games?” she repeated, sounding offended. “Men are drawn to my fortune. What am I to do with that attention? Swoon?” She snorted and folded her arms. “You want to advise me? Then please, sir, shower me with your sage advice,” she said irritably. “Tell me what I am to do with the vultures that surround me. Tell me how to find a man to marry when I can’t trust anyone, because I must choose someone.”
Cailean was startled by her frankness. “So it’s true, then? The rumors?” he ventured. “Your husband’s last testament has decreed—”
“Ah so you’ve heard all of my humiliating secrets,” she said and pressed a hand to her stomacher. “Of course it’s true. Do you think that sort of gossip is completely fabricated? If you want to know the truth about me, you shall have it. My dear late husband left my fate in the hands of Bishop Craig. He feared I would squander my son’s inheritance if left without a firm hand to guide me, and therefore made allowances that I would lose all of my son’s inheritance if I did not follow the bishop’s celestial advice and remarry in three years’ time.”
Cailean didn’t speak right away—he was too taken aback.
“And now, because more than two years have passed, and I have been quite unable to separate the fortune hunters, as you call them, from the gentlemen who might truly esteem me, Bishop Craig is increasingly determined to settle a match on me, for clearlyIcannot be trusted to choose one myself!” she said bitterly. “Have you any idea how difficult it is to try to discover some fond feelings for someone when you’ve only just buried your husband? Or when you know what everyone else in all of London knows—that every gentleman is in want of a fortune?”
She twisted away from him and rubbed her nape.
Cailean felt how this pained her in his own heart. “Did you love your husband?” he asked with quiet curiosity.
“Did Ilovehim?” she repeated angrily, then sighed. “I came to care for him,” she admitted. “Before he took ill, he was a good man, a good father.” She paused, running her fingers over the rough wood of the single shelf in the shed. “But I never loved him the way I loved Robert Spivey,” she said in a voice only scarcely above a whisper and glanced at him sheepishly. “Will you think even less of me if I tell you I was in love with another man before I married my husband? Robert Spivey was my one and only true love.”
That admission struck Cailean like a soft blow. He didn’t think less of her—he knew that women born into her situation had little say in who they would marry. His own mother had been a political pawn in her marriage to his father. What struck him was that her feelings for Spivey were so...deep. “Why did you no’ marry him, then?”
She shrugged. “He wasn’t suitable.”
Those words twisted in him, seeping into a wound that had been made nearly fifteen years ago.
“Does that astonish you? My father was a baron, and, therefore, I was destined to marry a man of standing, and certainly not a parish vicar’s son. I understood my duty, but when I was seventeen, a proper match seemed desperately far away, and Robert was so very handsome,” she said, looking down at her hands. “I could have used a bit of your advice then, for I was quite naive. And so...blind,” she added, frowning.
“And he loved you?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “He loved me deeply. In my memory, our love was beyond reason.”
“What happened?” he asked, not fully understanding. Perhaps he was naive, too.
“Oh, utter disaster, naturally. I rather thought I might convince my father that a match with Rob would be ideal...but before I could do so, my father announced to me that he’d agreed to a match with Lord Chatwick, and all there was left to do was for me to consent. The match I thought so far away was upon me.”
“Aye. What did you do?”
“What did I do? I married Lord Chatwick.”
“But—”
“Rob understood, you know. He said that perhaps we’d reached too far into our dreams. He understood,” she repeated, her gaze still on her hand as she stretched her fingers apart. “He was a gentleman, and he let me go as he ought to have done.”
She dropped her hand and looked up at him, and for the first time, Cailean saw uncertainty in her eyes. Spivey might have been a gentleman, but what sort of man was he? “I donna understand a man who doesna have the brass to fight for what he wants, aye? For who heloves. No’ a word of protest from him?”
Daisy colored.
“Your cousin said you were to marry him,” he said flatly.
