“All set.” He hesitated for a second, before standing up from his seated position by her on the bed. Naked emotion darkened the sea-green of his eyes into a stormy-green as he stared down at her in the middle of the huge seventeenth-century four-poster bed. She looked so innocent and fragile, snuggled in the bed with her hair still wet. You could have killed her.
Feeling ever so small and alone, Laetitia watched as he opened his mouth and then closed it, firmly clenching his jaws, then looked away, out the window. “Tavish Uilleam, I—”
“You should rest.” He turned his back on her and crossed the luxuriously decorated room, without a second glance at her.
The click of a shutting door had never seemed so final to Laetitia. Suddenly, too many questions bubbled in her mind, threatening to burst from her mouth in shouts. Why are you leaving me alone? Are you going to be OK? Where are you going? Are you coming back?
Desolate and unnerved, she rose and went to the anteroom of the suite, sitting in one of the armchairs, chin in hand, gazing through the wet window at the garden lawn lit by strategically placed lights, but the beauty of it was lost on her.
She was so absorbed by her thoughts she jumped in her seat when Alice touched her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” said the red-haired woman. Gesturing to the armchair next to hers, she asked, “May I sit down for a minute?”
“Yes, of course.” Laetitia twisted a lock of her hair, waiting for the amazon of a woman to settle herself and say something.
“I trust you not to tell Tavish Uilleam what I’m going to tell you now.”
She tilted her head, wary. “Why?”
“Because he is a very proud man.” Alice wrung her hands together. “And he won’t like that I came to plead his case.”
Plead his case? “Alice, Tavish Uilleam doesn’t need you to defend him. You don’t need to plead his case, especially not to me. He’s a wonderful, intelligent, fierce man. It’s clear he adores his family, and you all—especially the kids—adore him back.” She chewed her bottom lip with her teeth, shifting on her seat and arranging the pleats of her long skirt. She watched Alice warily, but she felt so connected to Tavish, a man who would stand by her no matter what. It was a gift—one she’d long ago given up ever having again. Granted, it was a tenuous place, but that didn’t change the fact that she felt like she belonged. It was not a gift she would let go. It was a gift she intended to return a thousand and one times. “I have some baggage myself, as you must know by now.”
“Leo is a tomb.” Alice grimaced. “Alistair Connor, not so much.”
Laetitia nodded. She didn’t expect her brother to keep that kind of secret from his family. “Though I have not been amid war, or such places, and I’m not trying to say I can fully understand what he has gone through, I can say that when you have to be constantly alert for . . . life-threatening danger for so long, you can’t just turn it off, like this.” She snapped her fingers. “The—my brain wouldn’t listen when I tell it, ‘Hey, I’m safe now,’ because . . . it knows I’m never safe, although I’ve tried to fool myself time and time again. It . . . takes much more time to unravel that kind of damage than it takes to do it. I’m not blaming him for what happened today. I could never hold it against him. Never.”
“Thank you for reassuring me.” Alice fidgeted in the armchair and looked down at her hands. “Anyway, I’d appreciate if you could listen to what I have to say.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“For more than a year after Tavish left the psychiatric ward, we could see . . . hungry anger simmered inside him, desperate for a target. No one was safe. He’d been an . . . enraged beast. After some trial and error, he found a psychiatrist and a therapist he trusted in and started medication that helped. He became calmer and his mind clearer.” Alice paused and took a deep breath. “But at times, he would be too violent to contain, and twice he had to be hospitalized again. Heavily drugged.”
Laetitia was at a loss for words.
“It was a difficult time for all of us, especially because Alistair Connor’s daughter and then our mother died a few months after he was rescued, and they were estranged. Sophia was the one who brought the two of them together. But that’s another story.” Very quietly she continued, “We learned to lean on each other, and during that very troubled time, our love and admiration for him—and the way he fought for his life and peace of mind—have only grown.”
Laetitia smiled at that. “He deserves it.”
