“What else?” she spat up at him. She was not half dead with fatigue now, not lost in a labyrinth of hellish, living memories. She knew where she was, what she was doing … what was being done to her. She’d fought once and survived. She would fight again.
“I’m taking you to my father’s to keep you from being killed.”
“You are too good.” Even as she jeered, some misbegotten part of her wanted him to convince her that he believed what he said. Even if it was madness, madness she could forgive. But he was not mad, nor misguided. He was simply a devil.
He didn’t expend the paltry effort of a reply.
“I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by telling me this,” she said, in spite of herself. “Why would someone want to hurt me or kill me? Why would Phillip want to kill me?”
His gaze slipped away from hers and she noted the involuntary act with bitter conviction. He would lie now. “Watt did not want this marriage. He may not even know why himself. Perhaps his father was forcing him to it and he saw no other way to escape.”
She laughed. “Not want this marriage? I went to him yesterday, to tell him what I had done. He wouldn’t let me, even though it was clear from what he said in the forest that he suspected. Is that the act of a man looking for a way out of a marriage?”
“You were going to tell Watt? Why?” He sounded shocked. “You asked me not to tell him.”
“Of course.” She bit off the words. “Because I feared you would say it in such a way that he had no recourse but to call you out—just as you did. You told him in the crudest manner possible. I could not have gone to my marriage bed with that lie waiting to be discovered and I would not have deceived him. But you would have no understanding of that, would you, Lord Janus?”
A flinch? More likely contained laughter.
“None at all,” he said. “I was going to advise you to prick your thumb as he slept and smear your thighs.”
She felt the blood flee from her face, her skin grow cold, but she was stronger now. She ignored his crudeness.
“What I would like to know is why you have even bothered weaving this pitiful story,” she said. “I would think a man of your talents would have at least come up with some better tale.” Her lip curled back in as much contempt for herself as for him. “In fact, why fabricate this Banbury tale about assassins at all? I mean, you have the bloody letter naming you my surrogate guardian, don’t you?”
She peered through the darkness, trying to find some sign she’d struck a human chord in that inhumanely still countenance. All she could see was moonlight shimmering over his black hair.
“You didn’t really need an excuse to take me, did you?” she insisted.
“No,” he finally answered in that cool, dead voice.
She could hear his breathing, the slight draw and exhalation, light, measured, as if he were consciously regulating it.
“So if you don’t mean to rape me—and make no mistake, that is the only way you will ever again take your pleasure between my legs—what do you want?” With bitter satisfaction she heard the small, sharp inhalation of his breath. Pain or anger, it made no difference to her, as long as it discomforted him.
She waited for his answer, head up. A long moment passed.
“Don’t you know?” he finally ground out.
“Money,” she said flatly. It made sense. In hindsight his entire stay in Fair Badden had been one, long, well-orchestrated bit of dodgery: the charming, unsuccessful fumbler slowly transformed into a peerlessly lucky gamester.
“There’ll be no money from Mrs. Fraiser,” she promised. “The lands and everything on it are entailed to her son and he’s far beyond the reach of your stratagems.”
No reply.
She bent forward into the light from the window so that he could see her contempt, read her disdain.
“You’ve no chance of blackmailing anyone into paying for my return.” A small satisfaction, but she would take what she could. “Whatever Phillip might want, Squire Watt will never accept me as his daughter-in-law now.”
“So sure? I’m not.”
She shook her head, and the long, tangled skeins of her hair settled around her cheeks and throat like a widow’s webbed veil. “He might overlook the lack of a dowry but not the lack of a maidenhead.”
“Oh, Rhiannon, I assure you, you’ve more to recommend to that particular marriage than a simple intact piece of skin.”
“I loathe you.”
“I know.”
He would not be baited, nor pricked with the contempt she was wielding like a blade. His heart and soul were immutable if, indeed, he owned them at all. How could she have been so deceived?
“How lucrative was your stay in Fair Badden?”
The shadow shape shrugged, drifting back a pace, dissolving further into the gloom. “Four hundred pounds. More or less.”
