The MacNaughton Bride (18 page)

But he insisted that
Aislinn
, as the lady of the house, needed more
clothes.
 
It amazed him that he was
the one having to insist about it, but he was happy about the fact that she
wasn’t going to be bankrupting him trying to get the latest finery from Paris
every season.
 
She needed some
practical clothing – a coat that wasn’t worn to the bone in several
places, some hats, and several pairs of better shoes – dress and
casual.
 
But he also wanted her to
have so nicer clothes in general, even just for wearing around the house.
 
Everything she owned – which
wasn’t much – looked like it had been worn to within an inch of its
life.
 
He could well afford it, and
he wanted his wife to be dressed nicely – unless she was receiving
patients, and then she could wear whatever she wanted – it would become
unrecognizably dirty almost instantaneously, anyway.

Even with her soon to be
expanding wardrobe, however, he refused to find another bed to sleep in at
night, and had firmly forbidden her from doing so.
 
He didn’t care what convention was.
 
His parents had shared a bed every
night of their lives, as had his grandparents and their parents and so on, for
as far back as anyone could remember.
 
The nights were too cold not to huddle for warmth when one could, and
that was exactly what he intended to do – at least – with his new
wife.

Aislinn
and her sister had done a wonderful job turning the enormous house into more of
a home.
 
The servants were expected
to be more on the ball, and they were even happy about it, because they loved
the woman they served.
 
She was
smart and attentive and affectionate, and she always did whatever she could in
the way of doctoring without ever expecting anything in return.
 
Working for Lord
MacNaughton
had always been somewhat prestigious, but now people were clamoring to be in
his employ, and he knew it wasn’t because of anything he’d done.

The twins didn’t do away
with any of the furniture that was already in the house – it was so
sparsely furnished that all they did was add, unless something worn or truly
repulsive caught their eye, in which case it was consigned to the attic, which
was quickly emptied of a lot of its occupants.
 

A tutor in lip reading was
quickly located by
Kell’s
man in Edinburgh, and
Aislinn
had begun to teach him signs that first night.
 
He proved to be an extremely adept
student, those big hands flying through the air with as much grace as even
Adelle’s
little hands.
 
And he wasn’t shy about speaking to her that way, either,
although he often made mistakes that had the sisters in unintended
stitches.
 
The brothers learned
next, and picked up just as quickly as their eldest did.
 
Soon their evenings were filled with
conversations flowing both verbally and manually, and laughter erupting
frequently both ways.

Kell
was biding his time, watching his wife when he thought she wasn’t looking,
holding her through the night, but not pressing his rights on her again.
 
He preferred to let her come to him,
and he was prepared to wait for that event.

At least another week or
so.

That was probably all he
would be able to stand.
 
Having her
in his arms every night, that firm, compact bottom pressed against his privates
– it was enough to drive him even crazier than he already was around
her.
 
All she had to do was enter a
room – bloody hell, all she had to do was enter his thoughts – and
he became agonizingly aroused and had to shift himself all around in polite
company to try to shield his reaction.
 
His brothers were always giggling when he did that, but he refused to
acknowledge their gleeful looks.
 
If he ever did, it would be all over for the
MacNaughton
brothers – all three of them.

Adelle
was taking some of their rabid attention away from him, though.
 
He was beginning to wonder if one of
his brothers might ask him for her hand, but then he couldn’t see that either
of them was a clear favorite.
 
Adelle
had a sunnier disposition than
Aislinn
did – but, in his wife’s defense, he could see why she was a little more
serious than her sister – but then, she hadn’t really had a lot to worry
about in her life – her sister had always seen to things.
 
Adelle
was a
natural born flirt, and when she didn’t want to know what was being said to
her, she merely turned away from the person who was speaking at her, thus
effectively ending the conversation.
 
She had only tried that trick on him once and he had let her know in no
uncertain terms that he wouldn’t put up with it any more so than if she didn’t
have hearing and speech problems.

She was very careful not to
do that with him any more.

But neither Grant nor Burke
had put his foot down yet that
Kell
could tell.
 
It would happen eventually, he supposed,
probably once one of them had been culled and branded.
 
Adelle
was
going to get an eyeful if she continued to try to play things that way when
they weren’t competing for her affections.
 
None of the
MacNaughton
men were
known for their infinite patience . . . although
Kell
was beginning to think that he should put his own name in the hat for saint.

Aislinn
didn’t seem to be warming towards him one bit.
 
She stopped trying to get into bed with clothes on, because
he had patted her bottom – hard – twice in a row when she’d done
it, cuddling her back to his front while she was still sobbing and her only
slightly roasted
nates
surrounded him with their
glowing warmth.
 
She never touched
him.
 
She never showed him any sort
of affection, and never solicited any from him.
 
She tolerated his closeness in bed, probably because she’d
deduced correctly that if she’d put up too much of a protest he wouldn’t
hesitate to warm her bottom again for her, even if he’d already done exactly
that just a few minutes before.

He had to stop daydreaming
about his wife, he chastised himself as he barely got out of the way of a
rampaging bull that was heading right for him.
 
