Bride (14 page)

Leather gloves. Rough leather gloves with heavily stitched seams that tore into delicate skin.

Melting. More melting. She was melting into the sheepskin, into the rock beneath, into the dark mass below.

Pain burst through her again and again. Where did it come from? This wasn't what he did when he called her
my dove.

Her back and arms seemed to melt from suffering. Her buttocks felt beaten as if with a whip.

Rolling and more beating. And more. Then back on her face on the skins.

She couldn't move. There was a thudding in her flesh and agony in a body no longer her own.

Something was not right. Not … right.

Chapter Nine

T
he kiss.

He had kissed her, Justine, she who had never been kissed before. And she had liked it. No. She had loved it more than anything that had ever happened to her in all her thirty-five years.

All those sensations!

The trembling in unmentionable places!

Places she couldn't mention because she didn't know what they were … But she would find out. Oh, there would be no holding back. She was becoming a woman of the world, and the price for enjoying that state was to ensure that all other women knew how to find and use it adequately.

Justine crossed her hands on her breast and stared up at the blue velvet bed canopy. Was this wrong? Potentially wrong? There was the possibility that the situation might progress into something wrong, yet wrongdoing only existed where it was perceived and, of course, she perceived nothing amiss in a purely academic enterprise.

Dawn's earliest silvery fingers plucked a way through cracks in the draperies.

Purely academic?

Surely, after so many blameless years, she could not be turning into a deceitful, pleasure-seeking doxy?

Doxy?

Justine shivered. The shiver was part horror, part anticipation. She welcomed the chance for more, for further experiences such as she had shared with Struan only hours earlier. Sleepless hours earlier.

This thing—these things—between men and women had been a shadowy mystery. She had watched courtships, watched the fluttering, blushing girls with their vaguely predatory courtiers change into complacent direct-eyed women married to possessive but somehow remote husbands.

To Calum she had confessed to doing
It
with Struan. Fortunately Calum seemed disposed to think her confused on the subject and therefore was not insisting on marriage. She would stay at Kirkcaldy regardless of Calum's wishes, but she'd been unwise to make such a confession in order to distract her brother from trying to take her home. Consequently Arran saw the matter in quite a different light, but no doubt Struan would have dealt with him by now.

Justine knew
It
must surely be the ultimate joining between man and woman—that which led to the husband's total possession of his wife. She had notions about
It
, but they seemed outrageous. Outrageous but not without merit—if a woman were with the right man.

Justine had seen animals mate. Her own maid had confirmed that this mating produced the animal offspring. She should absolutely not have glanced at that part of any gentleman's body.

Justine had glanced.

Justine had seen.

The process she envisioned must be entirely possible. The question was how? And, since men clearly enjoyed the event, was it possible that women could, despite dark warnings to the contrary, also enjoy such activities? Surely, when a husband gained total possession of his wife, the wife gained total possession of her husband? That conclusion was absolutely logical. But there was still the how of
It
.

How infuriating it was to be ignorant of one's own body. One thing was wholly without doubt. This marital joining would require extreme closeness between the male and the female.

To be extremely close to Struan would be bliss.

Heat bathed Justine's body and she closed her eyes tightly. She felt again the foreign but wholly marvelous ache in those inside places.

If only there were someone to ask questions of, some woman who would answer without awkwardness or censure.

Struan would help. He'd already helped. Of course he was kind. The only reason he'd kissed her had been that she'd asked him to help with her book.

But Struan must think the project she'd undertaken contained merit. He absolutely would not have kissed her for any other reason. That fact was one she must call to mind whenever she was tempted to daydream otherwise.

She rolled onto her stomach and buried her face in pillows that smelled of soap. It was preposterous to consider Struan and herself and marriage in the same thought. How Justine wished it were not so. How she wished it were possible for Struan to look at her with love, to hold her with love, to look at her with possessiveness, and for her to know that he thought of her as his alone.

Old. Plain. Deformed
. If she was destined to forever be a virtuous spinster not intended for anything but the service of others, why had the power to dream not been denied her also? Why had she been given this wretched, vivid imagination that made her feel, made her long for what could never be hers?

Justine turned her head to watch the early dawn's prodding at the drapes. She had always been reliable and sensible, and she would not change now. The decision to strike out and find satisfaction in the company of those she held most dear and most in need of her had been wise.

There. That at least was a beginning. Ella needed her, and Max—and Struan. Controlling silly, wholly unsuitable girlish fancies would be easy from this moment on. The mature woman would prevail.

But the mature woman would continue to seek enlightenment for the sake of other women. And that meant she would continue to need Struan's assistance.

Struan's closeness.

With the fresh rush of fire through her limbs, Justine threw back the bedcovers and swung her feet to the steps beside the bed. Early-morning cold sent a shiver of goose bumps over her skin.

The very first order of the day—now—at once—was to seek out Struan and speak, in a most straightforward manner, about last night. She had a terrible notion he might think that she thought… otherwise than the actual way of things between them. Or rather, he might think that she thought otherwise on her own behalf—not, of course, on his.

In her poppy-colored nightrobe, with her hair hastily brushed and wound into a single braid, Justine set off for the pagoda. He'd already seen her in her robe; silly conventions were no longer an issue.

She didn't allow herself to think anything in particular until she stood in the anterroom to Struan's apartments.

Then she thought.

Under other circumstances, if she were a young thing—if she were not lame and plain—this sort of approach would be absolutely beyond the realm of acceptable behavior. But she was not a young thing and she was lame and plain, and the sooner she made certain he understood her intentions completely, the better.

Some minutes later, hovering beside Struan's empty bed, Justine knew the flutter of early panic. He wasn't in his apartments.

