The Scottish Bride (Sherbrooke Brides 6)

“Marry me,” he said into her mouth. “I cannot bear this, Mary Rose. You must give me my way in this. Everything will be all right. You will speak Latin better than Max, and he will glow with pride. Ellis and Monroe will curl around your ankles and sleep against the backs of your knees. We will all deal well together. Marry me.”

Actually, he was beginning to believe that he would simply fall down and die if she didn’t marry him, if she didn’t allow herself to become his wife and belong to him. He couldn’t stop. He kept kissing her until she made a small noise into his mouth. That nearly whispered little sound shot mindless lust throughout his body. He realized in one last flicker of reason that it was simply all over for him.

He nearly leapt away from her, breathing so hard, so fast, that for a moment he couldn’t get hold of his body. When he did, he smiled at her shocked white face. Dear God, he had frightened her. He heard himself say with absolute honesty, “I want to do that to you until we are both very old and doddering.”

“I—” She gulped. “Yes,” she said then. “I would like that very much. I have never done that before. I am twenty-four years old, on the shelf, everyone says. I have never done that, Tysen, never known that one person could make another feel all these strange things. They’re frantic sorts of things. I want them desperately. I don’t want them to stop. I don’t understand.”

“Feel what things exactly?” He couldn’t believe he’d asked her that, but he didn’t take it back. He wanted to know.

He watched her hand fall to her belly and lightly press inward. He watched her fingers press downward a bit more. She didn’t realize what she was doing, but he did, and he nearly collapsed on the spot. It was all he could do to prevent himself from leaping on her again and throwing her on her back on that soft, giving bed.

“It is like I am somehow hungry, my stomach is hot, and I feel like I want to touch you everywhere.”

He nearly swallowed his tongue. Control, he thought. It had been so many years since he’d felt these ungovernable, roiling feelings that made him want to fly and howl and shout for joy. Go slowly, he thought, go gently. “Mary Rose, if you were my wife, then you could touch me everywhere, just as I could you. There is incredible pleasure when a husband and wife come together, so I have heard. I believe you and I would know that pleasure.”

“I was afraid when Erickson tried to hold me like you did. No, I was beyond afraid, I was terrified. Isn’t it peculiar that it is so very different with you? That it is all I can think about? Er, Tysen, could you please kiss me again? Perhaps let me press myself against you, all of you? You are very different from me.”

As God is my witness, I will not go beyond the point where I cannot stop myself. “I will kiss you and hold you if you promise to be my wife, Mary Rose. I am a vicar. I am not allowed to enjoy myself in such a way without God blessing our union. Surely you understand how I am constrained. I have done things in my life that now, knowing how life is, I would do differently, but despoiling you, giving in to a man’s lust—that I will not do.”

“Yes,” she said, so disappointed she wanted to cry, and yet at the same time she admired him tremendously, “I understand. I’m not at all good, Tysen. For many years I was jealous of Donnatella. I am impatient with my mother. I would have shot Erickson if I’d had a gun and knew how to load it and fire it.”

“Are you making some sort of point here?”

“I don’t know if I would make a very good vicar’s wife.”

“Nonsense. You are human, Mary Rose, delightfully so. Jealousy, anger, frustration—those are not bad things, they’re just things that all of us feel because they’re there to be felt. They cannot be ignored, at least not all of the time.

“You wish to know what I see when I look at you? I see a beautiful young woman. I am not blind. Looking at you delights me—your hair, your mysterious eyes, that wicked little smile of yours, and your nose, Mary Rose. It’s straight and narrow and really quite a nice nose.”

She was trying very hard not to laugh, not to fall to his knees, and weep her eyes out. “Tysen, stop it, just stop it.”

“Oh, no. I also see great kindness in you, Mary Rose. I see no petty meanness in you, just caring. You have been alone too much. You have not been cherished. I also think that you feel things very deeply. Perhaps, someday, you will feel deeply about me.” Oddly enough, at that very moment, he knew it was right to make this girl, a girl he hadn’t even known existed a simple week ago, his wife. It was the thing to do. It was what he wanted to do. Then he nearly laughed at himself, at all his mental machinations, all his man’s justifications. He also wanted to make love to her until both of them collapsed. He remembered vaguely the awesome desire he had felt for Melinda Beatrice when he’d been all of twenty years old and she was his goddess. He’d prayed for valiant deeds to perform to prove his devotion to her, but there hadn’t been any.

The fact of the matter was, however, that his union with Melinda Beatrice was a very long time ago and they had both been so very young. He was a man now. He had tried his best then, but he’d been so ill-prepared. There’d simply been so much he had never experienced, had not known how to deal with—from his wife to all the people in his congregation. And then he’d been a father and Melinda Beatrice had died.

But things were different now. He was different in many very important ways. His children had changed him, made his life richer, given him more compassion, more patience. The many men and women in his congregation had changed him as well. He had tried to be a good man, a man to minister to them as he should.

But never before in his life had he comprehended the simple joy another human being could bring him, the endless warmth, the caring, the immense joy of the world. And the excitement of just looking at her, a smile on his mouth without his even realizing it. Now she had come into his life—so completely unexpected. She fascinated him even as she brought out every protective instinct he had buried deep inside. This quite pretty girl, who wasn’t a girl anymore but a woman of twenty-four years, was now standing in his nightshirt not two feet away from him, and this was the only woman he wished to have by his side. Forever.

Dear Lord, give me the words to convince her that this is a very good idea.

16

Vallance Manor

“SHE WON’T MARRY me.”

Sir Lyon was disgusted with the young man who was sitting in front of him, his hands clasped between his knees, looking bewildered and defeated. He’d had such faith in him, not only in his good looks but in his ruthlessness. He’d believed him utterly dedicated to this task, but he’d failed.

Sir Lyon said, “Stand up and pull your shoulders back, damn you. You have hardly tried. Good God, man, get her away from that cursed vicar, and it will be done.”

Erickson raised his head. “He won’t even allow me to be alone with her. Neither will his daughter. She was practically crouched over Mary Rose to protect her from me. What am I supposed to do? Pound a man of God into the bloody ground? Lock the little girl into a closet?”

“No, of course not. If you did that, you’d be hung up by your heels.” Sir Lyon drank down a snifter of his fine French brandy. He rubbed his chin. He felt a clump of hair that his valet, Mortimer, blast the fellow, had missed when shaving him that morning. Sir Lyon said slowly, rubbing his palms over the brandy snifter, “There has to be a way to get to her, to spirit her away from Kildrummy Castle. Then the vicar would be out of it. What could he do? Nothing at all. Da

mnation, boy, I can’t believe she actually jumped into the stream. I always believed Mary Rose an obedient, diffident little thing.”

“She’s changed, sir,” Erickson said, and for a moment, he was puzzled by it. But it was true. Rather than freezing like a doe in a hunter’s sights, just days before, she’d run away from him into the pine forest near Kildrummy. He said slowly, “I can remember her as a little girl. She was quiet, obedient, just as you said. I remember that she was always standing on the outside of things, watching, listening. Maybe she’s changed slowly, small things that I just haven’t noticed. But she’s managed to keep herself away from me for a very long time now. I have tried every tactic, but nothing has worked.