CHAPTER NINE
Four years earlier
“I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry, Anna.” Moira pulled back her club and let fly. The ball popped into the air and landed not a foot away from its original position, and Moira let out a groan.
A damp breeze whipped over them, stirring the grass and shoving clouds swiftly across the darkening sky. It had started out a fine day for golf at Muirswood Links, but Anna expected them both to be drenched within the hour. No matter: victory would have come long beforehand. Moira was a terrible golfer.
Anna retrieved the gutty, one of the newfangled gutta-percha productions, painted white, more resistant to dampness than the old leather balls stuffed with feathers. She ordered them from a factory in Glasgow by the thousand. “Try again. More slowly this time. Keep your eye on where you mean to aim.”
Sighing, Moira repositioned the ball. “What I mean is, why not let him court you properly? A summer of romance, then the autumn to plan a wedding.”
“There’s no need to wait.”
“This is about Rawsey, isn’t it?” Moira looked up. “The island has been there—”
“Eye on your target, coz.”
Moira rolled her eyes and obeyed. “The island has stood for thousands of years. I believe it will survive one more winter without your improvements.”
Anna sighed. None of her cousins seemed to understand that Rawsey was not Rawsey without the islanders. That community, its decent, rough-spun kindness and honest industry, had been as much her family during her youth as any of her cousins. She could not fail them, nor could she love Rawsey without them. It fell to her to find them a way to make a living there, and that task couldn’t wait.
But there was no point wasting her breath once more on explanations. “It’s done,” she said. “Oh, bravo!” For Moira had at last sunk her ball.
With their caddy, a young towheaded boy, on their heels, they strolled to the next putting green. “What do you mean, it’s done?” Moira asked.
“I put out an advertisement yesterday for a schoolmaster and a builder. All that remains is to acquire the lumber.”
“Anna!” Moira looked exasperated. “You know Uncle Peter is watching like a hawk. He’ll be so grumpy if he finds out. Do you want a four-hour lecture?”
Smirking, Anna took a fresh ball from the caddy. Their uncle’s trusteeship of Rawsey would remain in place until the hour Anna was wed, and Uncle Peter was a man of old-fashioned convictions who would rant terribly if he discovered her conniving. More to the point, he spat terribly when he spoke, and every member of the family under forty had a tale to tell of being boxed into a corner and soaked by his scolding. “He won’t find out, though.” She swung her club, and the ball rolled obediently into the hole.
“How do you do that?”
“The hole is ten yards away, Moira. It really isn’t difficult. Now, if we were on the men’s course—”
“What if Lockwood changes his mind, Anna? What will you do then?”
Anna laughed. “He won’t.”
“How can you be so sure? He’s practically a stranger. And an Englishman, at that.”
Anna handed her club to the caddy and put her hands on her hips. “What’s all this sudden concern? You were the one who encouraged me to dance with him that night at the Camerons’.”
Moira blew a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. The wind, picking up, blew it right back. “And did you dance? Because if so, I never noticed. In fact, from what I saw, one moment you were ignoring him, the next you were engaged!”
“Then you weren’t watching closely enough.”
But Moira had worked herself up into a lather and paid no heed to this remark. “And this nonsense with the marriage contract!” She whacked her ball off into the hedgerow, and the caddy, with laudably straight-faced restraint, set another down for her. “Mama says you’re bringing a dowry to him. She says it’s practically medieval.”
Anna would not call it a dowry, more like a wise investment. His accountants and solicitors had met with hers, and proposed that twenty thousand pounds would clear Liam’s inherited debts.
But why simply clear them? His estates consisted of some of England’s richest agricultural lands. Why not equip them to turn a profit? Anna had instructed her solicitor to counter with a more appropriate figure—thirty thousand, to be paid in several installments, a third of it earmarked for agricultural improvements.
“I have no idea what Auntie Liz means,” she told Moira.
“She says you have a clause requiring that neither of you may constrain each other’s free movement, nor accuse each other of abandonment.”
Auntie Liz had been eavesdropping at the study door. “Yes, well, I don’t want a husband who complains when I disappear to Rawsey.”
“Mama says a marriage can’t work when it’s treated as a business deal.”
