Seamus’s voice suddenly carried on the wind. The boy stood by the dolmen stones shouting out a question about a ship in the bay.
She waved at the boy. “There’ll be no peace on Inishmaan until I give that boy my attention,” she murmured.
In a pensive silence, they strode up the final stretch to the height. Walking by her side, he fell into brooding. It always pained him to think he’d been stabbed by one of his own people. If the men of his clan would just see sense—if they would give up their own greed for power—then they would understand that it was in their best interests to follow his father’s lead.
Suddenly he realized that Cairenn was no longer walking beside him. She’d stopped just inside the ring of the embedded stones that dotted the ground around the dolmen.
The color had drained from her face.
He strode back to her. “Lass, what ails you?”
“Nothing.” She spoke in a breathy way that made him conscious of the lie. “I…just…need a moment to catch my breath.”
She placed her hand on his chest. At her touch, every muscle in his body came alive.
“Cairenn.”
“A pain in the head, no more.” Her fingers curled against him, seizing a fistful of his tunic as if she were trying to stay upright. “It will pass.”
He stood as still as a dolmen stone as the scent of this woman—rich earth and wildflowers—seeped into his mind. He breathed the fragrance deep and it was like he was taking her inside him, all of her, her softness and her warmth and her wild, sweeping imagination.
He slipped his hand over hers. At his touch, she lifted her face and threw her sea-green gaze at him like a grappling-hook into his heart.
“Lachlan,” she said, as if she were calling him from afar.
“I’m here.”
“But you’re not,” she said, her brows knotting as she pressed against him. “You’re not.”
He couldn’t help himself. He wrapped his arms around her. He whispered senseless words into her hair as he gazed past the thatched roofs of the distant farmhouses, to the gray sea and the hazy horizon, breathing in the sharp smell of the sea and rocking her to the sound of birds cawing and waves rolling in on the strand far below. He thought about the grim darkness of his own home and the smell of blood on his sword and angry men painted with woad and thatched roofs burning and wondered why he was in such a hurry to return to war when, everyone thinking him already dead, he might very easily make a place here amid peace.
He must have said something, for she looked up and fixed her startled green eyes upon him. He looked at her pale, lovely face and imagined her sitting in a house of wattle and daub that he’d built himself, spinning wool cut from his own sheep. It should be his cows she milked, his table she graced, his bed she warmed.
The oddest feeling came over him. It was as if he’d walked up this slope before, by the music of the surf below, feeling the warmth of the sun beating on the back of his head, following the bright blond head of the woman now pressed against him. It was an unearthly feeling, like the memory of something that had not yet happened but was already burned into his mind.
“Lachlan,” she said, his name on her lips pleading. “Don’t go.”
“I’m right here.”
“Stay,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Stay here and be safe.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cairenn gripped his shirt as if it were a rope in a drowning sea. She struggled to read Lachlan’s thoughts as the power of the dolmen boosted her gift to painful levels, but all she could read, in this moment, was the expression on his face. After so much study, she could finally identify confusion when it rippled across his wide, beautiful brow.
Of course he was confused by her behavior. He could not hear what she heard, standing on this height so close to the thrumming vibrations of the dolmen stones. He could not feel the pulsing collective thoughts of the people of Galway, the fishmongers bartering for prices, the blacksmiths teaching their apprentices, the millstone workers worrying as the gears slowed. Lachlan could not hear the Portuguese sailors on the ships in the bay jockeying to be the first to visit the whores in the smoky brothels.
Nor could Lachlan hear the thoughts of the Derry men now rowing toward Inishmaan, or the frightful plans of her father sitting at the stern of the galley among them.
“You’re shaking.” A muscle flexed in Lachlan’s cheek. “I’m taking you home.”
“No.”
