Once Upon a Tower

Page 77

He was moving faster now. He didn’t care about the ground, dwindling below him. His wife was leaning as far as she could out of the window, her golden hair falling forward over her shoulders and down the gray stone of the tower.
He had to rest for a moment because his wrist was on fire, and his ribs were shrieking with pain. “You cannot leave me,” he said, the words coming from his mouth somewhere between a command and a prayer. He reached, and hauled himself up a little farther.
“I know I’m shite in bed,” he said, not looking up because he was afraid the weight of his own tipped head would tear him from the wall. “But I can improve. We can stay in the bedroom, the two of us, for a year and a day. No footmen, Edie. I promise you that.”
He reached up again with his left wrist—that was the worst and a grunt broke from his lips despite himself.
She was sobbing and the sound of it drove him higher.
“I’m your falcon.” The words exploded from his heart, the way they had come to him when he’d stared into the loch and tried not to think about her . . . and had failed.
“Gowan, you’re out of your mind,” Edie cried, leaning out the window so far that her entire upper body was visible.
“Don’t fall!” he shouted, his voice exploding into the rainy silence around them.
“I won’t. Just please, please, Gowan, you’re close now. Just two or three more moves.”
“It’s this bloody wrist,” he told her. “I might have broken the damned thing.”
He heard her gasp, but he was pulling himself up again. “You’re not mine,” he told her, just below her now, almost within reach. “I’m yours, lass. You’re a net that I’m tangled in.”
“No poetry,” she cried, reaching down again, and then he felt her touch on his wet hair, so he pulled himself up again.
Once more.
And again.
Then over the windowsill.
The Duke of Kinross had done that thing that no man had done in six hundred years: he had conquered the unclimbable tower. In the rain. With two cracked ribs and a broken wrist. With a broken heart and a stubbornness inherited from generations of Scottish lairds.
Maybe those ancestors were at his shoulder, and pushed him up those last few feet. Or maybe it was the golden sweep of her hair, like Danaë’s gold, summoning him in the rain. Or maybe it was the nightingale sound of her voice.
Or maybe it was just Edie.
The Edieness of his wife. The way he loved her, bone deep, every musical note that made up her gorgeous, stubborn, generous, joyful soul.
Forty
Gowan might have passed out, just for a moment; he came to himself to find that he was kneeling on the floor, Edie in his arms, and she was sobbing against his shoulder.
“No,” he whispered. “Don’t cry, mo chrìdh. I’m sorry,” he blurted out, self-recrimination roughening his already hoarse voice. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She raised her face, and his heart cracked open at the sight of her eyes. His body hurt too much to stand up, just yet.
“You’re soaked!” She slipped away from him and came back with a towel, warm from hanging before the fire. Then she started pulling off his sopping garments until she saw the binding around his ribs and stopped in horror.
“I made close friends with a ditch,” he explained, standing and stripping the rest of his wet clothing off.
“Is it painful?”
He shook his head, taking the towel from her hands. Edie watched wordlessly as he dried off his legs, then his torso and arms. Finally he lifted his arms, albeit with a wince, and gave his wet hair a rough tousle before he wound the towel around his waist. He had an erection, of course. It hardly registered anymore, not when he was around her.
But she fell back when he stepped toward her. He stopped. “I didn’t mean to say that you wouldn’t be a good mother, Edie. You’ll be a wonderful mother. I need only think about you with our child in your arms and my heart melts.”
Her eyes were shuttered, and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“I should never have made arrangements for Susannah without asking you, but the outcome seemed inevitable. Even so, I’ll never do anything like that again. I will always ask you about the smallest thing that might interest you.” It was a vow.
“Susannah and Layla, and now my father, too, are happy,” Edie said. The sound of her musical voice made a purr of joy ripple through him.
“Please forgive me,” he said, taking another step toward her because he couldn’t stop himself. “I’m a hotheaded fool, and I was in the grip of a feeling of failure. I hate myself for having been cruel.”
“You said no more than you believed. Though I do think you’re mistaken about my capacity for motherhood.” A very small smile lit her eyes. “Susannah and I have come to appreciate each other much better in the last fortnight.”
It was like a dagger to his heart. Why hadn’t he been there? This was his family. He had been such a fool, keeping himself in the Highlands when his heart, his reason for living, was here.
He cleared his throat, finding it difficult to shape words. “There was nothing revolting about the way you found pleasure, Edie. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The only problem was that I knew instantly that I had failed to give you that pleasure before. I’m so sorry about that.”
Her lashes swept down. “I don’t really want to talk about it, Gowan.”
“We must talk about it,” he said desperately. “I can’t let you go, Edie. I can’t.”
“I know,” she said, unexpectedly.
“You do?”
She nodded. “You succeed at everything you do, Gowan. Now you have to succeed at bedding me because you cannot bear the thought of failure. Or,” she added, her brow darkening, “of letting something you purchased slip away.”
“I was mad to say such a thing. I should have been at your feet, thanking you for accepting my hand, and instead I was preening myself for having bought you, as if you were just another feather in my cap.”
Her face didn’t move, but he saw the pain in her eyes.
“I don’t deserve you.” The words were wrung from his heart. “I failed you in bed, and then I blamed you because I was ashamed.”
Finally, finally, she stepped toward him and her hand curved around his cheek. “You didn’t fail me in bed, Gowan. You mustn’t think that way. We are simply not compatible.”
“We are compatible,” he said stubbornly.
“You must accept that sometimes the world doesn’t go the way you wish,” she said gently.
He wanted to howl at that. Go the way he wished? With his parents . . . the dog he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about . . . the work that never ended. Without Edie, he faced day after day of toil. What hadn’t bothered him before felt like a sentence of ten thousand years of dark loneliness. After knowing her, and loving her.
“Please,” he said hoarsely. “Give us another chance, Edie. Please.”
There was a long moment, and then she asked, “Why did you climb the tower?”
“You wouldn’t let me in, and I had to be with you.” It was that simple.
A smile wobbled on her lips. He could see that kiss tucked in the corner of her mouth, the one that she never gave away, the one that made her so kissable.