The Ground She Walks Upon

by Meagan Mckinney

  His reaction pleased her. His body went rigid and his lips turned wooden and implacable, but as she crushed her lips over his in an ever increasing amount of passion, he seemed to melt like an icicle in the spring sun. After a long, almost painful hesitation, his hand deliciously entangled itself in her hair, and then her kiss became more fervent, and she thrilled with the power of turning stone-cold lips warm and pliable with desire, letting them sip from hers until his greed widened like the rings from a stone dropped into a pond.

  Slowly, slowly, he kissed her back. Kissed her until she again fell asleep atop the rose petals, her thoughts, her dreams, on Malachi MacCumhal.

  Trevallyan closed his eyes, no longer able to look at the sleeping girl in his bed. The shock of what had happened still left him immobile, as if a net had fallen from the heavens, capturing him. What the bloody hell had happened? He hadn’t even seen it coming. One second, he was helping her sip from a goblet and the next, he was on her like a wolf, taking her mouth as if he’d never kissed before.

  Against his will, he forced himself to look down at her. Ravenna slept in the ancient Trevallyan bedstead, the mud had been gently wiped from her face and her hair had been toweled dry. The physician had heavily drugged her.

  Hell, he thought, clawing for any source of comfort, she probably hadn’t even known whom she’d been kissing.

  But he knew, came a little voice. Because he’d done it. Allowed it. Participated.

  The very idea was like a kick in the gut. Of all the girls he should find himself kissing, this girl was the last one he wanted. When a man was bound and determined to thwart his “destiny,” it certainly seemed a fatal error to take destiny in his arms and kiss her as if he’d been aching to do it for days.

  His ire increased with every slow, peaceful breath that issued from her parted lips. He’d told Greeves he felt responsible for the accident, which was why he had insisted she be put into his rooms so that he could personally keep an eye on her. Now he wondered about the elaborateness of the lie. In truth, he felt no guilt over what had happened on the roadside. By all sanity and reason, he should have hauled her back to her grandmother’s house and let the old witch tend to her aching head. But he hadn’t, and the reason eluded him. Vexed him. He still didn’t know why Ravenna had been out there on the road. According to the messenger he’d sent to the cottage, Grania hadn’t even known the girl was gone. Ravenna had not been running around at night in a rainstorm, half naked, because she was seeking help for her grandmother. She’d been out there because she had gotten into some kind of trouble.

  His angry gaze turned to a stray black curl that had slipped across her forehead, making her look vulnerable and even younger than she was. Against his will, he reached out and caressed it. Again he wondered at the insanity that had made him bring her to the castle. The idea brought a thunderous furrow to his brow.

  If he’d believed in geise, he might indeed believe he and this beautiful sleeping girl were meant for each other. After what had transpired this night, he had no problem envisioning himself with her. Her nubile charms, quite deliciously exposed beneath the mist of her wet night rail, had found an appreciative audience. It was said lust and love were inextricably intertwined. If he lured her to his bed, would he find the magic of both in the geis? He smiled a little wickedly, a little wryly. Lust he’d known before. And while it was a strong and pleasant instinct, it held no magic. It needed love.

  So it was love or nothing. Lust would bring him about as far as his marriage and all his attempted marriages had brought him.

  He frowned, the lines deepening on his cheeks. He could get Ravenna into bed and to the altar. Money and power had historically made it easy to throw aside the smooth skin as Count Fabuloso possessed and create instead the desire for an older face. Arabella, his last fiancée, had never mentioned their age difference. She’d been clearly well-schooled by her mother, and if love could be faked, Arabella had performed well.

  But love could not be faked. That was the essence of its definition. Love was real; it could not be bought nor manufactured. In the end, neither he nor Lady Arabella could keep up the pretense.

  So he could capture Ravenna, he could seduce her, he could marry her. Regardless, the geis stated that it was she who should fall in love with him, a troublesome idea even if he did believe in geise, for in his mind was the inescapable truth that had left him empty-hearted all these years. He wanted to love and be loved in return.

