She swallowed and took a backward step.
His own lips quirking with amusement, he closed the short distance between them. “Schooled in seduction, hmmm?” Towering over her, he held her in place by the sheer might of his stare. “Prove it,” he said, and folded his arms.
Her head tilted at a defiant angle, she matched his stare with one of her own. “As you wish,” she said, lifting both hands to her bodice.
She began undoing the remaining stays, and to Donall’s surprise, rather than watching her with sharp anticipation of the moment her lovely breasts spilled free, the near imperceptible trembling of her lower lip and the more obvious shaking of her slender fingers cooled his ardor.
She unintentionally initiated an onslaught of emotions in him of a much more perilous nature . . . ones he did not care to identify beyond crediting them to the lingering influence of the scattered shards of his chivalry.
Wincing at her inept attempt to seduce him, Donall seized her hands and lowered them to her sides. “Fair lady,” he drawled, releasing her, “I commend your willingness to disprove my assessment of your professed . . . er, talents, but upon earnest consideration, I believe I prefer to do the proving myself.”
The creamy swell of her breasts rose with her indignation. “Pray do not trouble yourself, good sir.”
“Ah, but I must.” Stroking his chin, Donall eyed the fine display she presented, wittingly or unwittingly. “I have warned you I am not a man whose passions should be trifled with, and you, most revered lady, have offered too much for me to now refrain from partaking of such a delectable bounty.”
She stood still as stone, her gaze fixed on his, fierce pride shining in her magnificent eyes, defiance in the tight set of her jaw. “Then what is stopping you?”
Your innocence, his conscience shouted.
“Naught but my desire to prolong the pleasure we shall have with one another.” His deep voice, low and deliberately lazy, cloaked his true concerns.
She crossed her arms. “Why should you care about extending the pleasure, or tedium, of our . . . ah, joinings, when you profess to forget the names and faces of your amours the moment you’ve had your way with them?”
Because you are not them, and neither will I deflower a maiden, any maiden, with all the finesse of a stag in season!
“Do not tell me you would seek to spare me a rough taking?” Tilting her head to the side, she peered at him, the look on her face, and her words, making him wonder if she possessed the uncanny ability to read minds. “ ’Tis not consideration I seek from you.”
Donall shoved a hand through his hair. “I know full well what you want. And I have vowed to fulfill your . . . needs, and shall.” He paused to draw a breath. “Most adequately, too.”
He stepped closer.
So close he caught another tantalizing whiff of her wild-flower scent. “Aye, sweeting, I ken what you want. ’Tis the why behind the wanting that puzzles me.”
The panicked caught-fibbing-again look flashed across her face. “I want naught but pea—”
“Your alliance, I know,” he said, silencing her by placing two fingers against the lush fullness of her soft lips.
Only the certainty she hid some dark and disturbing secret motive saved him from succumbing to the powerful urge to replace his fingers with his lips. “Lady, I have seen nigh onto as many battles as you have seen days. I would not be here to stand before you, had I not learned at a very young age to heed my instincts,” he allowed.
“And at this moment, they are telling me you have more than one reason for desiring peace.” He paused to purposely let a wicked gleam enter his eyes. “For desiring me.”
“I do not desire you.” “Nay?” He slipped his fingers beneath her chin and eased her face upward. “Then why do you tremble?”
“Because I am cold.”
“What you are, lady, is a liar,” he said, softening his words by gently tracing the line of her jaw with the side of his thumb.
A tiny gasp escaped her and Donall smiled. “Sweet Isolde,” he murmured, “there is nary a cold bone in your body.”
Emboldened because she did not pull back from his caress, he indulged himself by touching the tip of his middle finger to the freckle on her cheek.
A grave mistake.
Something fierce and elemental ripped through him at the contact, a fearsome rush of raw desire that near buckled his knees. A veritable torrent unleashed by placing a single fingertip to one fetching freckle!
But a freckle he’d burned to touch from the very first moment he’d noticed it perched so jauntily over her left cheekbone.
