Her eyes widened at his insinuation, and then she realized that, rational or not, her hand was flying and she was determined to see that her palm smacked hard against his cheek.
But he caught her wrist, and his laughter was subtle, and she was suddenly pulled hard against him, aware despite all her layers of clothing and his that he was most certainly very male and very aroused, and more than ready to carry out his threat.
She struggled against his arms, but he held her close, and his kiss caught hold of her lips then, hard, rugged, as forceful as they were persuasive. She tried to fight him, tried with fury, and yet her strength waned and the taste and the scent and sheer power of his touch prevailed in the end, and he killed her then at his leisure, tasting her lips, knowing them with his tongue, with the gentle graze of his teeth. And then he was tenderly holding her against him, and his murmur touched her ear softly.
“Do I hold the rabbit or the hawk? The seductress is always there, bold, fighting, demanding. And you should know the ways of the world, and the ways of men, and yet then again I think that I am misled, that there is innocence there. Who are you, Martise?”
She pulled away from him, dismayed. Her hand flew to her throat, and she stumbled back upon the rock, wincing as she placed weight upon her ankle. “Mary’s—Mary’s sister!” she cried out. “You—you must remember that!”
He arched a brow to her, and it seemed that a golden gleam came down to hide all the emotion within his eyes. “I try,” he said quietly, then turned toward the caves, pausing. He cast his head back and closed his eyes against the sun, and then he opened them again and turned back to her. “You must try to remember it, too,” he said.
But before she could begin to ponder the true meaning of his words, he was gone, heading into the caves.
For the longest time, she simply sat there on the rock, listening to the sound of the surf. She was falling in love with him, she thought.
She could not be.
And yet she was.
Her thoughts about Bruce faded when she realized she was staring at a piece of fabric that seemed to trail from behind a rock, perhaps sixty feet away from her.
She hadn’t seen it before, she was certain.
Then she noted the tide was rising, and she thought that perhaps the rise of the water had loosened something behind the rock.
She stood slowly, and then she felt as if her heart congealed. Fabric … it could be Clarissa behind that stone.
Or her body.
Martise inhaled on a sharp gasp, but then quickly came to life. Hobbling on her sprained ankle, she made it as fast as she could across the sand. She rounded the huge rock and then her hand flew against her mouth to hold back a scream when she saw that the fabric indeed housed a body.
But it was not Clarissa’s.
Beneath her, pinned by the weight of the rock, lay a man. He was clad in the simple garb of a sailor. His graying hair was flat against the sand, tangled within it. The fabric she had seen had torn free from his pants where his leg had been snapped like a match, and now lay at an awkward angle, the bone protruding.
His shirt, too, was stained with blood.
For a moment she thought she would be sick.
She closed her eyes and remembered the days in Richmond at the hospital when she had tended the battle-injured. When she had smelled the rot of gangrene. When she had heard the horrible screams of the men as such injured legs were amputated.
She fought the nausea, and then she opened her eyes, determined. She fell down on the sand beside him, trying to remember any little thing she had learned from the doctors.
Then she wondered why she had worried. The man was obviously dead.
She pressed her fingers against his throat and laid her head on his chest. She jerked up, certain he had a heartbeat.
But there was little she could do for him here. She ripped open his shirt and saw that the wound had torn his lower abdomen. She sat back and ripped at her petticoat. He was heavy, and it was difficult to move his upper body to bind up the wound, but she tried to do just that.
Then she started to scream. “Bruce! Bruce! Please! I need you.”
The man was alive; he was still bleeding. Fresh marks of blood welled into the bandage and she ripped more material to pack the wound more tightly.
“Bruce!”
The man’s eyes opened. Unfocused, dazed, they stared into the sun. The man cried out.
And then he glanced at her, and his eyes were filled with fear and terror.
“It’s all right,” Martise tried to assure him. “I’m trying to help you. Please, lie back. We’ll get more help. We’ll splint your leg. It’s going to be all right.”
But he opened up his mouth and screamed again. Martise leaned forward, using her skirt to mop at his forehead. “Please, it will be all right. It will be all right.”
He was trying to say something. She leaned low against him as his lips moved and no sound came. There was only a whisper. She couldn’t understand him.
And then she thought that she did.
“Creeghan,” he mumbled.
She couldn’t have heard him correctly; it was her imagination. She tried to talk to him again, to keep talking, to say anything. “It’s going to be all right…”
But it wasn’t. The tide was coming in, and the man was still stuck beneath the rock.
Frantically, she began to tear at the material that was caught and pinning him down.
And then Bruce appeared.
“Martise!”
She was not sitting upon her rock, and so she thought that she heard a note of anxiety in his cry. “Bruce, over here! Please, help me!”
He was there in seconds. His tall black riding boots slashed through the water, and he swiftly assessed the situation. He rolled back his sleeves and set his strength against the boulder.
She watched as the cords in his neck tightened, as his face strained, as the muscles within his arms rippled and tautened out like whipcords. The rock didn’t move. But then he braced himself and pushed again, and the huge boulder moved over several inches.
The man was free.
