Devil in Tartan (Highland Grooms #4)(84)
Aulay walked up behind Lottie and wrapped his arms around her middle, pulling her into his chest and resting his chin on her head. They stood like that, gazing out at the pristine splendor of the loch and the land surrounding it. “Did you want to marry him?” Aulay muttered.
The question, apropos of nothing, surprised Lottie. “Iversen?”
“Aye.”
She had wanted to marry him because she was supposed to be married, and her choices on the island had been rather limited. “Aye,” she admitted. “If he’d stayed on at Lismore, I’d have married him, had he offered. But...” She paused, thinking.
“But?” he prodded her.
“I’m expected to marry, aye? I’ve avoided it on Lismore...selfishly,” she said, swallowing that word. “But I have long wanted to go out into the world, to see all there is. I should be struck by God’s wrath for it, but the truth is that I wanted to be free of the burden of my family. But when I had that opportunity, when Anders said I should come with him, I couldna leave them. And he... Well, he knew me better than I knew myself, he did. He knew I’d no’ leave them.”
“Do you miss him, then?” Aulay asked.
Lottie shook her head. She had scarcely given him any thought these last few weeks. Once her horizons expanded, which they had, if only a wee bit in the course of this voyage, Anders disappeared into a bank of faded memories. Beyond the initial shock and swell of anger at discovering that Anders was not in Aalborg in the capacity he’d said, or any capacity for that matter, Lottie had forgotten him. “He was my first infatuation, and I thought I esteemed him more than I did, because I didna know better. I hadna seen the world. But he was no great love of mine.” Her feelings for Aulay ran much deeper. And Lottie wasn’t sure now that there wasn’t a wee part of her that had suspected Anders wasn’t the man he presented himself to be. Nothing overt, but a small feeling.
“Now that you’ve seen the world, what do you think?” he asked curiously.
She thought she should have married MacColl. But if she had, she never would have experienced the extraordinary feelings with Aulay. “I think I feel small in it.” She turned around in his arms. “What do you think, Aulay Mackenzie?”
Aulay kissed her forehead. “I feel invincible in the world. It’s at home that I feel small.”
“Why?”
“Because I stand in the shadow of two brothers who were always a wee bit bigger than me, who followed my father into training soldiers. I was rather quiet, too, and my sisters, as you’ve surely noticed, are no’. I preferred painting to rough play, reading to talk. It was easy for me to be lost in the whirl around my siblings. But on a ship? I was the tallest of them all. I was the one my father noticed. I was the one everyone looked to.”
“I would look to you on land or sea,” Lottie murmured. How swiftly grief and guilt could weigh down on her these days. She bowed her head, resting it against his chest.
“I wanted to speak to you,” he said, and slipped his hand under her chin and made her look up, studying her a moment. “Donna be uneasy, lass.”
“Will I hang?” she asked boldly. “If I am to hang, I should like to know it, aye?”
“My father thinks no’. He thinks incarceration in Edinburgh is more likely. There is the question of what your laird will want for the debts, but as for us...a loss of liberty, as it were.”
Lottie pressed her lips together. She couldn’t bear to think of herself locked away with thieves and debtors. “And my brothers? The others? What will become of them?”
“I donna know, lass,” he said sorrowfully.
She knew what would become of them. She had worked it out, had discovered a way to pay back, at least partially, the Mackenzie debt, and provide for her clan at the same time. “What will become of you?” she asked.
His gaze dropped to her lips. “I donna know as yet,” he said. “The MacDonalds are distilling whisky illegally. Perhaps they will need someone to transport it for them.”
Lottie blinked. “You wouldn’t.”
“Aye, I would, if it meant returning to the family coffers what must be paid for the loss of the cargo. But it willna matter, Lottie. Nothing will matter.”
“Why no’?”
He stroked her hair. “Because if you are gone, I truly will have lost everything that matters.” He lowered his head to kiss her before Lottie could speak.
She wanted to argue, but something exploded in her chest when his lips touched hers. She realized she desperately needed to be held by him, to be touched, and filled. She needed to feel desired and wanted. She needed to feel his strength surround her and buoy her before she faced her punishment, and she responded with ferocity to that kiss that startled even her.
Aulay picked her up and twirled her around, pushing her up against one of the four posters of the bed. He smelled spicy and woodsy, his body hard planes and firm angles beneath her roaming hands, his scent of sea and woods. He was an elixir of lust.
He dug his fingers into the meat of her hips as he tangled his tongue with hers. It seemed as if a fire had flared beneath them and the flames were licking them from all sides. Aulay yanked the hem of her petticoat up and slid his hand between her legs. Lottie groaned with pleasure and grabbed his head between her hands to stop the kiss so that she might lean her head against the post and give in to the erotic sensation of his hand on her flesh.