  This time, falling in love himself might not be so difficult, he thought darkly as he stared down at the lovely young woman asleep in his bed. But inducing the same sentiment in her could be problematic. He could give her expensive baubles and dresses that might win her affection, but they would never win her love. With love, all the obvious methods were doomed to fail. Even the idea of becoming a countess couldn’t make her give her love to him. He was all too familiar with the type of woman who could do brilliant portrayals of “a woman in love” in order to acquire such things.

  And then there was Malachi MacCumhal.

  Unwittingly Niall’s eyes flashed with jealousy. He’d seen how she had looked at the lad as soon as she recognized him in the hall. There was a softness in her eyes he could never imagine her turning toward him. If she wanted a lout such as MacCumhal, he was at a loss as to what might turn her head.

  Anger gripped his insides with all the strength of an ironsmith. The geis was utter nonsense, and he could not be dictated by it. Even now, when he thought of the night of Ravenna’s momentous birth, he cringed at the stupidity of the old men who still believed they saw things when all that they saw was lightning and shadow. Slowly the fury eased from his body like an outgoing tide. The girl sleeping in his bed was not his concern and never would be.

  But what ebbs must flow once more, and again he felt the anger rising in his chest.

  He should get rid of her. He should send the pest away, he thought, his gaze resting on her damp, parted lips.

  She had kissed him and made him feel things he had not wanted to feel. He should banish her from the county, transport her to Antrim to work in one of the Great Houses there.… But she had kissed him. And suddenly the thought of sending her from Lir was becoming untenable.

  His finger traced her fragile jawline and moved downward in a line between her lightly clad breasts. It stopped at her belly and he drew imaginary circles over the silk counterpane, moving in a spiral down to her blanketed hips. He lusted after her. There was no point in denying it, for any man would lust after such a creature whom he’d seen wet and nearly naked. He longed to sink sweetly between her thighs and taste once more her honeyed lips and skin.

  But he wouldn’t. It was best that he had no business with her. He wanted a woman to love. A wild creature such as she was no kind of woman to make him a companion.

  “My lord…?” A cough broke out behind him. Niall turned and found Greeves in the doorway.

  “What is it? Has the doctor returned already?”

  “No, my lord…” Greeves looked almost pained. He made a sad, stately figure when he grabbed the empty sleeve of his frock coat as if for security. “It seems there’s been mischief in the next county. Lord Quinn is here along with several of the townsfolk. I believe this needs your attention right away.”

  Niall glanced down at Ravenna one last time. Her color was good and she slept with long, even breaths. There was no urgent need for him to stay in attendance.

  “Get Fiona to come here and watch over her. And tell her not to talk,” he snapped as he grabbed his waistcoat and jacket.

  “Very good, my lord. I hope…” Greeves looked behind him as if spooked. “I hope there isn’t too much trouble.”

  Niall tossed him a look of agreement, then glanced back at Ravenna. He thought about that stupid geis and then, like a train helplessly bulleting in one direction, he thought about the kiss.

  Bother the girl anyway, he thought, and all the silly superstitious requirements of the geis. He’d gone this long with
out begging a woman to love him. He was damned if he would begin with Ravenna.

  The blinding glare of morning poured through an enormous window in front of the bedstead. Light hit Ravenna’s head like a ball peen hammer. She squeezed her eyes closed and burrowed once more into the comforting darkness beneath the satin quilt like a bat seeking its cave.

  Then memory assailed her and she released an audible groan. She wasn’t home. Home didn’t have satin quilts and lavender-scented sheets. Her cottage also didn’t have windows that went from the floor to the heavens, letting in an abominable amount of sunshine.

  She recalled her disappointing meeting with Malachi and the subsequent encounter with Griffen O’Rooney in the Trevallyan graveyard. She’d run from Griffen into … a carriage. That was it. She hadn’t seen it, for she would have avoided the thing if she had. She’d been disoriented and she’d slipped beneath the horses’ flailing hooves. And whoever had found her had brought her to his or her home for recovery.