“You admit it?” she asked.
“Why not?” he countered. “You’ve already discovered me. I see no advantage in promoting your naïveté. If you could not stand to—how did you phrase it?—‘go to your marriage bed with that lie waiting to be discovered,’ how can I be any less noble? Only honesty between us now, eh, Rhiannon? Unless,” his voice dropped, became low and mocking, “you’d rather we dispensed with even that inconvenience … ?”
She shrank back from its ugliness.
“No? Ah, well.”
He was every bit as terrible as she conjectured. How much worse could he be? She had to know the extent of her gullibility.
“The song?” she asked. “Is that true, too?”
“Which song?” he asked.
“ ‘The Ride of the Demon Earl’s Brood.’ ”
“St. John must have tripped in his haste to tell you that little tale.”
“Is it true? Did you?”
“Why?” he countered. “Are you wondering just what sort of evil seed you received?”
She gasped at his crudity, at the calm passionless manner in which he delivered it.
“All right. Here it is. I slashed through a line of men armed with pikes and staves. I made my sword bright with their blood. I trampled them under my horse’s hooves.”
She wrapped her arms around herself.
“I aided redcoated Brits in killing Scottish peasants.” And then, so quietly she barely heard him. “I saved my brother from being killed.”
She raised her eyes, speared the darkness that hid him with her gaze. “Those peasants were my clan. McClairen was my laird.”
He stood as still and motionless as the night.
He’d seduced her on the eve of her wedding, killed her kinsmen, and stolen her from the home she’d so carefully fashioned, from the life she’d so carefully cultivated.
Well, she thought, she needn’t be careful anymore. There was no one here whom she wished to please.
“You can’t stay awake all the time,” she whispered. “But you’d best try, Ash Merrick. For as soon as you’re asleep, I’ll be gone and you’ll be lucky if I don’t leave that silver blade of yours sheathed between your ribs.”
“Trading threats, are we?” he mused softly. “Well, it’s my turn now. Listen carefully. You’re right. I can’t stay awake until we reach Wanton’s Blush. But if I catch you trying to run away, or trying to induce some poor fool into interfering with us, I’ll not hesitate to punish you. Severely.” Not a chord of warmth was revealed in his voice.
She huddled back on the mattress, glaring at him. She heard him take a deep breath.
“And as for your ‘killing me’ if I touch you—” His head shifted in the gloom and she caught the glint of his dark eyes. “Any time I want, anywhere I want.”
* * *
For three days a tempestuous sky dogged their travel. It hounded them along faint, ancient drovers’ paths up to high pastures and secret paddocks, the traditional hideouts of the raiders and thieves.
Ash did not try to break Rhiannon’s silence. With her savage denunciation, she’d finally made him confront his own motives.
His notion that Watt would want to kill her because he preferred the company of men was feeble and ridiculous. Her best interest hadn’t been at the heart of his decision, his loins had been. He’d deluded himself, and that tortured him most of all. He’d always been honest with himself if with no one else.
With no reason to enjoin Rhiannon’s good opinion, having repudiated it, he punished himself by seeking its opposite, her contempt—something she was more than obliged to give. It was a painful scourge. It was damn near killing him.
As for Rhiannon, she watched the rod-straight back before her with sullen hostility. She had little doubt Ash meant his threat to hurt her if she tried to flee. But it wasn’t that or the bruising pace he set—or even the fact that in spite of his claim she’d yet to see him asleep—that kept her from trying to escape. She had no place to go.
Each night she met his mocking smile with a tilt of her chin but held her breath until he’d wound a blanket about his shoulders and settled with his back against the door of the inns where they’d overnighted. He ignored her then, his gaze fixed on the floorboards, leaving her to wonder what drove him now to complete whatever plot he’d devised.
She little cared. And if the haunted expression she sometimes glimpsed upon his fierce, exhausted countenance might have once confounded her, bitterness left no room for such speculation. She simply welcomed whatever pain he felt. He’d destroyed her life.
