Eyes of the Cat

by Mimi Riser

  Temporarily?

  She fought to hang on to her composure. Ducking her head over Rosa didn’t help. Even when she couldn’t see that muscular form, she could still feel his gaze flowing over her like molten lava. Her carefully envisioned icicles began to melt. Fast.

  “Your cropped hair poses a problem for me, you know. It makes you look so much younger. I’ll be feeling a bit like a dirty old man till those lovely locks grow out.” With a weary sigh, he hauled himself away from the doorframe. “Speaking of which… Is that water still hot, do you think?”

  What? Hers and Rosa’s bath water?

  She glanced up to see where he was heading, relieved that it was toward the brass tub and not toward her. “It may still be a little warm, but—”

  “Close enough.” He kicked free from his moccasins and began peeling down his leggings.

  Good God, he wasn’t going to bathe right in front of her, was he?

  “Alan, you can’t use that water—it’s filthy!” She quickly ducked her face again as his hands moved to his breechclout.

  “So am I. Anything will be an improvement. I haven’t the energy to wait for fresh.” With a deep groan of contentment, he collapsed into the tub.

  And Tabitha spent a few breathless moments replacing her steamed icicles with the image of a massive glacier. By the time she dared look up, he was hidden, except for his handsome head and granite shoulders—which were distracting enough—but at least his eyes were closed. His head rested back against the curved brass rim, and she realized with a surge of sympathy that quite surprised her, he was knockdown, dragged-out exhausted. Though why that should bother her, she couldn’t imagine.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had any sleep?” she asked with a grudging concern.

  “Hmm…sleep? What’s that?”

  Good heavens, he must have been trailing those pirates since he left here. What was that? Nearly forty-eight hours ago?

  “Oh, honestly, this is absurd. You need sleep now more than you need a bath. Get out of that tub and go to bed before you sink from exhaustion and drown,” she ordered, scarcely thinking what she said.

  His eyelids flickered up, and she immediately regretted having even opened her mouth.

  “Spoken just like a wife.” He grinned. “Your worry over me is touching.”

  “It’s not worry. It’s simply commonsense advice. And I am no—”

  “Shh, you’ll wake that wee lassie on your lap.”

  “I am no one’s wife!” she whispered furiously. Somewhere at the North or South Pole a glacier must have just broken up.

  “Tabitha dear, for the final time, our marriage is valid,” Alan whispered back, his half-closed eyes looking disturbingly feline and predatory.

  “Maybe it would be in old Scotland, but we happen to be in modern Texas!” she hissed.

  “For all intents and purposes, MacAllister land is old Scotland.”

  “Of course it is. And I’m Joan of Arc, and you’re the war chief Cochise.”

  Alan heaved a long sigh, creating a slight splash as he slid lower in the tub. “No. Cochise was Apache. I’m Comanche, remember? My name is Eyes-of-the-Cat.”

  “Eyes… Eyes-of-the…” Tabitha didn’t need a reminder to keep her voice low. A scratchy rasp was all she could grate out. Her gaze darted furtively to the door.

  “Aye, that’s a rough translation, anyway,” Alan said tiredly. “And if you move one inch away from that chair, I’ll be out of this tub so fast—”

  “You wouldn’t dare touch me while I’m holding this child.”

  Eyes-of-the-Cat proved the worth of his name as a glittering gold glare riveted her where she sat. “Don’t tell me what I’d dare or not, lassie.”

  “And don’t you threaten me.” Something inside her went rigid, giving her the strength to hold firm under that glare. Or maybe it was the other scenes still so fresh in her mind’s eye that stiffened her resolve. “I’ve had enough of this! I won’t tolerate anymore,” she whispered tensely. “This morning I’ve seen the bloodiest that humanity has to offer. Unless you’re prepared to top it, there is nothing you can do to frighten me.”

  It was a good boast, but she had forgotten in the anger of the moment, that his power to dominate had little to do with pain. It was the opposite, rather. His main force lay in the raw heat of his physical presence—and the sensual pleasure it promised. Too late she was reminded of that as he rose up out of the tub, like a bronzed Neptune striding forth from the sea.

