The Many Sins of Cris De Feaux (Lords of Disgrace) Read online

  ‘Cris.’ He should not be here, it would all be unimaginably painful, but now, in this moment, all she could feel was joy.

  ‘How do I get up?’ He was smiling at her, her own happiness reflected in his face.

  ‘There are footholds, just there.’ She watched him climb easily, with none of her fumbling and scraped knees. Muscles taut, skin streaming water, hair slicked back to expose the austere planes of his face, he was like some sea god rising from the deep.

  ‘Tamsyn.’ She stumbled into his arms, heedless of sense or of anything but the moment. His body, under the chill of the water, was hot and so was his mouth on hers. Oh, the taste of him. Cris. Under her palms his back was smooth, broad, infinitely masculine, and she clung to him, taking and giving in a kiss that was trying to make up for over a month’s separation.

  When the necessity to breathe finally broke the kiss, they stayed locked together, not speaking, reading each other through their eyes. Finally Tamsyn could pretend no longer. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Because I love you.’ Cris sat down, pulled her with him, knee to knee, his hand still on her arm.

  ‘I told you that this is not possible.’

  ‘You told me that you did not love me. And at first, I believed you.’ He held her gaze, not hiding the pain in his eyes, not shielding his feelings as he always had before. ‘Then you wrote to me.’

  ‘But I explained why I cannot marry you. And it makes no difference to my feelings.’ Now she was the one veiling her gaze, trying to keep him from seeing the futile hope.

  ‘I know.’ He lifted his other hand and cupped the fingers around her averted face, turning her back to face him. ‘I asked myself why you would have written and told me something so painful to you, when, if you did not love me, it could make no difference. And the only answer I could find was that you did love me and that this tragedy in your past was why you were refusing to marry me.’

  ‘But it is not in my past. It will be my future, too. It cannot be yours.’

  ‘Tamsyn. Do not lie to me, because here, now, I will know, believe me. Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she burst out. ‘Yes, I love you. And what difference does knowing it make, except to worsen the pain for both of us of what we cannot have?’

  The tender expression in his eyes became something else, something hot and intense and possessive. ‘I knew it, I could sense it. I knew you were lying to me before. Tamsyn, my love.’

  She pushed back against his naked chest, even though it was like pushing against the Flatiron itself. ‘It makes no difference.’

  ‘You cannot have a child whether or not you marry me. I do not want one unless it is yours. It will be a grief for both of us, one we will share,’ he said fiercely. ‘I do not want children with any other woman because I want no other woman. Only you, Tamsyn. Only you.’

  ‘But your heir—’

  ‘He is a perfectly pleasant, intelligent young cousin who would have inherited if the woman I married bore only daughters, or if I had a son who died, or if I married someone else and we had no children anyway. I love you, you love me. We can be happy for the rest of our lives. We can build a good marriage and you will make a wonderful marchioness.’ When she stared at him, wordless, he pulled her to him, breast to breast, mouth to mouth.

  ‘I love you,’ he said against her lips. ‘I was washed up on this beach because I thought I had lost love and all the time I was on the verge of finding it. Don’t deny us this happiness, my darling.’

  Something broke inside her as if a dam had been breached, a stone wall that had been holding back her love for him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I won’t. I love you too much.’

  A bare rock, covered in limpets and seaweed and water, in the middle of a rising sea, was not the most comfortable place to make love, Tamsyn thought hazily. Cris lifted her on to his thighs, entered her with a gasp that held relief and joy and intensity, and then she forgot to think, or to feel the sun on her back or the friction against her knees or the slap of wet seaweed tossed up by the wind. All that was real was the power of Cris’s body and the need to use hers to show him how much she loved him.

  They broke together, clinging as they had done when they had first found each other in the sea, locked together now by love and the promise of a future.

  Finally Cris moved and they untangled their limbs, laughing a little at themselves, touching again and again, as though unable to believe this was real. He flopped back, full length on the rock. ‘Lord, but I do love you. What the blazes?’ He sat up again, rubbing his head and twisted to glare at the lump of bladderwrack that Tamsyn had been exploring with her foot earlier.

  ‘Is it a crab?’ She shifted to sit beside him, legs dangling, as he poked at the mass.

  ‘No, it’s hard.’ He pushed the weed aside. ‘Look—it’s a ring bolt and a chain.’

  ‘Pull it up.’ A certainty that she knew what this was began to creep over her.

  Cris hauled, his muscles bunching as he took the weight of whatever was at the end of the chain. He stood, braced his feet apart and hauled and suddenly a small, square, metal box broke the surface. He dumped it on the rock and stared at it. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think we’d found a pirate’s treasure.’

  ‘No. A smuggler’s. This rock was Jory’s place, ours when we were young.’ Tamsyn ran her hands over the rusting iron bands that bound the box. ‘There is no padlock, only a staple through the hasp.’