During their travel her gaze slew cautiously about. It was all so intimately recognizable: the feel of the wet, cool air; the dark, drenched colors; the scent of flinty rock and gin-spiced conifers. It had been waiting for her return for a decade, like a witch’s unwanted familiar.
The winnowing wind whispered a spurious greeting and the chill mist stretched milky fingers up to brush her legs in mock obeisance. Here the McClairens and all those sworn to support them—including the Russells—had returned from Culloden’s bloody battlefield seeking sanctuary. Here Lord Cumberland’s dragoons had found them. Here they’d been hunted down. Here massacred.
Even in moonlight the mountains seemed stained with blood, the ground, salted with her clansmen’s deaths, forever inhospitable and barren. A thousand high, craggy acres of graveyard.
She shuddered and closed her eyes against it. They’d made her home a potter’s field.
In such a manner they traveled for four more days and nights. On the fifth night they crested a high, tree-bereaved hill overlooking the sea. Below them and some miles off, a thin bridge of land connected the headland to a big, crescent-shaped island. It surged out of the sea, blocky and jagged with rock. At its inner curve it rose to a high shelf of land overlooking the sheer, dramatic cliffs facing east. On this apex perched a mansion, or castle, or fortress.
* * *
It was impossible to tell what exactly the place was, or had started out as, or looked to become, it was so rife with turrets and buttresses, cupolas and columns, friezes and pediments. A mad architect’s maddest creation.
Lines of windows cast beacons across terraced lawns and pockmarked sweeping staircases. All about, pinpricks of light—lanterns?—swung and swayed about the massive fortress’s base, like fairies dancing maniacally about the skirts of some mammoth, beleaguered matron.
Flitting in and out of the open doorways, through beams of light and patches of shadow, darting and settling in clusters and singly amidst the blackening lawn, were people, ladies and gentlemen, dozens and dozens of them.
Bemused and disconcerted by the spectacle, Rhiannon looked to Ash. His gaze was already on her, thoughtful and remote, his face stained with fatigue. He smiled tightly, and flung out his hand in a cavalier’s overmannered gesture.
“Welcome to McClairen’s Isle,” he said, “and Wanton’s Blush.”
Chapter Nineteen
They left the horses with a liveried servant and climbed the front stairs through the carved panels into a great hall ablaze with light and mirrors and gilt.
Beneath the beatific gaze of the plaster angels high overhead mingled dozens of people. They nibbled cakes and licked gloved fingers, spilt iced punch on Persian carpets, and laughed and posed and sweated in their rich gowns and piled wigs.
Ash led Rhiannon through the little queues of revelers and knots of gamers. Few noted their progress. Most had gone days without sleep, sun, or fresh food. They were swollen on wine and excitement, dull and fog-witted, groping through the mire of senseless spectacles and animal pleasures his father designed to keep them entertained … to keep them careless with their money. For, when all was said and done, Wanton’s Blush was simply the most dissolute, the most licentious, the most sumptuous gaming hell in all the British Isles.
In a few minutes they had broken free of the crush in the main hall and stood in a narrow corridor behind the curved staircase. A laughing woman burst out of a nearby door, her gown slipping from one shoulder, a trio of flushed and hound-eyed men tumbling in pursuit. Ash snatched Rhiannon up and out of their way.
His arms tightened convulsively. The salty, musty scent of travel filled his nostrils. The feel of her body stoked the appetite he’d held in check into a veritable blaze. He looked down. She’d averted her face.
Temper surged through him. What did he care? He thought fiercely. He did not need her scorn to tell him who he was.
“Fa! Carr never said we were to have a masque tonight!”
Ash looked up. A pink-ribboned, satin-clad creature in a lavender wig leaned against the door frame.
“But ’struth, must be so for here’s Little Red Ridy Hood herself!” The man’s plucked and pencilled brows rose in twin semicircles above shallow, lashless eyes.
Smoothly, Ash lowered Rhiannon to the ground. She did not step back. Of course not. She’d never give him the satisfaction of showing fear. Neither did she say a word or rebuke him in any way. She did not need to. Her silence was eloquent enough. She expected he’d stolen her from Watt to satisfy his carnal appetite.
