Claiming His Defiant Miss Read online

  Liam reached for another piece of wood and stood it up. His shirt was starting to stick to his back. He took a hefty swing, letting the axe blade cleave the wood hard. He didn’t think the ‘barn incident’ had been a mistake. What it had been was inevitable, like wildfire during a dry summer. He was sure what May thought. At the time, she’d enjoyed it. What she thought now was anyone’s guess. There’d hardly been time to talk about it with the new baby to care for and Bea to look after. The delivery had been safe, but hard. Matty, as Liam liked to think of the wee man, had been a big baby. But Liam knew, too, just how much worse it could have been. They’d all been lucky, especially, Bea. But she wouldn’t be able to do more than feed the baby and sleep for another few days.

  Yet, despite the busyness of the last few days, Liam had a suspicion that May was up to something. He rested on the handle of the axe, staring at the cottage as if he could see through its walls and divine May’s plan. It was early in the afternoon which meant she would be in the kitchen, chopping, slicing, dicing, baking—which meant punching bread. He imagined May liked that very much, especially when she was mad at him. She hadn’t been mad at him for three days now. This was the indicator that suggested she was plotting: May was being nice.

  Liam picked up a pile of wood and carried it closer to the house and stacked it in the little shed on the side of the kitchen. Of course, a nice May was delightful; she brought him hot coffee as he worked outside and quite often a little sweet something to go with it. She’d mastered the art of making shortbread biscuits. He sniffed the air near the kitchen. She might even be baking some now if his nose had the right of it. Almost done, too. He might get lucky.

  He made another trip with the wood, letting the fantasy fill his mind. A man would consider himself lucky to have all this: a solid cottage for his family, a healthy babe in the cradle, a woman doing for him, keeping his house neat and clean, putting hot food on the table at night and hot coffee in his hands every morning. It only took the addition of a woman tucked close beside him beneath the quilts every night to complete the perfection of that fantasy—a woman with long dark hair, clever hands and an even cleverer mouth. Never mind that the fantasy was stretched a bit thin. The babe in the cradle wasn’t his. But the rest of it could be. His groin started to stir. He had to give up carrying the wood for now and go back to chopping it if he was going to discourage any further arousal.

  Never mind that what had started out as May’s ‘arguments’ to prove to him that she was more than capable of a domestic life had now turned into May’s seduction. The minx! She was luring him with the fantasy. She knew how potent it would be for him. How many times had they lain under the summer sky at the lakes, her head against his chest, his arm about her keeping her close, and drawn these very images?

  ‘Liam, I would cook for you, bake for you, spread your bed with lavender-scented sheets perfectly ironed every night.’ The more they discussed America, the more it became apparent she was afraid to keep house for him. Her concern was what sort of house that might be and how would she do both—keeping that house and finding work of her own. To a girl raised in luxury’s lap, the prospect was overwhelming. She kissed him then, tenderly on the lips, before settling her head back in the hollow of his shoulder, her hair loose. He could smell the faintest hint of rosewater on those dark tresses. ‘I’d be a good woman to you, Liam.’ She ran her hand down him, finding him unerringly beneath his trousers, proudly ready for her touch.

  He let her play before he rolled her beneath him, able to stare down at her from above so she could see the earnestness in his eyes, the heat she put in them. ‘And I’ll be a good man to you, May. I’ll protect you, always, and I’ll love you for ever. I already do.’

  Naïve as the words were, he had managed to keep those promises, even if she didn’t require it of him. Here he was in the far reaches of Scotland, protecting her and, heaven help him, loving her still. Those innocent words had been spoken by a young man who didn’t know better—or rather who did know better and had conveniently forgotten the realities of the world for a while, a young man who’d got swept up in his own Pygmalion transformation and closed his eyes to the inevitable: he’d have to go back sometime.

  Liam gave the axe a hearty swing, his shoulders starting to burn with the effort. He’d been chopping a long time. But he didn’t dare stop now. He needed the clarity that came with hard work. He nearly had it all worked out when it came to May’s secret plans. She meant to seduce him with the fantasy, meant to use it to convince him to stay here instead of going to Edinburgh, even at the risk of Roan coming to them. And why not? He was just as likely to find them in Edinburgh. In her mind the odds weren’t significantly different for her regardless of place. But here was safer for her in other ways that she felt were significant.