  ‘You open it, you are his heir,’ Cris said. In the end it took both of them to force it open, lift the lid, creaking, to reveal a canvas bag no bigger than a lady’s reticule. ‘Hardly pieces of eight and golden doubloons.’

  ‘If it was full of money I suppose we’d have to give it to the Revenue,’ Tamsyn said, trying to cover her disappointment with a show of reasonableness.

  Cris put the bag in her hands and helped her open it. Inside was a gold chain and a handful of crystals. ‘Cris, these aren’t—?’

  ‘Diamonds? Yes, I think they are. I think your first husband has left you jewels where no one else but you would ever find them.’ They sparkled in his palm like the foam on the sand in the moment the sunlight caught it. ‘You can have these made into a necklace you’ll always remember him by.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind?’ she asked as he tipped them back into the bag, knotted it securely and hung it around his neck.

  ‘That he made you happy? That he kept you safe? Of course I don’t mind.’ He stood up and reached down to help her to her feet. ‘Come, we had best get ashore and decent before your aunts discover us disporting.’

  ‘That’s a good word, disporting.’ But he had already dived into the sea and was treading water, waiting for her. She dived in, too, and swam slowly back to the point where their feet could touch bottom. ‘We disported here before,’ she said and slipped her arms around his neck and curled her legs around his waist. ‘Shall we try it again?’

  *

  Later that evening, as they sat, hand in hand on the sofa, trying to make conversation with a deliriously happy Isobel and Rosie and not simply sit staring into each other’s eyes, Molly came in.

  ‘Letter for Mizz Tamsyn, just been delivered by the doctor’s man.’

  ‘Will you excuse me, I had better read it now. I can’t imagine what it might be.’

  The others talked while she took the letter to the table where the oil lamp stood and cracked open the seal.

  Dear Mrs Perowne,

  I have been meaning to read my predecessor’s diaries, which I found stored in a trunk in the attic of the house when I took over the practice, but have never found the time. After our discussion on the clifftop I looked at the one relating to the date of your husband’s death and the following weeks.

  I find that the late Dr Philpott was a believer in the old theories of health and medicine, now thankfully becoming a thing of the past. He wrote that your bodily humours were unbalanced by shock and grief and that your womb had no doubt ‘wandered’ as a result.
<
br />   You may be familiar with the idiotic but widely held theory that a ‘wandering’ womb is the cause of feminine hysteria. No doubt at the time you were understandably distraught at the tragic loss of your husband and might be thought, by an old-fashioned doctor, to be hysterical.

  He wrote that it was very regrettable, but he expected you to be rendered infertile as a result. I can assure you that nothing in his notes leads me to the same conclusion.

  I would recommend you to attend a specialist in these matters, possibly a London doctor—I can suggest some names. Or you may simply wish to let nature take its course.

  I am, dear Mrs Perowne, your obedient servant,

  Michael Tregarth, MD

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ Izzy asked.

  ‘No. Nothing is wrong at all. Dr Tregarth was simply recommending a certain course of action to deal with a problem I had discussed with him.’

  Cris stood up and held out his hand to her. ‘Shall we take a stroll in the moonlight before bedtime?’

  She let him lead her out on to the lawn and, out of sight of the windows, curled into his embrace.

  ‘Should I be concerned?’ Cris asked her, holding her a little away so he could look down into her face as she smiled up at him.

  ‘No, not at all.’ She told him what the letter had said. ‘I don’t want to be prodded about by London doctors. I shall follow his advice and let nature take its course.’

  Five minutes later, emerging breathless from his embrace, she murmured, ‘My bedchamber is still the same one as before, my love.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Cris growled. ‘Because after that kiss, my darling Tamsyn, I, too, fully intend to let nature take its course.’

  *

  If you enjoyed this story,

  don’t miss these other great reads in

  Louise Allen’s LORDS OF DISGRACE quartet,

  HIS HOUSEKEEPER’S CHRISTMAS WISH

  HIS CHRISTMAS COUNTESS.

  And watch out for

  THE UNEXPECTED MARRIAGE OF GABRIEL STONE

  coming soon!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE HIGHLAND LAIRD’S BRIDE by Nicole Locke.

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  The Highland Laird’s Bride

  by Nicole Locke

  Chapter One

  Scotland—1296

  ‘You were expecting me.’

  Lioslath of Clan Fergusson stopped pacing the darkness of her bedroom and adjusted the knife in her hand. From years of training, she knew simply on the utterance of his four words where Bram, Laird Colquhoun, stood in the room, and the precise location of his beating heart.

  She knew it, even though her back was to him and she’d been caught pacing. Defenceless. Or so he thought.

  The laird was right; she had been expecting him. Expecting him as one views a storm on the horizon. Ever since he and his clansmen, like black clouds, crested a nearby hill. Since he alerted her young brothers, who raced to the keep, giving them precious moments to lock the gates. All the while the storm of Laird Colquhoun and his clansmen gathered strength and lined up outside the keep with arrows and swords like lightning about to strike.

