The slam of the door caused the timbers to shudder, and Jillian understood. “Was that Grimm?” she breathed.

Ramsay nodded and grinned. When he started to lower his head again, Jillian hastily clamped her hand over her mouth.

“Come on, lass,” he urged, catching her hand in his. “Grant me a kiss to thank me for showing Grimm that if he’s too stupid to claim you, someone else will.”

“Where do you get the idea I care what that man thinks?” She seethed. “And he certainly doesn’t care if you kiss me.”

“You’re recovering from my kiss too fast for my liking, lass. As for Grimm, I saw you watching him through this window. If you don’t speak your heart—”

“He has no heart to speak to.”

“From what I saw at court I’d wager that’s true, but you’ll never know for certain until you try,” Ramsay continued. “I’d just as soon you try, fail, and get it over with so you can start looking at me with such longing.”

“Thank you for such brilliant advice, Logan. I can see by your own blissfully wedded state that you must know what you’re talking about when it comes to relationships.”

“The only reason I’m not blissfully wed is because I’m holding out for a good-hearted woman. They’ve become a rare commodity.”

“It requires a good-hearted man to attract a good-hearted woman, and you’ve likely been looking in the wrong places. You won’t find a woman’s heart between her—” Jillian broke off abruptly, mortified by what she’d almost said.

Ramsay roared with laughter. “Tell me I could make you forget Grimm Roderick and I’ll show a good-hearted man. I would treat you like a queen. Roderick doesn’t deserve you.”

Jillian sighed morosely. “He doesn’t want me. And if you breathe one word to him about what you think I feel, which I assure you I don’t, I shall find a way to make you miserable.”

“Just don’t be tearing my shirts.” Ramsay raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. “I’m off to the village, lass.” He ducked quickly out the door.

Jillian scowled at the closed door for a long moment after he’d gone. By the saints, these men were making her feel like she was thirteen again, and thirteen had not been a good year. A horrid year, come to think of it. The year she’d watched Grimm in the stables with a maid, then gone to stand in her room and gaze sadly at her body. Thirteen had been a miserable year of impossible duality, of womanly feelings in a child’s body. Now she was exhibiting childish feelings in a woman’s body. Would she ever gain her balance around that man?

Caithness. Once Grimm had considered the name interchangeable with “heaven.” When he’d first arrived at Caithness at the age of sixteen, the golden child who “adopted” him had been lacking only filmy wings to complete the illusion that she could offer him angelic absolution. Caithness had been a place of peace and joy, but the joy had been tainted by a bottomless well of desire for things he knew could never be his. Although Gibraltar and Elizabeth had opened their door and their hearts to him, there had been an invisible barrier he’d been unable to surmount. Dining in the Greathall, he’d listened as the St. Clairs, their five sons, and single daughter had joked and laughed. They had taken such obvious delight in each step along the path of life, savoring each phase of their children’s development. Grimm had been acutely aware of the fact that Caithness was not his home but another family’s, and he was sheltered merely out of their generosity, not by right of birth.

Grimm expelled a breath of frustration. Why? he wanted to shout, shaking his fists at the sky. Why did it have to be Ramsay? Ramsay Logan was an incorrigible womanizer, lacking the tenderness and sincerity a woman like Jillian needed. He’d met Ramsay at court, years ago, and had witnessed more than a few broken hearts abandoned in the savage Highlander’s charming wake. Why Ramsay? On the heels of that thought came a silent howl: Why not me? But he knew it could never be. We canna help it, son … we’re born this way. Senseless killers—and worse, he was a Berserker to boot. Even without summoning the Berserker, his father had killed his own wife. What would the inherited sickness of the mind, coupled with being a Berserker, make him capable of? The only thing he knew with any degree of certainty was that he never wanted to find out.

Grimm buried both hands in his hair and stopped walking. He pulled his fingers through, loosening the thong and reassuring himself his hair was clean, not matted with dirt from living in the forests. He had no war braids plaited into the locks, he was not brown as a Moor from months of sun and infrequent bathing, he no longer looked as barbaric as he had the day Jillian found him in the woods. But somehow he felt as if he could never wash away the stains of those years he’d lived in the Highland forests, pitting his wits against the fiercest predators to scavenge enough food to stay alive. Perhaps it was the memory of shivering in the icy winters, when he had been grateful for the layer of dirt on his skin because it was one more layer between his body and the freezing temperatures. Perhaps it was the blood on his hands and the sure knowledge that if he was ever fool enough to let himself feel for anyone it might be his turn to come to awareness with a knife in his hand and his own son watching.