He didn’t like to think of that day. It still pained him—aye, pain, the sort of pain he’d never in his life experienced. He’d come riding up from the cove with a few of his men and had seen the coach pulling away from Balhaire. He had reined to a halt, had glared at her as she’d passed and as the agony of this reality had settled into his marrow. The burn was deep—he was humiliated before his clan and at the same time made to understand what an ignorant man he was. And the burn was accompanied by the ache of watching someone leave him, someone whom he had, against all odds, come to care for very much.

A fool. There was no other word for him.

Arran would never forget that pain, as it burned in him yet. And he realized, as he scratched Old Roy behind the ears, that the time for reconciliation had come and gone. He’d not be made a fool of again.

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

MARGOT WAS AWAKENED by a dour-faced woman who announced a bath would be drawn for her, then shoved the draperies aside with such verve that Margot cried out when she was blinded by the sun. “Thank you,” she said, turning her face to the pillow. “Would you be so kind as to send my maid?”

The woman muttered something on the way out. Margot waited until she heard the door close before she pushed herself up to sit and brushed back the hair from her eyes. She was exhausted. And deliciously sore. And confused.

Last night had not been the homecoming she’d expected. Arran had confounded her. The passion he’d shown her—raw, formidable anger and desire—had moved her. She’d been dangerously inflamed by it, her body wanting the coarseness of it all.

But then there had been that slender moment, that tender caress. It had hardly happened at all—but she had felt it. She had seen it. And then he had made her turn her head.

What did it mean? Did he despise her? Was there a part of him that didn’t? Or had it been only a moment?

Arran seemed different to her now. Older. Wiser. Much more sure of himself than he’d been before. And whatever he’d meant by that touch, however truthful, it had awakened emotions Margot was not prepared to face. Such as regret. Buckets and buckets of regret for leaving him at all. For not having left sooner. Regret that she’d not known how to defy her father and never enter this marriage, regret that she’d allowed herself to be ruled by her emotions for the short months she’d spent here.