Again.
Frustrated breath hissed through his throat as he balled his fists and … pressed his knuckles down very decisively on the writing desk adjacent to the mirror.
He didn’t punch things. That was how his father dealt with obstacles. How Liam did.
He schemed. He used the wits, the strength, the intellect, and, granted, the looks God gave him to get what he wanted.
Glancing up, Gavin glowered at his reflection. These features, the perfect mix of his father’s brutish, Pict ancestors and his mother’s aristocratic breeding, served him well in all endeavors but this.
Had he been wrong about Alison Ross? When he thought he’d glimpsed lust in her eyes, could it have been something else? A mirror, perhaps, of his own desire … What about the kiss? He’d not imagined her response. The aggressiveness of it.
The passion.
It had set him on fire, and the blaze had yet to burn out. And after, they’d come to—well, if not a truce, at least a ceasefire. He’d held her for a moment and …
She’d let him.
He tried not to think of how many times he’d poured manipulation and skill into a seduction as a means to an end and winced. There had been more honesty and intimacy in that moment between them than he’d shared with a bevy of mistresses. Something had blossomed between them, hadn’t it? Some new understanding, some sort of nebulous whisper toward a reconciliation of terms.
Why had she run from him?
What if she hadn’t felt it?
Impossible.
A soft, familiar knock interrupted his reverie, and he rushed to open the chamber door.
“Mother?” he asked anxiously. “Are ye well?”
Eleanor Mackenzie, the dowager Marchioness of Ravencroft, had lived above five decades, and still her beauty remained unravaged by time. Her hair, once gold, fell in silver ringlets about a face nearly as smooth as that of a porcelain doll. Maybe the creases of her mouth had considerably deepened, and the skin beneath her chin was no longer as taut as it once was. When she walked, she made no sound. When she talked, her voice contained eternal apologies and shook with neurotic anxieties.
Even after all this time.
“Where is Alice?” Gavin took her hands in his, his broken, beautiful mother, and restlessly checked the hall for her maid and caretaker.
Green eyes, identical to the ones he’d only just been studying in the mirror, found his general direction, but never landed on anything.
Because they couldn’t.
“I—I’m sorry to disturb your sleep, my son,” she stammered. “But Alice has already gone to bed, and I didn’t think this was aught she could do something about.”
“What’s happened?” Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, Gavin gently nudged her toward the plush blue velvet chair by his fireplace.
“N-nay, take me to the window,” she stated, then amended. “If you would.”
Gavin led her there as she explained, “I—I opened my casement because the fire made my room a wee bit close, you see, and I thought I heard terrible echoes. A rifle shot, maybe. I was worried about poachers or … something worse. Perhaps we should call upon Mr. Monahan to look into it.”
When she’d said “Mr. Monahan,” she wasn’t referring to Callum, but to his father, their stable master, Eammon.
Unlatching the window, Gavin pushed it outward, muscles instantly tensing against the bracing chill. He listened to the darkness, and didn’t at all like the eerie silence that greeted him.
“There’s smoke upon the north wind tonight,” his mother fretted. “Do you smell it, son?”
Gavin didn’t need his mother’s keen senses, honed by her lack of sight, to catch the acrid smell of fire on the wind. “Aye.” He scanned the darkness to the north and the west, but the lack of moon made the inky shadows absolute. There were very few times Gavin imagined he could understand his mother’s plight, but tonight was one of them.
Something wasn’t right out there. The smoke wasn’t fed by peat or coal, this was something strange and unnatural.
If the smoke came from the north and west, that meant—
A powerful knock served to push his chamber door open, as he’d left it unlatched.
Callum burst in, grim-faced and wild-eyed, followed by his father, an older version of the Mac Tíre, with a thinner beard and a thicker waist.
His mother whimpered and clutched at him, ever sensitive to loud, abrupt sounds.
“Gunshots to the north,” Callum informed him.
Careful not to grip his mother too tightly, though every muscle wanted to seize, he asked, “Do ye smell gunpowder on the wind?”
