And in the few moments without pealing thunder and rapid bursts of light, an eerie greenish glow shone through the cracks in the rain-swollen shutter slats—the unholy color, a sure sign of a Highland storm the likes of which seldom had been seen.
At least not in his day.
Not that he was all too sure he’d own to having glimpsed such an otherworldly light even if he had.
Shivering, he gritted his teeth and wished he could have done with this mummery. He came close to going down on bent knee and telling her the truth . . . that he’d wanted her with the whole of his heart since he’d first glimpsed her at the ripe age of two-and-ten.
A tender age, to be sure, but enough years for even the most ambitious of lads to realize the folly of hoping to win the hand of a daughter of such a high and mighty house as MacLean.
In especial, a feuding clan.
Nevertheless, it was a plan he’d embarked on with all the gusto and faith of his bold, young heart—a goal he’d clung to every day upon awakening and every night before he’d succumbed to sleep.
He had contrived meetings at each gathering of the island clans. One day, he’d followed her onto the moors, hoping to please her with a bouquet of bell heather. Then she’d hurt her ankle, and after carrying her back to her kinsmen, they’d shunned and reviled him. The experience made it clear how futile his love was for her.
Thereafter, he’d avoided looking at her, the pain of doing so too deep for his young lad’s heart. And the few times he’d slipped and glanced her way, some flaunting evidence of her wealth and status had reminded him of his lacking.
Even so, all through the years, he’d hoped in secret. The thought of her sustaining him until, at Dupplin, utter failure had ripped and shredded even his hardiest hopes and dreams. And then fate had given her to him at last—upon the shards of all his inadequacies.
“Be not so certain you have the fullest rights of it,” she said then, bringing him back to the present, a challenge heating her voice again. “Oft-times there is much truth to be seen on the surface. The tragedy is when we fail to recognize it—or worse, when we do and then deny it.”
Their eyes met and held. “Mayhap, sir, we would both be well-served to acknowledge the ripples on the surface and look deeper to find the pebble that caused them?”
Magnus bit back a groan of frustration.
The pebbles lining his path were the size of boulders. Mammoth chunks of granite that would break a giant’s back, much less a mortal man’s.
Narrowing her eyes, his long-desired bride turned a penetrating gaze on him. “I can begin by telling you I shall do my best not to mind that you desire me for my hair color and not becau . . . because I am me.”
He stared at her, slack-jawed.
Could she not see his mind? His heart? Even if he did not speak the words?
Ne’er had he known a lovelier maid, or one more desirable.
Especially now, full naked save the enveloping folds of his plaid. Lucifer’s knees, just looking at her, with the fire glow gleaming off her bared shoulders and glinting in the ebony silk of her hair, inflamed him and set his blood to heating with furious, unabated need.
The only problem was the oversized chunk of granite looming up between them—an immovable barrier that had the words love, joy, and intimacy chiseled all over its hard-glittering surface.
The only truths he couldn’t share with her.
Not if he didn’t want that boulder shattering what wee bit of his pride yet remained intact.
So he would give her what he could—his body, his physical passion, and the knowledge that he indeed cared deeply.
He just wouldn’t mention his true feelings.
For his sake as much as hers.
Not until he’d repaid her brothers every last siller and could support her from his own coffers.
“Sweet lass.” He caught her hand, holding her gaze as he brought her fingers to his lips. “You are lovely as no other,” he vowed, trying hard to imagine what Hugh would say in this moment, how his golden-voiced brother would weasel his way out of such a foul-reeking corner.
“To me, you are incomparable,” he tried, the honeyed words sounding silly on his unused-to-tenderness tongue. “Any lass I knew before you, raven-haired or otherwise, is but a distant shadow, that I swear to you.”
Drawing a trembling breath, she pulled her hand from his grasp and looked down. But not before Magnus caught the glitter of unshed tears clinging to her spiky black lashes.
The shimmering gleam of her tears were a swift kick in the teeth to his fool attempts to imitate his sweet-tongued brother.
