But she’d never had David. And what had once been something of a relationship had been lost five years ago.
Shawna doused the lights. Mary Jane had seen to it that she had a warm fire here. She curled up in the bed and stared at the flames. She closed her eyes against the light, anticipating a night of uninterrupted sleep.
With the doorclosed upon the master’s chambers, Hawk walked up the steps to the window and balcony while Skylar looked around the room, at the ancient rock walls, the furniture that was hundreds of years old, and the Victorian touches that had added an element of elegance to the room.
“It’s spectacular,” Skylar said. She saw where Hawk had gone, and she quickly climbed the steps to join him, slipping her arms around his waist from behind him. “You are truly a diverse man, my love. I’ve now bedded in the most elegant manor home, a tipi, and a castle.” She laid her head against his back. “I pray that David is alive, Hawk. I know what it will mean to you.”
He turned at her words, taking her into his arms. “I pray that he lives as well.”
He still had no more evidence that his brother was alive than the mysterious message left with his attorney by a supposed “little jackanapes of a man” that he should come to the Druid Stones on the Night of the Moon Maiden.
That and his brother’s Douglas insignia ring.
He kissed his wife’s lips lightly, then found that his mouth lingered upon them. “Let’s get some sleep, shall we?” he said. “The journey has been agonizingly long, and I want to show you my father’s ancestral home tomorrow.” He was exhausted, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to sleep yet. What he’d intended as a gentle brush of affection had created a slow burning within him. He was tired, but not too tired to desire his beautiful wife. “Well, let’s at least get to bed,” he suggested.
Skylar moved down the steps, her fingers unfastening tiny buttons on her bodice. “There’s a great deal here that’sstunningly beautiful,” she agreed. She turned back to him. “Like Lady MacGinnis.”
Hawk couldn’t help but smile. He’d thought the tempestuous days that had begun their marriage were in the past.
She still questioned him with just a touch of jealousy.
He came down the steps to her, sitting at the foot of the bed and drawing her against him as he worked at the tiny buttons himself.
“Shawna is beautiful. She grows more lovely with age. Yet, even when she was just a babe, she was beautiful. Her eyes are so incredibly blue, her hair like ebony.”
“So, you have noticed this about her, of course,” Skylar said. He realized she had ceased undoing her buttons and was now redoing them just as quickly as he was attempting to unbutton them.
“Naturally.”
“Oh god,” Skylar groaned. “Was she a part of your past?”
He laughed, realizing that although Skylar had learned a great deal about his life in America and probably knew his soul better than anyone else alive, she knew little about this part of his past despite all that he had told her on the way to Scotland.
He met her silver eyes, drawing her closer against him. “I never slept with her, Skylar.”
She frowned. “How curious that there was not…something.”
He shook his head. “Not curious at all. She was infatuated with David when she was a child. He was amused by her at first, then…”
“Then?”
“Well, she grew up. And she was stunning and full of life and very proud, and she was charming and flirtatious and reckless. She drove him halfway insane, but I think that she really cared for him. And she taunted him so fiercely because she was jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“David was his own man. He would not be tricked, coerced, or taunted. He had a place in the government waiting for him, he’d been in the military, he was welcomed in political circles in all of Great Britain and America. I think Shawna was always afraid that she’d give everything to him, then find herself rejected if he discovered himself falling in love with a young woman of greater sophistication elsewhere. But still…”
“Still?”
He grinned. “If anything, she’s like a little sister to me, and I felt terrible for her after my brother’s funeral. She was lost then, completely broken. She could barely talk, even to me. Maybe especially to me.”
“She was very charming tonight.”
“She was.”
“Yet, it seems most apparent that there’s some mystery involved in what happened the night your brother was presumably killed. Could the beautiful Lady Shawna have attempted to do away with your brother?”
Hawk shook his head slowly. “I think not.”