He turned to her again. In his tanned face, the blue eyes were bright as cornflowers, and his thinness made his cheekbones as sharp and pure as those on a medieval sculpture. "No."
"Then?" Her stomach tightened in squirming anticipation. She didn’t want to know. She couldn’t live another moment without finding out.
A wry smile creased his cheeks. She really couldn’t get used to that beard. "It doesn’t take long to count to zero."
Every ounce of breath left her in a whoosh, and she sagged. Such powerful relief rushed through her that it turned her legs into wet string. "None?"
He shrugged as if he hadn’t changed her world with a single sentence. "I told you, I’ve been working."
Incredible as it was, she believed him. Hamish didn’t lie. Her head was swimming. She still had trouble getting enough air into her lungs. "All these months."
"Pretty much."
She slumped into a plain wooden chair and shook her head in self-disgust. "I’ve made a complete spectacle of myself." She shot him a resentful glance. "And you let me."
Amusement lit his features. "There was no stopping you."
"At first." He dragged another chair across the roof and sat opposite her.
"But afterward…"
He spread his hands to indicate his blamelessness. "Your tantrum was too intriguing. Never in my wildest dreams had I pictured you as jealous."
"I’m not jealous," she said in outrage, sitting up as straight as a ruler and scowling at him. Jealousy implied she cared about this great galoot. When she didn’t.
Hamish let the silence extend. After a few seconds, the odious truth stuck its claws into Emily and her eyes flickered away from his knowing sapphire stare.
How utterly devastating. How utterly disagreeable. Plague take him, she had been jealous. In fact, she’d been so jealous, she’d gone quite demented.
Who knew she harbored such possessive feelings about her husband? She’d come to Scotland for a rational discussion about their future. Yet she’d launched her campaign with a fit of fireworks that revealed far too much and put her at a distinct disadvantage.
"Why?" she managed to ask.
"Why was I working?"
He was playing games. She knew he understood her question. It was her turn to subject him to an uncomfortable silence.
After a while, his lips flattened. "Nobody took my fancy."
Her arched eyebrows told him that she found that explanation inadequate.
He shifted on the chair, making it creak. "Damn it, Emily. This is my home. I’m the laird. I’m a married man." He sounded nettled. "I owe it to my clan to set an example."
"Didn’t you get lonely?"
She’d seen Hamish lose himself in his work until nothing else existed, but for heaven’s sake he’d been away since last December. That was a long time for a lusty male to go without female company. She’d spent their time apart battling not to dwell on what Hamish might do to amuse himself in her absence. The subject was too painful, even at that distance. Now she knew there had been no other women, she was curious.
His grunt was self-derisory. "Of course I bloody did."
"So…"
"So nothing." He went on with such reluctance that she couldn’t doubt his sincerity. "The shameful truth is that I missed you like the devil. There. You came up here determined to hear a dreadful confession, and now you have."
"You missed me?" That seemed even more unlikely than the fact that her red-blooded husband hadn’t tumbled every strumpet between here and Inverness.
"Yes, laugh if you like." He sounded so grim and miserable, she had to believe he’d missed her. "It’s dashed funny, after all."
She spread her hands in bafflement, even as insidious warmth squeezed her heart. "If you missed me, why on earth didn’t you come back to London and blooming well see me?"