CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WITH THE EXCEPTION of the first night when she’d fallen into bed and had collapsed into exhausted sleep, Lottie had spent every night since tossing and turning, awakened over and over again with the ache of missing her father, or worry of what would happen to her, or fear of what would become of her brothers, of the ways she might make this right, if given the opportunity.
But in the last few nights, she’d been awakened by an unsettling case of desire.
Now was not the time to indulge in a fantasy about Aulay Mackenzie, and yet, she did. Over and over. What was she to do? Sit in a corner and mope all day as she waited for the arrival of the justice of the peace? These could very well be the last days of her life, or at the very least, the last days of her freedom. By all that was holy, she would not end without having experienced love—real, raw, expansive love.
It was the best distraction she could hope for.
As the nights slowly gave way to day in the endless wait, the endless rumination, the endless review of all the possible scenarios, Lottie would wake, dress in one of two day gowns Catriona and Vivienne had loaned her, then go and tend to her clan.
They had settled in at Balhaire perhaps too well—Mr. MacLean missed his wife and children, and had made use of the library to write letters to them. He proclaimed he’d deliver them personally after they appeared before a judge, but just in case, he’d extracted a promise from Billy Botly that he would see them delivered if Mr. MacLean did not go home again.
Duff missed his wife and children, too, but he had discovered an unlikely friend in Iain the Red, who, as it turned out, had once thought of being an actor. One night at dinner, the Mackenzies and Livingstones were treated—or tortured, depending on one’s perspective—to a reading of a sonnet performed by those two.
Gilroy and Beaty spent quite a lot of time wandering about the bailey, arguing about various things. Ships. Winds. Whether or not the Jacobite rebellion had begun in the Hebrides or the Highlands. They were like an old married couple with nothing important to bicker about, but determined to bicker all the same.
There was another curious development that warmed Lottie’s heart—Lady Mackenzie had taken an interest in Drustan. There was something about the regal lady that soothed Drustan, and more than once, Lottie had found him wandering around after her, picking up a chair and moving it at her direction, or helping her draw open draperies.
“Drustan,” Lottie whispered one morning, and gestured for him to come away, fearing that he was bothering her.
“You will not take my helpmate from me, Miss Livingstone,” Lady Mackenzie had said, and smiled fondly at Drustan. “We’ve forged our acquaintance quite well on our own, thank you.”
“But he—”
“He is a help to me,” she’d said flatly, and made a shooing motion at Lottie. “Go. Walk on, now. Take in the sun, but leave us be.”
When Drustan wasn’t following Lady Mackenzie around, he was carving, and at last, Mathais had found something to admire about his brother. He eagerly showed the carvings to Lottie—a gull, a ship, and Drustan’s latest, a dog that looked exactly like one of the mutts that was constantly underfoot in the great hall. The most amazing thing about Drustan was that between Lady Mackenzie’s need of him and his newfound talent in carving, he was much less prone to fits of frustration. Her father had always said that Drustan was too simple to be of any help to anyone. Perhaps her father had been wrong about that, too.
Mathais and Morven had passed the time pretending swordplay in the bailey. Rabbie Mackenzie happened to see them and invited them to learn real swordplay. Apparently the Mackenzies had long been known for training Highland soldiers. Mathais was beside himself with glee, and every afternoon, he returned to the gatehouse, sweating and dirty, his eyes gleaming, speaking rapidly about all that he’d learned as he thrust his phantom sword here and there around the little room Lottie used.
Lottie herself had been taken under the wing of Catriona and her friend, Lizzie MacDonald, a frequent visitor to Balhaire. The two of them liked to gossip about all the gentlemen in and around the Highlands. Lottie guessed Catriona to be close to her thirtieth year and wondered why she’d not been married off. She was the daughter of a powerful laird, quite bonny and spirited. How had she avoided it? Catriona doted on her nieces and nephews and sighed with longing when one of the women from the village brought her newborn bairn around to be admired.
“One day, I should very much like a bairn,” Catriona said wistfully, then smiled at Lottie. “I’ve no’ given up hope. Have you?”
Lottie’s face must have fallen, for Catriona suddenly gasped with alarm, and her cheeks flooded pink. “I beg your pardon, Lottie! I do so beg your pardon,” she said again, mortified that she would mention a happy future in the face of a trial.