Anna snorted. “Oh, so she thinks me unromantic. Yes, I’d forgotten what an idealist Auntie is!”
Moira caught back a laugh. Her mother knew how to pinch a shilling till it shrieked, and had informed Moira that she would not be allowed to fall in love with anybody worth less than ten thousand a year. “Touché. But Anna, really—why are you so certain of this man? So soon? I thought you wanted to marry a Scot.”
From over the hedges came a masculine hoot. Anna put her finger to her lips, and Moira, wide-eyed, nodded. The ladies’ links converged with the gentlemen’s course here, by the high hedgerows that boxed in Traitor’s Corner.
They listened hard as the dim voices resolved into conversation: Anna caught her cousin David’s voice, cheerful and lilting, explaining the origin of the Corner’s name to Lockwood. “Here’s the spot where the bastard Roger Johns betrayed Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invasion plans to an English spy. Some say he was brought back here to be hanged, but that happy rumor hasn’t ever been confirmed.”
“Alas,” came Lockwood’s dry reply. “So what you mean to say is, I should have brought roses to leave in homage.”
“Oh ho!” David sounded scandalized.
Moira, for her part, cast Anna a scowl. “Plenty of Scots,” she muttered, “would let you go where you please. No need to settle.”
“Lockwood’s only teasing.” Anna hiked up her skirts and clambered onto a nearby boulder. “Hullo there!”
Moira’s brother’s head shot up over the hedgerow. “Hark! The traitor’s ghost!”
A moment later, Lockwood’s head joined David’s, his amber eyes crinkled in a smile. “How goes it in the ladies’ links?”
“Tedious,” she said, and ignored Moira’s sniff. “All putting green, no chance to drive.”
“Sounds well suited to Lockwood.” This from David, grinning. “The lad couldn’t hit a ball if his life depended on it.”
“Lies,” Lockwood said calmly. “I can hit them well enough. It’s sinking them that’s the problem.”
“Meanwhile, I’m eight for eight,” David gloated.
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Moira said.
Anna clapped. “A splendid idea! Give us one minute—we’ll join you.”
“No, we won’t,” said Moira, and the caddy, clutching his hat in his hands, added his own objection:
“No ladies on the gents’ course, strict orders of the club keeper.”
Anna snorted. “The club keeper used to feed me bottles of milk when I was too small to walk,” she told the boy, “and to spank me when I was misbehaving as a toddler. He’s welcome to try it again, but he’ll have to catch me first.”
The boy looked peaked as he clawed a hand through his corn silk hair. “My lady, I’ll be sacked if I let you on that course.”
“Then pretend you’ve lost us,” Anna said. “Take our clubs, too, with half a sovereign for your trouble.”
That made the boy perk up. “You want me to take the clubs?”
“That’s right. We’ll use the gentlemen’s.”
“You won’t be able to lift ’em—even my putter,” David predicted.
“You’ll eat those words,” Anna said. “Send away your caddy, with a half sovereign for him as well.”
“You’d best pay me back for that!”
“I will.” She seized Moira’s arm, tugging her cousin down the length of the hedgerow, then shoving her, despite Moira’s protest, through a narrow patch worn by the passage of deer.
The gentlemen’s course was several times larger, an endless rolling field dotted with sandy bunkers and gentle hillocks, that spilled uninterrupted to the cliffs fronting the Firth of Forth. Anna took a moment, breathing deeply of the salt air, to admire the view: sunlight glimmering on the water, a distant ship passing beneath the low clouds, its white sails unfurled and billowing.
Then she turned smiling to face the others. Moira, arms crossed, was casting anxious glances down the links toward the distant clubhouse. But the other holes stood empty of players, and the caddies were scampering toward each other, leaping and crowing over their profits, so Anna felt it unlikely they would betray their benefactors.
“A foursome,” she decided. “Ladies against gents? Or will the siblings march together to their doom?”
“I will play with my brother,” Moira said over David’s guffaw. “That way, you might get to know your fiancé better.”
Lockwood, catching Anna’s eye, lifted a brow in silent question: Moira’s tone had been pointed. She shook her head in reply. “Very well,” she said. “Who will go first?”
