Seducing the Highlander (19 page)

“Has he been questioned?”

“I would guess Adain has done so, if just for appearances’ sake.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“Tomorrow we’ll pay this rhymester a visit. All right, go on. Your brother is my age and therefore he must certainly have at least considered the idea of taking a wife. Did he have a sweetheart? A mistress? Was he courting anyone?”

“Not all men spend most of their time chasing after women,” Julia muttered dryly, “but I somehow doubt you could understand that.” After a moment, she added, “I always thought that maybe he would marry Therese, but I never saw him display anything more than courtesy toward her, I suppose. My father would have been in favor of the match, for the Gibbonses have been our friends and neighbors for years.”

“Would she have been in favor of it?”

“I think she expected it would happen.” Julia yawned deeply, unable to help it. There was something soothing about being so intimately nestled against her attractive husband, and indeed, sexual intercourse was a tiring exercise in a physical sense.

It was odd, but she felt comfortable with him. Maybe it was because they had become lovers so quickly and the intimacy fostered an immediate bond.

Maybe she had fallen all too quickly under his legendary spell. Whatever caused it, she found lying in his arms to be seductively enjoyable.

“But now the resilient Lady Therese has fastened her sights on your cousin,” Robbie said neutrally.

“Adain?” The idea of that interrupted Julia’s slide into slumber, making her blink. “Whatever makes you think so?”

“My dear, sweet wife, with all due modesty, I think I can recognize the signs of flirtation and invitation.” Robbie’s tone was full of amused mockery.

“But he is supposed to be engaged to me.”

“But you went and married someone else, remember?” There was a light tone of masculine warning.

Her cheeks flushed as she realized how absurd her statement had been. “Of course I remember. It seems to me I’m here naked in bed with you, McCray. I just meant that Adain and I have had an understanding a long time. Therese knows that he claims to have a passion for me, and she also knows better than anyone that he’s a murderer.”

Robbie’s long fingers, which had been idly stroking her bare shoulder, went still. “Why better than anyone?”

Though it was one thing to realize her cousin’s heinous deed and despise him for killing her beloved father, it was quite another to send Adain to the gallows. Once, Julia had dreamed of being his wife. When Therese had given her the damning pin that had been found near her father’s corpse, Julia had hidden it. Besides, Edward had loyally refused, according to Therese, to ever testify against his lifelong friend. The one thing that cast doubt on Adain’s guilt was the lack of physical evidence linking him directly with the crime. If Julia had made the discovery of the pin public, Adain might well have been charged openly with her father’s murder but not necessarily convicted. Arthur would suffer through the trial—they all would—for the boy adored his older brother, and with the outcome not certain, she declined to come forward.

Maybe she was as foolish as Edward—but she did not want to see Adain hang. Her own loyalty was shaken, maybe even broken, but it wasn’t gone completely. Once, she’d loved him. The conflicted state of her emotions had sent her to Edinburgh and into Robbie’s arms and bed.

Julia stayed silent, inwardly cursing her loose tongue. Robert McCray was many things—rogue, warrior, rakehell—but he was not a fool.

“What does she know—and obviously you as well—that the rest of us don’t, lass?” Her husband’s question was gentle but relentlessly firm.

Against his chest, she muttered, “This isn’t your affair.”

“The devil it isn’t,” he said firmly, his hold tightening slightly. One long-fingered hand stroked her hair. “Everything about you is my affair, wife.”

“I’m tired,” Julia said stubbornly. “And I don’t wish to continue this discussion.”

“I’m not tired in the least. And make no mistake, we
will
discuss this tomorrow.”

A moment later, she realized he spoke the perfect truth about not being too tired. An iron- hard ridge of erect male flesh rose along her thigh, and her husband’s moonlit grin was both lazily attractive and tantalizingly male.

“Already?”

“Already,” he confirmed.

His kiss was so ardently persuasive that she sighed in wayward anticipation when he pulled her closer, forgetting everything else in the world except the hard feel of her husband’s arms around her and the heavy promise of sensual pleasure in his dark eyes.

 

 

They were only three doors away.