“Aye, he does. And so much more,” Alice agreed. “The war in Iraq and Afghanistan, on terrorism, on fear, has affected the world. For some, it’s only seeing bad news on TV, or being aware that somewhere in the world people are dying. But it’s so much more.”
“I know,” she whispered, the deep pain in Alice’s voice tugging at her.
“For others, such as those who lost loved ones in terrorist attacks, or like our family and so many others, who have a veteran with PTSD—and now I include you in our midst—war takes on a deeper and more personal meaning.” Alice shook her head, as if she could clean the webs gathered in the corners of her mind, and brushed away the tears that had gathered at her eyes. “War comes home—invades it, literally—and every day is another combat. Only, there’s nothing available, nothing real to fight. And you never know when the next attack will come, only from whom it will come.”
“Do—” Fear tightened her throat. Cold settled in her bones, and she hugged herself. “Wouldn’t you say that, in his own way, he’s learned how to cope?”
“Aye, and with mental illness, that’s all we can hope for. It’s not easy to put it all out there for you.” Alice’s green eyes, so like her brothers’, swept over Laetitia’s elfin face and found no judgment there. It made her continue, “But—and that is a big but, Laetitia—it does not mean he’s cured. I want you to understand he never will be. What happened today can happen again. Because react he will, as he did. It’s not common anymore, but it can still happen. PTSD is a very real, unending mental condition. It’s very dangerous.”
Alice’s words lodged like a million knives between Laetitia’s ribs. Laetitia’s lips parted, seeking air that had seemed too heavy to be breathed. “Are you trying to warn me off him?”
“The truth? Right from the bottom of my heart?”
While climbing trees as a child, when Laetitia had reached the end of the branches, where the leaves gave way to sun, and the breeze blew fresh and unhindered upon her face, there at the top, away from Geoffrey and Sinéad, away from the strange wanderings going inside the monastery, she would feel an unequalled sense of freedom. Yet, that was also the moment when she had first looked at the distant ground beneath her feet. And what came to mind was not the thrill of triumph but the realization she would have to get down. She would enjoy the moment, the fantasy, and set aside her worries and fears for later.
But now, just as she was about to secure a place in the world for herself and had found a measure of safety beside that fierce man, with nothing left to reach for, later had arrived.
Laetitia narrowed her eyes at Tavish’s sister. “Yes, from the bottom of your heart, would you wish for me to go away? To leave?”
Alice leaned in her direction and put her elbows on her knees. “Nae, Laetitia. I wish you to stay and face hell with him.”
“Good. Very good.” Laetitia nodded, seriously. “Because I was not planning on going anywhere. Even if Tavish asked. Or the devil himself ordered.”
“Sophia told me we were going to be excellent friends.” Alice smiled, dimples appearing on her cheeks. “Now, how about we spend some time with the kids?”
Craigdale Park
5:17 p.m.
His wounded leg complained under the effort, but he kept running until it gave way, and he fell sideways on the path, grabbing his thigh. Tavish lay on the grass, closing his eyes against a crash of grief.
He had known this was coming, the unraveling of circumstances too good to be true. Con
tentment and happiness didn’t exist in his life for more than a few moments at a time since coming back home, and they were really only illusory; any memory no longer seemed to belong to him. There was always something hidden. Lying in wait to spring up and ruin everything.
It wasn’t until Laetitia entered his life that the knot started to loosen. In Laetitia’s embrace he felt whole. It was like a balm on his wounded soul.
And yet with the shadows that hung around him, everything positive felt like it had happened to someone else in a dream that had just taken a sharp turn into a nightmare.
Anger roared through him, and his body vibrated with rage.
He lunged to his feet, a loud roar ripping from his throat, and shook his fist to the sky. “Ye are no’ taking anything more from me. I dare ye tae try! I dare ye.”
Ignoring his limping, aching leg, he jogged back to the looming shadow of Craigdale Castle, sparring with the shame of having hurt Laetitia, fear and anger battling a desperate need to understand the size of the war still living inside him.
The Elm Courtyard
6:31 p.m.
