Eammon Monahan’s sense of trepidation intensified as he lifted the saddle blanket from Lysander’s back, and uncovered the mystery as to why the beast had thrown poor Sam from the saddle. He’d awoken this morning sensing trouble on the north wind. The Monahans had always sensed the wind, and this one blew alteration and revelations whispering through the winter trees.
“A thistle.” He held it up for her inspection, though how Sam could see anything from eyes narrowed in fury confounded the blarney right out of him. “Right beneath the blanket. Left a proper scrape too, here on his back, poor lad.”
“I knew it had to be something. I can count on one hand the times I’ve been unseated from a horse, and more than a few have tried.” Sam plucked the sharp thistle from Eammon’s outstretched hand and inspected it thoroughly. “Gavin thinks he can order me to stay home, does he? The high-and-mighty Lord of Inverthorne Keep. Ha! I’ll saddle up, take this thistle to Erradale, and shove it up his—”
“Come now, lassie, don’t be too hard on your husband.”
“Someone has to be.”
Eammon chuckled, even though he still felt a mite pale, and his palms were still slick with moisture. “He was worried about you, is all.”
That morning, Eammon had aided in preparing a few horses for permanent transport to Erradale so the workers could have use of them, since they’d cobbled together a new stable of sorts on the land.
Lady Sam, Lord love her, had offered to prepare and saddle her own mount, and he’d allowed her to as he knew no one but Callum more adept with horses.
All was well until she led Lysander into the courtyard. The moment her wee arse plopped in the saddle, before her opposite foot had found its purchase, the beast had jumped, bucked, and reared, dumping her onto the stones.
Luckily, the girl knew how to fall, and had popped back up, quick as a fleet-footed cat, and subdued the animal.
That hadn’t stopped Thorne from losing his Mackenzie mind over it.
Their resulting yelling match had revealed three very amusing facts.
First, the new Countess of Thorne was the bravest woman alive, to stand up to her husband in such a state.
Second, she was pregnant, a fact that had been snarled at her by her husband in front of God and everyone.
And third … Gavin St. James was in love with his wife.
Beneath all of Lord Thorne’s brutish bluster lived a terror only understood by a man who’d survived a loss which he’d been helpless to avoid.
Well, the winds of alteration and revelation. They were never wrong …
After Thorne had ascertained that Sam—and the baby—was all right, he’d ordered her to stay at Inverthorne in a, granted, needlessly stern manner. Any sane man would have known a woman with spirit wouldn’t have responded favorably.
But Eammon had noted that Thorne’s usually golden skin had taken on a ghostly shade. His nostrils wouldn’t cease flaring, and when he shoved his finger at his wife and ordered her to bed, his hands had trembled violently.
Sam seemed not to have noticed, because she’d resisted him up until the moment he’d threatened to decapitate any man who allowed her on a horse with a blunt sword before riding away fast enough for her curses not to blister his backside.
Aye, that was love for you.
Eammon studied Sam, and wondered if she knew it. If they’d said the words. If she realized that Thorne would ride harder, work longer, and suffer more physical labor because the demon inside him would be whispering what ifs in his ear all the day long.
“Lysander, here, threw you good and far,” he ventured, patting the animal on the rump before shutting the stall door behind him. “Thorne was right to mention that such a topple puts you and your child in danger. I’d be wary of these beasts until the wee one’s arrived.”
“We weren’t going to tell anyone about my condition for a few weeks yet…,” she groused. His new lady was in no great habit of capitulation, but she puffed out her cheeks in that way of hers and muttered, “But I suppose you’re … not wrong.”
“And that’s almost like being right.” He chuckled.
“Don’t push it.”
A sparkle of humor underscored her churlish scowl, before she bent to investigate the saddle blanket. “I just don’t understand. I prepared and saddled Lysander, myself. I’m certain I’d have noticed a thistle of this size.”
Eammon was fair certain of that, as well. Though he knew that pregnancy often took its toll on a woman’s focus. He’d also lived long enough to know better than to mention it.