  Did she want to avoid Edinburgh that badly? Badly enough to seduce him? The thought galled nearly as much as the knowledge that her plan had almost worked. But he was on to her now and forewarned was forearmed. He would not let May use the fantasy against him. Sometimes protecting someone meant protecting them from themselves. It wouldn’t be fair to him or to her in the long run. She’d hate herself for it later if she let the fantasy go too far. It had already gone far enough. Why had it taken so long for him to see it?

  The kitchen door opened and May stepped outside wrapped in her cloak, carrying a small plate in one hand and a mug in the other. He could see the enticing steam rising from here. Forearmed suddenly meant less than it had a few seconds ago. How was he supposed to fight this?

  She was all smiles as she made her offering, the cold already turning her cheeks red. She’d made this a habit since he’d accused her the first time of trying to bribe him. If she thought regularity bred complacency, she’d be wrong. He was just as suspicious of her intentions now as he had been then, but no less appreciative. Whatever her intentions were, it was still cold outside.

  ‘I thought you’d like something hot to drink. Your hands must be frozen. You’ve been out here for ever.’ Her gaze drifted to his discarded coat hanging on a fence post. ‘Maybe a hot bath? I’ll need to start the water.’

  ‘You’ve been awfully nice lately, May. Shortbread, coffee and cider while I work and now baths. It does make a man wonder.’

  ‘So you’ve mentioned.’ Her eyes narrowed with speculation of her own. He could almost see her mind working. ‘Can I just be grateful for a service you’ve done my friend, one of my best friends?’

  ‘You can.’ He met her green-eyed gaze. ‘But I still think it’s more than that.’ She needed to remember he wasn’t a boy any more. He’d been trained by the government to think from others’ perspectives, to see things people wanted to keep hidden. He and Preston had gone up against far greater strategists than May Worth. He drank from the mug, letting the coffee go down warm. ‘Why don’t you tell me the real reason I can’t take you to Edinburgh?’

  ‘We can’t possibly leave Beatrice alone with the baby.’ She didn’t flinch, didn’t hesitate with her answer; a sure sign it was a lie, or at least a half-truth, Liam thought. Lies came with all sorts of tells, one of which was answering too quickly. It indicated the presence of a rehearsed answer.

  Liam pretended nonchalance and took another long swallow of coffee. ‘Has she said anything more about when Fields will be home?’ Beatrice talked about the man surprisingly little for a wife carrying her husband’s child. He didn’t even know the man’s first name, although the last name was familiar enough. Where had he just heard it? Fields Something prodded his memory. It didn’t surprise him. He’d be more surprised if the man existed at all, a hypothesis that was becoming more real to him by the day.

  ‘No.’ May shook her head with a sly smile. ‘Roads can be difficult this time of year and the sea even more so. Travel is unpredictable. We may not see him until spring.’ May was trying to buy time.

  ‘He’s at sea?’ Liam asked, although he’d
already been told before. ‘His ship is the Lillibeth?’ His memory was fully engaged now, the pieces falling into place. He’d heard these names before and quite recently.

  ‘Yes.’ May gave him a hesitant look, confirming what he suspected. Liam laughed heartily and loudly as the pieces came together, quite enjoying himself.

  ‘You might as well admit it, May. There is no Mr Fields.’ He held up a stalling finger when she would have protested. ‘You’ve invented him.’ Just as she’d invented everything else here. ‘I recall that Fields is the Captain’s name in The Pirate Rogue.’ He was recalling a great deal more about the chapters May had read aloud when Bea was in labour. Fields had also been a merchant along with being an explorer, and given to long stretches of time away from land.

  ‘Fields is a common enough name,’ May argued, tenacious to the last. ‘It’s not unreasonable that a hero in a novel shares the name with any number of people in Britain.’ He wished that were true. The absence of a real Mr Fields certainly complicated his position in regards to May and Edinburgh. It gave momentary credence to May’s argument that they couldn’t leave Beatrice. But he pushed on with his debunking. There was more to her reticence than Bea and the baby.

