The Secret Gift (22 page)

Her kiss was every bit as fiery as he had imagined.

He could taste the sip of wine she’d stolen before he’d arrived. He could smell the lavender soap she’d bathed in that morning. He could feel the soft, soft skin at the base of her neck, and he dragged his mouth to it, tasting it with his tongue.

He heard her moan, felt her body melt into his, and he pressed his hips against her, seeking to ease the roar of blood that was pulsing through his groin.

Slow down,
he told himself.
Get hold of yourself.
But she smelled so incredibly good.

“Stay.”

Graeme breathed out the word as his mouth kissed the tingling skin behind her ear.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she whispered, and raked her fingers through his hair, dragging his mouth back to hers. She kissed him just as hungrily as he had her.

Graeme eased Libby down onto the blanket, all the while holding her in thrall with his kiss. Libby clung to him as he laid her back, sliding her tongue hotly over his. When she pressed her hips against him, seeking his hardness, Graeme couldn’t keep from moaning out loud.

He thought certain he was going to explode.

He buried his face in her neck and slid his hands up, under her sweater, cupping her breasts. Libby gasped, arched her back against him. It had been so long, so very long. He watched as she closed her eyes, and saw the rapid rise and fall of every breath as he sat back and slowly, button by button, undid her sweater.

Libby blinked, her face aglow in the firelight as Graeme flicked open the last button and pushed back the folds of the sweater to feast on her with his eyes.

She was beautiful, her breasts full, inviting. He saw a chain that hung between them with a crystal-looking pendant that seemed to glow an unusual pink color. But it was the lacy scrap of bra, all that kept him from seeing her, from tasting her, that commanded all of his attention.

And fortunately for him, that lacy scrap of bra had a clasp in the front.

All he had to do was open it.

Graeme slid up beside her, lowered his mouth to hers, and slowly traced a finger down along her neck, between her breasts, moving the chain away as he took the clasp with his fingers and—

“Pardon, sir. I just forgot my—oh, dear God in heaven!”

Graeme and Libby shot up from the floor like two teenagers who’d just been caught under the high school bleachers.

A woman stood in the doorway, her eyes covered with one hand, her mouth covered with the other.

“Flora,” Graeme said.

Libby yanked the front of her sweater closed over her breasts and tried to take a breath, feeling humiliated to her very toes.

“I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I—”

The woman shook her head, still refusing to uncover her eyes. “I’d forgotten my handbag and—oh, what the devil does it matter? Please, just pretend I was never here.”

But that was just about to become impossible when Angus appeared in the hall behind her.

“Flora, did you find your ... ?”

Libby hadn’t thought she could be any further humiliated. But she’d been wrong. Even if her sweater hadn’t been so obviously undone, the plates, the glasses, the bottle of wine. It was obvious they’d just intruded on a rather intimate setting.

Graeme saw Libby’s mortification, and quickly shielded her as he led the other two from the room. “Perhaps we should check in the kitchen for your handbag, Flora ...”

The missing bag was eventually found up in Graeme’s office, where Flora had apparently set it before leaving for the day, inadvertently forgetting it there. Graeme let Flora and Angus out the back door, not saying a word about the scene they’d interrupted, and waited until he was certain they’d gone before heading back to the drawing room.

When he got there, the room was empty.

Libby had vanished.

Libby lay awake in her small single bed at the Crofter’s Cottage, trying not to think about where she could be lying—and trying not to think about in whose arms she could be lying as well.

She curled up and closed her eyes, sighing deeply as she hugged her body tightly around the pillow. It had been so long since she’d felt this. The breathless anticipation. That giddy sense of carelessness. The slow, soft ache that seemed to pulse deep within her, melting through her every limb. It had been so long, she’d very nearly forgotten what it had felt like to want to be with a man.

It had taken her six months. Six months just to
feel
again. Six months to get over the emotional rubble of what she had come to refer to as “Hurricane Jeff.”