“Losers first,” David said instantly, and handed Lockwood a driver.
• • •
Alas, defeat was all but inevitable. As they worked their way down the course, a light misting rain staining the grass an emerald green, Moira played the spoilsport by ceding all her shots to her brother—“Women aren’t allowed on this course! I am only following the rules!”—while Lockwood, for all his raw power, demonstrated the rank flaw of all beginners: he could not aim.
“That one’s gone into the water,” Anna said, shielding her eyes as she tracked the flight of the gutty into the horizon. “Remarkable! Four hundred yards, would you say?”
“Perhaps longer,” David allowed.
“Given practice, Lockwood, you could be a marvelous—”
“A pity your army didn’t have your aim,” David interrupted, his taunting smile directed at Lockwood as he lined up his next shot.
Anna kicked his ball away. “How many times have you played golf, David? Lockwood had never lifted a club until today.”
“No, let him have his fun now,” said Lockwood with a grin. His errant aim did not seem to have dampened his mood, which made him the first man Anna had known who did not sulk when losing. “Tomorrow, we go shooting—we’ll see then whose aim is better.”
“At least David will be less insufferable,” Moira muttered. “He is far less saucy when his opponent is armed.”
David’s next stroke was a piece of beauty, the ball arcing in a strong clean line toward the next hole, landing only yards short of the green. Everybody applauded, and then Moira complained of the distance to walk—“I much prefer the ladies’ links, this course goes on forever”—and David hauled her up and tossed her over his shoulder, causing her to squeal and beat him about the head as he stalked onward.
Lockwood, for his part, was carrying both bags of clubs—no inconsiderable weight. Yet he readjusted them as if they weighed nothing, in order to offer his arm to Anna. They strolled onward over the wet grass, his bearing as elegant as though he escorted her at a ball.
“You make a fine beast of burden,” Anna remarked. “Were you athletic at university?”
“I fenced and rowed for my college. Still do row, when I have the chance.”
“I’ll let Moira know. She was worried our sons would be sickly, thanks to the English blood.”
“Our sons,” he murmured. His gaze caught hers, and the heat in his look made her blush. “I doubt any son of yours would be less than strapping, Lady Forth. When I saw you drive that last ball, I realized why they have a separate course for ladies: you showed up your own cousin.”
She grinned. David had made no remark on that shot, but she’d outdone him by fifty yards. “Yes, well. Oats and haggis are my secret weapons.”
The air was darkening, the mist thickening into true rain. A drop splattered the tip of her nose, and Lockwood leaned forward and kissed it away.
Her stomach fluttered. “On a golf course?” she murmured. “Bold of you.”
“Anywhere,” he said huskily. “I am . . . deranged by you.”
Ahead, David dropped Moira without care or warning, and his sister’s outraged shrieks split the air as she staggered to catch her balance. “I’m done with this!” she cried. “It’s raining now, and I refuse—oh! Oh! It’s Murray!”
Anna turned to follow her pointing finger. Sure enough, the club keeper was running across the field toward them, shouting with fist upraised.
“Run!” cried David, and grabbed Moira’s arm, dragging her shrieking toward the split in the hedges.
Anna could not breathe for laughing. Old Murray had not run so hard in thirty years. “We’ll be—expelled,” she managed. “And knowing Murray—bullwhipped beforehand.”
“First he has to catch us.” Settling the straps of the golf bags more securely around his shoulder, Liam seized her hand—but she resisted, tugging him in the opposite direction of her cousins.
“This way,” she said. “We can hide, then circle around and slip back to the clubhouse.”
• • •
Anna’s father and uncles had golfed at this club throughout her childhood, and there was not an inch of the parkland she did not know. At the edge of the woods stood a shed where the groundskeeper kept his tools. The door swung open beneath her shove, admitting them into a cool, dry space mounded with sacks of soil and shovels and hoes. Rain pounded now on the tin roof, a thundering clatter that softened as Lockwood pulled the door shut.
He laid down the bags of clubs, then joined her at the small window, where she was watching Mr. Murray shove his way through the hedgerow.
“Oh, they’re caught,” she said with a wince as the old man dragged David back through the hedges by the scruff of his shirt. “Ha! He still treats us all as though we were children.”
