Captured Hearts and Stolen Kisses

by Ceci Giltenan et al.

  Her grip was slipping. The banister rung wobbled. She screamed again. Slivers of wood slid beneath her nails. The image of the twisted heap of barrel staves and cooper’s bands mounded below her renewed her screams.

  Above her a shaft of light penetrated the cold gloom. Someone had opened the door! "Help!"

  A figure leaned over the balustrade. Tangled, tawny hair draped around a tortured countenance. Just as quickly, the light receded and was eclipsed with the shutting of the door.

  Paralyzing fear robbed her blood and robbed her of coherent thought. Her fall was surely an accident, but then why hadn’t—

  With a crack, the rung to which she clung tilted outward.

  From somewhere she drew upon a last burst of energy. With a tremendous gathering of strength, she released her hold on the one banister railing and lunged for the next. It quivered—but didn’t break off.

  She didn’t have the muscle to lever herself up, but she could lower herself, rung by rung ... if she could ration her remaining stamina.

  Her hands were slippery with sweat and blood. With each passing second her skirts weighed more heavily. She swung to another rung. Clung. Swung again to the next. Clutched it—for one brief instant—slipped—and plunged into the chasm of darkness and pain and, finally, oblivion.

  ~ * ~

  "Mmmnnnhh.”

  "M’bairn? Ye are mending?"

  Enya turned her gaze toward the voice and looked at Elspeth. It was as if peering through gauze. She blinked. Her cloudy vision coalesced.

  "Ye got a braw egg-size lump on yer head, ye do." The old woman slipped her gnarled hand under her charge’s head and held a pewter cup to her lips. "Here, drink this, we’an. Twill rid ye of yer drouthy tongue.”

  She swallowed the viscous green liquid. "Aggh! That is awful."

  "Dinna be carnaptious, me bairn. Ye are lucky to be alive."

  “How long have I been . . . abed?”

  "Two days. Twas the laird who went looking for ye and found ye. For the past few minutes ye been talking dowfie-like. Sad moanings. I ken then ye were comin’ round. Sent for yer mother. She’s been glaikit with worry.’’

  Glancing around, Enya realized she was in Ranald’s room. "Did he—Ranald—sleep ... here with me?"

  Elspeth’s hooked nose wrinkled. "Had he wanted to, do ye think I would ha’ let him? Nae, he slept on yon rug.” She nodded at the bearskin stretched before the fireplace. "If ye call ain eye on ye sleepin’.’’

  The door opened, and Kathryn entered. "Enya! You are awake!”

  "It appears that you and I are taking turns convalescing, Mam."

  Her mother dropped a testing kiss on her forehead. "No fever." She straightened. Relief was reflected in her velvet-brown eyes. "You have visitors outside. Do you feel like seeing them?"

  She nodded and managed a smile. Even that effort hurt. “Aye. Send them in."

  Before the afternoon was over a steady stream of well-wishers had paraded through Ranald’s room: Duncan, Arch, Annie, Mary Laurie, Jamie, Flora, Patric, and even Dame Margaret.

  But not Ranald. Nor Mhorag.

  Enya was certain Mhorag was the woman who had looked over the balustrade and ignored her plea for help. Just as Ranald’s sister doubtlessly ignored Ruthven’s pleas for help. For all that, Mhorag could have been the instigator of Ruthven’s horrifying death!

  Kathryn returned in the evening, bearing a tray of food and more evil-tasting medicine. The bowl of steaming stew assuaged Enya’s hunger but not her pain. Not the pain in her heart. Ranald had not wanted to lose his precious captive—and not because she had succeeded in making him love her.

  The medicine, or the stew, made her sleepy, and she welcomed the respite. Sometime during the night, she awoke. Ranald knelt on one knee at the hearth. He was replenishing the fire that had languished. He must have heard her raise to one elbow because he glanced up. The anger blazing in his eyes was like a physical slap, and she recoiled.

  Suddenly she lost all her determination, her resilience, her strength of will. "I yield. I lost. I canna make you love me. I dinna understand it, but you hate me something fierce. I canna make that go away.”