His midnight-sky eyes settled on her with an intensity that made her blood rush. When she had made the decision to approach the dolmen stones, she knew that the noise would overwhelm her, but she’d also expected that the borrowed power would make it easier for her to focus on the one man whose thoughts she wanted to penetrate above all others. Instead, tremors shuddered through her, weakening her more every moment she lingered. For people like her, approaching these heights could be dangerous. Daring to touch a sacred stone could mean derangement, disappearance, or even death.
“Cairenn!” Seamus’s excitement broke through her shattered thoughts. “There’s a funny boat out there. It’s got a carving at the bow.”
“I can’t see it, Seamus.”
That was a lie. She could see the boat through Seamus’s mind as well as the minds of the men standing on the shore waiting its approach, but her attention was elsewhere. She thought she could sense something in Lachlan, but it was like trying to grab hold of a sea-slick fish in the dark with fumbling hands.
“Come and look!” Seamus’s bright excitement blinded her like a candle held too close to her eyes. “Tell me what it is!”
She said, “A moment, Seamus—”
“It looks like a dragon!”
The darkness of Lachlan’s mind gave a fraction, like the bowing of a sail in the wind. She sensed his essence billowing around her as she searched deeper—
“No,” Seamus shouted. “It’s a sea-serpent, curled up—”
“It’s a galley,” she interrupted, trying to dim Seamus’s excitement so she could concentrate. “Men are rowing.”
A jolt shot through Lachlan and she realized her mistake. Lachlan raised his head to follow Seamus’s gaze. Then Lachlan saw what Seamus saw, and what she herself saw through the eyes of others: A galley of the kind that came from the Western Isles.
But what Lachlan couldn’t know, as he released her to get a better look, was that her father had lured this ship to Inishmaan on the pretext of providing medicine for one of the ailing sailors. Her father had tempted these men to these shores, so that the ship, when it left, might carry Lachlan with it.
“Seamus,” Lachlan barked. “Take Cairenn home.”
***
Lachlan knew she was following him. He heard her soft footfall and Seamus’s galloping one behind him, but he had other concerns on his mind. Urgency drew him down the path toward the shore, to where the galley approached.
But did it bring friends, or enemies?
He stumbled his way downhill, ignoring the way his shoulder pulled and twanged, ignoring weariness from exertion, drawing on what grit was left in him. He paused on the path long before he reached the thatched-roofed storehouses and the one alehouse. Dozens of nut-brown coracles lay pulled up on the strand or upturned above the waterline, attended by groups of fishermen. Squinting against the sun glancing off the water, he watched the galley drop anchor beyond the reef. A coracle rowed out to meet it. He took cover in the shadow of thatch as the pilot boat made its return.
When the little boat dug its keel through the mud, Lachlan saw a familiar figure rise from within. Cairenn’s father stepped on the gunwale and leapt to the shore. He paused to speak to a man who followed him out of the coracle, a man wearing a tartan with the O’Neill colors.
Uneasiness gripped him and he ducked out of sight. The O’Neills were cousins to his people, but Lachlan didn’t recognize this man. Even if he could identify him, he wouldn’t know whether he could trust him. Even with his father’s help, Lachlan had never been
able to pinpoint the enemies within his own clan, so who was to say that this O’Neill wasn’t a friend of the assassins whose knife had found its way into his back?
Lachlan pressed behind the building as he heard striding steps approaching. When Conor’s dark figure swept by, Lachlan made sure the doctor was alone and then stepped into the path behind him. The doctor whirled and his hand went to the knife-hilt of his belt.
Lachlan raised a brow. “Expecting trouble on your own island?”
“Old habits die hard.” The doctor released his grip and looked him over. “The shoulder heals?”
“Well enough to heft a knife.” Lachlan tilted his head toward the shore. “What business do you have with an O’Neill?”
“Your business, Lachlan of Loch Fyfe.”
Had Lachlan been stronger, more wary, maybe he could have hidden his surprise. But Lachlan saw from the doctor’s face that his own reaction had swept away the last of the man’s doubts.