Donall the Bold, laird of the great Clan MacLean and master of Baldoon, champion knight of the Scottish realm, stalwart defender of the Isles . . . brought to his knees by a freckle.
His brows snapped together in consternation and he yanked his hand from her cheek. Saints, what stirrings would assail him when he first touched his arousal to her sweetness? His breath hitched at the thought, and the nigglings of ill ease that had been plaguing him intensified to a most alarming degree.
Clasping his hands safely behind his back, he looked at her but strove to see Baldoon and all those within its great curtained walls. Forced himself to dwell not on her, and the temptation she posed, but on the chaos facing his household if he could not soon charm his way out of her clutches.
Needing the sanity of distance from her, regardless of how scant, Donall returned to her bed and resumed his usual stance against her bedpost.
“Aye, ’tis a teller of tales you are,” he said, and this time his words held not a trace of softness.
Nor did he smile.
And neither did she. “Weighted down by onerous burdens is what I am, sirrah. Naught else.”
The bitterness edging her voice tugged at his onerous burden, the wretched soft spot she’d unknowingly bestowed on him, but he could not pursue and slay whate’er dragons bedeviled her.
He had too many pressing problems of his own.
But not pressing enough apparently, for almost of its own accord, his tongue paid humble obeisance to her. “A burden shared is a lesser one.” The saintly sounding words spilled from his lips before he realized he’d even formed them.
Donall frowned. By all the Lord’s disciples, he’d almost swear she’d cast an enchantment o’er him.
“I do not want to apportion my woes to others, least of all to you,” she was saying, wholly unaffected by his growing vexation. “What I want is to rid myself of them.”
“And peace.” Donall reminded her, not even trying to keep the mocking note from his voice.
She nodded. “Aye, that above all else. God willing, if my plan bears fruition, I shall see all my goals achieved.”
Donall lifted a brow. “Dare I hope you are about to reveal the nature of those other goals?”
A ghost of a smile flitted across her lips. “Nay.”
“Nay, I dare not hope, or nay, you shall not divulge your plans?”
She glanced briefly toward the bank of narrow windows. “You are already privy to my most ardent wish. ’Tis why you are here.”
Donall pushed away from the bedpost. The wistful tone in her voice sent prickly little shivers dancing over the back of his neck. “I am here to bed you,” he said bluntly, stating the fact as the cold truth it was in the hope of jarring loose her secrets.
But instead of oiling her tongue, she merely nodded her agreement, a guarded little smile stealing over her lips and into her eyes.
The gooseflesh breaking out on Donall’s nape spread down his arms. “You still wish to pursue this foolery after what I’ve told you?”
“Told me?” She cocked her head, a vision of innocence. Contrived innocence.
Donall planted his hands on his hips. “I would know if you still wish me to take you, knowing my interest will wane after I’ve done so?” Narrowing his eyes to slits, he peered hard at her. “It always does.”
She gave a little sigh, a resigned little sigh, and came
forward to stand right in front of him. She looked up at him and his heart plummeted.
Her expression boded ill.
He was about to receive a goodly portion of her “onerous burden.”
“Think you I am desirous of keeping your interest, Laird MacLean?”
Bracing himself, Donall simply waited. Blessedly, he didn’t have to for long.
“You flatter yourself overmuch, Donall the Bold. It is not your lasting attention I wish to hold, but your bairn,” she said, determination glinting in her eyes. “I want you to get me with child.”
In the deepest, most silent hour of the night, Iain MacLean lay still upon his bed and frowned at the elaborately carved canopy looming darkly above his head. His hands rested atop several layers of embroidered coverlets of the finest quality, his fingers growing more tense the longer he glared holes in the bed’s timber-framed ceiling.
Heavy, drawn curtains sumptuous enough to please a king’s exalted tastes enclosed him in a cocoon of darkness. A sequestered sea of smooth silks, noblest furs, and . . . emptiness.
With a cry of anguish heard by none save his bedchamber’s well-built walls, he flung aside the coverings and sat bolt upright.
