Mad About the Marquess (Highland Brides Book 2) (29 page)

“Mis-thought? Is that even a word?” But her statement seemed to shake some of the insistence out of him. He gave up his looming and sat on the edge of her bed. “Would you really rather be exiled to Nova Scotia than marry me? Am I really that bad?”

“Nay.” She had not expected such a personal appeal. A hot surge of sympathy—or was it empathy?—flooded her eyes. But sympathy was no reason to marry a man. Especially when the man in question was not entirely sympathetic to her.
 

It was all so confusing and exhausting, but she could not give in to either feeling. “You’re really that good. I’m the one who’s bad. I’m the one who is a thief and a liar and a highwayman, Strathcairn.” It was an awful thing to say the words out loud, to admit to such faults. But whatever shreds of honesty and scruples she had left demanded it. She
liked
him too much to let him make such a dreadful mistake. “The best that can be said of me is that I’m a flibbertigibbet, but the worst is that I would be forever disappointing and infuriating you as much as I disappoint and infuriate you right now. Think very hard if you’re prepared for a lifetime of that—a lifetime tied to an accomplished thief and liar.”

“And a highwaywoman, don’t forget.” He was trying to be amusing and teasing, but his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Although I would hardly say you were accomplished in that area. Thievery and lying, however…”

“Aye. And if you had not stopped me this evening,” she reminded him, “I would have kept on going in much the same vein until I did become accomplished.”

“Nay.” His voice was as sure as granite. “You would not. You would have outgrown such childish antics. We all do.”

“And did you rob coaches and steal snuffboxes when you were young, Strathcairn?” She could not imagine anything so criminal from such a passionately upright and law-abiding man.

“No,” he admitted. “But I did other stupid, though perhaps less larcenous, things.”

“Like what?” She could not conceive of any serious misdeeds from honest, forthright Strathcairn, to whom deception of any kind was abhorrent.
 

But the image of him five years ago, all blazing ginger glory, smiling, laughing and teasing Linnea, filled her mind. She tried to swat the mental picture away, to concentrate on the here and painful now, but when she looked at him, sitting on the side of her bed in his shirtsleeves, ardent and rumpled and insistent and stained with her blood, she fancied she could still see that younger version of Strathcairn, all that drive and passion, just wrongly applied.

“Quince. We are not discussing my past, but your future.”

“Our future, Strathcairn. One that looks rife with strife.” Because if she looked away from him, and looked at herself, the fantasy of all that rumpled, appealing ardency faded away.

And he also looked at her then—really looked at her—as if those clear green eyes were seeing beyond the larking, dancing, flibbertigibbet exterior she had constructed. Seeing that she was scared, and tired, and in a bloody great deal of pain, and the worst prospect in the world for a wife because she had been
shot while robbing a coach
. “It’s not pretty, is it, Strathcairn?”
 

His head rocked back slightly, as from a blow, but then he righted himself. And leaned closer, until she could smell the dangerously intriguing scent of night air and spent gunpowder on his skin. “On the contrary, wee Quince. It is very attractive.” He reached out to brush a wayward strand of her hair from her forehead. “Bruises, bloodstains and all.”

Her breath throttled up in her chest, tight and hot and aching. “You can’t mean that, Strathcairn. One of us has got to
think
.”
 

He sat back from her, even as his gaze seemed to bring him closer. “Do you really not know? Has no one in all of Edinburgh warned you against me, or told you of my less than sterling past?”

“Nay,” she began, but then hedged, “My mother did mention a rumor of an auld scandal. But I didn’t believe it could be anything but rumor.”

“Really?” He seemed suspicious of her claim.

“I
know
you, Strathcairn. You’re
good
.”

“My God.” He passed his hand over his eyes. “But you have to understand that rumor is like stink, Quince—it fouls everything it touches. It cannot be contained, even if it isn’t true. Especially if it isn’t true.”

