Beyond the Highland Mist

Page 56

“How dare you, you petite salope!” Olivia spit out. “I was only offering my help—”
“By following us, spying on us, and then bringing up his past? His past is gone, Olivia.” Adrienne wasn’t aware she was defending him until she heard herself doing it. “Some people learn from their past, grow better and wiser. My Hawk has done that. You’re just angry because you know he’s not the man he used to be. If he was, he would have stayed in the gardens with you instead of spending the evening talking with me.”
“Talking? He and I used to … talk … like that too. He’s just temporarily inflamed with a new body. He’ll get over it. And when he does, he’ll come back to my bed.”
“You’re wrong,” Adrienne said calmly. “And you know it. That’s what really upsets you.”
“Old dogs do not learn new tricks, sweet young fool,” Olivia sneered.
Adrienne flashed a saccharin smile at the older woman. “Perhaps not. But sometimes dogs give up their old tricks entirely.”
“You speak like a woman in love. Yet you wouldn’t say his name,” Olivia declared, arching a penciled brow.
Adrienne’s smile faded. “I speak for both myself and my husband when I suggest you leave Dalkeith at first light, whether the horses are rested or not. You are no longer welcome here. Don’t ever come back.”
I sure can pick ‘em, can’t I? she brooded as she picked her way through the garden.
Just as with Eberhard, the boat-deck-tanned playboy elite who’d manipulated her so flawlessly, she’d been a fool for a beautiful illusion. The real beauty had to come from inside. A man called the king’s whore … well, what kind of beauty was there in that?
Worse yet was the thought of what she’d been about to do, would have willingly done with the Hawk, if Olivia hadn’t come along. His pleas had virtually undone her defenses, and she knew full well that had Olivia not interrupted them, she would even now be lying beneath his magnificent body, just another one of the king’s whore’s conquests.
Maybe it’s not like that, Adrienne. Maybe you don’t know the whole story, a small voice in her heart pointed out.
Maybe I don’t want to know the whole story, she seethed. She clenched her hands until she felt the painful tear of nails in the soft flesh of her palms. I want to go home, she mourned like a lost child. I want Moonie.
That’s the only thing that’s worth wanting back there, she thought.
She blew out a frustrated breath.
“Adrienne.” His voice came out of the shadows of the lower bailey so softly that she thought at first she must have imagined it.
She whirled to meet his gaze. Moonlight fell in wide shafts through the trees, casting a silver bar across his chiseled face.
“Leave me alone, Hawk.”
“What did Olivia tell you?” The words sounded as though they were ripped from him against his will.
“Why don’t you go ask her? It seems the two of you communicated quite well in the past. A sort of ‘wordless communication,’ if I recall.”
“Lass, don’t,” he groaned.
“Why not? Does the truth hurt?”
“Adrienne, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t …” His voice trailed off and he sighed.
“It wasn’t what?” she said icily. Adrienne waited. Would he explain? The word whore could have a variety of meanings, none of them savory. She knew he’d been with beautiful women, and a lot of them from what the Comyn maids had told her, but just how many? A thousand? Ten thousand?
When the Hawk didn’t reply, Adrienne pushed. “Are you Olivia’s lover?”
“No, lass!”
“Were you?” Adrienne forced herself to ask.
Hawk sighed. “It’s true, but it was a long time ago, and you don’t know the circumstances—”
Adrienne glared. “I don’t want to know the circumstances under which you would be with a woman like her! If you had any discrimination at all, you would never … You men are all the same!”
Hawk’s brogue thickened measurably. “Give me a chance, Adrienne. Hear me out. ’Tisna fair to be hating me for things other men may have done to you. One more chance—that’s all I’m asking of you, lass.”
“I’ve given you too many chances! Leave me alone, Hawk Douglas. Just leave me alone!” Adrienne spun around and raced for the castle before she could humiliate herself by bursting into tears.
She dreamed of the Hawk and the promise she had glimpsed in his eyes. The hope. If he knew her past, would he still want her? Adrienne’s slumbering psyche struggled mightily with the lot of it. Dare she let herself love him? Dare she not? Her heart was still too bruised. Her mind recoiled from any possibility of further shame and regret. But the temptation to fall grew harder to resist every day. If only she were home in her cocoon of solitude. Safe again, but so lonely …