  She slowly took her aching head in hand and crept again from beneath the covers. Grania had to be worried sick about her, and if strangers had found her on the road, they might not know whom to notify.

  She eased herself to a sitting position and prayed for a gun that could shoot out the light. But no matter the physical pain, she knew she had to gather herself together and return to Grania. Grania was too old a woman to take the strain of fearing for her only kin.

  Using care in her movements not to jar her throbbing head, she leaned back against a mountain of downy pillows and willed her eyes to open despite the assault of sunlight. Slowly, she raised her eyelids until the room no longer appeared as if she were viewing it from the bottom of a pond. The bedstead, the brocaded green curtains, the stone walls, all came into focus at once, and realization dropped on her like a net. Her breath caught in her throat. She was back in Trevallyan’s bedchamber.

  She remembered all too well this room from that fateful day of her childhood. The Cromwellian doors still gleamed with beeswax, the windows of the tower still pointed at the top in Gothic tracery. In the antechamber beyond, one chair by the hearth looked well-used—even more worn than she remembered—while the other, though it had been years since she had laid eyes on it, still looked as if it had left the cabinetmaker’s yesterday.

  Her eyes closed with the horror of it. Lord Trevallyan’s coach must have been the one she had encountered on the rain-swept road. Fragmented pieces of memory came back to her. She’d been hurt, and he must have brought her to the castle. Now she was in the last place she had ever wanted to be again. In his bedchamber. And not only a visitor to it, but an intimate one at that, for she lay in his bed, as she had no doubt lain for hours, and she wore only…

  She forced her gaze down at the foreign garment covering her. Of course her own clothes would have been too wet and muddied for her to be put to bed in them. She lifted one arm and saw how the sleeve extended way beyond her fingertips. The garment was sheer white batiste with mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. A man’s shirt. Trevallyan’s shirt.

  A hot, sickly blush crawled up her cheeks as she remembered what she had been wearing when Trevallyan must have her found her. She had been wearing nothing but her night rail. She could just picture the ladies at the Weymouth-Hampstead School, or the Catholic matrons of the parish, dropping dead of mortification. She couldn’t even blame them. Her own constitution was much more sound than those sheltered English roses, and even she felt ill with shame.

  “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.…”

  At the sound of Trevallyan’s voice, she jerked her head to the right. There sat the reason for her humiliation, watching her, his eyes as cool as the ice from the winter Boyne.

  She met his gaze, for the moment forgetting the blinding white pain in her head. He sat in an elbow chair with his black-booted feet crossed in front of him. He was dressed in black trousers and a starched shirt much like the one she wore. His black neckcloth nearly covered his fashionably turned-out collar, and his figured-silk waistcoat, the color of crushed grapes, lent him an air of wealth that seemed in marked contrast to his dark, somber gray frock coat. He looked down at her, with an air of disdain. His face was freshly shaven and smelling of vetiver soap, while she, on the other hand, looked a mess.

  Shrinking inside from humiliation, she pictured herself as she sat in the bed. Her hair hung in a curtain of black knotted hanks, and she was hardly bathed since her encounter with all the mud.

  She waited for him to say something cutting, but he didn’t. He merely glanced at her and said obliquely, “’Tis a good motto for life, is it not? ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’”

  She opened her mouth, quick to explain that she had not meant yet again to be trespassing on his land, but her gaze fell on his face. Beneath all the polish, he appeared worn. There was a tiredness around his eyes that she hadn’t noticed before. He looked as if he’d been carrying a terrible burden that had now been lifted. In the back of her mind, she wondered if perhaps it was she who had burdened him, but the idea seemed so absurd—the Lord Trevallyan sitting vigil at the bedside of a woman little better than a street urchin—that she couldn’t quite believe it. There was no reason for him to care for her; more so, in her every encounter with him, he’d gone out of his way to make sure she knew what little value she held in his esteem. If there was something troubling him, it surely hadn’t been her health. Then her gaze lowered to his lips. A terrible, downright sickening thought occurred to her. She had dreamed she had kissed Malachi, and it was a dream so real she could still feel the press of warm lips on her own, feel the hard, strong hand cup the back of her neck and pull her farther into his embrace. She would swear on her grave she had kissed someone and that it hadn’t been entirely a dream. If all along she’d been in Trevallyan’s possession, then she might have actually kissed…

  Her hand clamped over her mouth that was now open wide with shock, not retort. She met his gaze and her eyes burned with guilt. It couldn’t be true. She couldn’t have kissed him, but the discomfort she found in his own gaze damned her more than her own foggy remembrance.