“Lileas!” The name burst from his throat, torn from the very depths of his soul.
Fierce pain clamped ’round his chest, icy cold bands of steel that squeezed the breath from him and crushed his soul. “My beloved.” This time the words were scarce more than a whisper, softly murmured pearls of misery borne on an agonized sigh.
His hands clutched the heavy folds of the bed curtains, his fingers digging into the opulence of the richly embroidered silk as if letting go would plunge him into the most vile abyss of hell.
He hung his dark head. “Lileas, I miss you . . .”
His great shoulders, rounded and hunched, began to shake. When the sobs rumbling deep in his chest breached his lips, Iain released the bed curtains and buried his face in his hands. Only after he had no more tears to shed and his voice became too hoarse to voice his pain, only then did he part the curtains and push to his feet.
The oppressive stillness of the dim chamber was nigh as great as the damning silence that lurked within the massive four-poster bed when its enveloping curtains were drawn. Even the hearth gave itself quiet and cold, its fire long extinguished.
Dead.
Spent as completely as his lady wife’s precious life.
His steps slow and heavy, he followed the path of the room’s sole illumination, a wide swath of pale moonlight, until he reached its point of entry: a splendidly arched window embrasure cut deep into the thickness of Baldoon’s stout walling.
Heaving a great sigh, he leaned his shoulder against the masoned recess and let the briny night air cool him. He rested the flat of his hand on the cold stone of the window tracery and stared out at the endless expanse of the sea.
A soft mist, washed silver by the moon, drifted slowly inland from the distant horizon, muting the rhythmic surge and withdrawal of the night-calmed sea, and cloaking its surface like a finely spun shroud.
Iain stepped farther into the window’s dark recess and pressed his forehead against the transom, welcoming its chill, grainy texture just as he welcomed the eerie quiet filling the room.
With the turn of a single fast-moving tide, light and softness had become as distant and unattainable as the disk-shaped moon shining high overhead.
Straining his eyes, he peered deep into the night’s silver-black darkness, probing the shadows until he found what he sought. The Lady Rock, half-hidden by wispy sheets of drifting fog, but there.
A harmless-looking hump broke the surface surprisingly close to Doon’s rugged shoreline, mockingly set smack in the middle of the broad, whitish-silver path of light cast across the dark waters by the impervious moon.
A rocky islet of death, as much a taker of life as the bastard MacKinnon whoresons who’d stranded his lady wife there, dooming her to drown.
Dooming his heart to die with her.
His hands clenched to fists, and fury, raw and unbridled, swelled within him until the force of it threatened to burst him asunder. But his grief weighed heavier than this strange, quiet night, and his anger receded, leaving sheer nothingness in its wake.
Pushing away from the window, he dragged a hand over his face and sank wearily onto one of the two opposite-facing seats carved into the embrasure walls.
His-and-her seats hewn of stone, hard and uncomfortable, but once piled high with beckoning mounds of gaily colored silken cushions.
A favored trysting spot where he and Lileas had spent many long hours lost in the simple joy of each other’s company.
Now the cushions were gone, and so was his wife . . . he sat alone on cold, naked stone and cried.
Or would have had he not already shed his every last tear.
Letting himself fall back against the wall, Iain turned his head toward the sea. The Lady Rock had slipped from view, swallowed either by the cloaking sea mist or engulfed by the fickle tide.
But he continued to stare, peering into the darkness and its mantle of silvery mist as if his will alone could summon forth the tidal rock once the waves had claimed it for the remainder of the night.
After a long while, he shoved to his feet and closed the shutters. “Soon you shall be avenged, my sweet,” he said to the dark and silent chamber, his hand yet resting on the damp, wooden slats now blocking the sea and its menaces from view.
“A sennight, no more, and vengeance shall be mine.” Turning his back on the window, he glowered instead at the vast emptiness of his magnificent bed.
His cold comfortless bed.