Hurrying, she made her way down to the vestibule and paused, listening to the sounds of the sprawling building.

Struan wasn't in the great hall, or the billiard room, or the smoking room, or either of the libraries, or the study, or one of the salons. There was no sign of him anywhere, including the kitchens.

Dawn was still in its palest misty state, with more darkness than light stroking the woodlands and gardens she saw when she peeked outside.

The letters
.

He must have gone to look for more of the letters.

What could possibly be in those communications that would send him forth in the middle of the night, or at least before the dawn, to search them out? What was in them that made him so desperately angry and so insistent on isolation?

Standing near the cold kitchen stove, Justine glanced toward the windows—and all but collapsed.

A face was shadowed there.

A hand shielded its eyes to give a clearer view of the gloomy interior.

She held still. With luck she was at an angle where whoever it was wouldn't notice her.

Her heart leaped and her stomach chased in its wake.

Then the face was gone.

Justine released the breath she'd held and blood rushed to her head. She felt faint, and sick—and angry—all at the same time. Alone, she was alone with a helpless maid and two helpless children, while some creature skulked around the lodge.

Struan had admitted he was oppressed, that someone was, as he put it, pressing for favors he didn't wish to extend. Was it possible that at this very moment the villain in question was prowling outside this building?

Stealthily, breathing through her mouth, struggling to control her trembling body and the weakness anxiety caused in her damaged leg, Justine removed a long-handled brass warming pan from its hook beside the fireplace.

With a burning throat, and hands that shook, she carefully found a place where she could see the area outside the kitchens without being visible to anyone looking back.

Nothing moved but a faint breeze through shrubs and bushes and the straggly kitchen garden plantings.

The house no longer seemed silent at all. Countless creaks and cracks and sighs pounded her straining ears. She made her way through the stillroom and pantries, into the cold rooms intended for the preparation of meat and fish, and down a short flight of steps to the dairy. No sign of life from any window.

She
had
seen a face. There was someone out there who should not be out there.

The warming pan's oak handle was cold and slippery between the linked fingers of her two hands. Adjusting her grip, she returned along the passageway to the kitchens.

In the entrance she halted. Her blood stood as still as her body.

Again a face pressed against a windowpane above the deep kitchen sinks.

She drew back into the passage. She was alone with three defenseless souls to protect. That creature could find a way into the lodge and murder them all in their beds!

Justine straightened her back. Not with Lady Justine Girvin alert and prepared to take action. No scurrilous intruder would be allowed to trifle with those she was bound to save.

Struan should hear about this debacle. He would discover that she was no meek, milk-and-water miss. He would suffer the tongue-lashing he deserved for leaving his children alone—particularly when he'd as good as admitted there was reason for fear.

Anger made her brave. Anger pumped courage through her veins. On tiptoe, she retraced her steps along the passageway to the outside door in the dairy at the very base of the tiled tower.

If she were most unlucky, the crazed creature would confront her as she opened the door to the kitchen gardens outside. If the creature were unlucky, she would come upon him unawares.

Releasing one of her hands from its cramped grip on the warming pan, she turned the key on the inside of the door and, very slowly, pushed until cold air struck her face.

No leering criminal leaped upon her.

Quickly, she slipped outside and flattened herself to the wall. A boxwood hedge as high as her shoulders made its untidy way around the tower. Justine stood between the building and the hedge.

Doubled over, she hugged the boxwood and crept forward to the corner, turned, and continued along the perimeter of the tower.

Rock scrunched.

Justine all but went to her knees. Then her determination rushed back with a force that made her temples pulse.

Struan should most definitely hear a great deal about this.
If
she lived to tell him her opinions of his behavior.

Footsteps—measured, stealthily placed footsteps came from the direction of the kitchens. Searching for a way in, no doubt. Searching for an unlocked door.

The door to the dairy! She had left the door to the dairy not just unlocked, but wide open.

Casting about, she looked for a gap in the hedge but found none. The footsteps had passed her. The interloper would enter by the door she'd unlocked and murder Ella, Max, and Mairi before Justine could do anything!

With the handle of the warming pan resting on her shoulder, she scurried back the way she'd come. At least the earth was soft on this side of the hedge and her limping steps made no sound. She pressed her lips together to contain her rasping breaths.

Only yards from Justine, a man came into sight. He walked boldly through the break in the boxwood in front of the tower and made for the open door to the dairy.

A young man with straight blond hair and decidedly rough clothing.

A murderer
.

The beast who had threatened Struan with nameless horrors that sent him riding off alone into the night, leaving his family unprotected!

Justine raised her weapon above her head and lunged. “You shall not harm them!”

As she shouted, the man turned. In the second before the brass pan met his skull, she saw his mouth stretch wide, and his eyes.

Face down, he fell at her feet.

He didn't move again.

“I say he should,” Arran announced, dropping from his horse.

Dismounting his gray, Calum joined him. “And I say he should not. This delay is intolerable. With every day, the position becomes more outrageous.”

“It has passed outrageous,” Arran said. “There is no choice, and I intend to put an end to all this shilly-shallying.”

Struan slid a blanket over his black's back and attended to the animal's feed. Yet another night had passed without the appearance of a letter. It had to mean that the change in his circumstances had been noted. He looked through the open stable door toward the lodge. Even with his trusty guards, there was always the possibility of a mistake, of someone finding a way inside.

Arran drew off his gloves. “We will confront Justine as soon as she arises and tell her to ready herself for the ceremony at once.”

Struan started out of the stables, but not before saying, more calmly than Arran deserved, “If you think you can control me—or Justine—you are a fool, brother. I'll thank you to say nothing further on this subject.” He'd tried to insist the two men return to Kirkcaldy, but they would have none of it.