Underneath The Mistletoe Collection. Marguerite Kaye
her mind still trying to come to terms with what her heart had been trying to tell her for days now. Weeks? How long had she loved him?
‘I suppose it was obvious,’ Innes said. ‘My being so dead-set against marriage—I always wondered what you made of that.’
‘I thought...’ What? What! She gazed at him, such longing in her heart, letting it flood her for just a moment. Just a moment. She loved him so much.
‘Ainsley? You thought...’ Innes prompted.
He must not guess she loved him, that was what she thought. Because if he guessed, he would send her away immediately, and she needed a few more weeks. Just a few more. ‘I thought there must have been,’ she said. ‘A woman. I thought that’s what it must have been.’
‘Well, you were right.’
She waited, trying not to show what she was feeling. Was she looking at him differently? Innes was staring out to sea again, his throat working. Whatever was coming next, he was struggling with it. She didn’t want to hear him talking about another woman, but he obviously needed to tell her. Ainsley ruthlessly thrust her own storm of feelings to one side. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘There was a woman. And of course she was lovely.’
‘She was. She was very lovely.’
She hadn’t meant him to agree with her. Now, perversely, she wanted to twist the knife, as if knowing how very different she was from his one true love would stop her loving him. ‘No doubt she was graced with a fortune, too,’ Ainsley said.
‘She was rich. An orphan and an only child, she was brought to live at Glen Vadie when she was just a bairn.’
‘Glen Vadie. That is the Caldwell estate?’
Innes nodded. ‘Aye, she was a distant relative of my mother’s. We grew up together.’
It was beginning to sound horribly like a fairy story, though without the happy ending, Ainsley thought. She already hated this rich, charming, well-born, beautiful woman.
Innes heaved a sigh. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not being very articulate. The truth is, I can hardly bear to think of it, for even after all this time I’m ashamed, and I don’t know what you’ll think of me.’
‘Innes, I could never think ill of you.’
He shifted uncomfortably on the stone and then got to his feet. ‘Ainsley, you will.’ His expression was deeply troubled, his eyes stormy. ‘I could let you go without telling you. I considered it, but I did not want this all to end on a lie.’
‘End?’ He had said it. She had known he was going to say it, but she wished he had not.
‘It was always going to end, Ainsley. We both knew that. It was what we agreed. You made it very clear you did not want anything else.’
Felled. Could a person be felled? She was felled. ‘And you?’
She hadn’t meant it to sound like a question. She couldn’t bear the way he answered her with such finality. ‘And me, too,’ Innes said gently. ‘Your being here, it was only meant to be for a wee while, to help me decide what to do with the place.’
‘But you haven’t decided,’ Ainsley said, unable to disguise the desperation in her voice. She was clutching at straws, she knew that, and knew, too, that it was pointless, but she couldn’t help herself.
‘I’ve decided that I’m going to stay,’ Innes said. ‘Besides, you know that’s not the point.’ He was flushed, but his mouth set firm, and when he spoke, though the words were said softly enough, the tone was resolute. ‘This morning I realised how much I have come to care for you, Ainsley. It’s not only that it breaks the terms of our agreement that makes my feelings for you wrong, nor that I know you don’t want the complication of any feelings at all, it’s that I can’t. It has to stop before either of us gets in too deep, for I will not allow myself to love you, Ainsley. I won’t.’
It hurt even more than she’d expected. She bit her lip hard, dug her nails into her palms, telling herself that she was glad he had not guessed her own feelings.
‘You’ll think me arrogant,’ he said, ‘telling you I won’t love you when you have no thought in your head of loving me.’ He sat down beside her again and took her hand, which she quickly unfurled from its fist. ‘This morning, we both got carried away. I could see from the look on your face afterwards that it—it shocked you as much as me. I don’t know what it is between us, maybe it’s spending so much time together that’s...I don’t know, intensified it, made it seem more than it is?’ He shrugged. ‘I do know that we neither of us want it, though. I do know that if I wasn’t telling you that it’s over, you’d be saying it to me, wouldn’t you?’
She ached to tell him just how far off the mark he had been in his interpretation of her reaction, but she was not so foolish. It was not pride that stopped her telling him how wrong he was, but love. Heartsick, she could only nod.
‘Aye.’ Innes nodded slowly. ‘I thought about letting you go without telling you, but I couldn’t. I want you to know, you see, not only because I owe it to you but because I—I can’t afford to allow myself to hope. This morning was like a glimpse of heaven and glimpse of hell at the same time.’ He stopped, running a shaky hand through his hair, and drew her a very ragged smile. ‘That’s why I brought you here. To remind me why it can’t go any further, and by showing you the worst of me, I’ll be making sure that even if I kept on wanting what I am not entitled to, I could never have it.’
As he looked over his shoulder at the cross, beneath which lay his brother’s mortal remains, goosebumps made Ainsley shudder. Her heart was clinging to Innes’s confession of how much he had come to care for her, wanting to believe it would be enough to turn the situation around, to persuade him that he could care more. Hope, that treacherous thing she could not seem to extinguish, blew this tiny flame to determined life. All she had to do was tell him that she loved him. That was all it would take.
But her head was having none of this. Innes did not want her love. Innes would not love. Innes did not feel entitled to love. It was a strange word to use, but as he turned back to her, his face bleak, the question died on her lips.
‘Her name was Blanche,’ he said.
It was, as Ainsley anticipated, horribly like a fairy tale. Blanche, Malcolm and Innes, like brothers and sister at first, until Blanche changed, seemingly overnight, blossoming into a beauty. The brothers no longer felt at all filial towards her. Desire, lust, and with it competition, had entered into their Garden of Eden.
‘But Blanche preferred you?’ Ainsley said, because of course she would, and who would not?
Innes looked genuinely puzzled. ‘How did you guess?’ Fortunately, he did not wait for an answer. ‘We tried to ignore it,’ he said. ‘How pathetic that sounds.’
‘You were very young.’
‘Old enough to know better.’
‘But if you were old enough—and you and she— If you were in love, then why— I don’t understand what the problem was.’
‘The problem,’ Innes said grimly, ‘was that Blanche was betrothed to my brother.’
Ainsley put her hand to her mouth, caught Innes watching and made a conscious effort to wipe the shock from her face. ‘But you were twins. Surely if Malcolm knew how you felt...’
‘He did not. We made sure he did not. At least, I thought we did,’ Innes told her, his mouth curled with disgust. ‘Besides, you’re forgetting that this is Strone Bridge. My father and Caldwell of Glen Vadie had signed the betrothal papers. A younger son would be no substitute for the heir.’
‘But if Blanche was in love with you...’
‘But Malcolm was in love with Blanche. And since Malcolm was my twin, I persuaded myself that I would be doing the honourable thing in giving her up, then I set about persuading Blanche