Page 30 of Return to Clan Sinclair
“Quite a dilemma, don’t you agree?”
Wordlessly, she placed both her hands on his shirted chest. If she splayed her fingers she still wouldn’t reach from arm to arm. How very tall he was, and strong. Look how he’d caught Carlton on the day she first saw him.
He wouldn’t come to her because of honor. Would she go to him because of need?
Stepping back, she straightened her skirt, ran her hands down her bodice, fiddling with the cuffs. She really was tired of black, but she would have scandalized her Irish family if she’d chosen to wear any other color.
Once a Mead widow, always a Mead widow.
She would have to return to her life. Or go back to Ireland long enough to explain her desertion and get her daughters. He’d be gone back to America by then and this interlude would be nothing more than memory.
Glancing up at him, she wanted to urge him to stay.
His face was arranged in stern lines, a muscle playing in his cheek. She wanted to touch his full lips, brush her fingers over his mouth. She was enchanted with him, to the detriment of her immortal soul and any sense of decency she once possessed.
She glanced at the passage back up to the library. She really should leave him and take care never to be around him alone.
Instead, she allowed him to spirit her from the grotto to the beach.
The wind was blowing so fierce it made patterns in the sand.
She let go of his hand, turned her back to the worst of it, trying to tame the tendrils of hair brushing against her cheeks.
He seemed impervious to anything nature could throw at him. Standing there, tall and broad, he reminded her of tales she’d always heard of Highlanders.
“Did your family come from Scotland?” she asked.
His bright grin had the ability to lift her heart. How foolish she was.
“I was wagering how long it would take for someone to ask.”
“Macrath or Virginia didn’t?”
He shook his head.
She studied a rock near her foot. It looked just like a turtle, complete with a tiny little head and pointed tail. Her youngest daughter would have tucked it into her pocket and kept it on a shelf in her bedroom. She bent and retrieved it, brushing the sand away and dropping it into her pocket.
“A weapon?” he asked.
She smiled, shook her head, then said, “No, a present. For Nessa. She likes all things turtle-shaped.” She retrieved the rock and opened her palm to show it to him.
He stroked his finger over the humped back.
The moment was too poignant. She couldn’t help but think of his lost family and her own darling children.
Of the two of them, she was so much more fortunate. A word she would never have used a few weeks ago to describe herself. But she had a family here in Scotland, and one in Ireland as well. She was surrounded by love and all she had to do was recognize it.
She would have curved her hand around the rock and dropped it back in her pocket if he hadn’t suddenly placed his forefinger on the inside of her wrist. Two of his fingers stroked across the tender skin there, as if encouraging her heart to beat faster.
She stared at his broad hand, the fingers callused as if he were no stranger to manual labor.
“Do you hate war?” she asked.
“Another question I’ve never been asked,” he said. “I understand war. I understand the politics that encourages one faction to fight another. I accept it the same way I do cruelty, knowing human nature is not always pretty. But hate? That would be as worthless as hating rain or the cold of winter. It simply is.”
“I never thought you a fatalist, Bruce.”
“It’s my Highlander blood,” he said. “To answer your question, my family came from Scotland, from the Highlands. Pushed out by sheep like hundreds and thousands of other Highlanders.”
