by Willa Blair
When she wasn’t driving him mad with her kiss, she distracted him, irritated him, even angered him, such as when she’d touched him as they left Fergus’s room, thanking him for his respectful treatment of the old man. Why would he not? Fergus might be old, but he knew the MacKyrie holdings like the back of his hand. Donal would be a fool to ignore him. Donal was no fool. Except, apparently, when it came to her. Carrying her to her chamber was one thing. Stroking her leg to the knee while she moaned with the pleasure his touch gave her? How much more of this could he take?
Ach, Jamie, get back here soon, before I do something we’ll both regret, Ellie and I.
****
Two days later, Ellie awoke with the vision still in her mind of Donal reaching for her. She’d had the dream again, at last. This time, she’d seen his face clearly enough to recognize him. Or had she? As the dream faded, so did the man’s face. Nay, she believed her Sight had shown her Donal, not Bram. The few times she’s been in his company, she’d felt none of the attraction Donal stirred in her. Bram was a slightly bigger, somewhat younger version of Donal, an inspired fighter, like the rest of the Lathans, but for Ellie, he held no charms.
Donal, on the other hand, would not leave her mind or her heart.
She went through her morning routine in a fog, trying to piece together the puzzle her Sight had shown her, barely speaking to those she passed. She couldn’t think from moment to moment where she was or what she was supposed to be doing. But the face in the vision would not become any more distinct, no matter how she tried to concentrate.
Finally, she gave up and went to a window to look down on the practice yard Donal had set up in the bailey. The lads were having at each other with wooden swords and blunt-tipped pikes. Off in a corner, archery targets stood, their centers untouched. Some shots had found their mark around the edges, but a collection of spent arrows littered the ground, some broken, she assumed, by hitting the adjacent walls.
Bram and Donal stood together between the two groups, talking and pointing to one lad or another. They made a fine-looking pair, golden strands in their hair glinting in the morning sunlight, shoulders and arms flexing beneath their shirts as they gestured. Bram laughed. Donal lifted a corner of his mouth. She wondered what could be so funny. Aye, Bram had a nice laugh, but Donal’s expression, while a much more subdued reaction to the humor they shared, riveted her attention to him. Subtle. Would he smile? Nay, he was back to frowning.
Suddenly, he shouted and moved quickly to two of the combatants. They watched with quizzical expressions as he began to correct their technique. Though the light wooden sword must feel like nothing compared to the weight of weapons he usually wielded, his muscles flexed and bunched as he moved smoothly through the maneuver he demonstrated. Ellie sighed again. Bram helped another lad nock his arrow and aim. But Ellie’s gaze kept returning to Donal, who now stood with arms crossed over his chest, eyes narrowed as he watched the two he’d corrected play out their mock battle.
Standing here mooning over Donal was not getting her anywhere. She had work to do. But something kept her rooted in place as Donal began to walk around the training ground, saying something to one pair of combatants, simply watching another. Finally, he looked up. Their gazes met and a bolt of icy green lightning arced from his eyes to hers. Hot shivers ran down her ribs to her core. She couldn’t break her gaze away, not that she wanted to. She lifted a hand and placed her palm on the window. Whether she meant it as a greeting, a supplication, or a gesture of defense, she didn’t know. Finally, he nodded, acknowledging her, then turned back to his charges. Ellie sucked in air and lowered her hand, suddenly aware she’d been holding her breath the entire time he’d captured her gaze. It had to be Donal in her dream, else why would she react to him this way?
She shook her head and turned away from the window, suddenly unsteady on her feet. She reached for the wall as she fought for balance. Breathe. Just breathe. In a moment, her equilibrium returned and she heaved a deeper breath in relief. Enough of this. She could not let Donal’s merest glance chase every thought from her head. She’d best go on down to the kitchen to check on the preparations for the midday meal. Those lads would be hungry.
Ellie finished setting out bread just as the mob poured noisily into the hall, shouting and laughing, full of exuberance over the battles they’d won and lost this morning. Bram entered next, then Donal. She gestured them to seats at her table, then went to alert the kitchen to start serving, if the noise hadn’t already done that.
