‘It is not that. If my words hurt you, that was not my intention, Callum. All I want is….’
‘Safety.’
‘What?’
‘You want safety from strife and worries. You want a sanctuary, and I promised to provide that, but I have not. Instead, I have forced myself on you. I have abused you.’
‘No, Callum. That was not my meaning. Please. I take back what I said. My words came out the wrong way. If I have wounded your pride, I am sorry for it.’
‘To hell with my damned pride. ‘Tis not my pride that is wounded, lass, ‘tis my sense of honour.’
‘Please, Callum. I thought that when I wed a man, he would come courting. I would get to know and like him and get used to the idea. Instead, I have lost everything I ever was or could be. For so long, I have hoped that life would improve, but I struggled and suffered for nothing. And then I was sold like an animal. This is not what my life should have been. Here, in Scotland, it is all cold and blood and violence.’
His jaw worked. ‘Is it Scotland you hate or lying with me?’ he said coldly.
Tara took a step towards him. ‘Lying with you is one more thing I do not understand and one more thing I must bear. It makes me feel ashamed.’
‘Aye, because you have thrown yourself away on me. I have been so blind. All those times I took you in my arms, and you clung to me and made those little moans. You were just suffering it.’
Callum thought her frigid and uncaring. Tears sprang to Tara’s eyes. Why could she not keep her pain inside? Why did she have to show it to him?
‘You mistake my meaning, Callum.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I have sensed a coldness in you. I try to reach your heart, but it is always just out of reach, and that is because you will always think I am beneath you, an unsuitable husband.’
‘No. It is just that I cannot take to that act. I do not know how to find pleasure in it without being filled with shame.’
‘So you pretend, to appease me, don’t you, lass?’
Tara took a step towards him. ‘Not entirely. Sometimes I want to, and there are times I feel pleasure, truly I do, but sometimes I am ashamed, and then I pretend.’
‘Fear not. You need not pretend any longer,’ he said sadly. ‘You have my name and my protection as my wife. You need not suffer to have the rest of me.’
As he stalked away, Tara understood what she had done. She had wounded Callum’s pride and his sense of decency. She had been cruel, ungrateful and cold, and she doubted he would ever forgive her. She had ripped him open, and the wound she left behind might never heal.
Chapter Twenty
The tavern was off the beaten track, a rundown hole of a place with no comfort and sour ale, but if he was to glean information about what the reivers were up to, it would be in a rat hole like this.
Callum had been in the corner nursing a drink for an hour or more, calmly watching and listening, when a familiar, though not altogether friendly, face appeared.
‘Callum Ross. What are you doing in a place like this?’
‘Ignoring people like you, Munro.’
Wolfric Munro smirked, slapped off the dust from the road and sat opposite him, beckoning the alewife for a jug of her finest.
‘Its rats piss. Don’t bother,’ snarled Callum.
‘As cheery company as ever, I see.’
‘I’ve nothing to be cheery about, Munro. I had fifteen head of cattle taken last night and two clansmen injured. Both of them, sliced on the face, from temple to jaw, as a warning to others who fight back.’
Wolfric sighed. ‘Aye, I heard there was a fight up at Laggan Moor. The same treatment has been meted out to some of my clansmen, too. I am heartily sick of it.’
The alewife banged a jug of foamy ale down on the table, and Wolfric took it up, sniffed it and grimaced. ‘So, I suppose you are lurking here to root out these reivers and their so-called leader – the Baron.’
‘The Baron?’