Page 65 of The Last Debutante
She smiled wider, opened her eyes, and gently touched her fingers to his chin.
BY THE TIMEJamie had picked up their food, Daria had dressed, combed her hair with her fingers, and rebraided it. She looked a wee bit as if she’d tumbled down a mountainside. It was incredibly arousing.
She glanced at him shyly. “I must admit that I haven’t the slightest idea what to say.”
“Nor do I,” he admitted. So many thoughts, so many strange feelings were rumbling through him that Jamie felt almost incapable of rational speech. He was cautious when it came to women, due to his position and the number of mothers who would like to see their daughters married to him, but this was different. Something had happened to him in the last hour that had never happened before, and he didn’t know what it was.
Jamie retreated into his thoughts, choosing to say nothing of what had happened between them until he could sort it out. He held out his hand to her. “Come then,leannan,we’ve been gone too long, aye?”
She nodded and took his hand. He squeezed hers affectionately and slung the bundle of food over his shoulder as he led her back to the horses. When he’d secured their things to his saddle, he helped Daria up onto hers, then put his hand on her knee. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to return to the reality of his life, which was beginning to seep back into his thoughts like a deep fog overtaking all the light. He would be perfectly content to spend the rest of his life on this grassy hill.
Daria leaned forward and smoothed her hand over the side of his head. “I will never forget you, Jamie Campbell. Not as long as I draw breath will I ever forget you.”
Somehow, he managed to put himself on his horse. Somehow, he managed to direct Niall to the path, and saw that Daria followed.
But he wasn’t really seeing. He was hearing those words over and over again in his head.I will never forget you.
That’s not what he’d wanted to hear, not with her scent still surrounding him, the feel of her body still embedded in his skin. But damn the saints if he knew what hehadwanted to hear her say.
He brooded about it all the way down the hills into Dundavie. Daria seemed not to take notice; she nattered incessantly on. He realized it was her way of putting aside what had happened, filling the air around them with words. She was enlightening him about something—her father’s orchids, he thought—as they entered the bailey, but he was lost in his own thoughts, trying to sort out feelings that had sprung up from some hidden, unused ground. His own private bog, now drained, now ready to support new growth. He didn’t even notice the others in the bailey—he could see only Daria, hear only his jumbled thoughts.
He dismounted, helped Daria down, and then stood there, his hand on her waist. “Daria,” he said quietly, thinking of precisely how he would voice what he was feeling. “I—”
“Madainn feasgar math,”he heard a familiar voice say, and it was only then that he noticed the people who had arrived at Dundavie.
Jamie turned his head and looked directly into a pair of green eyes. “Isabella.”
Twenty
DARIA, I...WHAT?
Daria wanted to catch his arm, twist him about, and hear him say what he was feeling. She wanted to believe it was something profound, something that would help her make sense of her whirlwind emotions. She hoped he would say that he, too, had fallen headlong off that windswept hill, and that, like her, he didn’t know if he should stop his fall and claw his way back to where he’d been, or just keep falling.
Daria was still falling.
In the moments after the utterly glorious interlude with him on the hill, she’d seen the hunger in Jamie’s eyes and she’d understood for the first time the power a woman held over a man. She’d felt gloriously wicked and desirable, almost giddy with a new sort of lightness.
But as they’d begun the trek to Dundavie, doubts had begun to creep into her thoughts: doubts about what she’d done, doubts about where her morals had skipped off to and what might happen if she continued down this path.Fall or fly?
She had looked at Jamie ahead of her, his magnificently robust, utterly virile body. She had looked at the breadth of his muscled shoulders tapering into his lean waist, his plaid spread over strong thighs, and the desire that welled up in her made her dizzy. She craved more of what he’d shown her. She craved the feel of his body above hers,inhers.
Lord help her! She’d been so alarmed by her emotions that she’d chattered like a magpie all the way back to Dundavie, trying to force her thoughts down, to cover them up under an avalanche of words, to shut out the cacophony in her head.
And then, when they’d arrived at Dundavie, he’d helped her down, and looked at her with such intensity that she had felt her blood begin to swirl again, and he’d said, “Daria, I—”
But the moment had been stolen away by a beautiful copper-headed woman who spoke to him in rapid Gaelic, her gaze unwavering. She didn’t even glance in Daria’s direction. Daria knew who she was, and she watched her speak to Jamie briefly, then glide back to the group she’d obviously come with.
When Jamie looked back to Daria, his smile was a little sheepish and a little pained. It had seemed to her that he was eager to be away from her when he’d said, “There you are now, lass, returned to Dundavie. If you will excuse me, aye?” And he’d walked away, his long stride carrying him into the keep. Away from her.
But... Daria, Iwhat?
Daria retreated to her rooms to stew in private. She barged into her suite, eager for solitude, and almost collided with Bethia, who was removing used linens from her room.
Bethia’s gaze traveled down Daria, then up again. She arched one dark brow.
“Stand aside, Bethia, or I will put you aside.”
Bethia stepped out of the way and Daria stalked past, shrugging out of her coat and tossing it onto the chaise.