As Tavish entered the square courtyard, he found Alistair sitting on the rocky bench, under one of the four great elms that stood like sentinels in each corner.
“I was worried,” Alistair said, giving him a big bottle of water and a towel. “How are you feeling?”
“Never been better,” he said dryly, before chugging the water and throwing the rest over himself.
Alistair raised an eyebrow, leaned back on the bench, and crossed his arms over his chest. “The interest is genuine.”
“Sorry. No’ one of my best days.” He took off his T-shirt and wiped his sweaty torso with the towel, then dressed in the clean long-sleeve T-shirt Alistair handed him. He sat on the bench beside his brother and massaged his thigh. “How is she?”
“You’ve got yourself a Sophia number two,” his brother said wryly. “After you left, she stubbornly came down and, until a few minutes ago, was playing with the kids, completely ignoring my saying you ordered her to rest.”
Tavish smiled for a minute as he imagined the scene. “I won’t complain, because I thought . . . she was going tae . . . leave.”
Stunned, Alistair faced him. With his head hung, his brother was the picture of a defeated man. “If it was you, you would?”
“Probably not, but she was—or should I say, is?—scared. It was there in her eyes.” He shook his head; in his mind he didn’t see Laetitia’s face as he walked out of the room—but when she flinched from him. “You know, Alistair Connor, I wasn’t there with you. I was in Iraq, in Afghanistan, somewhere in those hells.” Tavish flexed his large hands. “I am not . . . safe. She is not safe with me. She is such a wee thing—so delicate, fragile—I can break her in two. I could have hurt her badly. Or even I could even have killed her.”
Alistair’s heart clenched. It was hard not to feel pity in the face of such raw pain, but it was never a possibility to show it to Tavish. “Fucking stop that, Tavish Uilleam. It was a mere reac—”
“If I had a conscience, I would walk away,” he interrupted, shoving both hands in his hair and leaning back on the bench. Slowly, he let his hands fall away and looked at the already-dark sky. “But I doona want to. I canna, Alistair Connor. I just canna let her go. And I doona know what am I supposed tae do now.”
“Tavish Uilleam, you have more conscience than all the men I know,” Alistair said, putting a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “And I trust you, even if you can’t trust yourself.”
“I knew that under all this pretense, you were the gullible sort.” He gave his brother a playful nudge with his elbow, but his throat was tight. “Lucky me.”
“Humph.” Alistair stood up. “Come on, you are stinking.”
CHAPTER 40
8:05 p.m.
Tavish hadn’t come back, and hating the insecurity that crept in, despite her best efforts to keep it at bay, Laetitia decided she was not going to stay put and wait for him.
As she braided her hair, she mentally decided that the turquoise column-like wool dress, with a fitted bodice and long sleeves, paired with pumps would be a better choice for dinner than a sweater with jeans, because in spite of the easygoing and informal dress of the MacCraig family, as she climbed up the stairs to Tavish’s room, she had passed some guests descending, and they were more formally dressed.
She dressed, put on dangling coral-beaded silver earrings and a matching stylized slave bracelet, which covered the back of her left hand, and approved of the image that looked at her from inside the mirror.
As she made her way down from Tavish’s suite, on the right wing on the third floor to the Laird Library, located on the ground floor of the west wing, trying not to lose herself, she noticed the elegant furniture and fine antiques. The perfect soft lighting showcased the huge, elaborate French tapestries hanging on each side of the stairs, while a large number of paintings encased in gold frames were scattered throughout the corridors and rooms on the other floors.
From the light and airy hall to the deep ruby of the Red Drawing Room and from the magnificent dining room to the carefully manicured gardens outside, Craigdale seemed far, far away from the real world, a world she had barely begun to belong in, leaving her feeling even more out of place than she had ever felt before.
And it had nothing to do with the wealth displayed, because it was understated by the caring and loving approach evident throughout the place.
It had everything to do with where she stood now with Tavish, and the irony of it was not lost on her. She, who had balked at admitting she wanted a relationship was now concerned about maintaining it.
