It was the commotion that woke him, dragging him from a deep and dreamless sleep. Refusing to open his eyes, he felt his surroundings with his senses first. Damn it, she still burned! Hotter, if possible. His wife of scant days dying in his arms. What had woken him? Was it the Rom, finally arrived?
“Let me pass!” The smithy’s voice thundered from beyond the closed door, loud enough to rattle it. Hawk came fully awake. That man’s voice made his body ready for battle.
“The Hawk will kill you, man,” Grimm scoffed. “He doesn’t like you to begin with, and he’s not in a good temper.”
Hawk nodded agreement with Grimm’s words, and was glad he’d posted a half-guard outside the Green Lady’s room. There was no telling what he might have done if he’d woken to find the arrogant blacksmith peering down at him in his present frame of mind.
“Fools! I said I can cure her,” the smithy snapped.
Hawk stiffened instantly.
“A fool, I am?” Grimm’s voice cracked with disbelief. “Nay, a fool is he who thinks there’s a cure for such a poison as Callabron!”
“Dare you risk it, Grimm?” the smithy asked coolly.
“Let him pass,” the Hawk ordered through the closed door.
He heard the sound of swords drawing away with a metallic slash as guards parted the crossed blades that had been barring entrance to the Green Lady’s room, and then Adam was standing in the doorway, his big frame nearly filling it.
“If you came here thinking to play with me, Adam Black, get thee gone before I spill your blood and watch it run on my floor. ’Twould be a wee distraction, but it would make me feel better.”
“Why do you hold her thusly? So close, as if so dear?”
Hawk tightened his arms around her. “She’s dying.”
“But you scarce know her, man.”
“I have no reason for it that makes any sense. But I refuse to lose her.”
“She’s beautiful,” Adam offered.
“I’ve known many beautiful lasses.”
“She’s more beautiful than the others?”
“She’s more something than the others.” Hawk brushed his cheek gently against her hair. “Why have you come here?”
“I heard it was Callabron. I can cure her.”
“Think not to tempt me with impossibilities, smithy. Lure me not to false hope or you will lie dying beside her.”
“Think not to tempt me with impossibilities, Lord Hawk,” Adam echoed brightly. “Furthermore I speak truth about a cure.”
Hawk studied the smithy a careful moment. “Why would you do this, if you can?”
“Totally self-serving, I assure you.” Adam crossed to the bed and sat upon the edge. He extended his hand, then stopped in mid-reach at the look on Hawk’s face. “I can’t heal her without touching her, dread Hawk.”
“You mock me.”
“I mock everything. Don’t take it so personally. Although in your particular case, it is meant rather personally. But in this, I do offer you truth. I have the cure.”
Hawk snorted and tightened his arms protectively about his wife. “How does it come to pass that a simple smithy has such knowledge of an invaluable cure?”
“You waste time asking me questions while the lady lies dying.”
“Give it to me then, smithy.”
“Oh no. Not so easily—”
“Now who’s wasting time? I want the cure. Give it to me and begone, if you really have it.”
“A boon for a boon,” Adam said flatly.
Hawk had known this was coming. The man wanted his wife. “You son of a bitch. What do you want?”
Adam grinned puckishly. “Your wife. I save her. I get her.”
Hawk closed his eyes. He should have fired the bastard smithy when he’d had the chance. Where the hell were the Rom, anyway? They should have been at Dalkeith by now.
The smithy could heal his wife, or so he said.
The Rom may know nothing.
And all the smithy wanted in exchange for saving his wife’s life was his wife.
Every fiber in his body screamed in defiance. Entrust this woman, bequeath her body and her lush bounty unto another man? Never. Hawk forced his eyes open and stared at the man called Adam. He was to allow this arrogant, beautiful bastard of a smithy to raise his body above his wife’s and capture her moans of pleasure in his lips? The smithy’s lips were even now curving in a cruel smile as he savored the war that waged within the Hawk.