“Aye, but it would take two warring battalions to produce enough smoke to drift this far—”
Eammon’s hand fell onto his son’s shoulder, stopping his word with a meaningful grip. “You’ll forgive us our intrusion, my lady,” he enunciated gently, his County Claire accent always a melody with an upward inflection. “We mean to cause you no distress. We didn’t realize you were in here with your son.”
“Oh, Mr. Monahan.” Eleanor’s shaking hand lifted to clutch the collar of her robe closer to her high-necked gown. “I was—was just—I came to warn—I thought I heard…” Words failed her, as they often did in the company of men.
“Right you were, my lady, and so you did.” Eammon Monahan praised her as though she’d accomplished a brilliant feat. “But never you fear, the blasts were too far away to pose any threat on Inverthorne lands. Though they’d carry over Gresham Loch well enough.” He cast a meaningful, golden-eyed look at Gavin.
His breath tripping over a sudden weight in his chest, he had to force out the question. “Erradale?”
“Could be.” Callum nodded shortly.
Alison.
Even the trigger-happy lass wasn’t likely to be honing her skills at this time of night.
“The horses are ready,” Callum stated shortly.
“Mother, let me take ye back to yer room.” Gavin struggled to keep his impatience out of his voice, wrestling with it like an unexpected foe as he shuffled her forward.
To the wood and peat dwellings of Erradale, a fire would mean instantaneous disaster. And who would be shooting rifles in the middle of such a frigid bastard of an evening? A man would no more like to be outside than he would be caught beneath the ice forming on the loch.
“You young bucks can tear out of here after the wee Miss Ross,” Eammon offered. “If her ladyship would permit me to escort her back to her quarters, I’ll be along after seeing to her safety.”
Both Callum and Gavin took a moment to gape at Eammon. Never in their lives had they heard the grizzled man speak with such gentility of phrase.
Unperturbed, he stared right back at them.
“A-alone?” Eleanor croaked, her fist tightening on Gavin’s sleeve.
“I’ll fetch Alice,” Gavin offered.
“Nay.” A swallow heralded a polite smile perfected for a long-ago presentation to the queen. “Nay, you go, son. I can find my way on my own. ’Tis only three doors. I do it all the time.”
Kissing his mother’s forehead, Gavin launched himself toward the doorway with Callum close on his heels, as it had always been. They reached the end of the stone hall before they realized one set of footsteps was missing.
Gavin took a precious moment to look back.
Eammon stood at his door, holding it open. His chest held tight beneath his vest as though the older man wasn’t allowing himself to breathe. The fist curled at his side shook with the burden of restraint as he watched Gavin’s ethereal mother tiptoe back to her own chamber.
Retrieving his own rifle from the armory, Gavin tossed Callum his bow and quiver, and they each stowed their dirks and hatchets with the practiced alacrity of Highlanders who’d comfortably hunted together for the better part of a quarter century.
Demetrius’s hooves clattered over the stones of the ancient Inverthorne Bridge that arced over the McRae Burn. Just as soon as Gavin heard the
ground soften beneath his tread, he swung immediately to the north. The pace he set surpassed foolhardy to downright reckless on a night with no moon.
Callum had thought to bring a lantern but sensitive creature that Demetrius was, he seemed to recognize Gavin’s almost desperate haste. He leaned his neck into a gallop, his long stride eating up a road that had become a ribbon of ink barely distinguishable from the shadows.
Gavin kept his head down and his breath steady, forcing himself to exhale to the cadence of her name.
Alison.
He barely knew the woman. Hell, he couldn’t even claim to be overfond of her. She was little better than a banshee with a sidearm.
And yet … anxiety pounded through his veins with an intensity he’d thought himself incapable of. What could possibly be amiss at Erradale? As far as he knew, Calybrid and Locryn had no enemies to speak of. The Ross and the Mackenzie had been at peace for generations.
If one didn’t count Hamish Mackenzie and James Ross. His father and hers.
