Fifteen

His wife was the devil incarnate.

“Good morning, husband! Isn’t it a lovely day?”

True, she didn’t have horns or cloven hooves or smell like brimstone, but Dare was convinced she was a handmaiden of Satan, if not the Dark Master himself.

“Of course, you wouldn’t know it’s a lovely day outside since you sit here in the dark. I’ll just open these curtains and let the sunlight in.”

Who else but the devil would derive such pleasure from his pain?

“You haven’t eaten your breakfast. Dare, you must eat, you can’t expect to regain your health if you don’t eat.”

She was smiling at him, dammit, her dimples blaring away as she tried to coax him into eating. She was always coaxing him to do something or other. He didn’t want to be coaxed, he wanted to be left alone. In the dark. With no bright blue eyes to remind him just how much he’d lost.

He wanted to die.

“Dare? I’ve made something for you.”

He closed his eyes…eye…and held his breath. If he pretended he was asleep, perhaps she’d leave him be. It had worked in a past. A couple of times. Not recently, though.

“Here it is! It’s a new eye patch. Do you like it?”

Air moved in front of his face as if someone swung an object before him…an object approximately the size and shape of an eye patch.

An eye patch he needed to cover the gaping hole in his head where his right eye had once been.

“It wasn’t easy embroidering your plaid colors, but I persevered, and I think the effect is really quite stunning.”

There he sat—eyeless, scarred, his right arm limp, a complete wreck of a man. Useless, that’s what he was. No, worse than useless—pitiful. He was a pitiful, useless, half-man, one who had failed his wife at every possible level of husbandness.

“The sporran, I believe, adds a particularly cunning touch.”

Pitiful and pathetic, a shell, a former man, now good for nothing but sitting in the dark, taking up space, eating food that should go to better, more worthy, deserving men who hadn’t ruined their lives and their wives’ lives…sporran?

Dare opened his eye. “You put a sporran on an eye patch?”

Charlotte knelt at his feet, one hand resting on his knee. She held a red eye patch in one hand, decorated in such a manner that it looked like a miniscule kilt, complete with sporran. She must have worked for hours over it.

“Give it to someone else,” he heard himself say gruffly. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t know any other McGregor who needs an eye patch.” Charlotte flashed those damned happy dimples at him again. Her hand tightened on his knee, sending a sudden flash of warmth up his leg, straight to his groin.

That was another way he was bound to disappoint her. She wanted children. She had enjoyed their liaisons in bed. Now she was shackled to him for life, a pitiful specimen of mankind who would never be able to fulfill even her most basic desires.