She waved a stilling hand when he opened his mouth to recite another sonnet-like bit of sentimental nonsense. “Do you know I ought to be relieved?” she said in a small voice that made his heart tilt.
Taking the first step, he hooked two fingers beneath her chin, turned her face to him. “How so?” he asked, rubbing his thumb gently along the smooth line of her jaw. “Relieved in what way?”
“Ach”—she blinked furiously and dashed at her cheeks with the back of her hand—“see you, when I first came here, I feared you might prefer wee slips of maids like Janet, all fair and fragile.” She plucked at the plaid she’d wrapped so securely about her.
In particular, at the folds covering her abdomen.
Moistening her lips, she turned a shimmering gaze on him. “Had I known you relished well-rounded, more womanly-shaped lasses, I would ne’er have spent hours marching—”
Boom, boom, boom!
She clapped a mortified hand over her lips almost as if she, too, had heard the long-faded echo of many pairs of trampling feet trudging down the turnpike stairs.
Magnus heard it without question.
But he also heard a single pair of marching feet—a most fetching feminine pair with the sweetest ankles he’d ever seen. And in his mind’s eye, he saw those delightful feet not just traipsing down endless spirals of winding stone steps, but also making the journey back up the stairs.
Over and over again.
Just as Janet had reported that early morning in the rain-misted bailey.
Comprehension sluicing through him, he stared at her, his heart slamming hard against his ribs. Hoping she wouldn’t notice that his hands trembled, he reached to touch her loosened braids.
“Can it be you were about to admit marching up and down the tower stairs?” he asked, unraveling her plaits until the thick glossy strands spilled free. “And that you did so repeatedly?”
He stretched his fingers through the cool silk of her hair, savored its sweet slide across the back of his hand. Didn’t dare to trust the wild hope beginning to well inside him.
“Did Janet and Dagda perchance catch you in this . . . unusual activity?”
She said nothing, but the way she compressed her lips and a slight tensing of her eyelids proved ample answer.
An awkward silence she couldn’t keep for long.
“Botheration!” The expletive burst from her lips and she swiped another hand across her cheeks. “A grand and merry pox on whiche’er of the two told you.”
Magnus folded his arms, waited until a particularly strong buffet of wind ceased rattling the shutters before he spoke. “And will you tell me why you engaged in such foolery?”
Biting her lower lip, his bonnie bride said nothing.
Not that she had need of words—the delicate flush inching up her neck and making her face glow as bright as red-burning peats screamed her ill ease with a loudness more deafening than the sharp cracks of thunder shaking the chamber’s thick stone walls.
He cocked a brow, let the slightest of smiles take any harsh edges off his words—and hammer away a few more chips of stone from the mammoth clump of granite.
His smile broadening, he went on, the words flowing now. “A lass traversing a turnpike stair is none so rare a sight in any keep, I’ll wager, but a fair lady occupying herself with such a task for hours on end is . . . in- triguing.”
And encouraging beyond measure if he was correctly guessing the reason she’d indulged in such nonsense.
He hadn’t developed his physical stamina and muscular build without long hours of hardest training.
She swung away from him, tossed a sheaf of gleaming black hair over her shoulder. “There is naught intriguing about it,” she declared, her voice ringing. “For a braw champion of the lists, you are precious dull at kenning a woman’s heart if I must color my reasons for you!”
“Ahh . . . but you color so beautifully,” he said, feeling almost two-and-twelve again, bursting with hope. “Saints, but you are bonnie when you glow like that,” he blurted, grinning at her lovely profile. Noting well the bright red of the cheek turned his way, he wondered if a similar flush kissed the lush fullness of her breasts.
“So-o-o, you would you see me color, would you?” She whirled to face him, a blaze of MacLean fury sparking in her dark eyes. “If I say you what I was doing on those stairs, I shall flush a brighter red than a hundred Highland sunsets!”