Adain Cameron punched his pillow with force, his fist going deep into the soft down, his body too tense for slumber. He’d downed half a bottle of the best whiskey a man could buy, and it seemed impossible he could still be wide-awake. He was drunk; he’d known he was drunk about an hour ago, and . . . he was miserable anyway.

And so damnably aware of the bedroom three doors away from his.

Oh, it wasn’t that he’d never lain in his bed before in the darkness and thought about Julia sleeping just a short distance down the hallway. He’d imagined her as tempting as one of the legendary sirens, her glossy dark hair strewn over the embroidered softness of sheet and coverlet, her slender body relaxed and pale in the moonlight, those soft lips he’d tasted, parted and inviting. . . . It was just that in his fantasies Robbie McCray’s rangy body wasn’t in the bed with her.

Thunder and blast, there was no doubt of what they did in that bed, either. Heaven help him, he’d even heard them as he’d staggered down the hall past their door earlier this evening, Julia’s voice raised slightly, McCray’s deep tones in a chuckle, and then a telling sigh, light as the crystal moonlight, obviously female.

You would think—Adain rolled over again and grumbled darkly to himself—that in a house as old as Castle Cameron, the doors would be built thick enough for privacy. This past year had been a nightmare, and it seemed he was not going to find any relief from it now. Not only had he lost his uncle and his cousin, but Julia as well. His head spun a little and he shut his eyes, fiercely willing the sweet oblivion of sleep to come.

Instead, he heard a small knock, and a second later the creak of the hinges on the door of his bedroom. One eye cracked open and he saw someone slip inside, the door clicking shut with a quiet sound. There was enough light that he could see the tumble of long hair and he sat up, one hand going to his aching head. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me.” The voice was feminine and light, the tone hushed. “Shhh, Adain. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Therese?”

“Of course.” The fragrance of lilies came to him as she approached the bed. “I couldn’t sleep and was worried about you.”

“You are correct. You shouldn’t be here,” he said forcefully, and then winced at the echo of his own voice. “Edward would have your head . . . and mine too, come to think of it. It isn’t proper.” He snatched up the sheet, which had fallen to his waist. “I’m naked, for God’s sake. Please go back to bed.”

“Are you thinking about them together? Surely your heart is breaking.”

The soft question made his temples throb harder, the whiskey in retrospect not at all a good idea. Wearily, he muttered, “Therese, there are some things a man does not discuss, friends or not.”

Now by the side of the bed, Therese smiled, the gleam of her teeth showing in her pale face. She wore only a dressing gown tied at the waist, and her hands went to the sash, deftly tugging it open. “I can help you forget, Adain, if you will let me.”

Damn his traitorous male reaction; he couldn’t help but stare at the parted cloth, catching a glimpse of her generous pale breasts and the dark brown thatch between her legs. Where Julia was slim and shapely, Therese was full and rounded in every way a woman could be, and she shook back her hair, widening her robe to obviously tempt him.

However trying the day had been already, he hadn’t anticipated
this
.

“You’re an untouched maid,” Adain said thickly, “and the sister of an earl. Not to mention that your brother and I have been friends for years. I will not dishonor him by taking you to bed, Therese.”

“Edward doesn’t have to know.” She stepped forward and her hand came out to touch his shoulder persuasively. Her fingers felt cool and firm, and her brown eyes were wide and sincere. “Take me, Adain. I am willing.”

Whether Edward knew or not, Adain was sober enough to realize that a tumble with Therese Gibbons meant a trip to the altar and a wedding band on her finger. Besides, she was not the one he desired. Julia was lost, but not yet gone from his heart.

This was the very
last
complication he needed. “I won’t do it,” he growled ungallantly, trying hard to ignore the thrust of her prominent nipples so near his face.

In answer, she shimmied closer and reached for the sheet covering the lower half of his body, quickly pulling it back. “You deny me but your body doesn’t, Adain. Look at you, at half-mast already.”

She was right. He was getting hard, but it wasn’t because he was truly tempted, just that her nudity and nearness triggered an almost automatic response. “Dammit, Therese,” he said in impatient argument, “I am flesh and blood, and you are a pretty woman and all but naked. Please leave and speak to no one about this. I cannot use you and then hold my head up in the morning.”