“Did that man really spank you when you were little?”
She slanted Lockwood a laughing look. “Why? Do you imagine him too kind, or me too well behaved?”
“Neither,” he said, smiling.
“Quite right, on both counts.”
“But I do think it odd that your father would have let him raise his hand to you.”
She stepped back from the window. A sack stuffed with netting made a soft makeshift stool, which she sank onto with a sigh. “My father let anybody parent me who wanted to. He wasn’t very good at it himself, you know. So he was always glad of the help.” She smiled. “And I was awful. I still remember—he’d left me behind in the clubhouse while he went to play his rounds, and I was sulking awfully about it. So I pulled down the display of trophies, thinking that would force him to come back. You can’t blame old Murray for losing his temper.”
He crouched down before her, an easy athletic grace to the steadiness of his balance on the balls of his feet. She envied men their clothes. Her own skirts were sodden and heavy, but the rain had rolled right off his waxed trousers.
“Perhaps not,” he said. “But . . . your father left you there alone. Was that a commonplace habit?”
A single raindrop clung to his brow. As she watched, it dropped onto the high point of his cheekbone, then began a slow, luxuriant slide down the hollow of his cheek. He had beautiful bones. Full, chiseled lips. It was a wonder no English girl had snagged him already. Thank God nobody had snagged him.
What had he asked? Ah, yes: her father. “He was out of his depths,” she said. “My mother died in childbirth, you know. He hardly knew what to do with a little girl. But he made do, and struggled on, though I was not the easiest child by any estimation.”
“You loved him,” he said softly. “Very much.”
“Yes. And I was glad he took me wherever he went. When I was little, at least.” Then, harassed about the seemliness of toting his little daughter to golf courses and clubs, he’d chosen a different tack. “Anyway, he sent me off to the aunts soon thereafter.”
“The aunts? Which aunts? Lady Moira’s mother?”
“Sometimes my aunt Elizabeth, yes.” She smiled. Poor Auntie Liz. Her daughters, Moira and Celia and Laura, had not prepared her for a girl of Anna’s temperament. “It was a kind of joke in the family—who could manage to keep me longest. I didn’t make it easy.”
“It seems rather . . . lonely for a child, to be passed around. Never to have a steady home.”
She hesitated. “It was sometimes lonely. But I grew accustomed to it. It . . .” She took a breath. “It was hard when he left. But I never minded the aunts.”
His kiss on her cheek was softer than a whisper. “You will never be left again,” he said. “Not unless you choose it.”
The promise opened some unsteady pit in her stomach. That was not what their marriage contract had been drawn up to guarantee.
As their gazes held, the silence between them felt abruptly weighted—liable to collapse into a conversation that would feel dangerous, exposing.
He’d made a casual comment, spoken without forethought. He probably didn’t mean it as a promise.
But perhaps he did.
Perhaps she wanted him to mean it.
Marry, first. She swallowed. Marry, before you test it by asking.
“I could always count on Gram, though,” she said with forced brightness. “Winters in Rawsey were my favorite.” She made herself smile. “And now, thanks to you, I’ll be able to count on Rawsey whenever I like.”
For a moment, his regard remained serious and frowning. She touched his lips, gently urging them up at the corners. “Smile,” she whispered.
He kissed her fingertips, then caught her palm and held it to his mouth, breathing deeply of her. “Rawsey will be yours.” His lips moving against her skin raised goose bumps, caused her stomach to flip. “And anywhere else you might like. Whenever, wherever.”
“Yes.” That, he had promised in the contract. He would not interfere with her freedom of movement.
“Will you come to Rawsey?” she heard herself ask. “In the winter sometime?”
This laugh sounded genuine. “I could think of better climates for the winter.”
Her stomach sank.
No, no, his reply should not disappoint her. Their marriage was not designed for companionship, but to free each other from burdens: he, from the debts that crippled his estates and restricted his travels, and she, from legal impediments to her ownership of the island, and from the societal expectations that constrained unmarried women.
But she’d felt so sure, a moment ago, that he wanted differently . . .
She took back her hand. “Of course you’ll want to be in Nice or Rome, somewhere south.”