“Since you’re home today, why don’t you tell Lady Eleanor the good news? She’ll probably be a bit hurt if she hears it from someone other than you, and word of these things tends to spread quickly through a castle.”
In a gesture as old as time, Lady Thorne spread her fingers over her womb and nodded. “Thank you, Eammon,” she said, and turned to drift through the courtyard, her dark braid almost catching in the iron gate to Inverthorne as she secured it behind her.
The thistle troubled Eammon well into the afternoon. It’d been chaos in the stables and the courtyard this morning. Nearly a score more carpenters, craftsmen, and laborers had shown up in search of work at Erradale. Between that and the men who’d arrived from the bustling ranch to escort the horses back over Gresham Peak, he’d lost track of everyone tramping in and out of Inverthorne lands.
Was it possible someone had deliberately placed the thistle beneath the countess’s saddle blanket?
Barely more than a month had passed since Lady Sam’s enemies had attacked Erradale, and all had been quiet in the Highlands since. Though her wound had healed, she and Thorne both comported themselves with a certain amount of wariness. Gates were locked at all times, the keep secured as though expecting a Viking siege at any moment.
No one had exactly been told why, but all the necessary precautions had been taken, in any case.
As Eammon finally set his stables to rights, he made up his mind. If a detail niggled at him this much then it was obviously important. He should hie himself to Erradale and talk to Thorne about—
He turned and froze. How in the world had he allowed himself to be caught unawares? He’d been so deep inside his own mind, he’d never even registered that he wasn’t alone.
“M-my lady,” he breathed.
The dowager tilted her graceful neck in his direction from where she stood stroking the neck of a kind mare who’d come to the stall door to greet her. Eleanor was a vision in lavender silk embroidered with small green leaves the color of her eyes.
Would her beauty never fade? He almost wished it would. Then maybe to look at her with the rare golden late-afternoon sunlight streaming in through the wide stable doors would not do the same thing to his lungs as did a horse’s hoof to the chest.
“I didn’t think to find any horses left in the stables today. It was my understanding that my son took them all to Erradale.”
Eammon closed his eyes and prepared for another polite, nonsensical discussion with the woman he’d worshiped for the better part of two decades.
She was here, he told himself. She’d come to the stables without Thorne. Without Alice, even. And that was something. It wasn’t hope. But … something.
“Hermia’s a bit too old to be chasing cattle all over the moors of Erradale.” He approached Eleanor like he would any skittish animal. With enough noise for her to always be aware of him, but an even voice and no sudden, loud movements. “So she gets to enjoy the comforts of home.”
He stood behind Eleanor, patting Hermia’s brindled neck, careful not to allow his fingers to touch the dainty ones rhythmically smoothing down the animal’s glossy coat.
“She’s lucky to have you. So many men would sell her to the slaughterhouse once she’d become useless to them.”
“Well, she may be a bit older, but she’s not useless at all. I still put her out in the pastures while I’m teaching Great Scot’s Ghost to take to a rope. She helps remind him how to
behave.”
Slight twitches of Lady Eleanor’s sightless eyes and a change in her posture told him how aware she was of his proximity. She knew he stood beside her, their shoulders almost touching. Though, for the first time, she didn’t flinch away.
“Why come to the stable, my lady, if you didn’t think to find any horses?” He swallowed his heart when she turned to him, her face lifted as though she would study him.
Christ, he burned.
He burned with the memory of holding her limp, bleeding body in his arms as he carried her from Ravencroft, vowing that Hamish would have to walk through his bones to get her back. He burned with a helpless, barbaric rage each time she looked up at him and saw nothing.
But he was grateful, too, in a dreadful way. That she couldn’t discover what seared in his eyes when he looked at her.
For he was certain it would frighten her away. And he wanted nothing more than to be in her presence, for however long she could stand it.
“I did not properly present myself, Mr. Monahan,” she noted. “Good afternoon.” Reaching between them, she offered him her ungloved hand, high and bent in an obvious invitation to be kissed.