That wasn’t the first time today he’d almost been gored to
death.
 
She had to be a witch to
have gotten him so entranced.
 
It
was the lack of her that was doing it to him, he knew.
 
If he had just insisted on his marital
rights and taken her every night – several times each night – and
gotten his fill of her, he wouldn’t be thinking about her at inappropriate times
. . . like now . . . and church . . . and when he was trying to concentrating
on the boring paperwork that went along with running a large estate . . . and
when he first woke up in the morning and she was sometimes asleep against his
side . . .

He was living in a state of
perpetual, painful, compete arousal.
 
His balls had gone well beyond just blue – they were working on
deep purple by now.
 
It was his
fixation on his lithe, gorgeous wife that caused him to be much less vigilant
than he usually was about where he and his horse were going.
 
The horse reared unexpectedly, throwing
him to the ground and knocking his head against a rock.

She hadn’t been with him
for very long, but already
Aislinn
knew that it
wasn’t like
Kell
to miss a meal.
 
If he had expected to be gone for
dinner, he would have told her – it was an excellent habit he’d
developed, and she’d come to rely on it to plan their meals with the cook.
 
But dinner had come and gone, and there
was no sign of him.
 
The last
person who had seen him was Grant, who had thought that he was heading towards
the house to do some paperwork before dinner.

Aislinn
was trying to keep herself from thinking the worse, but it wasn’t working very
well.
 
In the middle of dinner,
Grant and Burke took some of the footmen and stable hands and set out to find
her husband.
 
Adelle
,
who had been following the conversation through everyone’s translations, came
to sit next to her sister and hugged her.
 
It was a rarity that she got to comfort
Aislinn
– it was almost always the other way around.
 
Aislinn
was so strong, and
generally wouldn’t accept much in the way of comfort from anyone.
 
But
Adelle
wrapped her thin arms around her sister’s equally frail shoulders and just
rocked her, stopping every once in a while to kiss the side of her head.

It seemed like forever
before
Aislinn
heard the horses in the
courtyard.
 
She jumped up,
Adelle
trailing after her, and ran through the double front
doors only to see her husband coming towards her, held up between his two
brothers.

“
Kell
!”
 
Aislinn
couldn’t keep the exclamation from bursting through her lips.
 
She ran to him, but as soon as he saw
her coming, he straightened up as much as he could – which unfortunately
wasn’t nearly enough for him to wipe that scared look of her face, nor the
pained one off his own.

“I’m fine, lassie,” he
breathed.
 
Despite his considerable
discomfort, he took heart at the fact that she looked honestly worried about
him.

“Bring him up to the room,
please, gentlemen.
 
Sile
, go to the cottage and bring me my bag.
 
Jenny, get a bottle of scotch and some
sheets to rip into bandages.”

His little wife was quite a
commander when given the chance.
 
Everyone danced to her tune, including her brothers, who were having a
devil of a time complying with her orders.
 
She had run up ahead of them, only to return to kibitz and
tell them to hurry along faster so that she could get to him and treat
him.
 

“We’re
haulin
’
him as fast as we can, Ma’am,” Burke informed her with a wry look.
 
“I think you’ve put on at least a stone
since
Sile
started cooking,
Kell
.
 
You’d best cut back –
ooooof
!”
 
His
older brother was feeling well enough to drive his elbow rudely into his side.

The two men laid
Kell
down none to gently on the bed as
Aislinn
immediately began to flutter around him.
 
She could see the big gash on the side of his head, but he wasn’t
walking under his own power, either, although there was nothing gory that she
could see immediately.

Grant and Burke exited
quickly, realizing just how unnecessary they were, but they kept looking back
at him as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing.
 
Aislinn
, of
course, was too busy hovering over her patient to notice their quizzical looks,
and
Kell
had been trying to glare them out of the
room since they’d put him on the bed.
 
Sile
arrived with
Aislinn’s
bag as they were leaving, and Jenny had already left some scotch on one of
their side tables.
 
Aislinn
chased
Sile
out with her
hearty thanks as soon as she could grab the bag from the girl and close the
door behind her.
 
The three of them
– four once
Adelle
joined them – stood
staring at the bedroom door for a short moment, some of them libidinously
wondering what exactly was going on, and some wishing that they could take care
of someone they loved.

Aislinn
was buzzing around him like a busy little bee, patting him down quite
provocatively and asking him a million questions.
 
“Were you knocked out?
 
Does your back or neck hurt?
 
Can you see all right?
 
Can
you turn your neck without pain?
 
Does it hurt when I touch you here?”

In answer to her last
question, he merely grinned evilly and moved her ever seeking hand to the
prominently tended portion of his muddied and grass stained kilt. “No more than
when you don’t touch me here, lass,” he groaned.

Scarlet right down to her
toes,
Aislinn
removed her hand as if he’d
deliberately held it to a hot flame, trying desperately to cling to her most
professional of demeanors.
 
She
might not be recognized as a doctor or been to school for it, but she had a
healing touch and a good knowledge of herbs, as well as a budding subscription
to the new fangled tendency to want everything and anything that touched a
patient to be as clean as possible.