“Better weather, yes. But not better places, if you aren’t there.” And before she could even think to check her smile, he leaned forward and kissed her.
They had kissed a good deal in the eight weeks since they’d left Rawsey. He’d gone back to England for a fortnight, but since his return, they’d found dozens of opportunities to meet. Spring was a festive time in Edinburgh. They met in ballrooms, over dinner tables, at musicales and garden parties. Anna’s aunt Elizabeth, her nominal chaperone, was suffering from her annual headaches, and could not muster the energy to chase and scold her. “You’re a mad girl who will do as you please,” Auntie Liz had told her the afternoon she’d emerged from the Stromonds’ garden with leaves in her hair. “Mind you don’t drag Moira into your nonsense—that’s all I ask.”
And so they flirted their way through the New Town and Old Town, and slipped into empty boxes at the opera to kiss in the dark. Anna felt as though she had been walking through a dream this season, fevered and magical. But not until now, in this tin-roofed shed with the rain beating down, had she truly found herself alone with him.
Anything could happen.
She lay back on the floor and pulled him down atop her. He smelled so good, like an enchantment, though each note of his scent was very ordinary—soap and pomade gotten from a high-street chemist, starch from the laundry, sweat from their outdoor exertions. She breathed in deeply and felt her head swim. He bit her lower lip and she squirmed against him, wishing away her clothes, wishing she could imprint his skin on hers, carry that sweaty soapy musk with her, to sniff at odd moments when she found herself bored or fatigued in company. It was better than coffee to make her senses leap and sharpen.
He kissed divinely. It got better and better. He used his lips to open her mouth wider, then angled his head and did something clever that sealed her lips to his. They kissed long and deep as she squirmed beneath him, wanting . . . something . . .
This edgy need was her new companion. At night, she fell asleep imagining his mouth, his hands. Near him, she all but vibrated, her skin magnetized, drawn to his, singing in his presence. Even now, as he kissed her, she wanted more. What if this hunger never ebbed? What if it could not be satisfied? What if she was broken, somehow, fevered and hopeless of a cure?
He did not seem hurried. He kissed her as though there were no other end but this, to taste her deeply, her lips and cheeks and the hollow where her pulse beat in her throat. When he was done with her, sometimes her knees trembled, but he never trembled, nor seemed flustered or startled. Was this so one-sided, then? Sometimes he almost seemed amused by the way she trembled for him. He said he dreamed of her, too, but what if this was only a joke to him?
She pushed against him, hoping to feel the proof of his excitement. But before she could find it, he twisted his hips away. When she tried again, he bit her lower lip in punishment, which made her gasp, then tracked his mouth to her ear, nibbling at her lobe.
His hand smoothed over her waist. She wanted it higher—or lower. She caught it, and felt its steadiness as it turned in hers, gripped her, and held her still.
Her breathing was ragged—his, inaudible. Once, she had heard him pant. Two days ago, in the galleries at the Royal Scottish Academy, she had dragged him behind a pillar. After a minute, his hand had slipped beneath her neckline, and as he’d cupped her breast, she’d heard him hiss out a breath.
She carried his hand now to her chest. “Touch me,” she whispered.
The edge of his teeth scraped her throat. She heard him swallow, and then, praise be, his hand slipped beneath her neckline, delving under her corset and chemise.
She gasped. It felt better even than it had in the museum. His palm so rough, callused, and hot . . . His thumb found her nipple, chafing her, and her body tightened, her belly twisted, a pulse started between her legs. She arched up and clamped his hand in place, and with her free hand, she swept over his back, down his ribs, to his muscular, flexing buttock.
He went rigid. His pelvis rocked into hers once—yes, at last, there was his desire—before he thrust himself aside, removing his hand from her breast as he went. He threw himself down beside her, flat on his back, and when, after a minute, he turned to kiss her again, a great pique sizzled through her and she twisted away.
He caught her face and turned it back. “Behave,” he murmured, and dragged her into another kiss, not permitting her to struggle.
She had never behaved: he could ask her aunts if he doubted it. Her body was aching, and his hands and mouth were the cure. Did he not ache?