  ‘And the Lillibeth? It seems unlikely there’d be a ship by that name captained by a man called Fields, even if every man in Britain bore that surname. I seem to remember the Lillibeth was featured in one of the chapters.’ Liam gave her a soft smile. ‘The defence of your friend is quite admirable, my dear, but it’s time to give up the ship.’

  May stood her ground, her chin starting to lift defiantly, daring him to contradict her. He should have known she’d try to salvage something useful from the wreck. ‘So now you know. There is no father for the child.’

  ‘Oh, there is a father,’ Liam corrected. ‘He’s just not here, just not married to the mother, is that it?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly so. We couldn’t very well tell the villagers that and Beatrice is too young to be a widow. Preston says young widows are always suspect.’ True enough. There’d been a young widow in Belgium who hadn’t been a widow at all, merely lonely enough to lie about it. He’d nearly got a bullet in the buttocks for his troubles.

  ‘What will you do when the village wonders why Mr Fields hasn’t returned?’

  ‘The sea is a rough place.’ May shrugged. ‘Our Mr Fields is a good captain. He’ll go down with his ship.’

  ‘As you are?’ Liam raised an eyebrow, his smile wry. His May was a cold-blooded minx. ‘We’ll just kill off Mr Fields? Is that it?’ Then, to be perverse, he added. ‘Bea will become a suspicious widow, after all.’

  May gave him an impatient look as if he was an idiot who grasped none of the intricacies of their little plan. ‘It won’t be like that. He’ll have died after the baby was born. No one will be suspicious then.’ He understood their plan all too well, along with the two giant gaping holes in it. May would have to go home sometime. She was born to satins and luxury. Her parents would never tolerate her hiding away in a fishing village for ever. That was the first hole. The second hole was that May couldn’t hold off Beatrice’s family for ever if they came for the child, which seemed a more likely threat than it had in the beginning now that he understood all the details. If Beatrice was May’s friend, she was likely high-born, too, and her parents would want her back as well once this birthing business was done with.

  They were standing close together now and his heart ached for her. She was trying so very hard to avoid reality. ‘You can’t stay here for ever, May,’ he said softly, perhaps as much for himself as for her, that this was a reminder she’d woven a fantasy for all of them at the cottage, but it could not hold.

  Her own reply was quiet steel, her eyes meeting his. ‘We’ll stay as long as we can.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  May had never understood the phrase ‘living on borrowed time’ so completely or literally until now. She finished the dishes and took off her apron. The cottage was quiet. She could hear Liam upstairs in the loft, walking about as he settled for the night. Liam was restless and worried. She could see it in his face when she took coffee out to him in the yard. He was spending more time in the cold, his eyes glued to the road. They had enough firewood now to last for months.

  She understood the reason for it: every day that passed brought the potential of Cabot Roan closer, just as every day brought Edinburgh closer. Staying as long as they could was getting shorter and shorter. She knew it even if they didn’t talk about it. Never mind that she’d decided not to go. It didn’t stop her from thinking about the deadline every time she looked at the calendar. Her parents would be arriving in the city, opening up the house they’d rented and expecting her. There’d been no news to the contrary. She couldn’t risk a letter out any more than they could risk a letter in to her. Which meant either they hadn’t heard about Preston, or that they had and Preston had counselled them not to send any further correspondence that would lead Cabot Roan to her.

  Between the threat of Roan finding her here and facing the suitor her parents were eager to show off in Edinburgh, her time was most definitely running out and with it, all that time symbolised. Most importantly, it was running out on her freedom. That particular clock had started ticking the moment Liam had arrived.

  Thinking of Liam was complicated. He represented both her freedom and the denial of it. He would drag her, although unwittingly, to Edinburgh and the prison that awaited her there. Another clock had been set with his arrival, too. This one far more personal. Did she use the anger of the past and her frustration with the present to sustain the wall between them, or did she use this precious time where there was no one to answer to, no society to stare in the face, to overcome the past and start anew? To what purpose? What did she want to come out of the new? Maybe the question is what do we do now? Liam had posed a bold question for which she had no answer, at least not one he would find acceptable. She wanted that answer to be: stay here and explore the possibilities. But they couldn’t. Even if Liam was willing to sustain the fantasy, Cabot Roan was coming and he would chase them to Edinburgh if they hadn’t left already. Borrowed time indeed.