  “I thought there was nothing I could do to frighten you,” he said, trailing water across the floor as he moved toward her.

  Tabitha doubled over the sleeping bundle in her lap. “I’m not frightened. I…I was worried about Rosa,” she improvised, her tightly shut eyes burning with the imprint of Alan’s hard muscled, glistening form. “You can’t walk around here like that. There’s a baby girl present!”

  “Two of them, apparently.” He angled away from her to close the door to the room. It pulled to with a deadly decisive click. “Rosa’s not the one who’s bothered, though.” He turned back to Tabitha. “She’s sound asleep. I doubt an earthquake could wake her at this point. Lay her on the bed. She’ll be safe there, and I want to talk to you without any distractions.”

  “Get dressed, and I’ll consider it.”

  “Fair enough, I suppose.” Alan sighed and retraced his steps to the dresser by the door.

  Talk about distracting. Tabitha silently smoldered. What did he think he was, poised there wearing nothing but his arrogance?

  She kept her face hidden over Rosa until he had dragged on a formfitting pair of fawn colored trousers. Then she carefully arose from the chair and carried the sleeping toddler to the bed. There was one good thing about this. With Rosa nestled in the center of the four-poster, Alan wouldn’t be able to use it for anything else.

  Leaving the tiny girl surrounded by pillows, so she couldn’t accidentally roll off the mattress, Tabitha turned around—and froze at the sight of Alan relaxed in the armchair she had just vacated. This was his idea of getting dressed? He had gotten no further than the fawn trousers and his boots, and appeared to find that quite adequate.

  The man had a definite grudge against shirts.

  She sighed, feeling somewhat underdressed herself. She hadn’t been able to determine, after the bath, which of Gabrina’s detested frocks to inflict upon herself, and had gone with the temporary compromise of a sea green silk dressing gown over her underthings until deciding. But when Rosa had started to fall asleep on her lap, she hadn’t wanted to disturb her, and then…

  “Come here,” Alan ordered, his voice a low, sensuous purr and his eyes pulling at her like magnets.

  Suddenly her feet didn’t belong to her anymore. Gliding over the smooth wood floor, Tabitha couldn’t resist the draw of that gaze until her knees bumped his. Then, like a sleepwalker snapping awake, she dug in her heels and stopped short, feeling like a bird that’s narrowly missed being snared. That had gone a little beyond hypnosis, as she understood the phenomenon.

  She jerked back a pace, almost as if she’d been burnt. In a way, she had—by the scorching blaze of two amber magnets.

  They never blinked. “Come here,” he repeated.

  Tabitha set her jaw, planted her feet, and tried to imagine a wall of ice looming in front of her.

  “I have come here,” she said, frost gleaming on every word.

  “I meant all the way here.”

  The ice wall sizzled into hot vapors as Alan reached through it, pulling her onto his lap. The dressing gown popped open with one deliberate tug, and his hands slid around the corseted waist beneath it, locking her against his naked chest before she could wrestle free.

  “I thought you wanted to talk,” she strained out as his lips hovered above hers for a few wild breaths.

  “Well…communicate, anyway. See if you can understand what I’m saying.”

  And his mouth went to work.

  The kiss was sheer, unbridled
eloquence, satin smooth and hotter than jalapenos. It spoke volumes to her body, but nothing Tabitha could translate into actual words. It was raw power, unthinking passion, hungry desire… Her own, amazingly, as well as his.

  Suddenly not caring whether it was proper or sensible or safe, she dove headlong into that kiss—desperate for more—winding her arms about his neck and near blistering his lips with the force of her response. Pouring herself over him, like honey fresh from the hive. If it were possible, she’d have climbed right inside him. She couldn’t get close enough.

  The chair toppled backward with an unnoticed thud, and they rolled together onto the floorboards in a fevered tangle of arms and legs—a wild, double-backed creature of groans and groping hands and panting mouths—all fire and frenzy and devastating, driving need.

