Six long and bitterly lonely years.
She’d left him to marry the viscount. Left him without a word. Without a note. Without a chance.
Just left him. Disappeared.
Crushed his heart, leaving the shattered fragments to harden and crust with time.
And now her bare feet were on his lap. Her body sleek and naked on the settee next to him. Her long dark hair—almost black—haphazard about the pillow. Her jaw slightly agape at his admission of the earldom he’d recently inherited.
Her mouth clamped closed, the shock dissolving from her exquisite porcelain skin. “I understood Lord Kirkmere had died before Maggie and I moved up here, and they were searching for the next heir, but I never would have imagined you, of all people, to appear here, next in line.”
“Neither did anyone else. Especially me. They had to search far back to find the branch that led to my”—he lifted his fingers one by one to tick off the number—“great, great, great, great-grandfather that was the youngest brother of three boys. He died in the Dutch War—young, so it wasn’t easily apparent he had a wife and child.”
Karta shook her head. “Amazing. The happenstance of it.”
“Aye.” He met her look, noting how her amber brown eyes were the color of honey in the light of the fire. Eyes he needed to not lose himself in, for he would be forever stuck. He had to remember the cruelty she was capable of. “It is that.”
“But what will Vinehill do without you? If it’s been the same since I was last there, you run that estate to a fault. Lachlan must be distraught, not to mention his grandfather.”
“Lach wasn’t exactly happy about what it would mean for Vinehill, but he was happy for me. If anything, it is more that Lach and Eva’s children didn’t want me to leave. Lach understands—as does the marquess even as bitter as he was when it was first announced. Lach will manage Vinehill fine now that his grandfather has finally peeled his fingernails away from controlling everything.”
“Was that even possible? The marquess was always a…force.” Her toes wiggled under his palm, nudging his hands back into motion.
“Politely said.” Domnall shrugged, then lifted her left foot, his thick hand slipping under her leg to massage the tight tendons. “The marquess has managed to do so, with lots of encouragement from Eva. I think the marquess is as in love with his granddaughter-in-law as Lach is. Either way, they will get on without me.”
Karta nodded, her chin rubbing on the stack of blankets drowning her body. “I just know how heavily the marquess depends—depended upon you.”
He nodded and his hands wrapped around her feet, drawing long strokes down against the length of them. Her feet had long since warmed, but he couldn’t quite pull his fingers from her skin. Couldn’t quite tuck her toes under the cover of the blankets.
For how he’d stumbled upon her in the snow—for how he’d believed not but an hour ago that he’d found her again and was about to lose her in the span of fifteen minutes—the feel of her skin, warm and pulsating with every heartbeat, grounded him to the fact that she was alive.
Next to him.
Next to him and now a widow.
A blasted widow.
Everything he could have ever wanted, if only he didn’t despise her for leaving him those many years ago.
A surge of bitterness ran through his chest as the past crept forward in his mind like it always did. His look shifted to the fire. “Why did ye come to Badenoch, Karta? It’s bitter cold with the wind beating through these lands and I know how you hate the cold.”
“I don’t hate it like I once did.”
His eyebrow cocked and he glanced at her. “When did that change?”
Her dark eyelashes closed slightly, her brown eyes looking to the dark rafters in the ceiling above. “It just…did.”
“I donnae hardly believe it. There was a time when ye would make me block the slightest whiff of wind from your shoulders. In the dead of summer, even.”
A soft smile lifted the right side of her full lips, then quickly fell away. “Maybe it was because I’ve had no one to shelter me from the cold, so I had to become accustomed to it.” A frown took over her bottom lip and her gaze dropped to him. “To be honest, I have been numb for the last six years and the cold here is one of the few things that makes me feel alive—makes me feel something. Even if that something is a bitter snap across my face.”
Domnall’s eyebrows lifted. “But it is also barren of people up here. Why not go to live in Edinburgh or, strike my words, London?”
Her frown deepened for a long moment, then she shook her head, more to herself than to him. “I was not well liked by my husband’s sons from his first wife. The eldest is older than me, the other two just younger, and after my husband died, I was banished to the dower house here in Badenoch. My options have been very few.”
Her words rushed far too fast from her lips. There was something she wasn’t telling him.
“Why not go home to your father’s estate? You’d at least be around people.”