The Highlander's Christmas Lassie by Anna Campbell

Author:Anna Campbell [Campbell, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anna Campbell
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Malcolm lay awake in the comfortable room that Rhona had shown him into. A fire blazed in the hearth, and he stretched out under a pile of eiderdowns in a big oak bed.

The snowstorm seemed to have blown itself out. The house around him was silent, and he was drained, not just from the last few days, but from years of bracing to discover the worst.

Whatever happened next, his obsessive searching had reached a happier outcome than he’d ever dared imagine. Even if Rhona decided she couldn’t bear to see him again and Patrick evinced no interest in his long-lost father, the world was a brighter place now that Malcolm knew that both Patrick and Rhona remained in it.

Yet still he couldn’t sleep. His head was buzzing with Rhona’s astonishing story. How marvelous she was. If only he could tell his stiff-necked father just what a treasure he’d scorned all those years ago. She was unlike anyone else, a queen and a goddess.

He’d cherished the memory of the young Rhona, but already the woman she’d become, so much more complex and fascinating, encroached on that image. His faithful soul was doubly pledged to her. Even with Rhona doing her best to maintain the distance between them, he’d tasted something like happiness in her kitchen tonight. The nearest he’d come to happiness since she’d left him.

He’d found Rhona. He’d found Patrick. Surely heaven wouldn’t be malicious enough to snatch away this second chance at fulfillment.

Except his trust in heaven’s benevolence had come to a violent end when he was eighteen. He couldn’t accept that now he’d found his beloved and his child, they wouldn’t disappear again. How unbearable to think that Rhona might send him back into the cold. In these last years, he’d barely clung to a scrap of humanity. What little remained of the man he’d once been would disintegrate if there was to be nothing more between him and Rhona than one short evening of prickly conversation.

She’d answered his curiosity about where she’d been all this time. But his needs stretched far beyond mere curiosity. None of which he could satisfy after midnight in this house where she’d offered him such grudging shelter.

Malcolm punched his pillow and shifted yet again on the soft featherbed. He told himself he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since his darling had been ripped away from him, so what did it matter if he missed out on yet another? But on those frustrating, miserable nights, his love hadn’t been sleeping a few doors along the corridor.

A good portion of his restlessness stemmed from frustrated desire. Over the years, it was inevitable that the Rhona in his mind had lost some of her physical reality. But tonight, seeing her in the flesh – and what glorious flesh it was – reminded him how a glance from those green eyes had once made him as randy as a young bull.

He was no longer a young bull, but, by God, his body didn’t seem to recognize that reality.

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