Lachlan said, “You’ve been busy in Galway.”
“The Derry men are talkative in their cups.” The doctor stepped up to him, lowering his voice. “Much has happened in Scotland since you left.”
The doctor placed a heavy hand on Lachlan’s good shoulder.
“Lachlan,” he said. “Your father is dead.”
CHAPTER NINE
Cairenn knew the feelings that passed through a mind when bad news was delivered—the denial, the shock, the anger—but she could not read Lachlan’s thoughts as her father delivered the tidings of Lachlan’s father’s death. All she could do was watch that beautiful face from where she stood on a ridge of the hillside path. From this distance, she saw him shake his head once, twice. She saw his brows lower as if he didn’t understand the words. Then his face went as still as stone.
As her father coaxed Lachlan up the path, she felt a weight of sadness and wondered if it was Lachlan’s or just her own. Her arms ached to open to the grieving man but that was foolishness. Her father would never approve of her making so intimate a gesture.
“Lachlan,” Da said, as they reached the bend in the path where she and Seamus stood. “I need a word with my daughter. You and I shall speak more on this later. Seamus, go tend to your cows, it’s nearly milking time.”
Dutifully, Seamus set up the hill toward the pastures above. Lachlan kept walking up the path, his gaze drawn inward where she couldn’t see.
Her father hadn’t yet said a word to her, but through his thoughts he communicated everything that had happened in Galway. She saw that he’d spent many nights in smoky seaside alehouses, sitting near the Derry men to listen to their drunken talk. She saw her father buy many a drink and venture many a question about where they’d come from.
I’ve got a daughter in Wales, her lands besieged. Are the English causing trouble in the Highlands as well? Trouble there is, a man had said, but it’s clan against clan and sept against sept. The Campbells fighting the Macdonalds, and the MacEgans fighting among themselves. The chieftain of Loch Fyfe found dead at the bottom of a cliff, only a week after his son disappeared off a ship in the North Sea.
Cairenn shivered with the impact of the news. “Father,” she whispered, “it’s too dangerous for Lachlan to leave.”
A muscle flickered in his cheek. “So it’s Lachlan now?”
She tried very hard not to blush. “He’ll return to a place where people want him dead.”
“That’s his decision. I can’t force a man who doesn’t want to stay.”
And Lachlan wouldn’t stay, that much she knew. With his father dead, she was sure that duty would tighten a fisted grip around his heart.
Her mother’s prophecy reverberated in her mind.
Death.
“Please, Father,” she said, her mind racing. “You must convince him he’s not strong enough to leave.”
Da murmured, “So that is the way of it then.”
She saw her own face through her father’s eyes, a rictus of desperation, yearning, and something else she dared not name. She heard the thought in her da’s mind, but she shook her head against it.
“Your mother warned me,” he said. “But like all fathers I held tight to the hope that you’d give your heart to someone close—”
“Father, please,” she interrupted, unhinged by the word heart. “I ask for your help for his sake, not mine.”
“I can’t help him any longer. But perhaps you can.” Da gestured over his shoulder toward the galley moored just outside the reef. “I know the Derry men’s words, but not their hearts.”
“You wish me to read them.” Hope surged up in her so strong that it blotted out all other thought. “But the subject of Lachlan must be the front of their minds if I’m—”
“They’ll be in the alehouse soon enough, and so will I. I’ll see that the subject comes up again.”
She nodded, greedily. She would know if any of those men held secrets, if any of those men had bad intent. She would know, and she would tell her father, and he would convince Lachlan to stay.
A tingling awareness swept over her. She stretched her mind to the Derry man now in the alehouse, and even farther to the men working in the anchored galley. Before she touched those minds, her father stepped close to capture her wandering attention.
“Read those men true, daughter.” His face was full of warning. “Even if it means Lachlan will leave on the morning tide.”