Libby had known Jeff Webster nearly all of her life, growing up with him from primary school all the way through high school in Ipswich-by-the-Sea. His mother had been a friend of her mother, and even though they’d gone on to different colleges, they’d often crossed paths at town celebrations for the Fourth of July or Christmas. Libby had lost touch with Jeff after she’d moved to New York, and had thought of him only occasionally, usually when she would spend a Friday “Wine Night” with Rosalia and their small circle of friends, when conversation would inevitably turn to “The Guy You Had Most Wanted to Sleep with from High School But Never Had.”

Until the day Jeff had suddenly, unexpectedly, shown up at the bookshop a little more than a year ago.

They’d shared a cup of coffee at the corner Starbucks, reminiscing and catching up over crumbling pieces of a blueberry muffin. After walking her back to the shop, Jeff had asked her out for dinner. It had seemed reasonable enough. He was looking for a job and was considering a relocation to New York. So of course he had called on an old friend, a familiar face in a strange and unknown city, someone who could tell him the best dry cleaners on the Upper West Side, or the quickest subway route to take to get to the financial district during rush hour. No doubt his mother had put him up to it.

But that one dinner had led to two. Two dinners had led to more. Eventually, several weeks and countless dinners later, they’d ended up sharing a breakfast in Libby’s bed. Jeff had gone from “The Guy She Had Most Wanted to Sleep with from High School But Never Had” to the one who had her running like a schoolgirl to catch the ringing phone.

Though she’d always held a secret sort of crush for him, Libby had never done anything more than dream that fate might someday bring her and the sandy-blond, blue-eyed Jeff together.

That secret dream, however, had seemed to come true.

Jeff had moved into her apartment not long after, making it easier for him to conduct interviews and form professional contacts. She’d be kidding herself if she didn’t admit that visions of her checkbook stating “Mrs. Jeff Webster” hadn’t danced through her fantasies fairly early on. She had been, after all, thirty years of age, and was more than ready to settle down into a stable, committed relationship.

But his proposal had been completely unexpected, coming on a snowy Christmas Eve the year before while ice skating beneath the stars in Central Park.

They’d set the date for late that April—a spring wedding in New England, when the daffodils and tulips would be ablaze in the gardens. In late February, when Jeff was finally offered a position with a Wall Street firm, everything seemed to be falling into place.

If only she’d seen the signs, but she’d been too caught up in wedding dress fittings, tablecloth color choices, and whether to offer fish or beef at the reception. Jeff’s late nights at work hadn’t seemed anything more than the novice broker learning the ropes, and Libby had been just too busy to notice his increasingly distant stares and missed lunch dates. Too busy, or perhaps just a little too afraid to admit to the truth, thinking that perhaps by pretending it wasn’t happening, she could somehow, magically, make it go away.

Everything would be better after the wedding, or so she’d managed to convince herself.

In the end, it had been all so very clichéd. Nerves, she’d told herself. Pre-wedding jitters. The bickering between them, the nights Jeff had spent on the couch, or even later at the office. The plain truth was she’d been a blind, naïve, utterly ridiculous fool.

But she wouldn’t accept all the blame for it herself. Even though he must have known days, even weeks earlier, Jeff chose to wait until the very weekend of their wedding, their wedding eve, in fact, and just two hours before the rehearsal and dinner being hosted by his own parents. He hadn’t even had the courage to tell her face-to-face, but instead had sent her a text message on her cell phone.

M SORRY, LIB. CAN’T DO IT. HOPE U’LL B ABLE TO 4GIVE SOMEDAY.

Her responding frantic calls and messages had gone unanswered.

By the time she’d gotten back to the city, Jeff had already moved his things out, what little he’d had. He’d changed his cell phone number (the cell phone
she’d
gotten for him), and he hadn’t so much as left a forwarding address. She’d found out a month later from her mother, who had heard it from his mother, that he’d moved his things out only to move them right into another apartment. Whose? A Park Avenue studio rented by her old high school friend, Fay Mills. Apparently, a leggy blond fashion model was more fascinating than a plain, ordinary antique-book seller.

Jeff’s family had been devastated, and the “Webster boy’s runner” had been the talk of Ipswich-by-the-Sea for months to follow. No doubt it still was. Such was the way of things in a small New England town. Events like that quickly became legend. Libby, however, had been spared having to hear it.