She’d been doing this quite a bit lately. In fact, every time he’d seen her since Sam had arrived and he’d dared to kiss her hand that first time.
“At your service, my lady.” He rubbed his rough palm on the thigh of his trousers before taking her incomprehensibly small fingers and planting a lingering kiss on the backs of her knuckles.
He about fell over when she didn’t let his hand go right away, but gave it a soft squeeze—one he’d wished to call reluctant—before she released him.
“I remember the first day the late Laird Ravencroft hired you to look after Inverthorne, Mr. Monahan. I remember thinking your eyes were the most extraordinary shade of dark gold.”
She’d remembered the color of his eyes? All these years? He tried to swallow. To speak. But, it seemed, none of his faculties were in order at the moment.
“You were a recent widower, if memory serves. I didn’t believe I’d ever seen anyone so sad before, except when I looked in the mirror.” She was silent a moment, long enough for all the words he’d never said to her to spill into his mouth at once.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Thankfully, she summoned an amused smile. “You … you didn’t have a beard back then, but I recall a wealth of unruly hair the color of beechwood.”
“There’s more gray, and less hair these days.” He croaked out an attempt at levity, his hand self-consciously finding a hairline that had retreated from where it had once been.
She lifted an elegant shoulder. “A great deal has changed since then, hasn’t it?”
“Aye.” He scratched at his whiskers. “You don’t like my beard?” He’d shave it today. Right now.
Fluttering her lashes in a shy suggestion of delight erased decades of sorrow from her face. She could have been any unsure young lady experiencing her first flirt with a stable boy. “I like it very much,” she whispered. “It tickles when you kiss me—my hand,” she amended quickly.
Heart stalling, he cast about an empty head for a reply. “My late wife never let me have one. She thought it too bristly. Said it made her sneeze so I shaved every morning without fail.” He winced with every bone he possessed. Should have said anything but that. Any green idiot knew you didn’t speak to the woman you hadn’t kissed about a woman you had. Christ, that’d been one of the first lessons he’d taught the boys about the fairer sex.
Suddenly, he wished the herd would return, so he could let one of them gallop over his head.
“Let you?” Her brow furrowed with bewilderment. “Did you not do as you please? Were you not her master?”
“Her master?” His bark of laughter shocked them both, and he sobered as quickly as he could. “Nay, my lady. My marriage … it was not anything like yours.”
She nodded, as though accepting something she’d already suspected. “How was it?”
“I don’t think you want to discuss—”
“How was it?” she repeated.
Reaching around to squeeze sudden tension from the back of his neck, he looked back through the decades. “Funny, mostly. Brigit loved to laugh, and if she wasn’t laughing, I wasn’t working hard enough. She had the patience of a banshee and was as stubborn as a fussy mule, but her laugh was my favorite sound on this earth.”
“Was?” Eleanor whispered.
Driven by reckless instinct honed by a lifetime of working with fretful creatures, Eammon brushed a curl back from her jaw, allowing the very tips of his rough fingers contact with her precious skin. “Well, I’ve heard another voice since I lost her … one I listen for every day.”
She stood stock-still, rapidly blinking those lovely green eyes as he trailed his finger up her jaw, tucking the curl neatly behind the shell of her ear. Emboldened, he traced the soft silver down at her hairline, finding the faded scar by her temple.
“Brigit,” she whispered tightly. “What a lovely name.” Then, to their mutual distress, she burst into tears.
Eammon panicked. He ached to hold her. Had she been any other woman, he’d have swept her into his arms. But he knew better than to imprison her against him. To show her his strength.
“What do you need, Eleanor?” he asked gently. “Should I get Alice? Or take you to her?”
“No!” Even through her tears, the word was strong. Decisive. “No, I found you on my own, and I left myself a path through the gate back to the castle. I’m not useless, you know. I may be blind … but I’m not broken. I’m still—still a—a woman.”
