The look of fury she had shot him.
He mounted and cantered around the cottage, remembering the private ways of childhood, the hidden paths he had discovered years ago to avoid Fergus’s drunken rages. She had to be heading for the cove, with its honeycombed caves and rock archways, a place of secrets and shadows. His smile faded. In the old days the cove had provided an ideal trysting spot for lovers. He’d met more than one village maid there at midnight himself. He had no reason to believe human nature had changed that much in twenty years.
A sultry summer night. A young clansman waiting eagerly for her in the moonlight. A backdrop of crashing ocean waves to serenade the two lovers. For a moment Duncan was tempted to turn around and pretend he hadn’t seen her. He could deal with her disobedience tomorrow. But after the unpleasant visit to the wretched cottage, he was too soul-weary to interrupt an intimate moment.
As he reached the rocky knoll path that led down to the beach, he started to urge his horse back onto the castle path. Then he saw her again, her bright hair like a beacon in the gray shadows of glooming, her bare brown legs exposed and clutching the mare’s sides as she rode toward the dark cluster of caves at the end of the cove.
The sight of her sparked something indefinable inside him.
He wanted to chase her down. He could outrun her horse and lead her himself into one of the damp private caves where he had hidden for hours, hearing Fergus call him from the cliffs. He wanted her vibrancy to counteract the coldness of his spirit. He wanted to tumble her to the sand. But what was the point? He couldn’t impress her with his legendary skill at seduction. If he tried to charm her with the clever badinage he had learned from the intellectual courtesans of the Parisian salons, she would laugh in his face, confused by words and customs she had never learned.
She would look at him, as the other Highlanders had looked at him all day, and he would become the outcast again, Duncan the Black Demon, the boy whose beautiful mother had bewitched the laird into believing he had fathered her son.
Marsali wouldn’t give a damn that grateful hordes had strewn flowers at his feet in the streets of Holland. Cook in her sublime ignorance would not care that he had given her the identical menu, and the purse to buy it, for a month’s meals worthy to grace the table of Czar Peter the Great.
He rubbed his hand across his unshaven face. Christ, why should he care? Peasants, women, drunks, Jacobite sympathizers, who would all end up getting themselves killed like his father.
He lowered his hand, a chill of suspicion cutting through his depression. He assumed out of his own irrational imaginings that Marsali was meeting a lover when in fact she might have a more dangerous objective in mind.
Intelligent, sharp-witted, strong-willed, a woman with good cause to hate the English for the loss of the men she’d loved. God only knew the wee hellion could be hatching another rebellion right under Duncan’s nose, and when it failed, he would be the one to shoulder the blame. The world-famous military general who could not control a mere girl.
The hotheaded little fool would destroy everything, including herself, just as his gentle misguided father had done. Duncan’s head pounded with visions of being stripped of his rank and court-martialed, of losing the plump Border prize the prime minister had dangled before him like a carrot. He saw himself dishonored and impoverished, his hopes crumbled to dust, his achievements in ashes.
Hell, for all he knew, he could expect a knife in the back on the lonely ride home, courtesy of the clan welcoming party. He would end his life as he’d begun it, in violence and despised.
Everything destroyed by a fairy brat’s defiance. A serving wench who barely came to his waist. A girl he had allowed himself the dangerous indulgence of pitying, of desiring. An urchin with the arrogance of a princess.
He leaned forward and spurred his stallion after her, his long black hair coming loose from its leather thong to lash his coldly determined face. Even if he had to chain her to his damned bedpost at night, she would not disobey him again. He would break her spirit before she ruined them both.
Marsali vented a sigh of frustration and slid to the sand. As she marched toward the caves, her mare stood resting at the shore. Uncle Colum thought himself very clever and elusive, never staying in the same location for more than a few months at a time. But Marsali was fed up with all this mystery.