She had listened to her married cousins’ gossip, late after a night spent drinking whisky and punch. She knew how to make him want her.
She reached down his body swiftly, before he could notice, and grasped the bulge tenting his trousers.
He made a choked noise, then caught her hand and pulled it back up, planting a kiss on her wrist. “Patience,” he said roughly.
“Why? Nobody’s about—”
“Because I say so.”
She yanked free and sat up.
After a moment, he, too, unfolded himself off the floor. Once he was sitting, long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, he said, “You’re put out.”
“You are not in charge of me.”
The rain abruptly softened. As the drumming died down, the silence felt shockingly loud between them. He tipped his head as he studied her.
“Fair enough,” he said at last. “Is that your only complaint?”
“No.”
“May I ask the other?”
“You know it.”
“Let me hear it anyway.”
“You . . .” Not for the first time she cursed her coloring, which showed her blushes so clearly. “I dislike being the weaker one.”
His brows lifted. “Weaker one? In what regard are you weak?”
She blew out a breath. “You’re so . . . unmoved.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then shook his head, a slight uncomprehending shake. “I am far from unmoved. You just felt proof of it.”
“And you knocked my hand away.”
His mouth opened, began to smile, abandoned the smile, and then closed again. A snort of amusement came from him. “It is my devout wish not to deflower you in a toolshed. I assure you, had I not moved your hand, I might have forgotten that rapidly.”
“Then forget it!”
He sat back as though to see her better, his amber eyes wide with amazement. “You wish to—here? Now?”
“I am sick,” she said furiously, “of feeling like this—so hot and fevered and . . . shaky.”
He put his hand to his mouth, staring at her. Then came his laughter, hoarse and soft. “My God. Anna, I do not think you even know how you compliment me. Be careful: my vanity may become unmanageable.”
“And now you’re laughing,” she said, but with less sharpness, for it was impossible to keep her temper when he was looking at her so warmly. “I dislike feeling like an ignorant naïf. Explain the joke, if you please.”
He dropped his hand, revealing his grin. “The joke is that I am the luckiest man alive. And the least deserving of it, surely. Lie back, now. I’ll cure this fever of yours. But no,” he added huskily as he came over her again, “I won’t deflower you. For that, I’ll need a proper bed—and a great deal more time.”
She squinted up at him, suspicious. “Then what—oh,” she said softly as his hand closed around her ankle, his grip hot and firm.
“It is a wonderful thing,” he said as his hand climbed higher, and his reach permitted him to lie down beside her and speak directly into her ear, “that I might be the one to show you this.” His palm massaged her thigh, and her breath caught as he continued. “For now you will think of me whenever you do it yourself.”
“Do—” What, she was going to ask, but the word slipped back down her throat as his hand found the split in her drawers, and he touched her where even she did not touch herself.
“This,” he murmured, his breath hot against her ear. “Practice this when I am not with you.” His fingers delved through her folds, finding a spot that made her body clench. “Then, on our wedding night, you can show me what you’ve learned.”
His touch was delicate, light, probing—then, as she gasped, he whispered, “There. Yes?” And at her wordless nod, he pressed his smile into her temple and stroked and pressed more firmly, setting up a rhythm that pitched her fever higher, to a careening, desperate gallop. She twisted, reaching for him—his free hand found hers, clutching it hard, holding it to his cheek as he stroked her, as he whispered words of praise, compliments to her, to the noises she made as she gasped and twitched and arched against him.
The crisis came on her first as a rivulet of sensation washing through her, building, building, and then—climaxing, glorious, glory indeed.
His palm pressed hard into her, holding her steady as she trembled. And then, when the pleasure at last settled and faded, he said, “Look at me.”
She found herself unwilling to open her eyes. He was still touching her below. She was wet—she could feel it. It was dreadfully mortifying. She knew she had gone red as a beet.
“Look at me,” he said gently. “Anna.”
She was no coward. She had asked for this.
On a ragged breath, she rolled her head toward his. His face so close that their lashes tangled, he said, “You are beautiful. And I thank you. I will live on this memory until our wedding night.”
Shyness fell away. She clasped his cheek, amazed by him.
“Two weeks to wait,” she murmured. “No fortnight will ever feel so long.”