The Arrow: A Highland Guard Novel (The Highland Guard) (17 page)

Perhaps “want” was the wrong word. Although the white lines around his mouth and tightness in his jaw had started to dissipate (he’d been angry about something, but whatever it was, it seemed to be directed at his brother and not her), there was a certain resolve and determination to his expression, like that of a man about to perform an unpleasant task that had to be done.

She being the unpleasant task.

Still, the gaze that met hers was not without compassion—not exactly what she wanted from him, however.

“About what happened in the barn the other day. I don’t want there to be any …” He hesitated. “Awkwardness between us.”

She tilted her head to the side and held his gaze. “Then what
would
you like there to be between us?”

For one moment something hot and possessive flared in his eyes. Something fierce and primal that sent a shudder of awareness racing through her. Something that left her a little shaky and wondering if she really had any idea of what she was asking for.

The flare quickly turned to irritation, however. “Nothing, damn it.” He dragged his hand through his hair as if were exuding all the patience of Job. “Christ, Cate, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Then don’t.”

He shot her a glare and ignored the comment. “What you want is impossible.”

“How do you know what I want?”

One side of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. “What do all young girls who fancy themselves in love want? The faerie tale. Marriage. Children. A husband who loves them back. But that isn’t me, Cate. I’m not the settle-down-with-one-woman type. When you are a little older you will understand.”

Now it was Cate who was angry. “Do not patronize me, Gregor. I’m twenty, not a fifteen-year-old girl anymore. I’m old enough to know my own feelings. I do not ‘fancy’ myself in love. I love you, whether you choose to accept that or not. Although the rest sounds nice, and I do think you are the settle-down-with-one-woman type—the right woman—all I want from you right now is to acknowledge that you feel something for me.”

“What I feel is lust, but I care too much about you to give in to it. Damn it, I’m trying to protect—” Suddenly, he stopped and looked as if he’d just been shot with one of those arrows he was so good with. “
How
old are you?”

She winced a little sheepishly. “Twenty.”

His gaze narrowed. “Why did you let me think you were younger?”

She shrugged. “You never asked. Your mother thought you’d guessed but didn’t want to know.”

He swore again, dragging his fingers through his hair again but this time more harshly. “Christ,
twenty
?” He dragged out the word accusingly, scanning her up and down as if she were some sort of strange creature from a menagerie that he’d never seen before.

“Is it really that important?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “No! I’m still your guardian, and you’re still too young.”

Cate’s nose wrinkled. Was that what this was about? Was that why he was fighting his attraction so hard? Because of some misplaced sense of responsibility toward her? She was no longer a foundling in need of rescue. “As you have just seen, I don’t need a protector anymore, Gregor. I can take care of myself.”

“Like you did with young MacNab? Do you know his father wanted to arrest you?”

“For what, defending myself?”

“For humiliating his son.”

She gaped at him as if he were jesting. “So I should have let him strike me?”

“Of course not. You shouldn’t have intervened in the first place.”

“He was hurting Pip.”

“There were a half-dozen of them, Cate. You should have gone for help. What would have happened if I hadn’t shown up when I did?”

She would rather not think about that. “Have you never fought when the odds were against you?”

His mouth fell in a hard line—a hard
defensive
line. “That isn’t the point.”

“What is the point, then? We are not talking about my fighting, we are talking about why you won’t act on this … lust.” She moved closer, putting her hand on his
chest—which he promptly removed. “You don’t need to feel responsible for me.”

“I
am
responsible for you, and taking advantage of your youth and inexperience would be wrong.”

Cate clenched her teeth to keep her temper in check—barely. She wanted to touch him again, but squeezed her fists at her sides in frustration instead. “Yet you had no problem kissing Seonaid, and she is a year younger than I am. What about her youth and inexperience?”

He clenched his teeth right back at her. “That was a mistake.”

That he knew it just as well as she made it somehow worse. She stared up at him. “How can you do that, Gregor? How can you share intimacies with women when they don’t mean anything to you?”

He barked out a sharp laugh. “Quite easily. The fact that you can ask that question shows just how little you understand of lovemaking. Believe me, caring is not required.”

Cate hated the flush that rose to her cheeks—hated that he could make her feel so silly and naive. “It doesn’t sound like lovemaking at all if you don’t care about the people you are making love to. Does it not bother you to break all those hearts?”

He laughed, actually laughed. “Oh, Lord, you are sweet. Do you think the women I take to my bed care about me? I assure you when a woman is making herself available two minutes after meeting me, it is not me she has fallen in love with but ‘the most handsome man in Scotland.’ ”

“Because that is all you ever let anyone see.”

He smiled, that dazzling roguish smile that had probably felled many a heart but to her felt like a slap. “And you think there is something else?”

She held his gaze steady. “I know there is.”

Her quiet certainty seemed to bother him. He frowned.
“Don’t look for something more, Caty. You will only be disappointed. I am quite happy with my life as it is.”

She stiffened at the childish diminutive. “It doesn’t bother you to have them use you like that?”

“Use me?” He laughed again, shaking his head, and then in mock seriousness said, “Aye, it’s a hardship having women eager to jump in my bed, but somehow I manage to carry on.”

But she knew it did matter to him, and that he was making fun of her made her want to lash out and prove it. “And when your sister-in-law used you to make your brother jealous, that didn’t matter either, did it?”

His expression went so cold for a moment she felt a whisper of fear. She thought about stepping back, but his fingers latched around her arm like a vise. The change that came over him was blood-chilling. Gone was the handsome heartbreaker and in his place was a deadly warrior. “Who told you about that?”

She bit her lip, not wanting to give away the confidence.

Guessing the source of her conflict, he pushed her away disgustedly. “Mother. She’s the only one who could. John and Padraig know nothing about it. What did she tell you?”

