Page 75 of Devil Black

For a moment she stiffened, then eased against him, accepting what he offered. She wore only a thin night rail, and he could feel all of her, fragile and thin—she had wasted to almost nothing. He cared not for the changes—she was Isobel, with the same scent and spirit, all he desired.

“Sleep.” He put his lips against her cheek, and her hair. “Let me hold you.”

She murmured desperately, and he wondered what moved in her mind. He could virtually feel the shadows that enfolded her, yet she did not push him away. A miracle!

She lifted one hand and touched his face. “I cannot sleep,” she confessed. “Not since... I have but snatches of rest before I come awake again, and no peace.”

“Perhaps I may bring you a measure of peace, Wife. Sleep.”

To his surprise and relief, she cuddled in still closer against him but did not relax completely.

“I have something to tell you,” she began, sounding tormented. “But I do not know how.”

“Hush,” he bade, with tenderness foreign to him, and stroked her hair. He knew only that he needed to be here with her, under any circumstances.

She ignored his directive. “I have been remembering things—they return to me whether I want them or not. It has all trickled back in bits and pieces. I now remember escaping from MacNab’s keep. And I recall where, and how, I was held.”

“Do not dwell upon it, Isobel. It is over now.”

That made her stir in his arms, seeking to gaze into his face. “It will never be over, so long as you love her.”

“Her?”

“Aisla.”

Dougal felt himself tense at the sound of the name, as does a man receiving a grievous wound. “What has she to do with it?”

“I know what befell her, in MacNab’s hands.” Isobel barely breathed the words. “I was held, you see, in the same room as she. And Bertram MacNab threatened to do to me what he had done to her.”

Dougal’s throat closed abruptly. Part of him wished to hear what more Isobel had to say, wanted to gather every detail; most of him did not want to know. He managed to say, “Whatever befell her happened long ago.”

“But,” Isobel reasserted, “you love her still.”

Dougal considered the words, as best he could. The tangle of emotions he felt for Aisla certainly could not be expressed in a single word, and he was no longer sure love was uppermost in the mix of guilt, anger, regret, and shame.

“She relied on me,” he said with difficulty. “I failed her.”

“How?” Isobel moved restlessly in the bed, escaping his arms.

“I did not give her the one thing she so desperately needed,” Dougal admitted wretchedly.

“As I have failed to give you a child?”

“It is no’ the same, no’ at all!” Dougal sat up so quickly he knocked her back onto the pillow. “You could not help what befell you. I failed! Sometimes of a night I lie thinking how it must have been for her, waiting and waiting for me to come, believing I would—for I had pledged myself to her. That is the thing you do no’ understand.”

“I do,” Isobel whispered. “We all make promises.”

“And now you say you saw the very room where she endured her nightmare? Tell me!”

“Perhaps it is best if I do not. Nothing can now be gained—”

“Nothing but that I may flagellate myself as I deserve. Tell me, Wife—what tortures befell the woman I had vowed to protect?”

He heard Isobel draw a breath, like a woman backing away from a cliff edge. She glimpsed, now, the hell in which he lived day after day, night after night.

At last she said, “Upon consideration, I think such things should not be spoken, even here. Bertram MacNab is a depraved monster who needs to be destroyed, for the good of the world. For all I have suffered, I am yet glad I was able to keep my sister from his hands. And I am grateful, Husband, you snatched me on the road that night.”

Still upright in the bed, gazing down at her, Dougal said bitterly, “Would you rather be tied to a man who cannot keep his promises? Who does not deserve love?”