“We’re comin’,” Cook told her. “We’re comin.’ Even the dead could hear that lot.”
Chuckling, Ellie returned to the hall and took her seat.
“Laird MacKyrie,” Bram said by way of greeting. Donal nodded, but didn’t speak.
Ellie’s determination to draw him out suddenly knew no bounds. “This morning’s practice went well, aye?”
“As well as can be expected,” Donal replied, arching an eyebrow and fiddling with his ale cup.
Ellie scooted her chair a bit closer to Donal and leaned toward him. Now or never, Ellie told herself. Let the seduction begin. “What were the lads doing wrong when ye stopped their swordplay?”
She dared not say “when ye saw me at the window.” That moment had been too profound, too fraught with a connection between them she dared not name, not in so public a place. Not where he could easily turn away from her and refuse to acknowledge what had arced between them. Aye, he’d felt it. She’d seen him start to uncross his arms when he’d noticed her, seen her hand upon the window glass. Would he have reached out to her as he did in her dream? But nay, he’d recalled himself and merely nodded, then turned away. It was a start.
Instead, she used the tabletop to draw imaginary positions the lads had been in, trying to capture Donal’s attention with a subject he liked, while leaning into his space and inviting him to do the same. “They crossed like this,” she began, crossing her index fingers.
Donal shook his head and took her hands in his. Her heart stilled at his touch then picked up beating again. She didn’t dare meet his gaze, but kept her eyes lowered. His hands were large and his rough calluses sent tingles shooting up her arms as she remembered their caress on her foot and leg, and imagined him touching her elsewhere.
“Nay, more like this.” He moved her fingers into the position he wanted, then held them in place. “If they cross too high, they’re vulnerable to an undercut with a dirk, like this.” He traced a line along her exposed palm.
Goose bumps broke out on her skin. She risked a glance at his face, but his gaze had not shifted from their hands. Then he looked at her. The boisterous noise in the hall faded to nothing. She was dimly aware of the kitchen staff moving around, setting out platters of food, but no aromas registered. Only Donal’s icy, light-green eyes.
Someone reached past her and Donal released her hands. The noise in the hall rushed back into her awareness. Scents of roasted meat and warm bread assaulted her nose. Donal turned away to thank a serving girl who had set a platter before them. Ellie shook her head to clear the cobwebs, sat back in her chair and took a breath. She pasted a benevolent smile on her face and looked out over her clan. Everyone was eating or talking, paying the laird’s table no attention. Good. Perhaps no one had noticed her momentary thrall.
Perhaps not even Donal. He sat beside her, calmly eating his meal. As she must also do. Ellie bit into a piece of bread. How could she seduce Donal when it seemed every time she tried, he ended up seducing her? One touch and she was helpless against him. Yet he seemed unaffected, eating steadily while he listened to Bram chatting away on his other side.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him turn away from Bram and look at her. She met his gaze.
A speculative gleam shone in his eye that had not been there before he’d held her hands in his. Perhaps her plan was working after all.
She gave him a confident smile and turned back to her meal with renewed appetite.
She could do this.
/>
She would.
Chapter 14
That evening, Donal could avoid it no longer. Sitting in the hall at a lower table with the other Lathans, he left his evening meal mostly untouched while he sipped his ale and watched Ellie converse with Micheil at the high table. Every now and then she looked his way, but never for long. Her glances teased at him, drew him in, had him waiting almost eagerly, damn it, for the next time she noticed him.
After he ignored several verbal jabs from his companions at the table, they left him to his thoughts and finished their supper. They knew his moods. Out of the corner of his eye, Donal saw Bram nod to him as they stood to leave, cut his glance to Ellie and then back to Donal. Aye, Bram knew—or suspected—there was something going on between them. Donal wished he knew what that something was. Ellie was convinced she knew. Her visions told her the future. Some of the time. If she could discern their meaning. How much of her certainty was Ellie seeing what she wanted to see in those dreams? Seeing him?
