His eyes holding hers, Gowan went down on one knee, just as he had in the drawing room at Fensmore. He held her palms to his lips. “I promise never to shout at you again. I vow it.”

The joy in Edie’s body was more potent than canary wine, more heated than the sun. She sank to her knees. “I promise never to lie to you. That’s my vow. And I will never love anyone the way I love you. I think we are both marked by our childhoods.”

Gowan made an inarticulate sound.

Edie leaned forward. “I love you, Gowan. Just as you are: problem-solving, brilliant, domineering, beautiful, poetic. You’re a poet when you’re not bossing bailiffs around.”

“And I love you, lass.” Gowan’s accent turned to a proper burr. “You’re my heart, Edie. My everything.”

Tears were sliding down her face, and he was kissing them away, and then somehow they were back on the bed. “I don’t deserve you,” he said hoarsely, “being as you love me even though I’m a proper—”

Edie stopped him with a kiss. “You survived,” she told him. “I love you the way you are because you not only survived, but you triumphed. All these people depend on you, Gowan. You could have been like your father, and turned your back, but you didn’t. And you never will.”

Gowan wasn’t listening to her, but she meant to tell him that two or three hundred times in the next fifty or sixty years, and someday he would understand.

“May I touch you, Edie?” he asked, his eyes fierce with desire.

Her heart was so open and wide that she didn’t hesitate. “Both of us,” she said, reaching for him.

They were kindling to a bonfire. He kissed his way down her body, put his mouth on her most delicate spots, and licked until her blood throbbed. Until she was whimpering, and crying. Until his fingers and his mouth ravished her so that she shrieked, her body arching from the bed.

Still, he didn’t even stop, not until they discovered that Edie could come again and again . . . but by then she was maddened with desire, and her begging went to Gowan’s head.

“Shall we?” he asked, husky and low, when he was so overcome by a desire to be with her in the most profound way possible that he couldn’t stop himself.

Edie sobbed without words, pulling at him. Gowan nudged her legs apart, braced himself, and slid in.

It didn’t hurt. Not even the tiniest amount. There was just an intoxicating feeling of fullness . . . and it was Gowan inside her.

But he didn’t move, waiting. “Is it painful?” he asked. In that moment Edie knew that if she felt the merest twinge, he would back away. The thought—his concern, his control—made flames lick at her.

She shook her head, clutched his arms, and opened her mouth, but just then he withdrew and pulsed into her again. He kissed her so hard that her scream was silenced. Then all of a sudden those feelings—that wild explosion of heat and emotion—ripped through her body again.

Gowan tore his mouth away and looked down at his wife in amazement. Edie was arched against him, her body shaking, eyes squeezed shut. Her hair was darkened with sweat, like corn silk in the rain.

He felt a joy through his body that would never go away. So he drew back and began thrusting into her over and over and over. Her eyes flew open and she gasped, “Can you feel it if I do this?”

“Hell,” he rasped, because he could feel exactly what she was doing. “If you do that, Edie—don’t do that! I’m going to lose control.”

She laughed and didn’t obey. With every pump of his hips, she rose to meet him, her thighs clamped around his body. She was clutching him inside, over and over. He couldn’t stop going harder, pounding, hurtling closer toward something that was almost frightening in its intensity.

Then Edie opened her eyes again, her lovely green eyes, and gasped, “Gowan.”

Her voice was desperate, and hunger blazed down his backbone.

“Will you—”

He braced his arms, leaning down to brush a kiss on her lips. “Tell me,” he managed.

Her hands slid down his back to his arse and pulled him even closer. He threw his head back. He dimly heard her gasp his name, and then she was clenching on him again, but it was tighter and sweeter than he could have imagined. Her whole body shook under him and she cried out . . .

Something in Gowan broke free. His whole body flamed up as he thrust into her.

She’s all states, and all princes, I. Nothing else is.

Edie sobbed beneath him. Gowan threw back his head, roared, and spent himself, giving her everything he had.

She gave it back, and gave it back again.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.

This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Forty-one

Edie woke, confused, to the sound of rushing water. And then she realized that she wasn’t alone. She was lying on her side, facing away from the man whose arm was curved around her waist. And she knew instinctively that if she moved, she would wake him.

“Don’t even think about it,” Gowan’s sleepy voice growled, and sure enough his arm shifted and a hand slipped around one of her breasts. “Mmmm. I believe this is my favorite part of your body.”

She laughed.

His hand slid downward. “Of course, I like this, too.” He cupped her between the legs, his hand warm and affectionate. “This is my favorite way to wake up.”

“Lords and ladies in polite society do not sleep together,” she pointed out, a gurgle of laughter in her voice. “That is for peasants, who must keep each other warm.”

His hand was back at her breast. “I love your body heat.” Then, uncannily, as if he had read her thoughts, he said, “I don’t think I’ll ever want to sleep without you, Edie. Those endless hours when I was riding from the Highlands in the rain, when I landed in the ditch, when I found another horse—”

“When you climbed the tower in the dark and the rain!” she said, rolling over to face him. She felt a pang of fear at the memory. “I almost lost you.” She dropped another kiss on his biggest bruise, the one that spread right across his shoulder.

“I thought I had lost you,” he said, pulling her closer. “I was so terrified. As frightened as if the moon fell from the sky, or the sun never rose.”

She slipped a leg between his, loving the way his breathing roughened at her slightest touch. “No more climbing towers.”

He grinned, and her heart thrilled to the flash of wild humor in his eyes, the laughing Gowan whom almost no one glimpsed but her. “Do you know the Clan MacAulay motto? It’s dulce periculum; danger is sweet. Go ahead and lock yourself in another tower, Edie. Danger is sweet, but you are sweeter.” He leaned forward and kissed her.

She drew away sometime later, her fingers trembling. “I love you,” she whispered.

He kissed her again.

“You will have to get used to sleeping alone,” she said a while later, teasing him, but a little serious as well. “I can’t constantly travel with you from estate to estate, Gowan.”

He shrugged. “So I won’t travel anymore.”

“But I thought you had to move from one to the other!”

“I thought through all that while I was away. There are a few decisions that only I can make. But the world is full of intelligent men. I have Bardolph to manage them. I have you to manage me.”