Hawk schooled his face to impassive calm. Never betray the real feelings. Never let them see what you’re thinking when it hurts the deepest. How well he’d learned that lesson from King James.
Yet—still—anything so that she might live. “A lass is not a boon to be granted. I will give her to you if—and only if—she wants you,” he said finally. If she died he would lose her. If she lived, by price of saving her, he would lose her too. But then again, maybe not. Unable to defuse the rage which he knew must be blazing in his eyes, he closed them again.
“Done. You will give her to me if she wants me. Remember your words, Lord Hawk.”
Hawk flinched.
When he opened his eyes again, Adam was holding out a hand to his wife’s face. Sweat glistened in beads above her lips and on her forehead. The wound upon her neck was pussing green around its blackened mouth. “You touch her, smithy, no more than you must to cure her,” the Hawk warned.
“For now. When she’s cured, I touch her all she wants.”
“She is the key word there.”
Adam laid his palm against Adrienne’s cheek, intently studying the wound on her neck. “I need boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens.”
“Bring me boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens,” the Hawk roared at the closed door.
“And I need you out of this room.”
“No.” There was no more finality in death than in the Hawk’s refusal.
“You leave or she dies,” Adam murmured, as if he’d merely said “It’s raining, had you noticed?”
Hawk didn’t move a muscle.
“Sidheach James Lyon Douglas, have you a choice?” Adam wondered.
“You have all my names. How do you know so much about me?”
“I made it my business to know so much about you.”
“How do I know you didn’t shoot her yourself with some obscure poison that isn’t even Callabron but mimics it, and now you’re faking a cure—all so you can simply steal my wife?”
“Absolutely.” Adam shrugged.
“What?” Hawk snarled.
Adam’s eyes glittered like hard stones. “You don’t know. You must make a choice. Can you save her at this point, Lord Hawk? I don’t think so. What are your options? She’s dying from something, that much is plain to see. You think it’s Callabron, but you’re not certain. Whatever it is, it is killing her. I say I can cure her and ask a boon for it. What choice do you have, really? They say you make hard decisions look easy. They say you’re a man who would move a mountain without blinking, if he wanted that mountain moved. They say you have an unerring sense of justice, right and wrong, honor and compassion. They say, also”—Adam grimaced at this—“that you are passingly fair between the sheets, or so one woman said, and it offended me in great sum. In fact, they say entirely too much about you for my liking. I came here to hate you, Hawk. But I didn’t come here to hate this woman you claim as your wife.”
Adam and Hawk stared at each other with barely harnessed violence.
Adrienne cried out sharply and shuddered in Hawk’s arms. Her body convulsed, then tensed as if pulled taut on a rack. Hawk swallowed hard. What choice? There was no choice, no choice at all.
“Cure her,” he muttered through gritted teeth.
“You grant my boon?” the smithy asked.
“As we agreed. Only if she chooses you.”
“You will place no restrictions upon any time she chooses to spend with me. I am wooing her from this day forth and you will not cauti
on her from me. She is free to see me as she pleases.”
“I am wooing her too.”
“That is the game, Hawk,” Adam said softly, and Hawk finally understood. The smithy didn’t want his wife handed over freely. He wanted a contest, a battle for her favors. He wanted an open challenge, and intended to win.
“You will hate it when I take her from you, dread Hawk,” the smithy promised. “Close the door when you leave.”
CHAPTER 10
“HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT A MAN’S WORLD CAN BE TURNED inside out before he even has a chance to see it coming and try to stop it, Grimm?”
Hawk had started drinking the moment the door had shut on his wife and the smithy. He was trying with determination to get head-reeling, feet-stumbling, bellyaching drunk and was not succeeding.
“Do you believe he can cure her, Hawk?”
Hawk puzzled a moment. “Aye, Grimm. I do. There’s something unnatural about Adam Black, and I mean to find out what it is.”
“What do you suspect?”
“I don’t know. Grimm, I want you to find out everything about the man you can. Talk to everyone on the estate until you get some answers. Where he came from, when he came here, who he’s related to, what he does all day. I want to know about every breath he draws, every piss he takes.”
