The Templar's Seduction by Mary Reed McCall

Author:Mary Reed McCall [McCall, Mary Reed]
Language: nld
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Alex was tempting fate by continuing along his path of seduction with Beth, and he knew it. Leaning against the wall and watching the revelry of the feast going on around him, he was very aware that a war was being waged inside him, the outcome of which remained uncertain.

The part of himself that he recognized all too well from his decades spent in pursuit of self-preservation — the part that tended toward the easiest path and that preached a message of doing anything necessary so long as the ends were achieved — kept calling him to ignore all else and continue making love to Beth, hotly, passionately, and as often as possible. It argued that undertaking that act with her was in fact expected of him as the husband he was playing.

There was no lack of attraction between them, after all. She was an eager partner, and the Alex of old would have felt few if any qualms in bedding her. The old him would be milking every drop of pleasure he could from the circumstances he'd been handed, convincing himself in the process that he had no other choice in the matter.

But a new and unexpected voice had been asserting itself inside him ever since he'd set foot inside the walls of Dunleavy Castle, growing louder and more insistent with every intimacy he'd shared with Beth. It flooded him with guilty regret in the awareness that he was taking her under false pretenses. He was deceiving her, and he hated it. How such scruples had arisen in him — him, of all men, who was so much farther from noble instinct than his brother or any of their Templar brethren — and why those newfound principles had such power over him, he had no idea. He only knew that they were relentless.

They kept saying that what he had done by coming here in the guise of Beth's husband was wrong enough. But making love to her was truly wicked — the worst form of betrayal he could inflict on her, perhaps. It might be worse, even, than the treachery he was committing by feeding Dunleavy's secrets to the English, for in becoming intimate with Beth he had violated her in the most personal sense, regardless of the fact that he had come to care for her deeply over the course of their time together.

He was an impostor. A tarnished former Templar Knight and a convicted thief who had been mere hours away from feeling the bite of the noose round his neck. He was not the esteemed Robert Kincaid, fourth Earl of Marston, celebrated warrior in the battles for Scotland's freedom ... or Elizabeth of Selkirk's lawfully wedded husband.

There was no escaping that fact no matter how much he wished to or how hard he tried.

The part of him that recognized it decried what he was doing here with her ... it urged him to confess, come what may. So strong had its pull become that only

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