His thoughts ran wilder the more he drank. He’d never met a woman who’d had him on tenterhooks the way Ellie MacKyrie had him. She turned up everywhere he went, speaking to him with that soft, sensual voice. Touching him with hands too warm to be real. Her touch set his skin afire and tightened his chest and groin with need. He knew what she was up to. He had to put a stop to it. She was the MacKyrie laird, damn it. He couldn’t take much more of this.
He served as arms master to clan Lathan, aye, an important and honorable position. But that didn’t change the fact that he was practically clanless, since he hadn’t returned to MacNabb lands in more years than he cared to count. His middle brother held the lairdship now, his da and oldest brothers lost at Flodden. But with two more brothers in line before him, the MacNabb lairdship would never be his. There was nothing for him there.
He had nothing to offer her but his strength and skill in battle. No lands, no castles, nothing to increase the value of her holdings. Nothing but this fire in his belly that burned for her. He shook his head. Nay, he was not the man to marry her.
She needed a marriage that brought with it a powerful alliance to benefit her clan, not a landless man little better than a soldier-for-hire.
A movement at the head table brought him back to the present. Ellie stood and walked across the hall, done with her meal and headed for the stairs to her tower. Micheil moved to the fire and settled on a bench with some of the other MacKyries.
Donal downed his ale in one long gulp. Might as well get this over with.
He caught up with her at the bottom of the stairs. “I’d like to speak with ye privately, Laird MacKyrie.”
Ellie faced him. “Laird MacKyrie? Is this so serious, then? I thought I was Ellie to ye.”
Donal didn’t reply. What could he say? Any response would open the floodgates of uncertainty he fought to control inside himself.
Ellie pursed her lips, then nodded. “Very well. Let’s go to the solar.”
As she led him up the stairs, her backside swayed above him, a beautifully full curve that begged to be touched. He could reach out and fill his hands with her softness.
He kept his hands to himself. Instead, he followed her into the solar, where she indicated he take a seat. The fire in the hearth lit the room with a soft glow that made the windows darker even than the night they revealed. The waning moon would not be up for hours yet. The thought of the moon gave him pause. Where was Jamie?
Ellie moved in the shadows to the sideboard and poured two cups. MacKyrie whisky. Donal grimaced. A powerful but enticing spirit, much like the woman who made it. She gave him a cup and took her seat, gaze on him, one eyebrow lifted, waiting for him to speak.
He took a sip of the strong drink. Smooth fire poured down his throat to his belly, warming him from the inside out, leaving behind a hint of a peaty, earthy taste. Was the whisky metaphor for the woman? A reflection of her spirit, her fire? Did she, like the whisky, also have an earthy side? Donal fervently hoped not, for if she ever showed it to him, his control would shatter in a surge of need the likes of which he dared not imagine. He’d be lost in her before either of them knew what happened.
“Why do ye wish to speak with me?” Ellie asked after taking a sip.
Donal hesitated. Now that he had her to himself, he had no idea how to approach his concerns without angering her or hurting her feelings, neither of which he wanted to do. He watched her lips kiss the cup as she sipped and imagined those lips on his skin. Remembered the taste of those lips under his. He tossed off the rest of his whisky and gave himself over to the fire as it burned its way to his belly, and below. If only it would burn away his desire for her. Instead, the flames she stoked within him leapt higher. He set the cup aside.
Seeing that, Ellie got up and poured more for him. She left the bottle on the table by his hand. “It must be serious to require fortification by the MacKyrie twenty-five-year-old.”
Serious? Nay, unless serious included a burning desire for the woman in front of him. The woman he could not have.
“What are ye doin’, Ellie?” The words slipped out before he could censor them. He already knew the answer. “Puttin’ yerself in my way, touching me every chance ye get. Do ye want me that much?”
The color rose in her cheeks. She cast her gaze down, then squared her shoulders and met his gaze full on. “Aye, ye ken I do.”