“I know that,” he soothed. Sweet Christ, he knew that. He’d been trying to forget for twenty bleeding years. “Tell me why you’re here alone. Tell me what I can do. What you need.” He pressed his handkerchief into her hand, and let her wipe her own tears and dab at her nose as she fought valiantly to compose herself.
“I—I found out I’m going to be a grandmother today,” she said around delicate hiccups.
“Aye, but isn’t that happy news?”
“The happiest.” Her chin wobbled, but a moment of biting her lip harder than she should brought it to heel. “And all I could think while congratulating my daughter-in-law was that I’d have never—that Gavin and I wouldn’t have survived that night if—I owe you my life, my son’s life, and now my precious grandchild’s life.”
A fresh wave of sobs overtook her, and this time he couldn’t stand it. He dragged her against him, and breathed a sigh of relief when she collapsed into his arms and clutched at his vest. The north wind blew … and he wished it to never stop.
“I think he makes her feel safe, Eammon,” she cried. “When he speaks to her he smiles, I can hear it. And even if he is hard or angry, he does not make her afraid. He does not hurt her, not even with his words. He’s a miracle, my boy. And after everything—” Emotion stole her words, and Eammon smoothed a hand over her silken curls, thinking that nothing ever was or would be sweeter than this woman in his arms.
“Whether he likes it or not, there is no mistaking his Mackenzie blood, but we’ve always known Gavin is not like his father.” It was a miracle, Eammon agreed. He hoped the world never again saw the likes of Hamish Mackenzie.
“No,” she said fervently against his chest. “He’s like you.”
His hand stalled in her hair. “What?”
“That’s what I came to tell you.” She sniffed as her sobs dwindled into little catches of breath. “Without you and dear Callum … Gavin might have been lost. After that night … well, I was certainly in no position to parent him. You’ve taught my son what it is to be a man. A decent man.”
Eammon made a face, wondering if “decent” was a word that should be applied to Gavin St. James just yet.
“Well … perhaps I should say a kind man,” she amended, and they both indulged in a breath of wry amusement at the thought of the Earl of Thorne’s notoriety.
“You honor m
e, my lady.” He pressed a chaste kiss to her temple.
She turned her head into the kiss. “Perhaps … you could call me Eleanor when we’re alone.”
“Oh?” Both his heart and his brows lifted at her words, and Eammon suddenly wondered if he might be trapped in a surreal dream. “Do you intend for us to be alone again?”
“Often,” she breathed. Her skin tinged a lovely shade of peach that crept from beneath the high neckline of her dress. “If I may, that is … if you would…”
“Oh, I would,” he said with relish. Maybe next time, he’d steal a kiss … see what she thought of his beard then—
Behind him, Hermia shifted restlessly, tossing her head. A swift shadow moved in his periphery.
Something Eleanor had said permeated the unbelievable bliss coursing through him with a lance of pure dread.
She’d found her way down to the stables alone. She’d left herself a path back to the keep. Glancing over her head, he peered through the stable doors out into the courtyard across which the iron gate to Inverthorne Keep stood open.
He might not have been so wary had the north wind not been blowing quite so hard. He might not have seen the shadow materialize from behind the gate, nor noted the pistol in time to cover Eleanor’s body with his own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
From behind her closed eyes, Samantha felt the shadow fall upon her like the specter of winter, stealing what warmth she’d found beneath the windows in the solarium.
“You’re a crafty, double-dealin’ bitch, I’ll give you that much.” Boyd Masters’s Western drawl was an incongruous echo against stone walls used to more lyrical brogues than butchered, bastardized English.
For a ridiculous moment, Samantha kept her eyes squeezed firmly shut. This scenario played out often in her nightmares. Was she lucky enough to be dreaming this time, as well?
More exhausted than usual, she’d come to bask during a break in the clouds after pulling a chaise over to where a shaft of rare winter sunlight warmed the stones. Stretching out upon it like a lazy kitten, she’d dozed the day away.
That sunlight had disappeared now.
The Scot Beds His Wife Page 29