Magnus folded his arms, waited, amazed to feel a grin crinkling his eyes and deepening the creases in his cheeks. His dimples. Mother of God, he’d almost forgotten how damned good it felt to smile.
Apparently too caught up in explaining herself to notice his mirth, Amicia snatched a convenient flagon off the table and poured herself a measure of finest uisge beatha, tossing it down in one choking gulp.
“Good sir, I mounted and descended those stairs so that I need not blush when standing before you unclothed,” she announced, her voice rising as she set down the cup with a loud clack. “So that my . . . er . . . exertions might pare a bit of the womanliness from my hips.”
She blew out her breath on a hot, gusty sigh. “See you, I’d hoped to rid myself of a bit of extra flesh—lest this body’s roundness repel you!”
Her color deepening indeed, she threw open his plaid and flung it aside. “Look you, Magnus MacKinnon,” she charged him, grabbing a barely-there roll of flesh at the top of her abdomen, pinching it hard before she let go to smooth her hands along the well-rounded curves of her shapely hips, “see my nakedness—the plumpness marring my belly, my . . . form!”
Magnus stared at her, too flummoxed to find words.
Did she truly not know how desirous she was?
How intoxicatingly beautiful?
Saints, the slight swell of her tummy delighted him. The luxuriant tangle of sooty curls at the tops of her thighs stole his breath, and the large, dark rounds crowning her breasts had him moistening lips run impossibly dry. Sheerest lust and raw, raging need swept through him like rivers of molten fire.
“Merciful heaven, dinna tell me you believed I’d find you displeasing?” he got out, strangle-voiced. “You—of all women?”
“And why not me . . . of all women?”
Because for more years than you know, just the whisper of your name across my heart has filled me with a warmth brighter and more beautiful than the light of a thousand suns.
Blinking, Magnus rammed a hand through his hair. Scalding heat crept up the back of his neck. Sakes, he half-expected to glance over his shoulder and discover Hugh had somehow let himself into the chamber, that his word-gifted bard of a brother hovered close behind him and had flustered the flowery sentiment in his ear.
But inside he knew.
The words dwelled in the deepest part of himself. There in the darkest, most intimate corner of his heart where they’d always been and, like as not, would e’er remain. Through this life and beyond.
Forever.
For eternity.
“Come you, Sir Magnus . . . tell me why.” She took a couple of steps toward him, her breasts swaying. “I am none so fragile that I cannot hear the truth.”
“The truth ought to be clear enough for you to see,” he said in a voice near as tight as the hot iron hardness lifting his plaid.
He stared at her, unable to tear his gaze from her voluptuous bounty, the raven curls adorning her woman’s mound. Saints help him, but a faint trace of her musky femininity wafted up from that jet-black triangle, the heady scent beguiling him.
“I need the words, my lord. My eyes see—and very well. Mayhap I see the truth. But even so, my heart would hear the words.”
“I’ faith,” Magnus swore, the boulder making itself known again. “Could you not tell that your kiss during the Claiming Ceremony near brought me to my knees? Is that not truth enough for you? Of my desire and my . . . affection?”
“And do I have your affection?” She touched a hand to his chest, smoothed her fingers across the hard-planed muscles before pressing her palm over his heartbeat. “I would know. Now. Before we . . . proceed.”
“Aye, sweeting, that you do—hold my affection. With all surety,” he admitted, the words freeing him even if they only told half the tale. “Never you worry.”
He looked at her, saw the doubt still swimming in her darkly luminous eyes.
“But I do worry, see you,” she said, blessedly making no move to cover herself.
Instead, she jammed fisted hands against her hips, the movement causing her large breasts to sway to and fro, the nipples tight and thrusting in the chill night air.
Magnus groaned, no longer trying to even conceal his aroused state. Indeed, he threw off Colin’s plaid, tossing it aside as swiftly as she’d had done with his.
If she wouldn’t believe the truth of his words, she’d be hard-pressed to deny the rigid length of him riding hard against his groin.
But she scarce noticed, her hot gaze fixed on the peat fire, her fingers digging fiercely into the sweet flesh of her abdomen.
