she could do, but, oh, how much she wished there was. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Alasdhair. Please don’t look at me like that, for I can’t bear it.’
He knew from bitter experience how very practised Lady Munro was in the art of belittlement, how she twisted and turned everything into a deformed version of itself. With both her parents assailing her, poor Ailsa would have stood little chance. If she had only believed … but in his heart, he knew he had not believed enough, either. It had been too much to wish for. Too much to deserve. ‘You’ve no more need to be sorry than I. I don’t blame you for not coming. I can see how it must have looked.’
‘But I did come.’
‘What!’
‘My mother told me she had arranged for us to meet to say goodbye. Despite her better judgement, she said, she thought it better that I hear from you direct. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing, the chance to see you just one more time. I was there at midnight as agreed. I waited and waited, but you didn’t come. I thought you couldn’t face me. You didn’t love me, but you cared enough about me not to be able to tell me that to my face. I thought my mother was right. I thought—but I was wrong. I was wrong. I was so wrong.’ Ailsa shuddered as sobs racked her body.
Alasdhair ran his hand distractedly through his hair. ‘I don’t understand. I stood here, under this very tree—our tree—the whole time. Where were you?’
Ailsa’s covered her face with her hands. ‘An Rionnag,’ she whispered.
Alasdhair cursed, long and low in the Gaelic, words he thought forgotten, then he stooped down to pull Ailsa to her feet, wrapping his arms around her, unable to resist the habit of comforting her any longer. ‘My God, but they made sure of separating us, your parents. Your father thought he had solved the problem by banishing me, but your mother knew different, so she set us up to think each betrayed by the other. And it worked. Between them they destroyed any chance we had of happiness.’
He stroked her hair, the way he had always done before to soothe her, but despite the familiar gesture, he felt like a stranger. She was acutely aware of him, not as the person he’d been, but of the man he had become. A man she didn’t know any more. It disconcerted, this not knowing, but having known. She had no idea how to behave.
Ailsa pushed herself back from his embrace and wiped her eyes, attempting a watery smile. ‘Sorry, it’s not like me to cry.’
Alasdhair shook his head and returned her smile with a crooked one of his own. ‘God knows, we both have reason enough.’
The wind ruffled his hair. As he shook it back from his face she noticed it, the faint white line above his left brow, made more visible by his tan. Ailsa reached up to trace the shape of it. ‘The oar, do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember, you nearly had me drowned.’
They had been swimming, and he was climbing back into the boat. Ailsa, struggling to slot one of the heavy oars into its lock, had slipped and the blade had gashed his brow. ‘I was trying to rescue you,’ she retorted. ‘I thought we’d never get it to stop bleeding. You’re lucky it’s such a tiny scar.’
‘I didn’t feel lucky at the time, my head ached for days.’ Her nearness was disconcerting. The memory of the girl he had once loved was retreating like a shadow at noon, fading in the bright light of the woman standing next to him. She was more different than the same. The years had not left her untouched.
He felt the softness of her curves pressing into him. Regret and wanting swamped him. It was a potent mix that overrode everything else. He pulled her to him. She did not resist. He slipped his arm around her waist, tilting her face up with his finger. She was trembling. She wanted him, too. In that moment, only for that moment, but it was enough. Without any thought of resisting, Alasdhair leaned into her. Their lips met.
Ailsa hesitated. She felt as she did sometimes, wrestling with the boat in a storm or rushing her horse at a high dyke. Exhilarated and afraid in equal measure. Her skin tugged at her, as if it had needs of its own of a sudden, needs it had never expressed. Save once.
Alasdhair felt so solid against her and so warm, the heat from him seeping into her like a dram of whisky. His lips touched hers. She sighed and the warmth spread, like fingers of sunshine on a rock. His hands on the curve of her spine nestled her closer. He angled his head and his lips seemed to mould themselves to hers.
It was breathtakingly intimate. Her heart hammered in her breast. A capricious mixture of wanting and uncertainty swept over her, a yearning for something lost. Her mouth softened under his caress. His tongue licked along the length of her bottom lip. An adult’s kiss. Her first. With a soft sigh she nestled closer, touched the tip of her tongue to his. A shock sparked between them and Alasdhair brought the embrace to an abrupt end.
Taking a hasty step back, he felt a flush striping the sharp planes of his cheekbones. What the devil had he been thinking! ‘Forgive me. I should not have—I don’t know what came over me.’
Colour flooded Ailsa’s face. She stared up at him, wide-eyed with shock.
What did he think he was doing! He had come here to tie up loose ends, not entangle himself further, and especially not with another man’s property—a fact that he had managed to forget all about in the shock of seeing Ailsa again.
‘Where is McNair anyway?’ Alasdhair asked roughly, furious with the man for his absence. If he had been here to take better care of his wife, this would not have occurred. ‘I did not see him at the grave.’
Confused as much by the repressed anger in Alasdhair’s voice, which seemed to have come from nowhere, as by the abrupt change of topic, Ailsa struggled to assemble her thoughts. ‘He’s been ill. A fever of the blood. He has been confined to bed.’
A fever of the blood! Perhaps that is what he had himself. Alasdhair shook his head, as if doing so would clear the mist that had clouded his judgement, that was distracted by the completely irrelevant puzzle of Ailsa’s response to him. If he had not known better, he would have thought she had no more experience of kisses than the last time their lips had met. ‘I should not have kissed you. It is no excuse, but I forgot that you were married, just for the moment.’
Ailsa flushed a deeper red. ‘But I’m not married. Despite what my father told you I was not betrothed to Donald McNair six years ago—or if my father made any promises on my behalf then, it was without my knowledge. I admit, I am betrothed to Donald now, but it is of much more recent standing.’
‘Not married!’ It had not occurred to him that she would still be single. It was a disturbing notion and not one he wanted to think about. ‘Wed or betrothed, long-standing or recent, it makes no difference,’ he said, more to himself than Ailsa. ‘You are spoken for and I should not have taken such a liberty.’
‘Nor I granted it to you,’ Ailsa said unhappily. She had never had any difficulty in refusing such liberties to others. Not even Donald had been permitted such intimacy, but kissing Alasdhair had seemed the most natural thing in the world. And the most delightful. She had forgotten it could be delightful, a kiss. Like a promise. Except this one, like the last one Alasdhair made, would remain for ever unfulfilled. ‘What about you, Alasdhair?’
‘What about me?’
‘Are you married?’
‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘Do you think me the sort of man to go about kissing women