Her gaze glimmered and she frowned, her brows shooting together. “That is all it would be to you?” There was a steely undertone to her voice.

“My love for Julia is strong,” he answered with painful honesty, not looking away but holding her gaze so she could see he was sincere. “I know she is married. I know I will never have her, but I will not get over it lightly, I fear. Until then, another woman is not an option. Not if I want to offer her an honorable courtship.”

“I see.” Her response was short, her hurt feelings evident in her voice. “I suppose I have made a fool of myself, then.”

Why the hell he felt guilty when he hadn’t even invited her was a mystery. Adain said thickly, “Not at all. And who knows, I may feel differently very soon.” He doubted it, but summoned enough politesse even in his inebriated state to say so. “Julia’s betrayal is recent, and I am still in shock because of it.”

“I assume that is true, since even now she sleeps in the arms of the infamous McCray.”

The jibe was more than a little cruel, coming from a woman who supposedly wanted to offer him the solace of her body, but then again, he’d rejected her. Adain said quietly, “I am aware of where she is and whom she sleeps with, Therese.”

She jerked her robe back together and averted her face. After a moment, she said in a more conciliatory tone, “I apologize. I came here to offer my comfort and instead upset you.”

“I doubt I will even remember it tomorrow,” he lied, “considering the amount of whiskey I consumed this evening. And as for McCray, he swears he believes in my innocence and wishes to help me clear my name. I may begrudge him every moment he spends with my cousin, but if he is sincere, I am glad he’s here.”

 

 

“I told you not to try tonight.”

Therese Gibbons stopped pacing and whirled around, so furious her teeth ground together. She snapped, “I miscalculated, Edward. Fine, I should have waited until our next visit to try to seduce Adain. But at least I am attempting to do
something,
while you sit around like the feeble-brained, liquor-soaked fool you are.”

In the dimly lit room her brother’s eyes glittered suddenly like those of some feral creature, his lazy pose—sprawled in a chair by the fireplace—at odds with the nasty twist to his mouth. “Be careful, dear sister, in case you forget I wrung the life out of Rufus with my bare hands. Your neck is much more slender.”

If there was one thing in this world Therese was not afraid of, it was her sniveling brother. “You used a chain to strangle an old man, you buffoon. And perhaps you should recall that I am the one who lured Randal to the cliff and rid the world of his useless existence.”

“Ah, yes,” her brother taunted, “yet another Cameron male who did not desire you.”

The sting of Adain Cameron’s recent rejection was still fresh, but Randal’s refusal to touch her, once she discovered his secret shame, did not rankle. “He didn’t fancy any woman, you sotted idiot. You would have a better chance than I at bedding the late weakling Cameron laird.”

“That’s disgusting,” Edward muttered, sinking lower in the chair, a glass of wine dangling from his fingers. “I am not a sodomite.”

“No, indeed. Instead you are a whoremonger who has brought our family to ruin with your gambling excesses and perverted appetites. At least passing off to Julia as Adain’s the brat that you sired that swells even now the belly of one of our maids served a purpose. She brought it up again earlier. Stealing the pin was a good idea, but that story was a flash of brilliance. Jealousy is a powerful emotion, and a moral lapse like that one is not easily forgiven. Since you are so pathetic you will tumble anything you encounter that is breathing, we might as well use it to our advantage.”

“Much better than being a washed-up spinster unable to snare the title and wealth she covets except by deceit and murder,” her brother countered with a nasty snarl.

Considering the volume of his voice, Therese was indeed glad that Robbie McCray was undoubtedly keeping himself occupied between Julia’s open legs and that Adain had drunk so much whiskey. She hissed, “Shut your mouth, you ineffectual excuse for a man. Arguing and insults are pointless; don’t you see that? Our plan is working so far. Everything is falling into place. Though I worked on Julia’s doubts over Adain’s innocence, I never dreamed she would aid us so well by marrying someone else. The only trouble we have right now is that McCray apparently has promised to help Adain clear his name.”