Farah felt her heart become a fragile thing. More fragile even than the vases and sculptures that lay in shards along the expensive flooring of his home. “Is there nothing left of him?” she whispered.
He stared at a point over her shoulder for a moment, before reaching out.
Farah didn’t dare move as he pulled a wet ringlet over her shoulder and wound it around his finger. “Only the way he—remembers you.”
Hope swelled and tears overflowed her lashes again, blurring her vision until she blinked them away. She felt like a woman ripped in two by opposing forces. Exquisite pain and agonizing elation. Dougan Mackenzie had been returned to her arms. Alive. Broken. Powerful. Unable to bear her touch. Unwilling to give his heart.
Were the heavens truly so cruel?
She reached up, smoothing the wet streams of his hair off his wide brow. “You don’t look a thing like him,” she murmured with awe. “He was so small, his face rounder. Softer. And yet, I see him in your dark eye, that dear, mischievous, intelligent boy. So, you see, he cannot be dead. I must have known that somehow, all this time. It’s why I never let you go.”
“That’s impossible,” he said.
Farah lifted the hem of her blue skirt and found a white petticoat beneath that was not yet drenched. Gently, she covered a finger with the hem, much as she had when they were children, and knelt up to wipe the rainwater from his face.
After a cautious wince, he remained unmoving. Unblinking. Unbreathing as she parodied her prior ministrations to him from all those years ago.
“Of course it’s possible,” she said. “It was your Gaelic spell that you said to me in the vestry at Applecross. Those last words.”
May we be reborn,
May our souls meet and know.
And love again.
And remember.
“I remember, Dougan. And I know you never forget.” She let the petticoat fall away and traced the lines of his brutal face with fingers soft as feathers, learning and memorizing this new incarnation of him. “My soul recognized your soul—and was reborn. I knew there was something behind those eyes, beneath those gloves, that would give back to me what I’ve been missing all these years.” Farah launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck and clinging like a burr. Their first kiss tasted of salt and desperation. Tears mingled, his or hers, she couldn’t tell. Lips fused. Bodies melded. And finally, a miracle.
His thick arms encircled her, pulled her to him, then his hands plunged into her hair as he claimed her mouth with his tongue. He was as big and hard as the stone wall behind him, a mountain of ice melting beneath her warmth. But his mouth neither punished nor demanded. This time, his kiss was full of darkness and hesitancy. It was as if all the emotions he couldn’t understand or allow poured from his mouth into hers in a tumble of chaos.
Farah accepted them all. Savored them. Would hold them and help him identify and sort through them later, when they’d finished discovering just who they’d become.
She felt safe here in the arms of this dangerous man. It was like returning to a home that had been destroyed and rebuilt. The same bones, same structure, but a new core that felt more foreign than if you hadn’t ever known it from before. Walls and obstacles constructed by hands that were not her own.
But it didn’t matter to her. She’d learn this man he’d become, renovate with her love what could be improved upon, and accept and adapt to what she could not repair.
“I love you, Dougan,” she murmured against his stroking mouth. “I’ve loved you for so long.”
He released her hair and shackled her shoulders with his strong hands, thrusting her away from him so abruptly she felt it in her bones. The scar interrupted by his eye was deep enough to catch the rain, and the expression on his face finally forced the storm’s chill beneath her skin. His breath came in ragged pants, and his lips were colored with the heat of a kiss. But any other effect had disappeared, and that fact struck Farah’s heart with dread.
“I am Dorian Blackwell.” He shook her shoulders a bit, as though that would give his words more weight. “I have been for the entirety of my adulthood and will be until this wretched life is over.”
“How is that possible?” she asked gently, setting her hands on his chest to stabilize herself. Curious ridges in the hard planes of muscle called her fingers to investigate. Seams? Scars? She found herself firmly planted away from him as he prepared to stand.
“That’s just another story full of blood and death,” he warned.
“Tell me,” she insisted, fisting her hands in her skirts, promising herself that no matter how badly she ached for it, she would not reach out until he finished.
The rain beat them with a steady staccato, dripping down the stones of the wall in dark streaks that evoked images of bloodstains. The grass beneath them cushioned the hard ground and fragrant hedges hid what walls could not. It was a lovely garden, just awakened to the first nudges of spring with blooms not yet blossomed. But as Dorian spoke, a grim pall covered the whole world, one that not even this lovely corner could brighten.
“I wrote to my father, the Marquess of Ravencroft, Laird Hamish Mackenzie, before they sentenced me. I begged him not only for help on my behalf, but also for his help in locating you. In keeping you safe.” His eyes touched her for a moment, but then swung to fix on a weathered hedge, stubbornly holding on to the barren kiss of winter.
“I never heard a word from my father, though as my situation became more desperate, I wrote to him more often. Turns out, instead of the paltry sum it would have taken to hire a lawyer for me, he paid exponentially more to his friend and associate Justice Roland Cranmer the Third to be rid of me. Cranmer, in turn, paid the three most corrupt and vicious guards in Newgate to beat me to death.”