He supposed the backward folk from the Rua Reidh could have started trouble. The year had been lean, and some of them had come to Liam looking for work in the barley fields before Samhain to help with the harvest to get them through winter. Perhaps they’d been driven to poaching, and the lass’s itchy trigger finger and apparent distrust of strangers would be tinder for an altercation.
Just as the ancient Erradale manor house would be easy tinder for an arsonist with a vendetta.
Gavin flinched as a stab of worry for the cargo hidden beneath his own keep pierced him. Though Inverthorne was a drafty stone castle, it now sat on a literal powder keg.
Fat lot of good that deal with the Rook had done him. He now possessed his own staggering fortune, and still he was perpetually denied.
Gavin took two miles to convince himself the sick, desperate feeling lodged in the pit of his stomach was for Erradale, and not its heiress. As she’d so inelegantly put it, if something were to happen to her, no one stood in the way of him getting everything he desired.
The land would be there even if the structures were not. The full herd of several hundred had yet to be gathered, and any losses garnered by poachers could easily be gained back in a spring or two of calving.
So, why was he risking a broken neck racing to her—to Erradale’s—rescue in the middle of the night?
It wasn’t because the thought of Alison, as fierce as she was tiny, in any danger made his chest burn as though he’d swallowed an ember of coal. It wasn’t the panicked, macabre thoughts stabbing at him with all the savagery of a thousand native spears …
All that luxurious hair of hers would burn first.
He kicked Demetrius to go faster.
Callum and my mother had heard rifle shots. Alison Ross didn’t use a rifle.
The Mac Tíre in question called after him, both a warning and an entreaty to slow down. To take care.
I willna reach her in time. Not if she’s been shot.
It didn’t matter, he told himself. It shouldn’t matter. She shouldn’t matter.
Not this much.
But it did. She did. Because he was not his father. He was not his brother. He didn’t litter the path to his legacy with violence. He didn’t create blood feuds that lasted generations. He didn’t take a little girl’s father from her so that he might possess her land.
And he didn’t … he couldn’t stomach the idea of her being hurt.
Or worse.
Goddammit. If the stubborn lass would have stayed in America, if she would have taken his offer, she’d be safe and he’d be ignorant that Alison Ross was anything but some name he’d once written on a transfer of funds.
He’d never have known that a woman could shoot just as well as a man, maybe better. He’d never have considered the amusement and arousal feminine profanity could provoke in him. Nor would he have known that a battle could be waged with a kiss, the casualties of his power and pride a small price to pay for the rare sensation of being truly alive.
For Gavin had never met anyone with more life and vitality than Alison Ross.
And now …
He spurred Demetrius with a merciless kick. At a dead run in the middle of the day, it took the better part of an hour to reach Erradale. Time became a nebulous thing as Gavin raced through the darkness. It was impossible to tell if minutes or an eternity had passed before he nearly collided with a traveler galloping with identical recklessness in the direction of Inverthorne.
“Callum? Callum, is that ye?” Locryn’s grizzled voice contained an altitude to its register that had Gavin swallowing his own unruly heart. He could barely make out the outline of a horse and what appeared to be two riders bundled against the cold.
Panicked words tumbled out of the infamously terse Locryn with heart-rending speed. “Sam. Ye have to help Sam. I couldna keep her on her mount and I have nothing to lash her down. She bathed before supper. Her hair was still wet. I doona ken if it’s the cold, or if she’s wounded, but she willna wake. They came for us. Two of them, and if it wasna for Sam they’d have … Well, she killed them both. A right terror with that pistol she is. And now she willna wake. Oh God. And Calybrid’s guts is pouring out of him and the surgeon is miles away and I had to leave her—”
“What do ye mean, she willna wake?” Gavin demanded. “Where is she? What the fuck did ye allow to happen to her?”
“Lord Thorne?” Locryn gasped.
“My guts are all where they’re supposed to be, ye oaf, now just tell him where Sam is,” Calybrid’s voice admonished weakly.
The light from Callum’s lantern reached them, illuminating the pair of old men, hunched against the cold. Locryn sat mounted behind Calybrid, pressing a bundled-up plaid to his side with one hand, and clutching at the reins with the other. Even in the golden light, poor Calybrid’s pallor was startling.
