“And let him get the notion in his head that he could use me again to advance his alliances? I think not.” Her voice spiked. “One marriage at the altar of his ambition was enough—not to mention the failed engagements to Jacob and then Lachlan I suffered. I’ve spent too many of my years tied to his machinations. I’m done with my duty to my family.”
“So now ye think to hide out here in the mountains? Live out your days skulking amongst the trees and mountain heath with only your maid for company?”
She shrugged, the pile of blankets shifting upward. “Better than the alternative.”
“Which is?”
Her nose wrinkled, the cut of her voice hardening. “Be pawned off onto another elderly, sallow-skinned dandy.”
There it was.
The shot of deranged jealousy—of fierce protectiveness—that sliced through his belly at the slightest hint of anyone doing Karta wrong.
He’d wondered when it would appear.
It had always been visceral and it flared back to life, just as raw and angry as it always had been.
His look narrowed at her. “Did the bastard hurt ye, Karta?”
“You don’t get to ask me that, Dom.” Her brown eyes pierced him, boring into him as they always had. “You gave up your right to ask anything about my person long ago.”
His hands tightened around her feet. “Karta—”
She jerked her toes from his grip, drawing them under the blankets and curling them up toward her body. “No. You did. You gave up everything to do with me that summer before I married the viscount.”
His hands curled into fists on his lap, his jaw clenching. “I was always too old for you.”
“Too old?” She shifted under the blankets, scooting away from him to sit up and set her back along the cushioned side of the settee. In a wild flurry of arms moving, she jutted out her left hand to clutch the blankets to her bare chest as she leaned forward, fire in her words. “You’re ten years older than me, Dom. How is that too old? Do you even know how much older the viscount was?”
He shook his head. The last thing he wanted to do was listen to facts about her husband.
“Twenty-two years. So don’t you dare speak such ridiculous drivel.” Her right hand found its way free of the blankets and she pointed at him. “Excuses. Excuses as always. The thousands of reasons why we shouldn’t be together. You’re too old. Vinehill needed you. You had to tromp across the countryside with Lach. You came up with one excuse after another and I’d heard them all—hundreds of times. But they never dissuaded me, did they?”
A sigh escaped his lips. “No.”
“But I should have listened to them. Each and every one. If I had…” Her head shook and she slumped back against the arm of the settee.
“If you had, what?”
Her lip curled as she looked at him with scorn in her brown eyes. “I would have been smart. I wouldn’t have ever dared to have my heart broken by you.”
His head jerked back. “I broke—what—what do you mean—I br—”
A sharp knock on the open door made both of their heads swivel toward the entrance of the room opposite the fireplace.
Stooped over with age, the Kirkmere butler stood there, looking from Domnall to Karta, his wiry grey eyebrows lifted high on his wrinkled forehead. “My lord.”
It took Domnall several seconds to realize the butler was addressing him. He gave his head a slight shake. “Yes, Fredrick?”
The man lifted a wrinkled hand to his ear, cupping it as he looked at Domnall. “What was that, my lord?”
Domnall lifted his voice. “I said, yes, Frederick?”
At least the man hadn’t heard him and Karta arguing. Not at Kirkmere Abbey for two hours and he already had a naked woman sitting in his drawing room. His first impression as Lord Kirkmere was not going quite as planned.
The butler nodded and what constituted a smile pulled his thin lips back. “Very good, sir. Cook has made a meal for ye and yer men and yer guest. And the men have just arrived with the maid from the dower house. They have placed the lass in one of the guest rooms above.”
“The doctor?” Domnall asked.