“His leg!” Martise warned, looking about frantically. They had left the area of any ground that resembled woods, but Bruce disappeared into the cave again and returned almost immediately.
She wondered how he had found a length of split lumber so easily, but it did not seem the time to ask. As he gritted his teeth against the pain he would cause the injured man, Bruce straightened the leg, snapping the bones into place.
The man screeched in agony.
Then he passed out, and Martise took more strips of petticoat to bind about him, and when she was done and the leg was secured, Bruce carefully caught him by the shoulders and pulled him from the path of the oncoming tide.
“You can go for Ian and Conar and Peter,” Martise said. “I’ll stay here with him—”
“Aye, lass, but I think we need the doctor here. That’s severe. And he’s suffered more injury than the leg, I’ll warrant. A man gnashed by the rocks seldom breathes again.” He drew off his black frock coat as he spoke, placing it around the man. “Aye, stay with him, and I’ll send Conar to bring Dr. MacTeague, then we’ll move him with the doctor’s supervision.” He paused just a moment. “He’ll probably lose that leg. I’ve seen such wounds before.”
“Yes,” Martise agreed, then looked up at him, startled, wondering where he had come across such a woefully shattered limb before.
He was already leaping up the rock, graceful, agile for his size.
Martise bent close to the man’s chest again. At first, she did not hear a heartbeat. Then she caught the faintest murmur, and she sat back, relieved.
There was nothing else she could do.
She was sodden and wet from her foray into the rising surf. Her feet were drenched, as were the hem of her skirt and what remained of her petticoats. She shivered fiercely. The daylight was leaving them. The surf was still rising, and a bitter chill seemed to have se
ttled over the sky. She looked up. It would rain that night, and the air would become cooler.
She looked back to the sailor. “Live!” she whispered to him. “Please, live. You must tell us what happened, why … it happened. And why you whispered the word ‘Creeghan’ to me.”
Creeghan. Because Castle Creeghan had brought about his downfall?
Because the great laird of Creeghan … had what?
She swirled around when she heard a sound on the sand. Bruce had come back, and Conar was with him.
“Ian has ridden for the doctor,” Bruce said. “It should not be long.”
“It had better not be,” Conar muttered. “Watch the tide, Bruce. It will be up to the cave in another hour.” He rubbed his hands together, shivering in the wind. “How he’s made it this long is surely a miracle. Bejesu, Bruce, but ’tis freezin’ here!”
“Aye, that it is,” Bruce agreed, and his gaze landed upon Martise, who still shivered and shook. Then she gasped out a protest as he reached down and swept her into his arms. “Lord Creeghan, whatever—”
“I’m taking you into the cave, out of the wind,” he told her with an angry crack to his voice. “We’ll have you down with a bad ankle and pneumonia if you don’t listen to some sense.”
“But the sailor—”
“Conar is there. We’ve a blanket to set over him. Martise, there’s nothing you can do!”
He was right. As they entered into the darkness of the cave, she unwillingly tightened her hold upon him. He slowly, carefully set her down, and then rose to tower over her.
“Are you all right there?”
She nodded.
“I’ll go back out, then.”
She could see him and Conar by the sailor. They sat on either side of the man in the sand, their knees up, elbows rested upon them. Their voices were low. She could not hear their words, and leaned her head back against the stone and listened to the wind.
It was growing shrill. Passionate, raging, and shrill. It swept through the cliffs, and it seemed to cry and moan and to have a haunted life all of its own.
She shivered. Even in the cave it was cold. Perhaps it was even worse, for the wind sounded more terrible here. The rains would begin soon.
But it was not long before Ian and Peter returned with the doctor. And Dr. MacTeague instantly sat down by the man, nodded his approval of the splint and bandage, and leaned low to the man’s chest.
“We can lift him painlessly enough, I think, the three of us,” Bruce was telling his cousins. “One at the shoulders and two at his feet. It will be a blessed mercy if he stays unconscious—”
“We need no mercy, Bruce,” MacTeague said quietly, looking up. “He’s dead.”
“What?” Martise cried in horror from the cave.
She stumbled to her feet and then lumbered heavily across the sand. She fell by the man and cared not if she insulted MacTeague. She leaned against the sailor to seek a heartbeat herself, and then she frantically felt at his shoulders and at his breast.
There was nothing.
MacTeague was watching her over the body of the fallen man.
“I’m sorry, Lady St. James. The man is gone.”
“But he was alive!”
“Aye, milady. And you did well, miraculously well. You made every effort … but he’s gone now.”
“I’ll take him up,” Conar said briefly, bending down to lift the body over his shoulder. He straightened. “It will not matter now to him if it be a rough and rocky road.”
He started up the cliffs. Martise sat in the sand, shivering anew, unable to accept the man’s death.
Then she felt Bruce’s hands upon her again, lifting her to her feet, sweeping her up into his arms. His eyes touched hers, but he spoke to MacTeague.
“The Lady St. James needs her ankle bound. Can we tend to it at the plateau?”
“Aye, that’s fine,” MacTeague agreed.
Her eyes remained on Bruce’s as he carried her surely up the cliff. The wind ripped and tore around them both, and screamed and cried.
