But Alec wasn’t looking at the dog.
He was looking at Lily, fast asleep at the center of the bed, in a pool of golden candlelight.
Wearing nothing but his plaid.
A better man would leave her. Close the door and find another bed. Another house. Another country.
A better man would have the strength to protect her from himself, the greatest danger she would ever face. The man who would claim her, keep her . . . despite being desperately, wholly unworthy of her.
He was not a better man.
His hand tightened on the door handle. He had tried to be. He had wanted to be. But now, here, bearing witness to her utter perfection, he no longer had the strength for it.
He ached for her. He wanted her. He wished for her.
It had only ever been her.
And in that moment, everything he was, everything he would ever be, was hers. And tonight, perhaps, he could fool himself into believing that she was his.
He looked to Hardy, pointed to the hallway. “Out.”
The dog followed the order instantly.
Alec closed the door, already heading for her. He stopped at the bedside, looking down at her as she slept, her hair a pool of auburn fire against the crisp linen. The bed was not too small. It was the perfect size for her—a fairy queen in her bower. She moved, one bare shoulder peeking out from the red tartan—pink and perfect and calling to him. He could not help himself. He groaned.
She opened her eyes at the sound, immediately finding his, as though the universe had connected them with a string. She did not start at his presence, as one might expect, finding a man of his size at one’s bedside. Instead, she smiled, soft and full of sleep, and Alec warmed with wicked pleasure. “You are home.”
She waited for him.
“How did you find me?”
The smile widened. “You are not the only one with access to Settlesworth, Your Grace.” She looked to the table several feet away, hosting a porcelain animal tea party. “I would not have thought this would be quite your aesthetic, though.”
He might have laughed if he did not want her so much. If he were not so broken by her presence. “Why are you here, Lily?”
She blinked, and he loathed himself for the doubt that flashed in her gaze. “I—” She stopped. Took a deep breath. Met his gaze with renewed certainty. “I came for you.”
His knees weakened, but he resisted the urge to go to her. To touch her. To give in to his desire. Somehow. Instead, he said, “My mother was English.”
A pause. Then, “As was mine.”
He ignored the reply, edged with humor, her eyes glittering and making him want her more than ever before as she threatened to laugh. As she tempted him more than he’d ever dreamed possible. “She was beautiful. My father was wild over her. Allegedly.”
“Allegedly?”
“By the time I arrived, neither cared for the other. They lived in Scotland—in the Highlands—and he worked the family distillery. She thought he was wealthy and landed, and he was, but the business—the estate that came with it—it was not run by another. It was run by Stuarts, had been for generations. He was a man who harvested wheat and sheared sheep and tarred roofs and mucked stalls. And she loathed it.”
She sat up as he spoke, the Stuart plaid wrapped about her, auburn hair down around her shoulders, and he resisted the urge to drink her in. Focused on the tale—once cautionary, now prophetic. “She was not made for Scotland, my father would say. She was too perfect. Slender like a reed, but unbendable. She could not bear the cold, the wet, the wild. We moved south, to the border, to another estate owned by the family. And my father thought the proximity to England would change her. Would return the girl he’d once loved.”
“That is not how it works.” She clutched the plaid to her breast, the fabric tempting him with little glimpses of shadow.
“You told me once that love is a powerful promise.” And it was. “My father learned that firsthand. As did I.”
Her eyes widened and he loathed the sadness there. “What happened?”
“She left us.”
Lily’s lips opened in a little, silent inhale. “When?”
He wanted to touch her more than he wanted to breathe, but this story, this prophetic tale, required telling. “When I consider it, she left our hearts long before she left us in truth. I cannot remember a time when she was happy.”
She did not look away from him. “Not even with you?”
“Especially not with me. I was all Scots. Too big. Too coarse. I would come in from the fields and she would shake her head in disappointment and say, to herself as much as to me, Nothing about you fits.”
Her brows were stitched together. “What does that mean? Fits where?”
“Here,” he whispered, the word harsh with memory. “The afternoon at the park. When you told me that you hadn’t received a birthday gift since you were a child?” She tilted her head in silent question. “I think you had the best of the possible scenarios. I doubt my mother ever even knew it was my birthday.”
What a ridiculous thing to remember. He was a grown man, four and thirty, and thinking on his childhood birthdays as though they mattered. He cleared his throat. Tried for calm. “She ran, eventually. She’d been sick for months—consumption—and she was convinced that it was Scotland that was doing it. Killing her.” He looked away. “I often wonder if she thought it was me.”
“She didn’t,” Lily said, and he could not help himself from looking at her. From meeting her grey eyes and drinking in the certainty in them. “It was not you.”
And for a fleeting moment, he wondered what might have become of him if he’d had Lily then, when his whole world had crashed down around him.
She might have saved him. Might have loved him.
Might have borne him a line of beautiful little girls, red-haired and perfect, who would have worn the little clothes she’d sewn and mended his heart.
Instead . . . “She died not two weeks after she returned to England.”
Lily gasped his name and reached for him, but he stepped out of her reach, not trusting himself in the wake of her touch. “You did not kill her.”
“I know,” he said. “But neither did I save her.”
She shook her head. “You cannot save us all.”
“The moment I was old enough, I fled as well. For England. For school. My father—” He stopped.