Moira glanced about the tiny cottage, but there was only the one bed. Duncan was looking at her as if he were dying of thirst and she was the last drop of water on God’s earth. If ever there was a man who could tempt her, it was Duncan MacDonald.
“Moira.” He said her name as if she were all he wanted in this world.
But she knew better. She had been down that road before.
“The ladder to the loft is there.” She pointed to it and turned her back on him.
As she listened to Duncan climbing the ladder, she forced herself to recall how she had stood on the wall at Dunscaith in all her wedding finery, still hanging on to hope like the foolish and trusting lass that she had been.
“How could he do this to me?” Moira had said to her maid, Rhona, who had been her confidante from the start of her affair with Duncan. “How could he leave me?”
“This Irish chieftain’s son is a handsome man—he’ll make ye a fine husband,” Rhona said, patting her arm. Then her eyes got big as she looked over Moira’s shoulder. “Your father’s coming. I’ll wait for ye down in the hall.”
Moira turned and saw her father. Rhona bobbed her head and hurried past him.
“What are ye doing up here?” her father asked. “Everyone’s waiting for ye.”
“Da!” She threw her arms around his waist.
“There, there.” Her father brushed her hair back. “What’s this about?”
“He didn’t come,” she said against his chest.
“Is it that damned Duncan you’re still fussing about?”
She wept for three days after Duncan left before she confessed to her father that she was in love with Duncan. He had been the angriest she had ever seen him when she told him she had given Duncan her virginity and would marry no one else. But that was before she discovered she was with child. When she told her father she was pregnant, he had quickly arranged a marriage to a man who happened to be their guest at the time and who had the appropriate pedigree.
“I thought Duncan would come back for me,” she choked out.
“Ye can see now that he didn’t deserve ye.”
“Duncan’s the one I want, Da,” she said into his shirt.
He leaned her away from him and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I’m telling ye, that Duncan is bad seed.”
“Ye don’t know that, Da,” she said. “And I don’t care who his father is, anyway.”
“Ye should. Blood will out.” Her father took her face in his big, rough hands and looked straight into her eyes. “I didn’t tell ye before to spare your feelings, but I gave Duncan the choice of going with the others to France or staying. He chose to go.”
Now Moira pushed the painful memories of that day aside and took off her gown to wash up in the water the woman had so kindly left for them. She gingerly washed the cuts and scrapes on her body that the healer had not seen. Even after being drenched to the skin in that storm at sea, she found blood in the creases inside her elbows.
Moira covered her face with her wet hands, sank to the floor, and wept. She did not regret killing Sean, but the memory was still terrible. Then she cried for all those years of trying to appease him, of always having to be careful and constrained. And now Duncan was here, bringing back those other memories. And then there was Niall to worry about. And hardest of all, she missed her son.
She was not one to give in to self-pity, but she was just so damned tired of being strong.
* * *
Duncan lay staring up at the thatched roof above his head. His every muscle tensed as he strained to listen to the soft splash of water each time Moira wrung the towel out in the bowl. As she washed herself, he tortured himself imagining her long, slender fingers running the wet towel over her throat and down her breasts.
His erotic thoughts were interrupted by another sound, like a mewling kitten. Was that Moira weeping?
Ouch!Duncan hit his head on a wooden beam when he sat up. The roof was so low that he had to crawl across the straw on his hands and knees to the hole where the ladder was. Peering through it, he saw Moira sitting on the floor with her head on her knees. Her shoulders were shaking.
She did not look up as he climbed down. When he sat beside her and put his arms around her, she leaned into him. Duncan’s heart beat too fast, and his chest felt too tight to breathe. She was just in her shift.
“Shh. You’re all right now,” he said as she wept her heart out. Words rarely helped anything, but he gave it a try. “If it’s Niall you’re worried about, he’s tough. It takes more than a wound like that to kill a MacDonald.”
There was nothing he could say about her dead husband except good riddance.