Page 72 of The Lyon and the Unicorn
The woman who loathed him and saved her smiles for another.
At first he’d thought her courses had darkened her temper. Women were known to turn into harridans each month, and he’d spotted the telltale blood on her night shift the day after their wedding. But even though he’d left her alone the next two nights, she refused to soften toward him.
When he resumed his attentions, she accepted them with indifference, until her body yielded and she cried out her pleasure. But by the time her climax subsided, she’d already reforged the armor around her heart.
She needed to protect herself—aye, he understood that, given what she’d endured in her life. But he couldn’t deny the pain in his soul at knowing that she sought to protect herself fromhim.
But they’d only been married a fortnight. He couldn’t expect her to forgive him within days of their wedding. This wild lass he’d married, who trusted nothing but her own instincts—he couldn’t force her to come to him. She’d have to come of her own accord. Only then would she be truly his.
He was not like his da. He wasn’t going to force his woman into submission.
Nor am I going to drink and piss away the legacy of my ancestors.
“Is that right, son?”
His father’s angry voice returned him to the present.
Devil’s ballocks—he’d spoken aloud.
“How did ye get to be so lacking in respect for yer da?” his father said, the stench of sour whisky on his breath. “I’ll tell ye—it’s since ye married that slut.”
“Mywifeis the reason why the estate isn’t ruined,” Murdo growled. “And I told ye not to speak of her in that manner.”
“Ye’re a fool, son. I’m only saying what I see.”
Murdo set his pen aside. “Whatdoyou see, Da?”
“Nothing I wouldn’t expect,” his father said. “How many men, I don’t ken.”
“That’senough.”
“Duncan, for one. I can’t tell how many more.”
“Da, I’ll not listen to yer lies about—”
“I’veseenthem,” Da said. “The morning after yer wedding night I was outside before dawn, and—”
“Visiting a whore, no doubt.”
“A man has needs, son, and I’ve no wife to fulfil those needs.”
“Ye fulfilled yer needs elsewhere even when Ma was alive,” Murdo said. “She wasn’t enough for you.”
“And ye’re not enough forher. I speak the truth—ye know it deep down.” Da placed a hand on his arm. “Son, I won’t see ye humiliated by a faithless wife. I saw them embracing by the wood hut.”
By the wood hut…
Murdo recalled what he’d seen the morning after he woke to an empty bed and peered out of the window: the ghillie with a woman. At first he’d thought it was Marsaili—she was a comely enough lass, and he’d stumbled across Duncan comforting her before over something or other.
A flicker of doubt threaded itself into his mind.
His father might be a faithless man, strict, unkind, rarely fair. But he never spoke an untruth. Even when he’d broken his vows with Ma and taken another woman, he didn’t bother to conceal it. Da always said: he was the laird, and the laird was law.
With that level of arrogance, why bother to lie?
“There’s one way to tell if yer wife’s betraying ye,” Da said, “and that’s if she denies ye in bed.”
Murdo averted his gaze.