“How could I think otherwise when, from my first day here, Janet made it clear she was your intended and you, my lord, made it more than plain you did not want me?”
“Janet was e’er a lass with . . . problems,” Magnus owned, lifting a handful of her hair, letting the silken strands spill through his fingers. “And I, lass, have been the good part of a fool.”
It was the most he was willing to concede . . . the most he could concede.
“I think you are anything but a fool,” she said, leaning back against the table’s edge, her expression softening, her eyes growing misty.
Too misty for his liking.
For it was affection and a fine lusty union he meant to share with her—not moon-eyed revelations and sentimental sighs.
“Colin has asked for Janet’s hand,” he blustered, seeking a topic to cool the heart-fire glowing in her eyes. To save him from having his own eyes grow all soft and dewy if she kept staring at him with her heart on her sleeve.
“He is man enough to master her problems—just as I am thinking she will prove every ounce the strong lass he will be needing at his side when he leaves here.”
Amicia gasped, her own cares momentarily forgotten.
She’d seen Colin and Janet together, and had harbored her suspicions, her hopes, for them both. But she hadn’t heard anything beyond the usual castle prattling and blether. The most of it snatches of vague speculation amongst the tongue-waggling kitchen and laundry wenches.
“Y-you truly do not mind if she leaves with your friend?” She had to know. “She seemed so . . . smitten with you.”
“For the love of Saint Columba, sweetness, have you not heard a word I’ve told you?” He looked at her, the blue of his eyes almost indigo in the firelit room.
“Nay, I see well that you haven’t paid heed to anything I’ve said. Mayhap deeds will speak all the louder?” He almost growled the words, the huskiness in his deep voice exciting her—the implication behind his words melting her.
A most determined look coming over his handsome face, he snatched up one of the discarded plaids, bunched its soft folds into a semblance of a cushion, and, reaching for her, hoisted her onto the table’s edge, thrusting the makeshift cushion beneath her to soften the table’s hard surface.
His hardness caught her eye, the sight of it undoing her.
Some wee demon i
nside her made her narrow her eyes at him in challenge. “I ceased fretting about Janet when I learned about the raven-haired lasses. Knowing about them—”
At her words, a strangled groan ripped from his throat and he urged her legs apart, stepping between them even as he splayed his hands around the curves of her buttocks, kneaded the soft plumpness he found there.
“There-ne’er-were-any-raven-haired-lasses, do you hear me, Amicia?” The words tore from his throat. “Nary a one. Not in the sense you understood.”
Amicia blinked, her breath quickening. She was acutely aware of the hot passion blazing in his eyes and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. “But I do not understand.”
“You are those raven-haired lasses! Always you! They were but pale substitutes for what I could not have.” He almost shouted the confession at her. “You and only you—the lass I have coveted since I first laid eyes on you. The lass I knew I could ne’er hope to possess.”
“Oh, dear saints,” Amicia gasped, her heart swelling with such joy she thought it’d surely burst. Her eyes streaming, she looked at him, not even trying to check the flow of hot-scalding tears. “Oh, dear saints,” she said again, the words almost too wobbly to be understood this time. “Can it be true?”
In answer, he pulled her against him, lowered his lips to hers in a searing, soul-stealing kiss. A blinding fusion of seeking lips, sweeping tongues, and hot mingled breath.
Years and years of need unleashed.
Over and over again, he kissed her with a reckless abandon that melted her bones and left their Claiming Ceremony kiss far behind. The wild tangle of their tongues watered her knees and moistened another, suddenly very damp and tingling place that pulsed and throbbed with an urgency that shocked her.
“Aye, it is true.” He broke the kiss just long enough to breathe the assurance against her cheek. “It has always been about you.”
Pulling back a bit more, he gave her a wolfish smile—a full, dimpled one that filled her with a golden warmth to rival the sun. “Think you I would have lost that long-ago archery contest had I not caught a glimpse of you standing near?”
Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] Page 23