  He rose, brushed off his hands, and crossed to the bed. For once he was giving her a second and more attentive look. He had never seen her passive. She fell back onto the pillow, waiting.

  He reached down and picked up a lock of her hair, pooled over the pillow like the Red Sea of his Bible. "You dinna try to rid yourself of our bairn?"

  "What?" She felt a wee groggy and wasn’t certain she had understood.

  "The fall. You weren’t carrying me we’an in you? You weren’t trying to rid yourself of it?"

  "My God, Ranald!" Gone was that moment of weakness. She sprang upright to a sitting position. Her head swam with the sudden action. She rubbed her temples and muttered hotly, "Damn ye, Ranald. How could I be carrying your child when I feel so—so barren?"

  He turned away, began tugging off his shirt. She thought to bring up Mhorag’s pitiless act, but what was the use?

  He shucked his breeches. In the soft candlelight, his body was beautiful. Supremely male. Muscle plated his chest, knotted his shoulder blades, laddered his stomach, and roped his thighs and calves.

  "Do you think I hate you so verra much,” she asked, “that I would risk killing myself?"

  He stretched out on his side on the rug, pillowed his head in his arm, and tugged one side of the rug over his shoulders. “I think ye do not care what you do."

  The broad back presented to her told her that, in turn, he did not care what she did.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It couldn’t be possible!

  Enya swallowed the putrid taste and went in search of her mother. She was nowhere inside the castle. Outside, the drift of warmer air from the south had come so slowly that Enya was surprised to realize that spring was indeed here. Its drizzling rains had brought a drizzling overcast, but the air was raw and refreshingly penetrating.

  She found her mother crossing the bailey. "You shouldn’t be out in this weather, Mam.”

  "I was looking over the ponies.”

  “Looking over the ponies?” She fell in alongside her mother in returning to the great hall. "Why?"

  “Arch believes Ranald has set some of his lackeys to watch him."

  She lowered her voice. "Mother, the passes won’t be clear of snow yet.”

  "Another couple of weeks they may be. Kincairn won’t be expecting us to flee this soon. And we’re not going down through the passes. Arch is taking the best of the horses for all of us and driving the rest with us into the woods. We will wait out the thawing deep in the forest."

  Enya had her doubts whether Ranald would let them go so easily. Especially if what she feared was true. "Mam . . . I was sick this morning. I threw up the oatmeal I had for breakfast.”

  “You have missed your monthly?"

  She felt miserable. "Aye. I thought maybe the fall from the stairs had upset my bodily routine. But I am almost two months late now.”

  Her mother eyed her critically. "Daughter, I do not know what goes on in the privacy of Ranald’s chamber between you two. But he seems, basically, a fair man. Highly intelligent, if not highly educated.”

  "Mam, his only interest is using me as an instrument of revenge. I am so bloody disgusted with him and his messianic sense of mission.”

  "Is that all you feel about him?"

  She searched her feelings and replied honestly, "I . . . I am attracted to him.”

  Her mother was carefully keeping her expression bland. And her tone. "I see. But you dunna love him?"

  "I dunna know. How can I? One moment I hate him for using me so callously. The next, when he touches me . . .” She broke off, embarrassed.

  She was overwhelmed by one feeling these days: apathy. She behaved with a revolting helplessness. Day after day. Gone was her joie de vivre, her independent spirit. She let Ranald’s moods act as a catalyst for her own actions. She was responding and rea
cting, rather than being her own person.

  She was sinking fast into bottomless depths of shame as Ranald’s captive—more appropriately, Ranald’s whore—a shame from which there could be no faintest hope she might ever escape.

  Should she manage to escape Lochaber Castle and Ranald Kincairn, she suspected that she would nonetheless feel that shame the rest of her life.

  ~ * ~

  “That’s not enough hot water."

  Duncan lowered the empty pail and stared across the width of the copper tub at the wild Highland lass swathed in a linen towel. “Ye try me patience, Mhorag."

  Her lids lowered. "You are insolent. Do you want another beating?”

  “I want ye.”

  “Ye'll never have me!”