“There. I knew it couldn’t be true.”

“But I can’t afford—” Some strong emotion pushed him to his feet to pace away from her. “I can’t take another five years to rebuild my name and reputation. I can’t endure while another lass’ name is linked to mine without the benefit of matrimony to clear the slate clean.”

The words hung in the air between them like cold frost from a breath.

“Another lass?” Something icier than dread chilled its way into her bones—she was surprised she couldn’t hear her knees shivering and knocking together. “What do you mean?”

He shut his eyes, and just like that his face closed off, as cold and immutable as stone. “I mean that we must marry.” He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “I mean, I insist.”
 

The moment lengthened like a shadow, drawing out until she finally understood that he was not offering for her to salvage her reputation, but his.

 
She turned away, to hide the blazing heat burning her eyes, but his hand slid to cup her chin. “We have something between us, you and I.” He met her eyes. “It may not be ‘fellow-feeling’ as you called it, but it’s something far more powerful.”

There was something in his touch, something fiercer than tenderness—an unrepentant ardor burning away all her cool resolve.
 

She closed her eyes to concentrate, to remember what she needed to say. “That’s just lust, Strathcairn, a shaky, changeable beast at best. Hardly something to base a marriage upon. I have a lust for stealing things, plainly put, and look where that’s got me.”

“Aye.” He considered her words. “With me. And I have a better idea of what we might do with all that lust you seem to have so carefully bottled up inside you.”

Oh, holy helpful cherubs. He saw too much—and not enough. “There’s nothing careful about it,” she insisted, even as her voice cracked under all the heat building in her throat. “It’s all rather heedless, and rubbishing—” The heat in her throat had climbed behind her eyes, scalding her.

“Quince.” He took her face in his hands, and turned her chin up to him. “Lass, are you afraid? Of me?”

By jimble, he had got to the heart of her quick enough, hadn’t he?

“I would be a fool not to be,” she whispered. She was afraid of them both. Afraid of what she would become when the enticing lust wore itself out, as it inevitably would, and he no longer looked at her with such scorching tenderness. Afraid of what would happen to her if she started to believe the promise in his eyes. And his kiss.

Which he brought to her now, a quiet bittersweet gift of his lips upon hers. Offering her that insistent ardor. Seducing her with the promise of his glorious, blazing passion. Tempting her to believe.

Oh, holy stars in the sky, it would be so easy—so much easier—if she could let herself love him. But for all his insistence, the fact remained that he didn’t, and couldn’t love her. And he certainly didn’t trust her.

He must have sensed her weakness. His kiss slid to the sensitive skin below her ear. “Have you any more objections?”

She had only one left. “I’ll make you a dreadful wife, and an even more dreadful Marchioness of Cairn. ” And with that idea came another. “I won’t have children.”

She took him entirely by surprise—he went still with consternation. “Won’t or can’t?”

How could she explain? How could she even begin to articulate the fears that filled her soul in the empty quiet hours when she had nothing to do to distract her from the ugly, unavoidable truth. “I’m the bad seed in the family greenhouse, Strathcairn. No amount of nurturing, or watering, or change of soil or gardener can change that.”
 

She was tainted because she stole, not for charity or righteousness, but for the sheer unadulterated pleasure and illicit thrill. And that fact she could never, ever change.

“You’ve convinced yourself of this, haven’t you—that you’re no good, when what you really are is passionate and capable and bold.”

“Not exactly sterling traits in a young lady.”

“Rubbish,” he contradicted. “They are sterling traits in a woman. And especially brilliant traits in a marchioness.”

“A marchioness needs to bear an heir.” Quince was growing too tired, too weary and sad to parse the truth into logical, palatable pieces. “So it is all the same, Strathcairn. You are a mon of property who will be in need of an heir. You should marry someone who can give you one.”

“How do you know you cannot have children? Has some doctor—” He shot to his feet. “Are you not a virgin?”