Lottie didn’t see Aulay as much as she would like. Apparently, he spent quite a lot of time with his father. “Examining the accounts,” Catriona said ominously. “We owe so much.”
One afternoon, however, Aulay sought Lottie out. He wanted to take her and Mathais down to a cove. “We’re no’ to leave the castle walls,” Lottie reminded him.
“What, then, have you lost your daring?” he asked, arching a brow.
No, she had not.
Aulay showed her and Mathais a path that went around the village, through a small forest, and down to the beach. The land jutted out into something that resembled a comma, providing a natural shelter in a cove that was large enough for ships. “Imagine it,” he said, sweeping his arm to the water. “We once had two ships moored here.” He dropped his arm and stared at the water, as if seeing those two ships, long gone now.
Lottie folded her arms around her belly. It never failed—every time his ships were mentioned, she felt a wee bit ill.
Aulay crouched down on the sand and pointed across the water. “There, do you see?” he asked. “A red mark, halfway up.”
Lottie squinted. She could see it—red markings that looked like writing.
“Our initials,” he said. “I swam there on a dare from my brother Cailean and climbed up with a bit of paint in my pocket.”
Mathais gasped. “How did you do it?”
“I was a good climber, aye?” Aulay said, and laughed.
“I was challenged like that once, to jump from a cliff into the sea,” Lottie said absently. “The cliff was ten feet high, perhaps a wee bit higher. But I didna account for my skirt. It came up around my head and verra nearly tumbled me upside down.”
“We had to pull her out of the water,” Mathais added. “It took four of us.”
Lottie laughed at the memory. Times had been hard on Lismore, but they’d also been blissfully free. How odd that the freedom she’d had there had felt so confining. It didn’t seem so now.
They walked along the water’s edge, picking up shells. Mathais boasted that Rabbie Mackenzie had said he’d make a good soldier, and he’d be willing to train him when the time came. “That’s what I’ve long wanted to be, aye?” he said.
Lottie looked at him with surprise. “I’ve no’ heard you say so!”
“I rather thought you’d no’ approve and insist I am needed at home. But I must be me own man, Lottie. That’s what Rabbie says, aye? Every man stands on his own two feet and faces the world.” And then he promptly backed up over a rock and tripped, righting himself just before he would have tumbled to the ground.
“A lad canna face the world if he’s on his arse,” Lottie muttered out of Mathais’s hearing, but Aulay heard her, and had to turn his back to them to hide his laughter.
They strolled along the shore toward the path leading back to the castle, but once they began the steep climb, Lottie paused and glanced back at the cove. So did Aulay. “What will you do now?” she asked. “Will you have another ship?”
His jaw clenched. “Unlikely,” he said tightly. “What we have will go to pay the loss of cargo. There’ll be nothing left for a ship.”
Lottie said nothing. Her guilt choked all words of condolence from her. And she did not like to think about what was glaringly true—she’d done to Aulay what her father had done to his family. She’d lost his livelihood with foolish choices. But Lottie thought she might have divined a way to fix it, at least in part, should she be granted the opportunity. The opportunity, it seemed, would be the difficult part.
Whatever Aulay thought of her now, for the space of one idyllic afternoon, his anger had subsided. She tried to imagine them together like this always. She tried to make it into a dream she could hold and keep. But it was impossible. There was a cloud over that dream that was growing darker and darker as the date with the justice of the peace loomed.
* * *
ONE MORNING, LOTTIE woke up with a start, her heart pounding. She’d had a thought in the last minutes of her sleep, the sudden reminder that in three days time the justice of the peace was due to arrive to adjudicate her taking the Mackenzie ship. In practical terms, that meant any day now, really, as no one knew precisely when the judge would appear.
Any hope of going back to sleep was lost, so Lottie got up and dressed and went out into the bailey. It was quite early yet; the few souls she saw were servants preparing for the day’s work. She made her way to the gardens, which she’d discovered early on. At least once a day she came to wander through the roses and rhododendrons. It was bonny here, tranquil. A tiny slice of heaven, as her mother used to say about her own garden. It was the only place in Balhaire Lottie could go to forget about her fate.
“You’re about early.”
