Page 85 of The Laird's Masked Passion

CHAPTER TWENTY

By morning, Elspeth had formed the decided opinion that pleasure was a most inconvenient discovery.

It did not behave as a proper revelation ought. It did not arrive, declare itself, and then take up some orderly residence in the mind where it might be considered at leisure. No. It crept into the body, left warmth where there ought to have been composure, and returned at the most unsuitable moments with no respect whatever for breakfast, servants, or moral dignity.

She woke before Skye came to draw the curtains and lay very still beneath the coverlet, staring at the canopy. Her skin remembered too much. Her mouth remembered Colin’s mouth. Her hands, treacherous things, remembered reaching for him and being stopped.

That will be fer another time.

Elspeth turned onto her side and buried her face in the pillow.

She had asked him. Worse than that, she hadnotbeen made to ask. She had chosen it. She stood in his study, with her shawlfalling from one shoulder and shame burning her face, and she asked her husband to show her what another woman’s pleasure looked like from within.

A proper woman might have fainted after such a request. Elspeth had not fainted. She had done something far less respectable.

She had enjoyed being answered.

The thought drew a sound from her that was half groan, half protest. Skye, entering at that very moment with a basin of warm water, paused upon the threshold.

“Are ye ill, me lady?”

“Nay,” Elspeth said into the pillow.

“Are ye certain?”

“I am morally injured.”

Skye set down the basin. “Shall I fetch the healer?”

“Only if he has a cure fer humiliation.”

“I dinnae think he daes.”

“Then he is of nay use tae me.”

Skye, who had known her too long to be frightened by dramatic ailments, merely opened the shutters. Morning entered in a pale, bright wash, touching the rushes, the carved chest, the folded gown laid out for the feast, and the place beside Elspeth’s bed where no husband had slept.

That absence should have relieved her. Instead, it sat in the room like an unasked question.

Colin had escorted her back to the chamber after the study and left her at the door with all the dreadful courtesy of a man who had not, a quarter of an hour before, ruined the peace of her body. He had not come to bed. Or if he had, he had done so after she had at last surrendered to a shallow, restless sleep, and vanished before dawn like a thief too proud to steal anything he had not already unsettled.

At breakfast, she understood the campaign to be mutual. Colin was present in the hall, which was worse than if he had been absent. He stood near the hearth speaking with Breac and Murdoch, with one hand resting upon the back of a chair, his dark head bent slightly as he listened. He looked composed, severe, and entirely untroubled by the fact that his wife could no longer see his hands without recalling what they had done.

Elspeth entered with Skye and immediately looked away. Unfortunately, looking away required deciding where to look instead, and the Great Hall offered very few objects as safe as they had been the day before. The long tables were being prepared for the later feast. Women passed with baskets of oatcakes and cloths, while men carried casks toward the outer yard.

Everywhere there was movement, noise, anticipation. Everywhere there was Colin, never near enough to speak without intention, but near enough to be seen, near enough to be felt. He crossed the hall twice and never looked her way until he did, and then Elspeth wished he had not. His gaze touched her with no outward heat, no smile, no hint that midnight had existed. That cold restraint cut more deeply than wickedness would have done.

So he regretted it. The conclusion arrived swift and sharp.

Of course he did. Men such as Colin could look upon desire as one more appetite to command. He answered her curiosity because she was his wife, because he took it upon himself to instruct her, because perhaps he found her ignorance amusing. But by daylight, with his clan in motion and his duties pressing upon him, she was again a complication bought before witnesses and defended because honor required it.

Elspeth took her seat and stirred a bowl of porridge until it became an object of pity.

“Will ye eat that,” Skye murmured, “or beat it intae surrender?”

“I am considering both.”

Across the hall, Colin laughed at something Breac said. It was not loud. It was not even especially cheerful. But it existed, and it had not been given to her. Elspeth hated that this mattered.