She knew she was pale enough that the heat of her blush scorched her cheeks. “What if I weren’t?” The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew them for what they truly were—a test. A test to see just how far Strathcairn’s like and affection and lust would let him go.

A test of her worth.

The moment stretched between them like a physical thing, pulling and weighing her down. And he was just as immobile, standing stock still in the middle of her bedchamber floor.
 

And when he answered, his voice was full of quiet conviction, of that unwavering, granite surety. “I would still want you.”

She could not breathe. She could not think. “Want me enough to still marry me?”

“Aye.”

She closed her eyes tight, as if she could stop what was coming. As if she could go back, and make a different choice in that moment his carriage had come at her from out of the night.
 

But she could not. And she could no longer hold back the feeling that this—that Strathcairn and she—were entirely inevitable. “Why? Why must we do this to each other? Why can we not just let each other be?”

“Oh, wee Quince.” The mattress dipped from his weight.

She opened her burning eyes to find him inches away, looking at her with that strange mixture of exasperation and astonished wonder.
 

“You must know by now that I cannot possibly let you be.” His voice slipped into that lovely brogue-y lilt he knew she had no power to resist. “We are in a world of trouble, you and me.” He searched her face, poring over it with his eyes and his hands, tracing every curve and plane, as if he might find the answer to some question he had asked writ large across her forehead. “So I’ll just have to ask you to believe me, and trust me.”

Trust. It had all come down to trust.

She had to close her eyes to avoid the watchful intensity of his gaze. She had to hold on to the last leery piece of her breaking heart. “I am afraid.”

 
“You, lass? You, who took to the roads as a highwayman?” He cradled her snugly against his chest. “What if I promise never to shoot you again?”

“It’s not that easy, Strathcairn.” Her voice was as hot and sticky as the tears she could feel accumulating at the corners of her eyes. “You can have no idea of the provocation you might face with me. And there will be provocation—I can’t seem to help it. So why?” she asked again, needing to understand, needing to be sure—of herself as much as him. “Why would you want me, when you could have—when you s
hould
want—any other lass?”

He answered with a bittersweet smile that threatened to spill all of her carefully controlled tears. “Why would I want any other girl, when I could have a bold lass like you?”

There were a thousand and three reasons, but mostly just one. “You don’t even like me.”

“I do,” he insisted with quiet conviction. “You know I do. We wouldn’t be in this predicament—I wouldn’t have laid my eyes and my hands upon you in the first place if it were otherwise. And you like me as well. Somewhere down deep inside, you like me fine. You never would have spent so much time aggravating me otherwise.”

“This is terrible logic, Strathcairn, this idea that we antagonize each other out of love.”

“Love, is it now?” His smile warmed the very corners of his handsome face.

“Nay.” She could not shake her head while she was nestled so against his chest. “You ken that. I told you, I’m not romantic. I’m bad.”
 

“You’re not.” He was just as insistent. “You’re just young and bold and curious and too smart to let such an opportunity pass you by. The opportunity to be thrilled each and every night of your life. And some of the afternoons, as well as the mornings, too.”

“Strathcairn.” She swallowed her astonished amusement. “Are you trying to flirt me into marrying you?

“Nay, lass. I’m trying to seduce you into marrying me. I’m sitting on your bed, with you in my arms, and your mother and your sister and a vicar right outside the door, and despite the copious bloodstains upon your shirt, I can still make out the outline of your magnificent wee breasts, and I want you so bad, I ache.”

It was entirely, ridiculously wrong. But it was somehow the right answer.
 

She knew she had flaws that ran as deep as a loch, and that she would make him a miserable wife. But the truth was that she still wanted him to want her. Because, truth be told, he was the only sort of man—clever, amusing, attractive and experienced—that she could ever bring herself to marry. And he was something more. He was Strathcairn, the only man who had ever been bold enough to capture her imagination and invade her dreams. “Well, all right then. If you insist.”