  “Did—did … Did I kiss you?” she whispered, agony in her voice.

  “Yes,” he answered coldly, suddenly unable to meet her eyes.

  She cringed at his stiff, disapproving countenance and wondered how she could have become such a trollop. Perhaps she was cursed by her mother’s past after all. Perhaps it was something she could not control, like the funny, hot feeling she got whenever she thought of the men who bathed nude in the River Lir. So was her life over? Was she now going to have the urge to kiss every man? Even the good father and Trevallyan’s old, one-armed butler? God save her.

  “’Twas not that unpleasant, I wager.”

  Her gaze flickered back to his. If she didn’t know better, she’d believe there was a tiny, so-small-if-you-blinked-you-would-miss-it, glimmer of amusement in his blue-green eyes.

  Stupidly, she stuttered, “Wh-what was not that unpleasant, my lord?”

  “The kiss.”

  “But I didn’t mean to kiss you,” she blurted out, backing away from the topic like a wet cat running from a bucket. “Please believe me, I thought you were someone else.”

  Trevallyan stared at her so pointedly he seemed to be drilling holes right through her. “I see,” he said, his voice tinged with a strange anger. “Was this man, perchance, the criminal who burnt down the Quinn barn last night?”

  She felt a knot tighten in her throat. Malachi had been in trouble when she’d seen him last. She didn’t want to hear tell of crimes. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “The barn couldn’t be saved.” He quieted. “Nor could Kathleen’s prize mare.”

  Ravenna stared at the rumpled sheets, sickened by the picture of a terrified mare burning up in flames. She couldn’t believe Malachi, the boy she had known and loved, would do such a wicked deed, but deep in her heart she knew it wa
s probably true. Something had happened to him. Growing up poor and resentful had turned Malachi’s mischievous tendencies into criminal ones.

  “Do they know who it was that burned the barn down?” she asked, her throat dry and fiery from withheld tears.

  He gripped her jaw and turned her head to face him. “A man said he saw the criminal’s face lit briefly by the barn fires. He said he thought the lad looked like … Malachi MacCumhal.”

  “A scant sighting in the dead of night is not evidence the fire was set by him.” She bit her lower lip and her forehead lined with worry. “Besides, I can’t believe Malachi would purposely do such a thing. Nobody loves horses as much as he does. Why, he sneaks old Reverend Drummond’s mare an ear of corn every time the old man isn’t looking.”

  “Malachi will hang if he doesn’t quit this White Boy nonsense.”

  “He didn’t burn that barn down, I tell you!” She thrust her jaw from his grasp and stared at him with eyes that glittered with anger. Her behavior was contrary to her thoughts, but as irrational as it was, she still couldn’t accept Malachi’s blame. And especially not from Trevallyan. Niall Trevallyan had never known hardship and loss. He sat in his fine castle all day, counting his riches and devising the next pleasure, like all the rest of the Ascendency. At the moment, the wife and baby buried in the Trevallyan graveyard didn’t seem to mar her picture of him one bit. The man before her had been born to every privilege and fortune, and he could never know how Malachi felt. Never.

  “You defend him?” Trevallyan asked coolly.

  “Yes,” she snapped, though she was no more sure of Malachi’s innocence than Trevallyan was.

  Trevallyan screeched back his chair and rose. He crossed his arms over his chest and peered down at her as if she were a hapless child. “So you claim he’s not guilty. I trust you can back up that claim.”

  She stared up at his grave features, fear for her dear friend twisting in her heart. “I—I know he didn’t burn down that barn. You must understand, I know Malachi. He’s a good lad. I know he is.”