  His stance relaxed. He grinned. “Ye know ye want me, too, Mhorag."

  Her free hand knotted into a fist. "Like I want the plague!"

  "I’ll plague ye ’til ye give yerself to me."

  He started around the tub toward her and she sidestepped the other way.

  "Do you dare dream?" she sneered, but he noted the tinge of fear in her voice.

  He laughed. "I would climb Scotland’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, for ye—or swim Loch Morar.” With that, he stepped into the knee-high water and latched an arm around her waist before she could retreat. "Mhorag, me mermaid, I want only to love ye.”

  She went rigid. Her lips quivered. Her eyes dilated. "I cannot.”

  "Sure ye can." He lifted her over the tub’s rim and pulled her against him. The ends of her towel trailed in the steaming water. His gaze ran over her upturned oval face; those eyes closed and their long lashes lay like black lace fans over her high cheekbones. “Ye are verra beautiful."

  Her lids snapped open. Her eyes were blue stones. "I’m ugly inside!”

  "No. Only hurtin’ inside." He took the towel from the clutch of her cold fingers and let it slide into the bathwater. "Dinna ye know ye’re made for love?”

  She did not try to cover her nakedness. "I have done things that have hurt other people.”

  “Fear drives us to do things we wished we hadn’t. That doesn’t make us ugly inside. Ye are formed so perfectly. Small waist. Breasts me hands could cup. A bum that begs to be—”

  “A bum?"

  He chuckled. “This." His hands slid down over her bare buttocks.

  She trembled, but a hint of a smile touched her bow-shaped lips. “Something is prodding my stomach."

  “Ach, he wants to be let out."

  "He?"

  "Look for yeself.”

  She eyed him doubtfully, and he said, “He willna hurt ye." His callused fingers played lazily with a nipple that hardened quickly. “He’s quite tame. Just a wee insistent about making known his wants."

  A flush the color of summer’s wild roses tinted her cheeks. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. Her fingers drifted down to the flap of his breeches. She smiled shyly. “Mayhap I’ll make his acquaintance."

  This time he was the one to close his eyes as she went on her knees in the water. "Take yer time. I want ye two to become intimate friends.”

  * * *

  The onions Enya chopped for the pea soup not only made her teary-eyed but were making her nauseated. Gone was her sweet tooth. Not even black currant cake hot from the oven tempted her.

  In a way, she reflected, the Lowlanders were both captives and captors. She was Ranald’s captive, Duncan was captivated by Mhorag, Mary Laurie’s captor was a salter, even debonair Jamie had been taken by the country lass Annie Dubh.

  Wiping away a tear with the back of her hand, she forced herself to think about another captive of sorts. Her mother had been Malcolm’s captive. Then she had been forced to become his bride. Afterward, that descendant of wild Pictish princesses had become a captive of culture, doing what her head told her rather than her heart. Kathryn’s love child by Arch had, also, become a captive of culture.

  And her own love child?

  She placed her hand on the flat of stomach, almost concave. Yet she knew life stirred there.

  As for culture, was not Ranald’s as impressive as her own? Gaelic was Europe’s oldest vernacular literature, its manuscript illumination the finest flower of art, its harp music Europe’s most advanced.

  She could not meet Ranald’s discerning gaze when she served him and his men that evening, for fear he might see her nervousness.

  He barely glanced at her. He and Jamie and Ian were deep in discussion. "I rode down to Corrieyarick Pass,” Jamie was saying. “The snow there canna be more than a horse’s wither high.”

  “But it could get deeper farther through the pass,” Ian said.

  “It could melt, also," Ranald said, and tore off a hunk of the hot, sweet bread and the hard and pungent goat cheese from the platter she set before him. "Murdock’s regiments could be upon Lochaber before we know it.”

  Though she would have liked to linger, to hear more, she felt it best to move on so she would not arouse his suspicion. Besides, while Ranald and his men supped she had her own agenda, one which he was too preoccupied to take note.

  Minutes later, she slipped into her mother’s room. Arch stood behind her mother, who sat in a rocking chair with a woolen plaid thrown across her legs. Elspeth sat on a stool, and Mary Laurie leaned against one of the bed’s four posters. Duncan perched a hip on the window seat. One booted ankle was crossed at his knee.