First, he had lived on the moor to better communicate with the old gods. Then he had installed himself in the castle dungeon as resident wizard because he was reading a book about alchemy and thought he’d give turning base metal into gold a try. The previous summer he had wandered willy-nilly in the woods to contact the spirits of his Druid ancestors.
But ever since last autumn he had set up housekeeping in a wrecked old ship to study the ebb and flow of the waves. The ship was almost to the end of the cove, the tide was rising as a storm brewed offshore, and earlier in the day he had mentioned something about casting a solstice spell in a cave at midnight.
Well, hell. There had to be at least two dozen caves, and one looked about the same as the other to Marsali, her perception dulled by a day of grueling physical labor and public humiliation.
Furthermore, she had a knot on her head from that smelly tapestry falling off the wall and a throbbing bruise on her behind from where she had landed.
“Find the old codger for me, Eun,” she called to the bird perched on the hooded lip of yet another cave before her. “Magic or not, he and I are having a straight talk about the chieftain.”
She had just stepped inside the mouth of the cave when she felt the thunderous resonance through the soles of her feet of a rider approaching. Her mare whickered in warning and moved swiftly down the cove out of sight, as if sensing danger in the air. It crossed Marsali’s mind to make a similar escape. But there was no time. Besides, she was more curious than afraid.
Tightening her shawl around her shoulders, she edged back to the mouth of the cave, her eyes widening in anticipation as the horseman drew his lathered horse to a halt. Duncan, of all people. Dear Lord, the man was magnificent, long muscular legs gripping the horse’s lathered flesh before he vaulted to the sand, his black hair framing a face that an artist might have chiseled in a fit of inspiration.
Marsali frowned, not certain if he had seen her or if she could continue to admire him in secret. He was heading straight for the cave, the length of stride portending trouble. Before she could duck back inside, she was pinned against the wall like a butterfly by his large frame. She wriggled helplessly. The scent of camphor and lavender from his father’s old clothes mingled with his own male musk to make her aching head swim. The tips of her breasts tingled, flattened against the wall of his chest. Her heart racing, she stared up at the underside of his clenched jaw, trying not to remember what he looked like naked. The harder she tried, the clearer the image became.
His gaze raked her briefly before darting to the end of the cave. “Where is he?”
“Where is who?” Intrigued, she glanced back herself in the direction of his scrutiny, grateful to be distracted from her own thoughts.
His gaze swung back to her face. “The lover you planned a tryst with,” he said grimly.
“The who I planned a what with?” she asked, blinking in bewilderment from behind her wind-blown tangle of hair.
“The spy then,” Duncan said impatiently.
She lifted her hand in a tentative caress to his lean cheek. “You are unwell, my lord?” she inquired gently. “I should have warned you about Cook’s potage. She tends to use the nastiest ingredients, and you did insult her cooking in front of everyone. Perhaps she poisoned—”
He jerked his hand from her hand, liking her delicate touch too much. “I know all about your Jacobite associations, Marsali.”
“You do?”
“Yes. All about the rebellion you’re planning.”
She frowned, trying to remember if madness ran in the MacElgin family. Surely the man wasn’t referring to her harmless little ambushes a
s rebellions? “You didn’t drink any of the mead Johnnie uses to clean the dirks, did you?” she asked guardedly.
Something in her voice, the almost maternal concern and absurd innocence, penetrated the dark mood that had ensnared him earlier. She was making him feel like a fool again; he was suddenly embarrassed by his frenzy to follow her here, unsure of what he’d hoped to prove. He might have conquered great armies, but apparently not his own deepest insecurities. The girl reduced him to raw emotion. She brought out a side of him he’d never confronted before. “I thought I gave you orders to remain inside the castle.” She clenched the dangling corners of her shawl, curling her bare toes into the crunchy white sand. His voice was doing strange things to her system again, and his large body blocked any hope of escape. What had angered him so? “I couldn’t sleep, my lord.”