“Enough to know that it wasn’t your fault. That you cared for Isobel, and she manipulated you.”

He laughed harshly. “So being stupid and gullible is an excuse for bedding my brother’s future wife?” Cate’s eyes widened, and he laughed harshly. “Aye, I’d wager my mother didn’t know about that. But that’s the risk when two
young
people start playing a game in which they don’t know all the rules.” That warning was directed at her. “She played me perfectly. I thought she loved me, and she thought flirting and allowing a few liberties to the laird-to-be’s ‘useless but beautiful to look at’—her words—younger brother would make Alasdair jealous. Imagine her horror when we were both carried away by a few liberties.
More than once. But her plan worked. Alasdair heard the rumors—or some of them—and came home.”

Cate reached for him, but he shrugged her hand off.

She tried to ignore the stab of hurt provoked by the rejection. “He didn’t know that you and she …?”

The gaze he turned on her was full of pain and self-loathing. “Not right away. I left to fulfill my service for my uncle, thinking I would be announcing our engagement when I returned home; instead she was married to my brother. But he must have learned the truth at some point. The brother I’d idolized could barely stand to be in the same room with me.” He shrugged as if it didn’t mean anything, but she knew it meant everything. “He left not long after I returned and was killed during the siege of Bothwell Castle a few months later. My father blamed me, of course.”

“That’s ridiculous! You had nothing to do with it!”

His eyes were hot and empty as he glared at her. “Didn’t I? The truth destroyed my brother. You see, it turned out he really did love her. She needn’t have used me at all—he’d intended to marry her all along. Her betrayal—my betrayal—drove him to the edge, and he volunteered for every dangerous job he could. Eventually one killed him.”

“That isn’t your fault, Gregor. You cannot be responsible for your brother’s actions—or Isobel’s.”

He held her gaze a long time. Eventually his mouth quirked. “My father didn’t agree. After we buried my brother it was as if I ceased to exist. Turns out disdain was better than being invisible. So when Bruce was looking for men to join him, I left.”

“What happened to Isobel?”

“She died in childbirth a few months after we buried my brother. In case you were wondering, it wasn’t mine. She and Alasdair had been married for over a year before I returned.”

“You cared for her, Gregor. What happened wasn’t your fault.”

He gave her a long, slow, wicked look meant to scare her away. “As I said, caring had little to do with it.”

“So because you care about me and don’t want me to get hurt, you will not act on your ‘lust,’ but because you do not care about those other women it’s fine to take them to your bed? Do you not think that is a bit backward?” She moved closer. “Why don’t you just pretend I’m Seonaid?”

He obviously didn’t appreciate her sarcasm. “You are nothing like Seonaid.”

That they could both agree upon. But the tension she could feel rolling off him in hot waves egged her on. She wanted him to take her in his arms and show her all the passion her body was clamoring for.

“If caring is not required, what is required?” she challenged, standing so close to him their bodies were almost brushing. “Are my breasts not large enough for you? Is my face not pretty enough?”

He uttered a curse she’d never heard from him before. She could feel the tension reverberating off him like a drum. The tic in his jaw pulsed angrily. “Stop it, Cate. It won’t work. I told you I am not the man for you.”

She heard the heavy warning in his voice, but she did not heed it. He was close to giving in; she could feel it. She pressed the tips of the breasts he seemed determined not to look at against his chest, forcing him to try to deny the attraction sparking between them. “Why am I so different? Am I not willing enough? Must I throw myself down at your feet like everyone else?”

He grabbed her arm, jerking her against him, his eyes hot with anger—and something else. “Is that not what you’ve been doing since I returned?”

Cate gasped. Was that what he thought? She’d never meant … She hadn’t thought he would see it that way. She
didn’t want to be anything like those women. “I was trying to get you to notice me because I love you.”

“As if I haven’t heard that before.”

He glanced down at the breasts poking into his chest, and the heat of it scorched her. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. She thought his body was drumming with a need as powerful as hers. That the pull would be as irresistible for him as it was for her. That she had what it took to attract a man like him.

Instead, his mouth curved in a slow smile. “I’m not so easily trapped, little one. Believe me, if a pretty face and a pert pair of breasts were all it took, I would have found myself standing at the church door years ago.”

Cate wrenched away, drawing back in horror. My God, what had she been thinking? She hadn’t been trying to trap him into anything except maybe a kiss. But had she actually thought to use her body to do so?

She wasn’t sensual or entrancing. She didn’t captivate or intrigue. She wasn’t the type of woman men couldn’t resist kissing (as evidenced by the fact that she was twenty and had never been kissed!). She was “cute,” not beautiful. Her body was taut and strong from fighting, not soft and lush for lovemaking.

And his rejection reminded her of that. It crushed her womanly confidence, and worse, made her feel silly for trying.

She hoped the tears choking her throat hadn’t reached her eyes. “I wanted you to kiss me because I love you. Because every time I close my eyes and dream of what my first kiss will be like, yours is the only face I ever see. Because I’m twenty years old and I’ve never wanted any other man but you. And because I thought you wanted to kiss me, too. So if you are going to accuse me of anything, have it be for being a fool to think I had what it takes to tempt you.”

Nine
 

Gregor was fighting on his last gasp of air. He couldn’t fucking breathe. Have what it takes to tempt him? Did the lass have any idea how hard it had been for him to pull away? How that feel of her breasts against his chest had set off nerve endings he never even knew he had? How his skin had tightened, his blood had heated, and his cock had thickened until it was hammering against his stomach with need he hadn’t felt since he was her age? How much he wanted to push her up against the wall of the barrack and give her exactly what she was asking for—and probably a whole hell of a lot more?