Sliding her palms down her dress, she walked into the library, her paces measured, waiting for them to notice her.
It took but a second for Tavish’s eyes to snap from the piano keyboard to her. His fingers faltered, and the music stopped. With his stoic mask in place, he stood up, looking remote and removed, a man who was waiting for condemnation to be passed on him. “We dinna think you’d be coming down.”
Sophia’s lips slightly parted in surprise at his harsh tone; she looked at Alistair, who shrugged, and at Alice, who shook her head at her.
Laetitia’s chin raised a notch. There was something terrible and painful in his eyes. Something that knotted her stomach and made her want to soothe some of the torment she sensed within him. Her voice sounded soft and melodic, as always, in the suddenly too-silent room. “I wouldn’t have missed dinner for nothing.”
“Don’t you look lovely.” Lachlann was the first to regain his composure and stood up from the chessboard table, where he was playing with Leonard. “How are you feeling?”
“Great, thanks,” Laetitia answered, stepping farther in the room. With her gaze locked on Tavish’s, she smiled. “I had the best care one could have. It’s as if nothing has happened.”
With long strides, Tavish cut across his father’s path and approached her with a feline-like gait that not even his slight limp could mar.
He stopped just shy of touching her, waiting for her to back away. A dark frown appeared on his face. He caught her jaws in both palms, gently forcing her face up, examining her wound but avoiding her eyes. “Perhaps a real doctor should take a look at this.”
His words felled her. Laetitia’s eyes burned, and a lump lodged in her throat, locking it. Her arms went under the blazer and around his waist, her hands touching his skin under the sweater.
It took him a moment, but his arms pulled her to his body. She let herself fall into him, let him crush her to him.
His hand cupped the back of her neck.
She raised her head, looking at him with clear violet-blue eyes.
The giant anvil that had settled in his heart lifted. He leaned down and kissed her, a mere brush of lips.
Her softness to his hardness, her luscious lips yielding under his, her unspoken need for him—it was all he needed to feel whole again. He deepened the kiss, wanting it never
to end.
She broke away from the kiss, sucking in deep breaths. He was just so there. Right there. All perfect and gorgeous and smelling divine.
Their gazes collided: on the turbulent sea-greens there was a mix of anger, fear, regret, and passion; on the violet-blues, nothing more than acceptance and desire.
He whispered, “I’m sorry, my Little Elf. I’m so—”
She brushed her lips on his, interrupting his unnecessary apologies. “Tavish Uilleam. Please, don’t. It’s just a scratch. It’s nothing.”
Because the moment that the thunder shook the woods had been a collection of nothings, and she would make sure the nothings didn’t matter.
10:59 p.m.
They were all seated in the cozier Game Room, eating the delicious chocolates Sophia always kept stocked, as Tavish’s sister and brother competed to tell the most embarrassing stories from his youth. In any other situation, he’d have put an end to it, but Laetitia looked thoroughly interested, and he found himself laughing at his own expense. When his father proposed a round of backgammon, Tavish took his cue to be alone with her.
“Come on, Little Elf. I want to show you something.”
Exiting the Game Room through the glass door, they stepped into the Elm Courtyard, where he paused, showing her the many variations of snowdrops planted there. They then crossed the courtyard to a nearby building. He opened one of the very tall double doors and allowed Laetitia to enter, shutting it behind him, then almost tripping over her standing at the entrance of the enormously wide and three-story-high room.
In the moonlight that came in through the huge glass panes that formed the rocky walls and part of the roof, Laetitia could discern wild trees and tropical plants. She looked around bewildered. “This is magnificent.”
“My great-grandmother built it after a fire that almost collapsed this whole part of the castle. After her, all the duchesses have being adding to it, making it more and more enchanting.” He paced away from her to the far end of the greenhouse, to a small artificial rocky cascade that led to a lake in the center of the room, where there was a stylish sitting room. “It is one of my favorite places in Craigdale.”