  Drowning in a steamy flood of kisses, lost in the ecstatic feel of that masculine body burning against hers, it took several seconds for the piercing cries to penetrate Tabitha’s awareness. But when realization hit, she twisted away and stumbled across the room, leaving Alan panting for breath and sprawled on the floor behind her, like the victim of a dynamite blast. Which, in a way, he was.

  Tabitha, too. But she had that inbred feminine ability to push personal concerns out the window when a young one was sounding an alarm call.

  “Rosita, what’s the matter, niña? Que esta?” She gathered the trembling little figure into her arms. “Did you have a bad dream, a… Oh, heck, what’s the Spanish for nightmare?” she muttered to herself.

  “Pesadilla,” Alan offered hoarsely, slowly hauling to his feet, like a diver coming up from the deep.

  “Thank you,” Tabitha said absently. Then stiffened and blushed as the sight and sound of the man reopened the window, and all the sensations she’d previously bumped out swept back in. Good Lord, what had she been doing?

  Or…what had she been made to do?

  Her eyes narrowed and her arms tightened around Rosa, as Alan came toward them.

  He was brought up short against a wall of the toddler’s shrieks. “Bloody hell, what’s the matter with her?”

  “You,” Tabitha breathed, feeling chills as she guessed what had frightened the niña. So high on the bed and surrounded by pillows, she hadn’t thought Rosa could have seen them on the floor, but the noise of the chair tipping must have woken her and… Oh, God…

  “I think Rosa saw what happened to her mother and sisters,” she said, staring at him with a dull horror. “When she saw us, she must have thought you were trying…trying to…”

  Her voice trailed off. Perhaps Rosa had been right. Was it any less of an attack if the victim had somehow been mesmerized into accepting it?

  With a low curse, Alan lifted Rosa out of Tabitha’s arms before she realized what he’d intended.

  “Stop that! You’re frightening her!”

  “And the sooner she sees I mean no harm, the sooner she’ll stop being frightened.” He angled away as Tabitha angrily tried to retrieve her.

  “You’re hardly harmless,” she said.

  “I’m not the one who toppled the chair,” he replied smoothly, and began speaking softly to Rosa in Spanish.

  The little traitor quieted almost immediately, staring up at him as Tabitha stood fuming at them both.

  “Now, if only I could convince you as easily.” Alan glanced at her, the ghost of a grin haunting his face. He jerked slightly when Rosa caught him off guard by grabbing for his nose, as though she had wanted to make sure it was real.

  Tabitha’s breath snagged in her throat. Rosa had made the same mistake she had. That was why the little thing had panicked. Just like herself, Rosa had thought Alan was the man with the ragged holes where his nose should have been. Why was that so disturbing, she wondered, a weird chill crawling over her flesh.

  Because it implied the two men were more similar than she had decided back at the Garcias’. Comparing them that morning, she’d been struck by the opposition in their energies. But that was actually a rather subjective judgment, wasn’t it? If you ignored the differences in bearing and expression—and the nose—their physical similarities were a little…well, uncanny. It was difficult to imagine there being even one physique like Alan’s in the world, let alone two. It was almost as if they were…

  She gave her head a quick shake to drive the thought out. Impossible. As short a time as she’d been here, wouldn’t someone have spoken of it before now? Even Gabrina had mentioned nothing of the kind. Granted, the Scots girl really hadn’t known that much about her so-called betrothed, but surely she would have been aware of something like that.

  Possibly not, though. That whole overseas engagement had been such a preposterous thing to start with. Tabitha was half inclined to believe the entire affair had been arranged by some malicious quirk of fate simply to land her in the spot she was now: Trapped in a make-believe marriage with a man who was more puzzling than the pyramids.

  She couldn’t even understand him based on the rest of his eccentric family. In many ways, he was so little like them. His coloring was darker than most of the MacAllisters—not to mention his temperament. His accent was lighter. He was their black sheep, and didn’t appear to be overly fond of the rest of the flock. A feeling that might be mutual. Although, whether or not the MacAllisters liked their laird, it seemed obvious many of them were intimidated by him. Hardly surprising, Tabitha supposed. He certainly intimidated her. Even if he had turned out to be remarkably good with Rosa. In a matter of moments, the exhausted toddler had drifted straight back to sleep in Alan’s arms.