  May reached into the cupboard and rummaged until she found the bottle of brandy stored in the back. She would choose to stay until Roan’s awful arrival happened. Just in case it didn’t. But to do that, she’d first have to convince Liam it was a risk worth taking.

  She pulled out the two ‘good’ glasses she and Beatrice had splurged on in the local shop, the memory of that decision making her smile. She put the bottle and glasses on a tray and drew a breath before heading up the stairs. What she intended was on the daring side, but desperate times called for desperate measures—desperate measures of brandy, that was. This afternoon in the yard had suggested to her rather blatantly that she needed a new plan of attack if she wanted to persuade Liam to give up on the idea of moving her to Edinburgh ahead of Roan.

  At the top of the steps, she called out quietly to announce her presence. A lamp cast its soft light across the loft. Liam looked up from where he was stretched out on the bed with a book. ‘Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve always had a book nearby.’ May set the tray down on the little bedside table. The loft felt even smaller with Liam in it. ‘What are you reading tonight?’ She sat on the edge of the bed.

  Liam marked the page with a thin ribbon and closed the book, showing her the cover. ‘The Odyssey. I did the Iliad this summer. Took me three months.’

  ‘You read too much.’ May smiled and poured the brandy.

  ‘I’m making up for lost time.’ Liam chuckled. ‘I spent the first nineteen years of my life without books. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life that way.’

  ‘How is this one going?’ May poured herself a glass.

  Liam grinned. ‘Slow, like Odysseus’s journey. Only a daft fool takes ten years to get home to the wife he loves. He’s with t
he sirens now. You can already tell that’s going to go badly for him.’

  May laughed and sipped her brandy, trying to ignore the little thrill of excitement that ran through her any time he was near, and the quiet evening ambiance of the room, and that he was studying his glass with quiet intent. ‘Since when do you drink brandy?’

  May laughed. ‘I was drinking brandy months before I met you.’ She crossed her legs on the bed and settled in with a wicked grin. ‘Didn’t I ever tell you about the time Beatrice and I got roaring drunk on my father’s good stuff? Some of her father’s stuff, too.’

  Liam leaned back against the pillows, starting to relax. They’d talked like this in the old days, trading secrets. ‘I don’t believe you did, Maylark.’

  May sipped some brandy, letting it burn down her throat, letting it embolden her. ‘It was my seventeenth birthday and my parents were gone to London to celebrate something with Preston, graduation or his first appointment, I forget. But it was big and they left me at home because I wasn’t out yet, even though it was my birthday.’ It had hurt at the time. ‘Preston was always the golden child. But I still loved him.’ She took another swallow, a bigger one. ‘I think my parents were afraid of all the trouble I’d get up to.’

  Liam gave her a considering look of mock disbelief. ‘Not you?’

  May shrugged. ‘Well, maybe they were right. Maybe I was a little too wild for London. I was certainly too wild to be left home. Beatrice came over to “celebrate” my birthday and we drank ourselves into a stupor and then got terribly sick.’

  ‘And now, May? Are we going to get roaring drunk tonight?’

  May gave a throaty laugh. ‘Oh, no, I’ve become a much more responsible drinker since then.’

  ‘Ah? Is that so? Are we celebrating then? You see, I’m trying to decide why you’ve come upstairs with brandy, May. I learned in the Iliad never to look a gift horse in the mouth. I thought we’d agreed this afternoon that your proverbial ship is sunk. You don’t need to be nice, or grateful any more. I’m on to you, remember? And suddenly here you are, in my bedroom after dark, plying me with good brandy in the good glasses. You must want something badly.’ His blue eyes were half-lidded as his gaze dropped meaningfully to her mouth, his voice low. Her breath caught at the attention. ‘One might, in fact, think you’ve come up here to seduce me.’