  "A cache of supplies await us in the forest," Arch said without preamble. “The mounts will be saddled at the third hour two days hence."

  "Already Ranald is discussing leaving Lochaber,” Enya said.

  “That settles it,” he said. "We ride out just before dawn. Duncan and I shall divert the portcullis guard until everyone is safely on their way.”

  Kathryn leaned forward and addressed Enya. "Will there be any problem in escaping Ranald in the early-morning hours?"

  Heat flushed her cheeks. "If he summons me to his chambers, I usually leave for the kitchen just before he rises at dawn.”

  Her mother nodded. "Then our plan remains as is. Who goes with us—and who stays? Duncan?"

  He fingered the worn heel of his boot, then glanced up. "Tis no secret I’m taken with Mhorag. But she’ll never come away with a mere fisherman.” He grinned unabashedly. "A smuggler at heart—and a Lowlander at that."

  "Elspeth?" Kathryn asked.

  That network of wrinkles webbing the old woman’s face thickened. “Me soul is in the Lowlands. I go with Enya and ye.”

  "Mary Laurie?"

  The plump maidservant focused an inordinate amount of attention on her folded hands. "I am loyal to the Clan Afton. Ye know that. But me heart is with Cyril the Salter. I willna be going with ye, but neither will I betray ye."

  Kathryn nodded. "You two have my blessing. We’d best go our separate ways now."

  “Until the third hour then,” Arch said. “For now, go with God.”

  Enya felt as if she needed God and much more to protect her, not from Ranald but from her own feelings.

  Like a condemned prisoner, she walked the parameters of her quarters. Her stomach churned and knotted. At times, she would rush to the window, throw open the shutters, and inhale the cold raw air until her nausea passed.

  Her sorrow would not depart as easily. She had come to love the man. There was no denying he was respected by men, women, and children alike. And desired by any number of pretty young females.

  So why would he love her? A woman whom only a few would call extraordinarily beautiful. A woman whom he associated with his greatest pain.

  The mantle clock softly chimed the hour of midnight. She was so utterly exhausted these days. She paused before the mottled mirror. Her lips twisted in a grimace. With the mauve shadows that ringed her eyes she looked like a raccoon.

  In the reflection of the mirror she saw the door open. Ranald appeared like her worst nightmare. "Not tonight," she told his reflection.

  Those wondrously colored eyes scanned her face. “Ye ar
e ill?”

  “No." She rubbed her hands together, then thrust them behind her back. "Just tired."

  He shut the door behind him and strode on into her room to sprawl in its single chair.

  "You look tired,” she said, then regretted her outburst. It betrayed her concern. He had not shaven that day, and in the mirror the lines fanning either side of his eyes appeared more pronounced.

  "Don’t be thinking of leaving.”

  She whirled to face him. Her heart beat like a hummingbird’s. "You know?”

  He grimaced. "All of you vanished at the same time this evening. I may not be an Edinburgh engineer, but I can bloody well figure out something is afoot.”

  She sagged, slumped to the bed, and was barely able to remain in a sitting position. She braced a steadying hand on the mattress. Her head drooped. “Now what? What more can you do to me short of murdering me?" Slowly her gaze raised to meet his. She whispered, "Or is that, too, an alternative?”

  He rubbed the bridge of his bladed nose. "We ride out of here on the morrow. All of us. Except for Thane. He has a better chance of surviving if I leave him here. I shall miss him.”

  "You worry more for an animal than you do for me and my family and servants. You could leave us here, as well. But you are a brute.”

  "I know. Ye have told me so often enough." He rose to his towering height. "The others have already been confined to their rooms. They will be released—unharmed—once we reach Loch Leven.”

  Her eyes widened. “I, also?”

  "Aye.”

  His simple reply stung her pride, quenched her secret hope. "Why?”

  "You will slow us down."

  Somehow this was worse, this indifference. She almost welcomed his resentment if she could not have his love. "I see."

  He strode to her door. "We ride out after breakfast. Be ready."