Duncan forced her back even farther, not caring that he left her little room to breathe. The point of their conversation eluded him. Minuscule droplets of fine summer mist spangled her hair, reflecting the moonlight. He felt like a dragon snorting fire on a fairy princess. He also felt like an idiot for longing to believe the innocence in her eyes when logic warned him she had to be lying.
“You were meeting someone, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” she replied, seeing no reason to lie.
He covered an unexpected jolt of disappointment with a cynical smile. “Lover or spy?”
“Neither, actually.” She shrugged blithely, her conscience clear. “I was looking for my uncle, but I don’t know which cave he calls a covenstead these days.”
A peculiar alchemy of feelings clashed inside Duncan: relief, amused contempt at his own suspicious nature, and some other deeper emotion he didn’t care to explore. “Your uncle—”
“The wizard,” Marsali said, fascinated by the sudden medley of strange emotions that transformed his face, hinting at roiling depths below the calm surface.
A droplet of mist ran down the curl that caressed her cheek and etched a silvery track to the base of her throat. Duncan slowly lifted his hand and smudged it with his thumb, his touch amazingly tender. “You defied me,” he said in a subdued voice. “I’m afraid I’ll have to discipline you.”
His voice was low with undercurrents as powerful as the sea outside, and no doubt just as treacherous if a woman let herself wander out too far. Unfortunately, Marsali’s spirit had always loved a bit of adventure. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said again, a shudder of anticipation shooting all the way down to the soles of her feet.
He smiled slowly, his eyes taunting her. “Then I’ll give you more work tomorrow.”
A spurt of anger broke through the spell of sensual lassitude that immobilized her. “You’re a bastard,” she said. “You enjoyed humiliating me.”
“Aye,” he admitted, chuckling. “There were moments.”
“The… the tide is rising, my lord.”
He tugged lightly at the curl that touched her cheek, twining his forefinger around the auburn threads of her hair. “Let it rise.”
She lowered her eyes, studying the ruffles of his finely embroidered shirt until her vision blurred. “My heart is pounding like the surf outside,” she said softly. “I’m not sure my legs will continue to support me. My head is swimming, partially because the tapestry fell upon it but mostly due to you, and—” She drew a breath, her gaze flying to his as he hooked his thumb into her gown and drew her by the rough muslin against him. The warm abrasion of his callused skin against the swell of her breast sent tendrils of heat curling deep down into her belly. Marsali had never experienced such delightful confusion. She had never known a man like him in her life.
She shivered, whispering, “What are you doing?”
He was silent for a moment, his blue eyes unfathomable. “God only knows, Marsali, and He’s probably too afraid to watch.”
Before she could decide how to handle this, he had drawn her into his arms and lowered his mouth to hers, kissing her with an erotic tenderness that electrified her. Her entire body jerked as if seared by lightning at the contact. His mouth tasted cool and redolent of wine, possessive, gently demanding an answer. When he gripped her tighter, she felt her resistance melting into a strange anticipation. The power of his kiss stole her breath. She trembled violently.
“Marsali.”
His deep voice resounded in the distance. She was falling down a bottomless hole, floating on a current of endless enjoyment—until he brought his hands to her shoulders to give her a rousing shake.
“You’re shivering like a larch in a spring gale,” he said in amusement. “Do I frighten you that much, lass?”
She blinked, resenting the return to reality. “Sometimes you do,” she admitted with a deep sigh, snuggling into him. “But I’m probably shivering more because the water is coming up to my toes, and it’s damned cold at the cove even in summer.”
Duncan stood perfectly still as she rubbed her feet against his ankles. Uninhibited, unaware of how she affected him, she had no inkling of the black urges he was battling. Very carefully, he lifted his hands from her shoulders. Her innocence flayed him to the core. Only a minute ago his anger at her had threatened to rage out of control. And now here he stood, spellbound, forgetting time and place, intrigued by a girl who had never trod one dainty toe beyond his wild land. A girl who had watched her clansmen smear his naked body with sludge and chicken feathers only hours ago.
