In spite of the scar on his cheek, Malcolm was, she thought, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Stern, dark, stony. But beautiful somehow, in a savage way. And like a savage creature, he seemed to sense her there. His eyelashes fluttered open, and he murmured, “Lorna?”
“No,” Arabella said, softly.
But he seemed not to hear her, reaching to stroke her hair with a longing tenderness, trying to turn as if to take her into his arms. “Lorna.”
She pressed one palm to his broad chest to fend him off. “Please don’t move or you’ll open your wound again. I’m not Lorna. I’m just a girl you tried to save today…”
He stopped stroking her hair, and blinked glassy eyes. “You looked like my wife. In the firelight.” Then Malcolm let his head fall back upon the pillow, poised to drift off again.
Arabella thought it might be better to keep him awake. “You must have loved her very much.”
“Aye.” Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to want to say more than that.
To keep him talking, and because she was painfully curious, she asked, “Do you mind—would you care to say—how—how did she die?”
Malcolm didn’t answer for a very long time. So long, in fact, she believed he had fallen again into a deadly slumber. But when he spoke, it was like a curse. “Donald clan warriors took her, years ago.”
Arabella startled. Was he confused or was it possible that his wife had also been kidnapped? She hated the Donalds for it—making her twice as glad that she’d poisoned the lot of them. “They killed her?”
Shivering, Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut as if he wished she would go away and leave him be. It obviously pained him to speak of it, and he wasn’t going to answer. It would have been cruel to press him, so she resolved to say nothing more about it, and tucked the blanket around his shoulders.
That’s when he murmured, “I killed her.”
Arabella’s blood ran cold. She had seen this man kill—seen him cut through his foes with savagery. Could he kill a woman with his own hands? A woman he loved? Suddenly fearful to be alone with him, she began to sit up. “You killed your wife?”
“Aye,” he said, with a bitter scowl, never opening his eyes. “I never laid a violent hand on her but there are ways to kill a woman by not touching her. And I did that.” A little breathless with confusion, Arabella realized he wasn’t going to explain himself. He merely swallowed, then swallowed again. “I’m thirsty.”
“Take some bark tea,” she said, rising to get the cup. “It will help with the pain.”
Grimacing, Malcolm spilled more of it than he got down his gullet. And it pained Arabella to realize that such a big strong warrior was too weak to hold his own cup. She held it for him, even though his dark eyes burned with some emotion she could not name. “T’was the shame that did it,” he finally murmured into his cup. “I don’t like to speak of it. Haven’t spoken of it nearly at all, but—I thought after what they did to her—that my Lorna would not want to be touched, so I kept my hands off her. I suppose I made her feel like a sullied thing. Made her too ashamed to live. They say she fell from that cliff. Lost her way, lost her footing. But I know she jumped.”
These were more words than Arabella had heard the wounded warrior string together before, and they were words that broke her heart. Words that spoke of guilt and pain and heartbreak. Words filled with such regret that t
hey made tears well up in her eyes for him. “Don’t think she jumped, for it is too great a sin.”
“T’was my sin. I s’pose it’s why she haunts me to this day.”
But he sounded glad of it. Arabella had never heard anyone be glad of a haunting before, but he was. She wished that Lorna might be at peace, and Malcolm too. But it was such a sad story that she was sure it would now haunt her, too. “Enough?” she asked, of the tea.
He nodded, pushing upon her hand. Then, after some moments, Malcolm added, “Seeing you as we did, being mauled like that…”
Arabella bit her lip, realizing why he’d told her the story. Why he’d confessed such heartbreaking details to a stranger. “I reminded you of your wife.”
“Aye. I saw not you, but my Lorna upon the ground, and it rattled me to my bones. I canna think how else I would ever be clumsy enough to leave myself open to take such a wound.”
“Oh,” Arabella said, softly, because felt somehow guilty for it.
But even knowing now that she was not his wife, he reached up for a lock of her hair, and stroked it softly between his fingers. “I’m sorry, lass. We shouldn’t have let them take you and ruin you even if you are a witch.”
Arabella’s throat tightened as the realization of her situation came home to her anew. Given her broken betrothal, there was likely not a man in the clan who would believe she hadn’t been ruined. Not even the men who had put a stop to it believed her. And that made her angry. “I’m not a witch, but I suppose I’m to be taken as a fallen woman no matter what I do or say.”
Malcolm’s eyes half-closed in his pain-addled state. “Worse things to be than a fallen woman.”
Arabella snorted. “What’s worse than being a fallen woman?”
“Being a dead woman.” He said it harshly. Bitterly. Honestly.
It was an answer that made her fists curl by her sides, but one that she supposed no other man might be able to tell her with any sense of authority. Well, she certainly wouldn’t be leaping off any cliff-sides. “If anyone should die of shame it should be men who steal women away.”