My Lady's Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel(27)

He stares at you warily.

“Confide in me, my love,” you continue. “Let me lighten your burden. You have suffered alone for too long.”

Lord Craven kisses you deeply, as though for the last time. You respond with equal urgency, your mouth ravenous. As at last you pull apart, he keeps you within his powerful arms and leans his forehead against yours, like he is seeking absolution.

“In the beginning we were happy,” he says. “But as I loved her more, she loved me less. She thought it weak of me, to love her. She thought all men weak. When she bore a child, she was horrified it was a boy. She used to whisper to me, before we fell asleep, that he would be dead by morning. I would wake and run to the boy’s room, place my ear to his mouth to check for breath. She would shatter me with her cruel laughter, watching me from the doorway. ‘You will never know when I will strike,’ she would say. And then one day, she did. She tried to stab him with a kitchen knife stolen from Cook as she slept.”

You nod knowingly. “Cook does sleep a lot.”

Craven nods back, his breath ragged, and continues.

“I came upon her in her chamber and screamed, begged for her to stop. She laughed at me. Her throat, her beautiful throat, thrown back in laughter as she tried to kill our son.

“?‘I never truly loved you,’ she said to me. She was a beautiful woman, but so ugly when she laughed. She was a demon then. She—she tried to throw our boy in the fire, but I caught him. My jacket was singed, and as I went to put out the flame, she grabbed hold and tried to push me in as well. ‘Nothing is according to plan,’ she cried. ‘Nothing but this will do, this will do! See you in hell!’ And as we struggled, she must have gotten turned around. My last memory is of her falling into the fireplace, her hair aflame, her eyes red, her laughter turned to screams, her beauty consumed by the blaze.”

You hold him. Your mind reels, and yet you hold him. “Surely you tried to save her?”

“Yes!” he cries in anguish. “I pulled her from the flames, but it was too late. I lay her upon the hearth, I stroked her face, and I wept. But all my weeping could not douse her. I could not save her. And perhaps”—he is fully sobbing now—“perhaps it was her wish not to be saved.”

He turns to you, his eyes lost and despairing. Your heart aches for him.

“So, now you know it all,” he says. “The full, ugly truth of it. What do you think? Are you repulsed?”





If you are not repulsed in the slightest, and hearing his confession has burned away all suspicion and distrust in the furnace of truth so that now all that remains is pure and true love between two souls, joined as one for all eternity, then turn to this page.

If actually yes, you are repulsed—he seems like a lovely man, but he has essentially confessed to killing his wife, and this is quite a lot of baggage to deal with—farewell! Turn to this page.





“Yes,” you say. “I’m yours.”

Mac shakes his head. “All my life, I have told myself I do not deserve the love of a good woman,” he whispers. “I do not deserve to know beauty, or laughter. And you—you make gifts of your kindness and mirth, you make gifts of your soul, to all around you. To the orphans. Even to this wee foal. But to me, you make a gift of love. And I dinnae ken what to do with a gift so fine as this.”

His admission leaves you breathless. Mac looks down at the foal, and you swear his stormy eyes are gilt with unspilt tears.

“You can make me a gift of your body,” you say.

He pulls you into a kiss that would make other mouths ashamed of themselves, then pulls you up and onto him and slides slick fingers into your aching rainbow, searching for the gold at the end of it.

He listens to your every moan, attends every catch of your breath, and when the time is right and neither of you can resist creating the perfect union that your love, like this foal, was born to witness, he slips his dirk into your sheath.

Together, you play the most beautiful song on the bagpipes of your joined bodies. Together, you reach love’s most exuberant pinnacle, screaming louder than the stable full of horses as you do.

Mac is the best, most purehearted, surprisingly nimble, and not surprisingly well-endowed man you have ever known.

And yet…there is something about this whole business that doesn’t make sense. The name that has haunted you since you first saw it interrupts your joy again. Constantina. Why would a camp follower such as Constantina suddenly turn on Mac? What did he do to make her act so? Does Abercrombie have any idea of what Mac did? And why did he lie about how much he knew her? Your head is whirling.

“Excuse me,” you whisper. “I’ve got to…freshen up.”





Turn to this page.





“I do understand,” you say, as casually as you can muster. Fabien looks over his shoulder at you and scoffs before returning his gaze to the desert night.

“Do you, chérie?” he says. “You, a sheltered lady’s companion, who has never known what it means to be hungry and friendless…”

His back is turned. Now is your moment.

Silently you reach for one of the more promising-looking rocks within reach and creep toward him. Fabien does not notice and continues monologuing into the night, his pectorals glazed by the moonlight.