The lavender-headed fop’s gaze drifted from his interested inspection of Rhiannon to Ash, sizing up the filth of travel, the five-day growth of beard, and the tangled tail of black hair.
“And this is either the woodsman or the wolf. I say, fellow, which are you supposed to be?”
“Pray commence trembling, Hurley, that’s Merrick you’re twitting.” A gorgeous young girl appeared beside the plump, pink Hurley. Her young, pure face was absolutely smooth and her poise was unassailable. The gray of her elaborately powdered wig contrasted jarringly with her obvious youth, somehow making a mockery of both.
“Merrick?” the perplexed Hurley asked.
“My brother,” the girl replied.
“Fia,” Ash said, inclining his head. She was fifteen—or was it sixteen?—and having known so little of her mother, was utterly her father’s creature. Ash trusted her less than anyone else, perhaps because in spite of himself he felt the bonds of blood between them, urging something different.
“Merrick? Carr’s son?” Hurley stuttered.
“One of them,” Ash allowed coolly.
“The ruthless one,” Fia said with a small, practiced smile. She moved her salved lips close to one of Hurley’s pink ears. Ash could practically see it quiver. “The dangerous one,” she whispered loudly. “The passionate one.”
Hurley’s expression of perplexity gave way to a licentiousness. He reached out to tickle Fia beneath her chin. Calmly Fia slashed her fan across his knuckles. He snatched back his hand, staring at her in wounded wonder.
“Be gone, Lord Hurley. Before Merrick decides to misinterpret your attentions to his little sister.” Her face was as smooth as a porcelain doll’s and yet a little sneer curled around her words.
The white powder covering Hurley’s face could not hide his flush, and with a mumbled adieu, he escaped. Fia ignored his departure.
Beside Ash Rhiannon stirred.
“What is this you’ve brought, brother?” Fia murmured. “Something for Carr? A new toy?”
“His ward,” Ash retu
rned shortly. Rhiannon’s head remained bowed, her eyes downcast, her shoulders slumped. She looked as if she’d been beaten which, Ash decided, was probably just what she wanted to look like.
Fia, a little smile chasing cross her features, dipped her head and peeked up.
“He has a ward now, does he?” she said in a voice as gentle and dangerous as the sound of a snake slithering over a dry lawn. Calmly Ash stepped between them. Fia glanced at him in surprise. “Who’d have thought?”
“I would,” a deep masculine voice with a distinct Scottish burr announced.
At the sound, Ash turned. Approaching him was a tall, broad-shouldered man. The chandelier light polished his dark mahogany head to a metallic sheen.
“Donne,” Ash greeted him. He was surprised to see him here, at Wanton’s Blush. Carr usually picked his guests carefully and while Donne was certainly rich enough to be admitted, he did not display the proper susceptibility to drinking, gambling, or wenching.
A smile carved deep dimples in each of Donne’s lean cheeks, mirroring the cleft in his chin. There was a watchfulness about the long, narrow eyes currently fixed on Fia. She’d straightened abruptly at his appearance but now stood regarding the Scot with the calm imperturbability she’d owned since childhood.
Rhiannon, like some damn silent statue, remained motionless at Ash’s side. He needed to get her upstairs before Carr discovered them. He was tired and edgy, in no condition to deal with his father. Still, if Donne was here, perhaps he’d come with some interesting information.
“What the devil are you doing here, Donne?”
Donne shrugged. “I came along as part of a set. Hurley’s house party, you know. I simply could not refuse the opportunity to game a bit and, of course, such charming company.”
At his last words he bowed in Fia’s direction, and though the movement was easy and elegant, a quality of practiced boredom robbed it of politeness and made it instead an actor’s gesture, cruelly meaningless.
If possible, Fia’s young, unnaturally beautiful face grew smoother; her large eyes went dark as obsidian in a black rill’s bed.
Donne turned to Rhiannon, bowing again, and this time the movement was respectful, the gesture an acknowledgement rather than a caricature.
The Passionate One Page 16