She was startled by the sound of Aulay’s voice and jerked around as he strolled into the garden, pausing to study a rhododendron that had grown quite tall. He was wearing the plaid again, his hair loose around his shoulders. He looked wild and untamed to her. Entirely seductive, overwhelmingly enticing. The devil in tartan again.
“Aye, and what brings you here so early, then?”
“You.”
Her breath caught. She arched a brow.
“I saw you from the window.” He paused just a few feet from her, but it hardly mattered the distance. There seemed always something so palpable when he was near, a raw need that buzzed between them. She knew that he felt it, too—she could see it in the way his eyes glimmered.
“Would you like a wee adventure?” he asked, and squatted down to pick up a long leaf that had fallen onto the path.
He didn’t need to ask—of course she would like a wee adventure, anything to take her from her thoughts. “What sort?”
“My nephew, Lord Chatwick, has a hunting lodge no’ far from here. It is closed for the season.” He looked up from his study of the leaf. “It has a bonny view of the hills.”
She’d seen the hills. She’d walked through them with him, to Balhaire. “I’m no’ to leave Balhaire.”
He slowly rose to his full height. “I’ll see to it that you are returned in due course.”
“Are we to walk?”
“We’ll ride. I donna have a pony for you, but if you can manage it, I’ve a horse.”
Her heart began to skip. She’d given her word she’d not leave Balhaire. What he was suggesting was different than a walk down to the cove, which was still in plain sight of Balhaire. “My brothers will—”
“Catriona will see to them, I’ve no doubt. Well, then?”
She would go, of course she would go, she would go anywhere with this man, for as long as she was able. “Then aye, Captain, I can manage a horse.”
Aulay saddled two horses himself, and before anyone was about, before shop fronts had opened or anyone had appeared to break their fast, before Gilroy and Beaty began to argue, or Mr. MacLean wrote another letter to his wife, or Duff staged another play, Lottie and Aulay departed Balhaire on horseback.
They rode away from the sea and up a meadowed glen. After a half hour, she could see the glint of a loch in the distance, and as they neared it, a white manor house on the shores of the loch. “Arrandale,” Aulay said, pointing to it. “Rabbie and Bernadette make their home there.”
From there, he turned south, and led them onto a wooded path. It was dark and cool in among the trees, the path dappled by the sun shining through a thick canopy of branches. When they emerged into another meadow, she could see another house.
“’Tis the lodge, Auchenard,” he said.
“A lodge,” she said, her voice full of wonder. It was smaller than the others, but to Lottie, it was just as grand. “It’s so beautiful, aye?”
Aulay dismounted on the front lawn, then held her horse as she hopped down. “It’s quite big for hunting, is it no’?” she asked curiously.
“It was built by an English earl. They prefer grandeur to simplicity, aye?”
Lottie wouldn’t know—she’d never met an Englishman that she could recall. It was one of the hopes she’d had for her future. She longed to see their grand houses, to see London, to see what proper ladies wore. That dream had crumbled along with her other hopes in the last fortnight.
He walked to the front door and tried it, but it was locked. “Rabbie keeps the house for Cailean and my nephew. Tight as a ship, it is. Stay here,” he said, and disappeared around the corner of the house. Several moments passed before she heard some clanking behind the front door. It swung open and Aulay bowed. “Madam,” he said, and gestured grandly to the entrance.
She stepped inside and looked around. The musty smell of the house, the sheets covering the furnishings, indicated the house had been closed for a long time. Most of the windows were covered, too, painted with soap. Aulay led Lottie down a dark hallway and into a larger room, which she supposed was the salon. The ceiling was several feet over her head, criss-crossed with thick wood beams. A massive hearth stood cold at one end, the smell of ash still quite pronounced. Aulay pushed aside heavy drapes from the windows, revealing a surprisingly fine view of a loch at the bottom of an overgrown green lawn. The surface of the loch was smooth as glass, glittering in the sun. Behind the loch, hills rose up in shades of dark green, gold and purple.
Lottie pressed a hand to her chest as she took in the beauty of the lodge’s surroundings, awestruck. “I’ve no’ seen a view as fine as this, on my word.”
“Aye,” Aulay agreed. But was not looking at the view. He was looking at her.
