Tender Feud

Katrine paused in the stable doorway, watching his hard, handsome face, wondering how she could ever have thought him cruel or arrogant.

Then Raith looked up.

His dark eyes collided with hers, blue eyes that had softened momentarily and were, for an unguarded moment, searching. Returning his gaze, Katrine found herself remembering not the last night they’d been together, when they had calmed a frightened child who suffered from nightmares, but the heat of his mouth on her breasts, the fevered gentleness of his calloused hands on her skin. No matter that she scolded herself for recalling such unsettling, unseemly memories, she couldn’t dismiss them, not as long as Raith was looking at her like that.

To her relief he tore his gaze away and focused it on Meggie and the squirming lamb. After another moment of listening to the bleating animal, Raith stood with an admonition to his ward. “You’d best feed the poor thing, Meggie, before it expires from starvation.”

When Meggie and Hector had taken the lamb back to the stall, Raith turned his horse over to a stable lad. At the same time he gave Katrine a brief glance that she should have taken as a gesture of dismissal.

He meant to return to the house, she realized, but she couldn’t allow him to go just yet. Taking a hasty step forward, she forestalled Raith with the question she knew she had to ask, even though she was afraid of the answer. “Did you have any luck finding a governess?”

“No. I interviewed five, but none of them was suitable for a child like Meggie.”

None of them was compassionate enough, Katrine interpreted his reply to mean. The relief she felt was absurd. She wanted Meggie to have someone to care for her, didn’t she? She would be freed shortly, and the child desperately needed a caring, motherly sort of woman to provide the love and attention her tormented little soul craved, even more than she needed to continue the lessons Katrine had begun.

“I’ll try again next week,” Raith said, watching her face. “I’ll find someone, even if I have to go to Edinburgh.”

Katrine nodded, realizing as Raith turned away that he had misinterpreted the motivation behind her question. But she was grateful that he had. For how could she admit to him that her concern wasn’t for Meggie as much as it was for herself? She simply didn’t want a hired governess, a strange woman, taking her place with the child she was coming to love. Nor did she want to hasten the day that it happened.

But how could she tell Raith that she was having second thoughts about leaving Cair House, about being released?

And how could she explain her even more profound reason for her reluctance to leave? What would she say? That she fancied herself in love with the Laird of Ardgour?

It was a love that she couldn’t explain even to herself, but that nevertheless was real. Incredibly, stunningly, achingly real. He was the man of her dreams.

Regrettably, her feelings for Raith didn’t diminish. No matter that she saw little of him in the following few days, Katrine’s yearning for him only increased, while a fierce restlessness settled over her like a pall.

For the most part, she blamed Raith for her condition. He had completely disarmed her, showing her the gentle side of his hard, uncompromising nature. And he had awakened fires in her body that couldn’t be put out. At night, when she was alone in her stark garret room, lying on her pallet, waiting vainly for sleep, she would remember his fierce kisses and his soul-stirring caresses. And her body would begin throbbing in places she hadn’t even known existed.

It was desire, plain and simple. She recognized it, even though she had never felt it before.

But overlying her desire was a vague unease. She couldn’t shake the premonition that something dire was about to happen, even if that something was her release from captivity. Indeed, the only time she was at peace with herself was when she was with Meggie.

At least the child seemed to blossom under her tutelage. Although Katrine attributed much of Meggie’s cheerfulness to her new pet, the young girl showed a joyful eagerness to learn, whether it was drawing or needlework or reading. Even if she couldn’t speak, she could mouth words—which Katrine encouraged—and her dark eyes never failed to grow bright at the stories her provisional governess read aloud to her. Moreover, Meggie showed a real aptitude for music. Before the week was up, she was playing simple tunes on the harpsichord. Her stitchery, too, was remarkable for a child her age, so good in fact that Katrine soon devised a purposeful project for her to complete—embroidering Raith’s initials on a handkerchief, along with a sprig of holly, the badge of the MacLean of Ardgour, so that Meggie could surprise her guardian with a gift.

“‘Tis a fine braw handkerchief,” Flora pronounced when she saw the initial efforts. “The laird is sure to be pleased.”

Nothing could have made the child happier, Katrine thought, watching Meggie’s beaming face.

As for her own happiness, it was virtually nonexistent. Except for her delight in her charge’s progress, her emotional state was one of restless misery. Raith ignored her presence in his household entirely. It was as if she didn’t exist, as if the passionate interlude by the burn had never happened. She didn’t even have Callum’s roguish teasing to enliven her days, for he had been gone for more than a week.

But it was Raith’s attention that she longed for, that she craved. Even a return to the hostile antagonism that had marked their early relationship would have been preferable to this total rejection.

She found herself thinking of him constantly, and, more darkly, dwelling on thoughts of his late wife. Jealousy was a new emotion in Katrine’s experience, but that was what drove her one day to go searching through Ellen’s clothes, which were stored in an attic room. She told herself it was because she needed material to make over some frocks for Meggie, that it was shameful to allow perfectly good clothing to go to waste. But

she knew that was only her excuse to discover more about the beautiful young woman Raith had loved. For if she knew what it was about Ellen that had enamored him so, perhaps she could make herself more appealing to him, at least enough so that he would cease treating her like a leper.

What she found in the trunks did nothing to ease her insecurity…flounces and furbelows, painted fans, vials of sweet-smelling perfume, a jewel-encrusted box that held Ellen’s beauty patches. How feminine and delicate it all was. Not at all what she herself would have chosen to wear, Katrine reflected—she, with her practical, hot-tempered nature that was so contrary to the fragile, sweet-natured Ellen MacDonald MacLean. With a heavy heart, Katrine closed the lids of the trunks. She was uncomfortably aware that Ellen was becoming an obsession with her.

Neither could she forget about Raith’s grief upon losing his wife to childbirth, or the tale Flora had told her about Morag.

Katrine had been held captive for exactly twenty-six days when she decided to learn for herself precisely what had happened to cause his fierce loathing of the midwife.

“Where does Morag live?” she asked Lachlan that afternoon when she spied him in the stable yard. She would have asked Hector earlier when he had brought the lamb for Meggie to play with, but though the shepherd tolerated her for Meggie’s sake, Katrine didn’t think his courtesy would extend to discussing a subject that was really none of a Campbell’s business.

Lachlan apparently shared that view, for he gave her a wary look. “Why do ye wish to know?”

“I’ve heard she has a superb knowledge of healing herbs,” Katrine prevaricated. “If I had a wound that was festering, Morag would be the one to ask about a remedy, wouldn’t she?”