A girl whose fey power he was just beginning to understand. The power of a pure heart and unbroken spirit, of loyalty and the ability to laugh in the face of adversity. A girl who trusted even him, and who tempted him beyond reason.
“You’re a strange wee thing.” He caught her chin in his fingers, examining her face as if it held an answer to her puzzling allure. “Most women wouldn’t notice the cold when I was kissing them. Didn’t I do a proper job of it then?”
“I have nothing to compare it to,” she said honestly, then leaned into him with a gasp as another wavelet broke around their feet.
“Your betrothed never kissed you?” Duncan asked in astonishment.
“Aye, but not like that,” she confessed, grinning mischievously. “My father would have killed him.”
Duncan fought the reaction that rose inside him, the stirrings of conscience and uncomplicated lust. This woman had no protector, he tried to remember, unless he counted himself, as a surrogate, as her laird and chieftain, and the impulses racing through him were anything but paternal. In fact, they were unspeakably wicked.
“Let go of me, Marsali,” he said, taking a breath and praying the cool sea air would quelch the fire building in his loins.
“Why, my lord?” She sighed, pressing closer, confused by the resurgence of anger she detected in his tone. Had she done something again to offend him? It seemed he was angry because he’d kissed her, but for her it had ended far too soon. “You’re keeping me warm, and I like the feel of you.”
“Wear a plaid,” he said curtly, bringing his hands to her shoulders to push her away. The fire inside him wasn’t dying out, after all. It was raging into a bloody bonfire, and if the damned girl didn’t have the sense or experience to understand he was a heartless bastard who would take advantage of her innocence, then she could only blame herself.
“What about this uncle of yours?” he asked harshly, suddenly wishing someone else would assume responsibility for her. “And don’t ever tell a man you like the feel of him again.”
Marsali stiffened, remembering where she was with a horrible jolt of conscience. Whatever had she been thinking? What would happen if Uncle Colum were to suddenly materialize behind them? After all, a wizard possessed certain powers that even a chieftain could not claim.
What if her uncle were to catch her in Duncan’s arms and change Duncan into a lobster, a power Colum allegedly owned but that Marsali had never witnessed? What if he hit Duncan over the head with his yew staff in his temper and knocked him out? Dear heaven, what if Colum took a very dim human view of the situation and demanded t
hat Duncan marry his niece? Marsali snorted softly at the ridiculous image, picturing herself standing at the altar pledging her troth to an unconscious lobster.
Duncan arched his brow. “Most women don’t snort the first time I kiss them either.”
“Well—”
She broke off with a gasp of alarm, grabbing Duncan’s arm to tug him toward the mouth of the cave as a large wave rolled toward them and thundered against his knees. The impact barely budged him, but it did bring his head around in surprise.
“We’re going to drown, my lord! The cave fills within minutes.”
Even as she spoke, the next wave gathered force and crashed against them, its unleashed power propelling them deeper into the cave. Marsali staggered backward as if drawn by an invisible hand, so slight it took little to unbalance her.
She fell backward, throwing her hands out behind her, only to feel icy sand envelop her up to her elbows. As the wave broke against the wall, saltwater stinging her eyes, she realized she had stumbled into one of the hidden sinkholes Uncle Colum had warned her about more times than she could count. She wasn’t really worried, though. She knew the chieftain would save her.
Chapter
7
Duncan swung around to grab her, belatedly remembering the deadly riptides that had borne more than one of his relatives to an early and unexpected death. What in God’s name had he been doing? Dallying with a dirty-faced hoyden. Misusing his power to intimidate a maidservant. He was worse than one of his raw teenage recruits, letting himself be charmed by a girl who had more audacity than his entire regiment.
How the hell had it happened? He had set out intending to punish her. Instead, he had trapped her like a lion in his lair. He had taken advantage of her inexperience, and in the end it was the sweet innocence of her response that had punished him.
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