***
Hours later Cairenn entered the sickroom to find Lachlan pacing before the hearth. He lifted his head and set his midnight-blue gaze upon her. A quiver rippled through her. Not because she couldn’t read his thoughts—those were as fathomless as ever—but because, perhaps for the first time, she could read his face.
Grief was not easy to bury. It sat in the crimped skin around his eyes, in the furrows deepening on his brow, in the bright steady light of warning in his eyes. Warning for what, she could only guess. Grief made men act oddly. Women wept, but men spit sparks.
She swallowed her unease and headed to the table scattered with bottles and unguents and linens. “My father has sent me to remove your bandages.”
“Just give me a knife,” he said, setting to pacing again, “and I’ll cut off the bandages myself.”
“Then you’ll pull the scab right off and it’ll be worse than before.” She busied herself searching for a clay pot with the right unguent. “And how are you going to put salve on your own back?”
“Why didn’t your father come himself?”
“He’s detained at the waterfront, drinking with the O’Neills.”
“Still?”
“Do you think he can know those men’s minds so quickly?”
“He can never know them, not at all.”
Yes, he can, Lachlan. She let her hair fall across her brow so Lachlan couldn’t read the bright thought on her face. Because Da has me, and I have a gift.
You can have me, too.
She squeezed away the thought before she blushed, then she rounded the table and approached. Her heart rose in her throat as he stopped his pacing. She paused close enough to feel the intensity of his presence, a warm and subtle vibration of the air between them. As the silence stretched, a tingling uncertainty weakened her knees as a flush crept up her neck.
So this is what happens to a woman, she thought, when she’s falling haplessly in love with a man.
He reached for his rope belt and, with a flick of his fingers, untied it. It thudded to the floor at his feet. Her heart throbbed a painful beat as he then hauled up his woolen surcoat to wrestle it over his head and toss it toward the pallet.
She’d seen many a man undress. The sailors, before they lugged heavy cargo on shore. The villager men at thatching-time, when the sun became fierce. But it was different watching Lachlan reach over his shoulder and grab a fistful of his linen undertunic. As the hem rode up, it revealed the ridged muscles of his thighs, and then the wound cloth of the braies hugging his hips, and, once he lifted his head free, the gleaming stretch of his n
aked chest.
She swallowed and it was like forcing a goose egg through a stocking. She’d seen Lachlan shirtless often enough but never when he was so upright and bright with strength—and never when she had a specific intent in mind. Unnerved, she dropped her gaze only to find herself staring at a more dangerous place—the stripe of pale skin just above the waist of his braies. She wondered what it would be like to ride her fingertips along that pale border.
The room around her bowed and swayed. The motion stopped when he turned his back to her and dropped down to sit on the hearth stool.
She mentally shook herself and placed her linens and the bowl of unguent on the little table at the foot of the pallet. She couldn’t let him affect her this way, not when she was about to risk so much.
She eased the tips of her fingers under the edge of the linen wrappings. Though the wound was healed and the angry soreness long gone, he flinched as though touched by a spark. A long muscle along his side flexed at her touch. She puzzled over these reactions as she plucked at the knot until she pulled it free. To unwind the strip of linen from his body, she needed to reach over his shoulder and across his chest.
A strand of his hair tickled her chin as she leaned in. She smelled his scent—medicinal herbs and sun-warmed linen, and something else, something musky and completely masculine. When she slipped her arm around his other side in order to seize the end of the linen, she pressed a breast against the thick, hard muscle of his shoulder.
A jolt went through him. It reverberated through her.
She eased away from his warmth more quickly than she should have, because a woman needed room to breathe if she wasn’t going to see black spots winking before her eyes. She tried very hard to fix her mind on the second layer of unwinding, but she was clumsy about it. When she reached around to seize the growing ball of cloth again, he made a hissing sound and ripped the roll from her hands. He pulled the bandage across his chest with haste and then backhanded the crumpled cloth to her.
Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3) Page 7