“Seven days, and I set sail, Lileas,” he said, and started forward . . . toward the hulking mass of carved oak and heartache. “Seven days and the MacKinnons will wish they’d ne’er been born.”
During the same small hours, but far and away across the boggy moorland of tumbled stones and stunted trees that stretched between MacLean and MacInnes lands, old Devorgilla hovered in front of her hearthstone, deftly jabbing at orange glowing clumps of peat with an iron poker. A shower of sparks and a smoky sweet curl of smoke rewarded her efforts and wreathed her lined face with a satisfied smile.
Stoop-shouldered, her free hand pressed to her hip, she prodded the smoldering peat until the sparks became lapping, dancing flames, and the fragrant smoke thickened and began drifting up toward the chimney hole cut in the low ceiling.
Her ancient bones warm again, she leaned the poker against the wall and returned her attention to the black cauldron suspended above the fire and its bubbling, foul-reeking contents. Leaning forward, she squinted at the steaming concoction, then sniffed.
And sniffed again.
“Harumph,” she grumbled, and took a long-handled ladle off the nearby table.
Still muttering, she dipped the spoon into the gurgling brew and brought a small sample to her lips. One taste, and she fair cackled with glee.
A second sampling, and she was convinced.
Her excitement mounting, the crone used the ladle to fill a dented pewter cup to the brim. She drained it in one gurgling gulp.
“Incense and holy water are not as potent,” she informed Mab, the tricolored feline curled fast asleep on the stone-slabbed floor.
The cat opened its eyes and stared at her. A supercilious look, a reprimand for daring to disrupt her sleep. But Mab’s haughty glare only increased Devorgilla’s glee.
’Twas the first time she’d noticed Mab’s eyes were of two colors.
Chortling with mirth, her gait sprightlier than usual, the crone crossed the cottage’s main room to the long wooden shelf that held her assortment of healing and spell-casting ingredients and preparations.
“Nigh good enough to make oxen fly,” she complimented herself as she studied the jumbled collection of herbs, powders and oils, and other charmed objects.
Her lips pursed, she rubbed her chin and let her cloudy-eyed gaze dart from one earthen container or leathe
r-wrapped flagon to the next. After a moment, she took a small wooden bowl and began filling it with a wee pinch of this and a more generous dash of that, mixed them together, then carried the bowl outside, where she lifted it up to catch the pale light of the moon.
“In the name of the old gods,” she chanted, “by the moon and the stars, I conjure you . . .” A fine and rare wind, blue-white and shimmering, swept into the glade to snatch the blessing from her tongue and speed it heavenward.
Well content, Devorgilla lowered the bowl and gave the moon a humble nod of thanks. When she stepped back into the cottage, she went straight to the cauldron and tipped the bowl’s contents into its bubbling brew and stirred.
Stirred and planned.
All manner of mischief.
All manner of good.
Even if some would not yet thank her.
Chapter Nine
GET YOU WITH child?” Donall the Bold’s jaw dropped in a most unflattering expression of incredulity.
Isolde flushed with acute self-consciousness at the look of total astonishment on his handsome face. “ ’Tis the natural course of t-things when a man and woman have . . . llain together,” she stammered, hating the way his gaping made her stumble over her tongue.
He threw back his dark head and stared at the raftered ceiling. A sound that could have been a growl of bottomless outrage, or a snort of utter derision, came from deep in his throat.
When he finally looked at her again, his brown eyes had darkened to a dangerous degree. “And to think I am called bold.”
Her cheeks burning, Isolde said, “Were I truly thus, I would surely not find this situation so distasteful.”
“Distasteful?” His vexation almost scorched her. “If you, the accomplished seductress, find being bedded by me offensive, then release me and spare yourself the agony.”
Mortification rose in Isolde’s throat, hot, thick, and stealing her breath. “I cannot,” she choked out, pushing the two words off her tongue.
I cannot because a child who shares our blood is the only salvation I see for this isle, for my dwindling clan, and to spare me a marriage to Balloch MacArthur, thus freeing me to wed my true soul mate.
Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 01] Page 14