Temptation Read online

  James gave Temperance a weak smile. “Since Colin didn’t want the place, my work with lawyers meant nothing except that now I’m the real owner of the McCairn— such as it is—and I can pass it on to my descendants.”

  “To Ramsey,” Temperance said softly.

  “Yes. To Ramsey.” For a moment James didn’t say anything, but then he looked up at her and there was no longer any shield in front of his eyes, nothing guarding him, protecting him, and Temperance knew that she was looking at the inside of him, a place he didn’t allow people to see.

  “All those years,” he said softly, so quietly that she had to lean forward to hear him. “I thought that the problem with McCairn was money. If I just had enough money, I could bring my land and my people back to what they once were. When you said McCairn was a laughingstock of all Scotland, you were right.”

  When Temperance opened her mouth to apologize for that thoughtless statement, he put up his hand to stop her. “No,” he said, “you were right, and you hit a nerve when you said it. I was ashamed of my family’s history of gambling and the resulting failure of my homeland. Grace was right: I was hiding in McCairn, staying away from the world.”

  James couldn’t sit still any longer but again stood and began to pace. “But I was content all those years before you came, content with what I was doing, content with being alone. I now realize that I did heavy, manual labor fourteen hours a day to keep myself from thinking.”

  He stopped pacing and looked at her. “But then you came along and you woke all of us up. You made me laugh. You made me want the company of a woman. I hadn’t been lonely until you showed up, then I was sick with loneliness.”

  James sat back down on the chair and looked into Temperance’s eyes. “But I never told you. I never told you how much having dinner with you meant to me. Or how much pleasure I received from the hours we spent in the cave. You were so generous and kind to the people of McCairn, more generous than I ever was. You were kind to them on a personal level. I didn’t have to do anything because I was the McCairn.”

  When he looked at her, there were tears starting to form in his eyes. “You were right to leave me. You should have. If you’d stayed, I would have—”

  “Taken me for granted?” she said.

  At that James smiled. “You always did have the ability to make me laugh. Yes, if you’d gone through with that wedding, I think I would have come to treat you abominably. We don’t prize what’s easily won.”

  He took a breath and looked away for a moment, then back at her. “I came here today to . . .”

  “To what?” she prompted.

  He smiled at her. “To tell you that I’d forgive you and take you back. Looks like I didn’t learn much in these last years, does it? I don’t think it ever occurred to me that you’d be married and have a child. I think I thought that you were—”

  “Crying in loneliness over you every night, as you were over me?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, then had to take another breath to calm himself. He’d lost. His damned, insufferable pride had lost him everything.

  But when he looked at Temperance, he smiled. “I can’t believe this, but I feel better now. It’s odd, but I thought that if I ever humbled myself, I’d crack right down the middle, but instead, it feels kind of free. I feel lighter.”

  Temperance smiled warmly at him. “I guess they don’t have the saying in Scotland that confession is good for the soul.”

  “It wasn’t a saying we had in laird school,” he said, making her laugh; then he withdrew another box from his pocket. “I want to show you something else.”

  It was a ring box. “James, I don’t think—” she began, but he cut her off. It was obvious that she was going to tell him that he didn’t have to humble himself any more.

  “No, I need to tell you something,” he said. “I need to do this for myself. At the altar you said that you wanted a ring and—”

  “James, please,” she said. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “But I do,” he said. “I want to show you something. I did, as you said, trick and manipulate you, but maybe I had some good intentions. After I walk out that door today, I promise that I’ll never bother you again, so I need to leave you with some good thoughts about me.”

  Opening the little box, he pulled out a gold ring and handed it to her. “Can you read the inscription?”

  Taking it, she held the ring up to the light.

  “At the wedding you said that if I had just come to you on bended knee with a ring in a pretty box, you would have said yes. I wanted to show you that I meant to, I really did, but I also wanted to hand you riches, so I waited until the last minute with Kenna to see what she knew.”

  He handed her a receipt from a jewelry store. It was dated weeks before she left McCairn. The receipt said that the ring was to be inscribed with, “To Temperance, with all my love, James.”

  As Temperance looked inside the ring, she could see engraved inside, “To TM with all my love, JM.”

  “It was too long, so they had to abbreviate it,” James said, smiling. “And they didn’t have last names, and they knew that I was demanding the ring be ready within twenty-four hours, so they made do.”

  Temperance handed the ring back to him, then sat back against her chair and looked at him in silence.

  As James looked at her hands, his stomach clenched. There was a wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand.

  When he spoke, he tried to sound as though his heart weren’t breaking. “So who is he?” James asked.

  “Who is whom?”

  “Your husband. If my uncle found him for you, I’ll kill Angus.”

  Temperance smiled. “Don’t have one. I tell people that I was widowed, and they accept that. Truthfully, I don’t think anyone believes me, but the lie makes me more human. Kenna’s been a great help. She’s good at business, and she says she likes earning money much more than, well, men.”

  James was staring at her, his mouth open. “But the child,” he said.

  “He’s yours,” Temperance said cheerfully, as though she were announcing a party.

  “What?”

  “My son is your son. I never was good at numbers, and so much was happening in those last weeks that I didn’t realize that I was going to have a baby.”

  It took James several minutes to comprehend what she’d just said. “No husband?” he whispered.

  “No husband.”

  The next moment James was fumbling for the ring and almost dropped it twice before he got to Temperance; then he went down on one knee and grabbed both her hands in one of his. “Will you marry me? Please? We’ll live wherever you want. Here in New York, so you can run your business. And now I can afford to buy you anything you want—not that I think you can be bought, but I—”

  Temperance put a finger over his lips. “I’d like to go back to McCairn. I’d like my son . . . our son to be raised there, with his big brother, Ramsey. And as for this place, Kenna can run it. She doesn’t need me.”

  “I need you,” James said, his eyes pleading. “We all need you. Desperately.”

  “And I need you,” Temperance said softly. “And our son needs us both.” Bending, she softly kissed his lips. “Would you like to meet your son? Really meet him?”

  For a moment James looked as though he were going to cry; then he stood up and Temperance could see a change come over him. He had discarded his pride to win her, and now she had given it back to him. And he had given her back her pride also. These last years had been difficult. Being a single mother was hard, and—

  “Shall we go?” he asked, as he held out his arm for her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

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