They continued their tour of the lodge, eventually wandering upstairs. The master suite of rooms had a similar view as the room downstairs. Aulay opened windows, pushing them out, allowing a breeze to waft in and settle the dust. “I’ve always longed to see grand places like Balhaire and Auchenard. I am grateful that I’ve had the chance.”
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.
Aulay picked her up with one arm around her waist and moved her to the bed. He fell with her onto its top and began to move over her body, his hands trailing his mouth.
Wildly pleasurable sensations glittered and spun through her veins. Lottie welcomed the weight of his body on hers, every stroke of his hands, every touch of his mouth.
He suddenly pushed up. “Take it off,” he said breathlessly as he quickly began to disrobe himself.
Lottie slid off the bed and undid the laces of her gown. Aulay’s frantic motions slowed, and he fell back against the bedpost, watching her intently, his gaze following her every movement, tracing over every bit of her bare skin as she revealed it to him. When she had removed everything and stood before him completely nude, Aulay held out his hand to her. It seemed so civilized after the heathen side of them had been writhing on that bed. But she slipped her hand into his and met his warm, dark gaze as he pulled her to the bed.
He buried his face between her breasts, took one in his mouth, then stood up and dropped his plaid. He was the most magnificent specimen of a man Lottie could possibly imagine, and she was savagely aroused. He reached for her, his fingers gliding over her skin, burying his face in her neck as he slid one arm behind her back and lifted her up so that he could move between her thighs. Lottie raked her fingers down his back to his hips, sinking her fingers into his flesh as he slid into her. She groaned like a wild animal as he began to move in her, then was quickly panting with the pleasure that was mounting in her. He kept his gaze locked on hers, his eyes the color of a blue-green flame, wild and intense and filled with molten desire.
His need sizzled through the tips of his fingers and his mouth on her skin; she could feel his gaze burn a path across her body, could feel the connection between them growing tauter. The climax they shared was as powerful as it was profound, both of them crying out with it.
This was what love was supposed to be. This was the way love was supposed to feel. And as Aulay collapsed beside her, she stroked his hair and said, “Tha gaol agam ort, Aulay. I love you, I do.”
He gathered her in his arms, hugged her tightly to him, and whispered into her hair, “And I love you, Lottie Livingstone.”
His admission spiraled down and around her heart and left Lottie breathless. She kissed his face, his ear, his lips. It had all been worth it, it had, to hear him say those words to her. No matter what else, those few words, his esteem, this look in his eye, had made it all worth it.
But as the heat began to ebb from their bodies, her euphoria began to ebb, too. Something about this extraordinary afternoon began to feel final. It was as if the promise of what could have been between them had sunk off the coast of Scotland, and this afternoon was the last bit of it to sink.
Aulay must have been thinking the same. He traced a circle around her bare breast and said, “I want you to escape.”
She surely hadn’t heard him correctly. “Pardon?”
“I canna save you, lass, no’ this time. God knows I would if I could, but there are too many others affected, too many who have lost as much or more than I.” He put his finger under her chin and turned her head to his. “It is out of my hands, aye? You must run. You must.”
She sat up and stared down at him in disbelief. “I’m no coward, Aulay Mackenzie! I’ll no’ run!”
He had the audacity to smile at her declaration. “Aye, lass, I know better than anyone that you are no coward.” He took her face between his hands. “You owe me at least this, Lottie, aye? I’ve tried to despise you, God knows that I have, but I canna do it. I canna fault you any longer. It’s madness, but I can only admire you and love you, and hopefully send you to safety. You owe me this.”
“You donna think clearly!” she cried. “We canna escape—every Mackenzie of Balhaire knows who we are and from where we hail. What do you think, we’ll get on another ship and sail back to Denmark? No! We’ll return to Lismore and sooner or later, they’ll come for us, they will.”
“Lottie, heed me—”
She pushed his hand away. “No.” She couldn’t run. She’d done something awful and now she would stand up to what she did, especially knowing that running would only delay the inevitable and make it worse for all of her clan. She could see the pain in Aulay’s eyes, could feel his despair. She pushed him onto his back and straddled him, then leaned over him, her hair falling around them and curtaining off the world. “No more talk. We’ve no’ much time, aye?”
He put his hands on her breasts. “Diah, woman, do you ever abide what a man tells you to do, then?”
“That depends on what he bids me do,” she said saucily, and silenced him with a kiss.