“Understood, Hawk.”
“Good.”
They both turned to stare at the door to the Green Lady’s room. It had been hours since the smithy had closed the door. Not a sound had escaped since.
“Who would try to kill her, Hawk?” Grimm puzzled. “Mad Janet was practically a recluse. According to the gossip at Comyn keep, fewer than five people ever saw her. How could a lass so far out of circulation offend anyone enough to invite murder?”
Hawk rubbed his head tiredly. His stomach was churning and the Scotch wasn’t helping. On sudden impulse he rolled the bottle away from him, toward Grimm. “Don’t let me have any more. I need a clear head. I can’t think right now. He’s touching her, Grimm. He could be bathing her, gazing upon her. I want to kill him.”
“So do it, when he’s done curing her,” Grimm said easily.
“I can’t!”
“Then I’ll do it for you,” Grimm said, ever faithful.
“Nay. We made a pact.”
“You made a pact with him?” Grimm’s eyes flared wide. “Damn it all to hell, man! You never break a pact. Why would you be so foolish to make a pact with a man you can’t stand?”
“He can save my wife.”
“When did you come to have such feeling for this Mad Janet you swore never to take to wife anyway?”
“Shut up, Grimm.”
“What’s the pact, Hawk?” Grimm persisted.
“He wants Adrienne.”
“You gave him Adrienne?”
“Grimm, no more questions. Just find out anything and everything about this man called Adam Black.”
“Be assured, I will.”
“You are flawless, beauty,” the smithy said as his coal-black eyes raked over her nude body twisted in the damp sheets.
“Flawless lalless,” Adrienne pooh-poohed dreamily. The heat was ebbing, slowly.
“Decidedly lawless.”
He couldn’t know. Not possibly. “What do you mean by that?” She struggled to form the words, and wasn’t certain she even made a sound.
“Just that there must be something criminal about a woman so beautiful,” he replied archly.
“Nothing criminal about me,” she demurred distantly.
“Oh, beauty, I think there is much criminal about you.”
“There is something just not normal about you, Adam,” she mumbled as she tossed restlessly.
“No,” he replied smugly, “there is certainly nothing normal about me. Give me your hand, beauty, I’ll show you not normal.”
And then there was cool water, frothy ocean upon powder-white sand. Whisper of gentle surf rushing over the beach, cool sand beneath her bare toes. No ants, no rack, no fire. Just peace in her most favorite haven in the world. The seaside at Maui where she’d vacationed with her girlfriends. Beautiful, blissful days they’d passed there with fresh-squeezed orange juice and endless summer jogs on the beach, bare feet slapping the edge of the tide.
And then the stranger images. Scent of jasmine and sandalwood. Snowflake sand dotted with fuchsia silk tents and butterflies upon every bough of every limb of every rowan. An improbable place. And she was lying in the cool sands and healed by tropical lapis waves.
“Beauty, my beauty. Want me. Feel me, hunger for me and I will slake your need.”
“Hawk?”
Adam’s anger was palpable in the air.
Adrienne forced her eyes open a slit, and gasped. If her body had obeyed, she would have shot straight up in bed. But it didn’t obey. It lay flaccid and weak upon the bed while her temper shot up instead. “Get out of my room!” she yelled. At least her voice hadn’t lost its vigor.
“I was just checking to make sure your forehead cooled.” Adam grinned puckishly.
“You thickheaded oaf! I don’t care why you’re in here, just get out!”
Finally her body obeyed a little and she managed to get her fingers around a tumbler at the bedside. Too weak to throw it, she was at least able to slide it off the table. Glass crashed to the floor and shattered. The sound mollified her slightly.
“You were dying. I cured you,” Adam reminded.
“Thank you. Now get out.”
Adam blinked. “That’s all? Thank you, now get out?”