“Who the fuck is Sam?” Gavin demanded. “Where is Alison?”
“In America, she is called Sam,” Callum explained, entirely too calmly for Gavin’s liking.
“Where is she?” Gavin roared, a murderous ire snarling forth from a dank, forgotten place. The place with the Mackenzie name. “How could ye leave her?”
“She is maybe half a mile down the way.” Locryn pointed, his rheumy dark eyes gleaming with moisture. “Around Brollachan Bend. Rowan is lashed by her on the left.”
With a savage curse, Gavin spurred Demetrius with such strength, the stallion leaped forward.
“I couldna carry them both so I came for help!” Locryn called after him. “She’s bundled in a fine cloak, and…”
The rest of the old man’s words were frozen into the air, lost to the frantic pounding of Demetrius’s hooves and Gavin’s heart.
Gavin knew this road as well as he knew the slopes and planes of his own body. He could have counted the strides to Brollachan Bend were he as blind as his mother. He knew every bog, every meadow. He’d memorized this land as though it’d become a part of him.
Once he reached the bend, Gavin leaped from Demetrius’s back before he’d completely come to a stop. He bellowed for her, for Alison, for Sam, and the answering silence ripped away a small part of his humanity.
Then he heard it, a rustle in the bushes. The soft, welcoming nicker of a horse left alone in the darkness.
There. There she was, curled beneath an ancient elm and, indeed, wrapped in a very fine cloak.
In his cloak.
Gavin scrambled to her, slipping on dead leaves made brittle by frost. The night had grown cold enough that he could barely feel his own hands in their fine gloves.
“Alison,” he called, snatching her into his arms, giving her a shake when she didn’t respond. “Alison. Wake up, lass.”
Running on naught but primitive instinct, he ripped his cloak open and his gloves off, passing his trembling hands over her face, her neck, her arms, and torso. Nothing. No wound.
Had she hit her head? he wondered as he spanned her thighs and lower. Had she—
The slick moisture instantly cooled on his palm when he pulled it away from her calf. Callum approached with his lantern just in time to illuminate what Gavin already knew would be coating his hand, the crimson horror of it signifying that they were running out of time …
Or might be too late.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pain filtered through the darkness first, and Samantha desperately tried to retreat into the warm void of oblivion in which she’d been drifting. It was too cold out there in the world. Cold enough to lock her muscles tight and stiffen her bones. Too cold to survive. Too bitter.
Too lonely.
She understood now what Locryn and Callum had meant. This was better, this dark, safe cave. One of her own making. Where she didn’t have to be afraid of her world rupturing apart at any moment.
Could she not just remain here? Here in the safe, velvet darkness where the ground was feather-soft and the walls were solid, impenetrable, and radiated with fragrant warmth that reminded her of both the forest and the sea. Of Wester Ross. The Scottish Highlands.
Of her new home.
Of something—someone?—both disquieting and captivating.
Samantha fought the pain with all her might as it tried to pull her away from her cave. First, when pressure winched at her thigh and liquid lightning had lanced through her calf with indescribable pain. She’d struggled and sobbed until her body had been seized by bands of iron, and crushed into stillness by warm, iron shackles.
The void had reclaimed her for a time, until she’d surfaced with her muscles seized in great, bone-rattling tremors. Her core had become ice, and her skin pricked with fire laced with a thousand needles. And still, her arms remained secured to her sides, her body locked against a hard, blazing heat.
It had frightened her at first, being unable to move, unable to speak through a jaw incapable of doing anything but grinding her teeth with involuntary shivers.
But she’d had no strength left to struggle, and moving had become an agony that began in her calf and radiated up her leg. Finally, she’d given in. The fear and fight drained out of her, and she’d sagged against the hard walls of her cave, allowing them to curl around her. To pull her in with warm rumbles of strange masculine whispers that reminded her of ancient prayers.
The Scot Beds His Wife Page 14