“Why? I’ve nothing to offer ye.”
“How can ye say that?”
“I am no laird. I have no lands, no bounty, no power to ally with yer clan’s.”
“Those things dinna matter to me, Donal.”
“They should.” He was shocked to hear that from a laird, especially this laird, knowing how desperately her clan needed a powerful alliance. “How can ye say that?”
At his frown, she continued, setting her cup aside and leaning toward him. “Ye have the skills I need. All the rest will come in time.”
“As do many others who are also lairds in their own right. Who could give ye those things right now. Ye must marry one of them.”
She hesitated then, the pink in her cheeks suddenly stained red, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“What is it, Ellie?”
She squared her shoulders and Donal let himself be distracted for a moment by the way the fabric of her dress tightened across her breasts.
“None of them fire my blood, Donal. Only ye.”
That floored him. “Has there been no one since yer husband died?”
“No one.”
Donal settled back into his seat and looked away, across the room, out the window, anywhere but at Ellie.
“Lass, ye’re infatuated with the idea of a man ye think possesses the skills ye need to save yer clan, as a warrior and a leader. That’s all.”
Ellie shook her head. “Nay, that canna be all there is to what I feel. I’m no’ a wee lass with stars in her eyes, mooning o’er a handsome lad with muscles and a big sword. If that were so, I’d already be married to a neighbor with an army to guard the keep and the will to rule it.”
“Like MacDuff?”
Ellie shuddered. “Aye.” She turned her face away. “Nay. I canna bear to think of that man touching me.”
Donal sighed. “Nor can I, Ellie. Nor can I.”
Ellie’s gaze was suddenly bright with hope. “Then ye do want me.”
He cursed himself. He wanted to lie. He should. But she already knew the truth. “Of course.” He bit it out. “Ye ken I do. But that doesna mean I should have ye. Or that ye should look to marry me. Despite whatever ye think yer Sight is showing ye—and ye ken well it can be wrong—I’m no’ the man ye need.”
“I think ye are.”
“Because yer visions told ye? Yer unpredictable talent? The same visions that failed to show ye the disaster yer men were headed into at Flodden?” Donal winced and clenched his jaw so hard that his teeth clicked together. Gods, he never should have said that. What was he thinking?
Ellie jumped from he
r seat with a gasp. “How could ye?” She stalked to the hearth and stared into the flames. “I have wished every day, every night, since they decided to answer the King’s call that I could have warned them. Saved them.”
Donal shook his head, debating whether to go to her or stay where he was to give her a moment to collect herself. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I shouldna said that. It was cruel. I ken ye would have done all ye could to save them.” Staying put won. She would not welcome his touch after he’d wounded her so callously.
She paced before the hearth for a few moments, then resumed her seat with a sigh. “It wouldna mattered. My father was so intent on earning a title from the Scottish king that he wouldha gone, even if he had believed in my talent. Which he refused to do.”
“Nay? How could he no’? We’ve seen the truth of it even in the short time we’ve been here.”
“And it makes ye uncomfortable, aye? ’Tis one of the reasons ye dinna wish to stay with me.”
“I...I sometimes wonder what it would be like. But ye ken my reasons. Ye must do better than me.”
“There is no one better.”
Donal poured two more fingers of whisky into his cup and took a sip, then set it aside and rested his head against the back of the chair, staring at the ceiling. “I should leave MacKyrie,” he finally said. When he met her gaze, the stricken look on Ellie’s face was enough to make him recant. “But I canna. I vowed to help yer lads.”
“That’s all ye care about? Helping the lads?”
“That’s all I should care about. Training them up will keep them alive.”
“What about my life?”
“Ellie, taking ye, getting ye with child, will ruin yer chances to make a match of the kind a laird should make.”
“I had that, and look what good it did me. Nay, I dinna care what others think. I’ll choose this time.”
“Ye should care. Yer clan has many vulnerable years ahead of it. An alliance with a strong neighbor is what ye need most.”
“Then why did I sign the treaty Jamie carried?”