Though she hadn’t wanted to admit it, it was the humiliation that had kept her from stopping in to see her mother as often as she previously had. She just couldn’t face the stares, the pitying smiles, the knowing that every person in the town where she’d been born and had grown up knew she’d been summarily jilted at the altar.

So instead, Libby had thrown herself into her career. Working herself to exhaustion had been the only thing that seemed to help keep the heartache at bay. Eventually the sharp edge of her broken heart had dulled. She’d even gone out on a date or two, but never more than once with the same guy and never parting with anything more than a peck on the cheek. She simply used the excuse of work to discourage anyone who might have had more than a passing interest.

Always work.

Her mother had known it, had accepted it without a single word of complaint. Only now, after learning the truth of her mother’s life in Scotland, did Libby even begin to realize just how much her mother had truly understood her daughter’s need to run away.

But now, with Matilde gone, all of it—her embarrassment, her pride—seemed so utterly worthless.

Truth was, Libby hadn’t had to attend quite that many estate sales, but it had been so much easier than facing her empty apartment night after night. Rosalia did get her to go out once, only by convincing her that it would be a group gathering and thus no pressure whatsoever for her to do anything more than sip her mineral water and listen to the conversation of others. Libby had gone, but had slipped away when the token “unaccompanied male” of the group had rested his hand a little too high on her leg under the table.

The touch of a man’s hands on her skin hadn’t produced anything in her except the bitter reminder that had things worked out differently, she could be sitting alone with Jeff somewhere just then, with his hand gripping her thigh possessively.

She’d sworn she would never long for the touch of a man’s hands on her body again. And she hadn’t.

Until she’d met Graeme Mackenzie.

When he’d kissed her so unexpectedly before that fire, Libby had wondered if she’d somehow dreamed it. The wine, the fire—it had been the perfect setting for such a fantasy, but there was no denying the touch of his hands on her, and the way her body had responded so completely, so utterly naturally to him.

It was the first time in a long time that she’d truly felt alive, alive as a woman, a woman with physical needs and desires.

The intrusion of the housekeeper had been like a sudden jarring shower of ice-cold water. In fact, Libby remembered feeling quite numb for the first few seconds, as if it had been a dream after all. But then to have Angus appear as well? Her dream had quickly become the very worst nightmare. As soon as Graeme had ushered them out of the room, so obviously to spare her sensibilities, Libby had done the only thing she could think of.

She’d fled.

And now, as she lay there alone beneath a coverlet that had been knitted by two spinster sisters, she was left to do nothing more than stare at the ceiling, filled with regret, and think of what could have been.

Libby began to wonder if every significant moment for the rest of her life was destined to end up with her standing before a crowd of onlookers in complete humiliation.

The call from Hamish Brodie came early the next morning, just as Libby was entering the kitchen for breakfast.

“Checking in,” he said abruptly no more than a half second after she’d put the receiver to her ear. “Just wanted to let you know I’ve filed the necessary paperwork with the necessary parties. I’ve requested a hearing with the Sheriff Court regarding Lady Venetia’s right to manage the estate property, and have asked the Highland Council to sit in on the proceedings. They have an interest, you see, in seeing you succeed, and the community’s future. I also wanted to tell you I have a copy of your parents’ marriage record, which I received just yesterday afternoon from the Register Office.”

Libby scarcely comprehended anything else he’d said before that. “You have?”

“Indeed. Let’s see. It says here the marriage took place at a church called Balnakeil. It is up in your area, near to the village, I believe. Apparently it is a ruin, dating back quite some time, but it is still a listed church, though no one holds worship services there any longer. The minister of the village church at that time performed the ceremony there, no doubt to avoid the controversy of wedding them in the village without the blessing of the village’s landlord, the Mackays. That also explains why you haven’t been able to find any record of it in the parish records. The law only requires that the event be recorded with the General Register Office here in Edinburgh. Which it was. So, although it was a sort of secret ceremony, it is all very legal, I assure you.”