“Don’t think I’m so stupid that I don’t realize you were touching my breasts!” she whispered fiercely. At the abashed look on his face she realized he had indeed thought she’d been unconscious. “So that and my thanks are all you’ll be getting, smithy!” she growled. “I hate beautiful men. Hate them!”
“I know,” Adam smiled with real pleasure and obeyed her dismissal.
Adrienne squeezed her eyes shut tightly but upon the pink-gray insides of her eyelids shadows arose. Images of being held between the Hawk’s rock-hard thighs, wrapped in arms that were bands of steel. His voice murmuring her name over and over, calling her back, commanding her back. Demanding that she live. Whispering words of … what? What had he said?
“She lives, Lord Buzzard—”
“Hawk.”
“Both birds of prey. What difference?”
“A buzzard is a scavenger. A hawk selects his kill as carefully as a falcon. Stalks it with the same unerring conviction. And fails as frequently—which is never.”
“Never,” Adam mused. “There are no absolutes, Lord Hawk.”
“In that you’re wrong. I choose, I adhere, I pursue, I commit, I attain. That—that, my errant friend—is an absolute.”
Adam shook his head and studied the Hawk with apparent fascination. “A worthy adversary. The hunt begins. No cheating. No tricks. You may not forbid her from me. And I know that you tried to already. You will recant your rules.”
Hawk inclined his dark head. “She chooses,” he allowed tightly. “I will forbid her nothing.”
Adam nodded, a satisfied nod as he plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his loose trousers and waited.
“Well? Get thee from my castle, smithy. You have your place, and it is without my walls.”
“You might try a thank-you. She lives.”
“I’m not certain you aren’t the reason she almost died.”
At that, Adam’s brow creased thoughtfully. “No. But now that I think on it, I have work to do. I wonder … who would try to kill the beauty, if not me? And I didn’t. Had I, she would be dead. No slow poison from my hand. Quick death or not at all.”
“You’re a strange man, smithy.”
“But I will soon be most familiar to her.”
“Pray the gods she is wiser than that,” Grimm mumbled as Adam stalked off into the dim corridor. Night had fallen and the castle lamps were still largely unlit.
Hawk sighed heavily.
> “What deal did you make with that devil?” Grimm asked in a voice scarcely audible.
“Think you he may be?”
“Something is not natural about that man and I intend to find out what.”
“Good. Because he wants my wife, and she doesn’t want me. And I saw her wanting him with a hurt in her eyes.”
Grimm winced. “You are certain you don’t want her just because she doesn’t want you and he wants her?”
Hawk shook his head slowly. “Grimm, I have no words for what she makes me feel.”
“You always have words.”
“Not this time, which warns me truly that I’m in deep trouble and about to get deeper. Deep as I must to woo that lass. Think you I’ve been spelled?”
“If love can be bottled, or shot from Cupid’s bow, my friend,” Grimm whispered into the breeze that ruffled in Hawk’s wake when he entered Adrienne’s chamber.
In the weeks to come the Hawk would wonder many times why the Rom, whom he trusted and valued, and whom he had thought returned those feelings in kind, had never come to tend his wife during those terrible days. When he spoke to his guard, the man said that he’d delivered the message. Not only didn’t the Rom come, they were conspicuously absent from Dalkeith. They made no trips to the castle to barter their goods. They spent no evenings weaving tales in the Greathall before a rapt and dazzled audience. Not one of the Rom approached Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea; they kept to their fields, out past the rowans.
That fact nagged at Hawk’s mind briefly, but was quickly lost in the thick of more weighty concerns. He promised himself he would resolve his questions with a trip to the gypsy camp once his wife was fully healed and matters with the strange smithy were resolved. But it was to be some time before he made the trip to the Rom camp; and by that time, things would be vastly changed.
Adrienne drifted up from healing slumber to find her husband watching her intently.
“I thought I’d lost you.” The Hawk’s face was dark, glistening in the firelight, and it was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. It took her several long moments to shake loose the cotton stuffing that had replaced her brain. With wakefulness came defiance. Just looking at that man made her temper rise.
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