“He was alive,” she whispered.
“Aye, he was alive,” Bruce agreed. And then he looked ahead, climbing. “He might have told us—something,” he said.
“He did,” she murmured.
Then he was staring at her again, staring hard.
In the gray, murky air that swirled around them, he seemed to be cloaked in darkness. Fear and longing mingled within her, along with the terrible sense of danger she felt whenever he was near.
She knew not if the danger was within the naked, all-powerful charisma of the man, or if it lay in something more evil.
“What did he say?” he demanded harshly.
Conar and Ian and Peter and the doctor and the dead man were far ahead of them.
They were alone on the cliffs, alone by the sea, and she was powerless within his arms.
“What did he say?” Bruce repeated, his voice like the thunder that would soon crack the sky.
“Nothing, nothing, really!”
“You’re lying, girl.”
“No!” she cried. “He tried to speak. He barely had a voice left. I leaned against him. I tried to hear—”
“Don’t you understand! We might have learned something!” he snapped back at her.
Oh, yes, she understood.
The man might have told them all something … Creeghan. The word that he had whispered was “Creeghan.”
The wind screeched and moaned again, and then suddenly, with a violence all its own, the rain came.
Bruce ducked his head low against her, and for the fraction of a second, Martise caught her breath, certain that he meant to throw her …
Down to the Dragon’s Teeth far below.
But he did not. He held her more tightly to leap his way across the rocks, and hurry for the plateau and the waiting horses.
There was no question that her ankle could be bound then and there. Nor did Bruce even take a step toward the mare. He set her atop the bay and leapt up behind her, and called out that they would head straight for the castle.
He sheltered her from the wind, and from the rain, and though her heart beat too quickly at first, she was glad enough to lean against him and let him take the brunt of the wind and the rain. Lightning flashed, and thunder roared, and she closed her eyes, tucked close against him.
He was in his element, it seemed. Undaunted by the wind or the sheeting rain or the sizzle of the lightning or the heartless crack and peel of the thunder.
Indeed, he appeared immune to it, a lord of the wind, a lord of the thunder. She could not care at the moment, she could not think. She could only hold tight throughout the reckless ride and seek her harbor in the hard warmth of his chest.
They came to Creeghan. Bruce burst through the door with her in his arms. Elaina and Hogarth, both in the room, cried out at her appearance.
“What is it?” Elaina cried.
Bruce set her in the chair before the fire.
“It’s nothing—” Martise tried to say.
“’Tis her ankle. Brandy, Hogarth, we’ve a need of some warmed brandy.” His eyes met hers as he loosened the button at her throat, then he stepped back and MacTeague took his place. Hogarth was there with the brandy, informing her that there would be a steaming bath in her room as soon as she was ready.
“Thank you, but I’m fine, truly I am,” she said.
MacTeague was pulling off her stocking and gently feeling her foot and ankle. Ian drew off his soaking frock coat and set it upon a hook in the wall, then walked across the room to the table, pouring out whisky for the men and handing a glass to his father before bringing glasses to his brother and Bruce.
And then they all stared at Martise. She tried to smile.
“Well, ’tis a sprain, and Lady St. James might want to soak it in her bath before I bind it. It will do well enough, but”—he pointed a stern finger at her—“ye must stay off your feet, milady, for a good week.”
“A week!” she cri
ed with dismay.
“A week,” he said firmly.
Bruce set down his whisky and stepped forward again. “Come on, I’ll carry you up for your bath.”
“I’ll come, too,” Elaina said, “and tend to her.”
Bruce paused, looking at his sister. “Well,” Elaina reminded him softly, “I can help her where you must not, Bruce.”
Bruce’s look conveyed that he could help her very well, and that he really didn’t give a damn whether he must or must not. But he smiled at his sister and agreed and started for the stairs.
And his eyes upon Martise’s as he walked indicated that he really could and would do whatever he chose. Whenever he chose.
He opened the door to her room with his shoulder and carried her in to set her on the bed. Holly was there, pouring a last kettle of steaming water into the bath.
“Oh, my Lady St. James!” Holly moaned.
“I’ll stay with her, Holly,” Elaina said.
Bruce was down upon a knee, removing her other boot, his eyes upon hers. His hand moved subtly against her stocking, and his gaze was wicked. But then he smiled, dropped her boot upon the floor, and rose.
“Call me, Elaina, when Lady St. James is ready to come down and see the doctor again.”
He strode to the door. Martise watched him, then she struggled to sit up. “Wait, Bruce, please!”
“Aye?”
“Where—where is he? The sailor.”
“Tenderly wrapped within the archway, I assure you. We’ll bring him back to the village. MacTeague will want to examine him at greater length.”
He was walking out the door.
“Bruce!” she called once again.
He paused, watching her, waiting. Was it warily? she wondered. She could not tell. His fire eyes burned into her.
“What about the girl? Clarissa. Did any of the others find her?”
He hesitated. “No, I’m afraid not,” he said. He stared at her a moment longer, then looked to his sister. “Call me, Elaina,” he said, and then he was gone.
And even though Elaina chattered and sympathized, Martise felt as if she was very much alone.
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