Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
We enter the bedroom and it somehow looks different than yesterday. The fire is built higher. The candles on the mantel are full and lit. The four-poster has been turned down, the heavy quilt folded back, the linen sheet beneath it crisp and white. The heavy red curtains at the corners of the bed are pulled back and tied with gilded rope. The leaded glass of the long window is fogged at the edges with the heat of the room and the cool of the rain outside, and the rain has settled in now, hammering steady on the glass.
If I wasn’t so nervous about what’s about to happen, I’d think it was epically cozy and comforting.
He closes the door behind us, and the sound echoes across the walls. It feels final, like we’re locked inside, like there’s no turning back, and I have to fight the urge to panic.
He turns me to him and gently cups my face in both hands.
“Iris. There’s something I want to ask you.”
“Okay.”
“You have been with…how many?”
I blink. I hadn’t expected the question. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t that.
“One,” I admit. “Just Ryan.”
“Your husband.”
“Ex-husband,” I correct. “But yes. Just him.”
It was one of the things I’ve been annoyed about since the divorce, actually. All throughout my teens and twenties I could have been sewing my wild oats, but instead I settled with him and there were barely any oats sewn at all. Sure, there had been a high school boyfriend I fooled around with before Ryan, but Ryan is the one I officially lost my virginity to. Feels like I wasted so many of the “good years” of my life, even though I know that’s nonsense.
“Aye,” Alasdair says. The expression on his face gives me nothing.
“I have an IUD,” I add, because the question has put me in the headspace where I am telling him things he might want to know. “I’m not going to get pregnant. I have no interest in getting pregnant, believe me. That isn’t a thing you need to worry about.”
His expression softens for a moment.
“Aye, foxglove. Thank you for telling me.”
“And…” I clear my throat. “I’m clean. Sorry, that’s a terribly outdated thing to say. I mean, I don’t have any STIs. Only been with the one person and it’s been over a year and I hadn’t been with anyone else. I mean he was with someone else, that rat bastard was cheating on me, but when I found that I got tested and…”
“I understand,” he says, giving me a placating smile that says I don’t need to keep on blabbering.
“And you?”
He looks at me like I’ve humored him.
“It has been a very long time,” he eventually says.
“How long?” I ask, because I’m nosy.
“Long enough that you don’t need to worry about anything I might give you. Long enough that the asking embarrasses me, foxglove.”
That was not the answer I expected, and yet it’s the answer I should have expected. He’s a man who lives alone in a castle on a tidal loch in a part of the Scottish Highlands that does not have a town for fifteen miles or a city for hours, a man that doesn’t seem to interact with anyone but me. Of course it’s been a long time. Then again, small towns can surprise you.
“Okay.” I surrender.
“Okay.”
“Are we…good?”
“Aye, foxglove.”
He kisses me.
The kiss is different from the kisses he has given me before. It is the kiss of a man who has stopped negotiating with himself; who no longer wishes to be held back. His mouth opens against mine and his tongue is in my mouth, full and wet and wanting, and his hands are on my face and then on my throat and then at my shoulders, and I’m being pushed gently back toward the bed without my feet quite finding the floor between his steps.
The backs of my knees hit the edge of the mattress.
He pulls back.
He looks at me for a beat, as if to read my reaction.
Then he undresses me.
He does this slowly, even slower than he did yesterday. He undresses me like he’s unwrapping a present he’s been waiting all year for. The cardigan first, slid off my shoulders and laid across the chair beside us. Then his fingers at the hem of the cream waffle-knit, lifting it, pulling it up and over my head, the cotton catching briefly on the half-up of my hair before he frees it. My hair falls back around my shoulders.
He looks down.
I am bare from the waist up, my boobs free.
The realization that I didn’t wear a bra moves across his face the way a slow tide moves across a flat beach.
“Christ, Iris,” he says, inhaling sharply.
His hands come up. He cups my breasts in both hands, slow, like he’s weighing them. His thumbs find my nipples already hard from the air of the room and from him. He drags the pad of each thumb across them and I make an involuntary sound.