  But they hadn’t struck. And it had been almost a month. Which meant weeks of her climbing the haphazardly rebuilt platform to look over the gates; weeks of hearing the Colquhoun men below her even before she climbed the rickety steps.

  It had been almost a month, and still they didn’t strike. Although she barred the gates, though the villagers shunned him, Laird Colquhoun hadn’t struck like the harshest of Scottish storms. Rather, he and his clansmen enclosed the keep. Surrounded, she felt choked by his stormy presence, suffocated by the battering wait.

  But this morning, she knew the wait was over when she spied the carefully placed food at the outside entrance of the secret passage. Her captor had discovered her tunnel. She knew, despite the fact she locked the gates, the storm would get inside.

  When he hadn’t come during the day, Lioslath expected Bram of Clan Colquhoun this night. She was no fool.

  But she hadn’t been expecting his voice. Deep, melodious, a tenor that sent an immediate awareness skittering up the backs of her legs and wrapping warmth around her centre.

  So she didn’t immediately turn to see him, even though a man was in her bedroom. Forbidden and unwanted. She didn’t pretend maidenly outrage as she had carefully planned, to provide a necessary distraction and give her an advantage before her attack.

  It was his voice. It was…unexpected.

  It didn’t fit here, in the dark, in the intimacy of her bedroom. It didn’t fit with what she’d seen of him so far.

  Arrogant, proud, superior, Bram rode through her broken village to her weather-worn gates thinking himself a welcome benefactor with his carts of overstocked gifts. Or worse, as laird of the keep bestowing treasures to his people.

  Since Laird Colquhoun began the siege, he’d been an abrasive force, from his vibrant red hair to the length of his strides as he walked amongst his men. His voice booming orders; his demands to open the gates. His constant laughter. Everything about him she instinctively rejected.

  But not now.

  Now his voice reverberated with some power, some seductive tone she’d never heard before. She felt his voice. And it shouldn’t have felt like this. Not to her. She calmed her wavering heart.

  Never to her.

  Allowing the cool night air into her lungs, she turned and immediately wished she stood elsewhere.

  The full moon cast light through the window and holes in the roof, but his back was to the light and Bram remained in darkness.

  She knew the darkness would give his voice an advantage. She adjusted the knife, careful to keep it close and ready. Her plan might have changed, but not her intent. Bram of Clan Colquhoun was expected, but he was not wanted. He had arrived too late for that.

  ‘Get out,’ she said, without menace. Dog hid in a corner. She needed not to alert him to her tumultuous feelings; she needed to remain calm and keep to their routine. For years they’d hunted together. Dog knew what the knife in her hand meant: for him to lie in wait for her signal—and surprise their prey. ‘Get out of my room and away from the keep. Weren’t the closed gates and the hurtled dung enough deterrent? Leave, Laird Colquhoun. You never should have come.’

  *

  Bram could only stare.

  Weeks of being barred entrance to the keep of Clan Fergusson, of wasting time
while determining the layout of the keep and the village. Of glimpsing the woman who, without schedule, would appear at the top of the gates. Visible, but never near enough to truly see her.

  But now, as shafts of moonlight illuminated her form, he did see her. It was as if the night created another star. One brighter than those poised in the sky above this tiny room.

  He glanced around. A single bed, a small table at the opposite wall. Something large, like a trunk, in the dark corner nearest her. A simple room and too meagre for her beauty, but at least they were alone.

  ‘You were expecting me,’ Bram repeated, now realising the meaning of finding this woman fully dressed and pacing. ‘You received my gift this morning. You observed us today. You knew I was coming.’

  ‘Your gift?’

  ‘The deer and vegetables by the entrance,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if you would take them.’

  She frowned, a darkness marring her eyes.

  He knew she’d been stealing their food for the past week. Until yesterday, he hadn’t known how. When he discovered the tunnel, he knew he had to let her know his intentions. So this morning, he placed the food at the entrance. He only meant it as part of his negotiations.

  But now he knew, instantly, he failed.

  ‘You didn’t want to take them,’ he answered for her. He was a master at diplomacy, but his gift hadn’t softened her towards him. She locked the gates against him and his clansmen. The food was only a reminder.

  ‘Why aren’t you leaving?’ she said instead.

  Because what he came to do wasn’t done. He had to be here. Tonight. While he’d been waiting for the gates to open, danger came to his clan. His duty as laird necessitated he end this stalemate, but it wasn’t duty he thought of now.

  Lioslath’s short black hair curled and spiked defiantly. It highlighted her sharp cheekbones and softly angled chin. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, and it emphasised the size and brightness of her eyes. And the colour…

  They were blue, intense and startling against the blackness of her hair and thick eyelashes. It was as if under her finely arched brows shone the brightest of summer skies.