  Watching him gently settle the tiny figure onto the bed, Tabitha tried to juxtapose that image with the one of him galloping down on the outlaws, like an avenging angel of death. The two pictures wouldn’t fit together. But then, neither did anything else about the man. He was a towering mass of muscle and mysteries. Mysteries that were only increasing…

  “Tabitha, what is it? You’re staring as though you’ve no idea who I am.”

  “I don’t.” Averting her gaze, she began backing across the room. It was unnerving enough to be caught staring—especially when she hadn’t realized she’d been doing it—but it was more unnerving to have him stalking toward her like this.

  “I don’t know who you are,” she said, hastily trying to refasten her dressing gown as she moved. She’d just noticed it was hanging open. Gulp. When had that happened, she wondered right before she nearly tripped over the upended chair—which jogged her memory, of course. “I don’t know anything about you,” she added, blushing deeper than the burgundy upholstery she was awkwardly skirting past.

  “That’s what marriage is for.” Alan reached down with one hand to set the armchair straight as he trailed her. “We’ll have the rest of our lives to become acquainted.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” In unthinking anger, her eyes met his.

  “No. ’Twas meant to get you to look at me.”

  With a wrenching in her midsection at her mistake, Tabitha realized she’d been caught in those amber snares. Again. Alan’s gaze halted her in her tracks and held her motionless while he covered the last few steps between them.

  “How do you do that?” she whispered as he stopped only heartbeats away.

  “Do what?” he asked innocently, his eyes barely allowing her room to breathe.

  Damn him. He knows what I mean, she fumed, feeling herself slipping steadily deeper into the web those eyes were weaving.

  “Why do you need me to look at you?” she countered, trying to use the words as grappling hooks to drag free.

  They fell a little short of the mark.

  “If you spent more time in front of a mirror, you’d know the answer to that,” he murmured, still holding her with nothing but his gaze. “Is it my turn now? I’ve a question or two, myself.”

  I hope they’re spoken ones, Tabitha prayed, remembering his last attempt at communication. She doubted she could survive another discussion like that. Already her legs were starting to sizzle out
from under her just from the heat of standing so close to him.

  “I’d like to know why you’re so afraid of your own desire,” Alan said, his hands like hot steel as they flashed forward and captured her shoulders. “Why do you fight so hard against something you obviously want so much?”

  It hit her like a slap in the face, twisting her out of his grip and driving her back several steps. Amazing… Here, she’d worried that anger would make her more susceptible to hypnotic control, but the opposite was true.

  “How dare you! I’m not fighting anything I want. I don’t want any of this. It’s all your doing, not mine,” she declared, standing in her outrage like it was a suit of armor. “How dare you lay this at my feet? It isn’t you who’s been kidnapped and threatened and used. You’re not the one who’s the prisoner here!”

  “Aren’t I?”

  His hands were still poised in front of him, as though he refused to acknowledge she was no longer within them. To Tabitha, it looked like a veil had just been pulled from his eyes, exposing something that may never before have seen the light of day.

  “I’ve been wondering about that. I’ve been remembering how you dropped out of the tree into my arms”—an odd roughness snagged at his voice—“and I’ve been asking myself who was the one who was really caught.”

  “That’s absurd.” What she saw in those unbanked eyes gripped her heart like a fist. This was the dirtiest trick he had played on her yet. She couldn’t possibly accept what that gaze was offering. It wasn’t real. She knew it couldn’t be real. And even if it was, she didn’t want it.

  Did she?

  Of course I don’t, she told herself.

  “You can’t mean that. It doesn’t make any sense,” she told Alan.

  His hands reached forward slightly. And his eyes dove straight into her core. “Why not?”

  Why… She had known the answer to that a moment ago, hadn’t she? What had jerked it from her head? Those amber magnets…

  “Because what you’re suggesting is fantasy. It doesn’t happen that way in real life,” she blurted in a rush, desperation having jogged her memory.