This time, Marina did falter. She lifted her disheveled dark head, and he met dark eyes burning with fear and defiance. Right now, fear was paramount. “If you drop me, I’ll never forgive you.”
He prayed she’d live. He prayed his strength would prevail. He prayed that she wouldn’t discern how close failure loomed.
“As if I’ll let you fall,” he scoffed. “Then I’d miss out on your humble thanks for saving your life.”
“Saving me for the second time,” she said in a thick voice. “That must count as showing off.”
“My granny always said things come in threes. I hope you dinna mean to prove her right.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Take my hand, Marina,” he said. “I willnae let you fall.” Let that be the truth.
“Per l’amor di dio, don’t let me go.”
“Never,” he said, as if he made a sacred vow.
Something in his tone must have convinced her to take the risk, because with a jerky movement, she released the sapling. For a sickening moment, she clawed upward before he caught her other wrist in his hand.
Fergus took a massive breath and summoned every ounce of strength he could muster. “I’m going to pull ye up, but if you can use your feet as well, it will be grand.”
“Now?”
He noticed she’d given up pretending this was a great adventure. He dug in his toes and retreated from the edge. “Now.”
In excruciating increments, he began to heave her up. Every muscle in his body strained to support her. He felt brief resistance, then she began to rise with him. She was panting audibly. Her arms must be aching worse than his.
“You’re a braw lassie,” he said with what breath he could spare.
Her dangling weight shot agony through his sinews. He dug his hips, legs and feet deeper into the ground, but still her weight pulled him forward toward the edge. He braced against the momentum.
“Cielo,” she cried, as one foot slipped. The sound of her boot scraping over rock would enter his nightmares, joining the moment he’d looked over the waterfall.
“I’ve got you.” He ground his teeth and clung tighter as she dipped lower. His shoulders felt like they were on fire.
After a horrid second, she found her footing again, this time with more certainty.
When Fergus first found her on the ledge, he’d hardly dared to believe that he might save her. With each inch higher she came, his hope lifted, too. He backed away and hooked his feet into a rut that offered a little extra purchase.
The top of Marina’s head appeared above the ledge. He wriggled back further, hauling her toward him with every ounce of strength. Her pale face gradually rose into view. There was a graze across one slanted cheekbone and dirt streaked her cheek.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“Can you pull yourself up now, using my arms?” he grated out.
“I think so,” she gasped.
She must have found more secure footing, because after a few agonizing minutes, she managed to struggle onto the grass, with a mixture of treating him as a human rope and digging her feet into the cliff face.
It took an act of will to release her wrist. With cramping hands, he lunged forward to grip her skirts and bring her legs up.
Panting, she collapsed on the rough grass beside him. Hardly able to believe he’d succeeded, he grabbed her in his aching arms and clutched her tight into his body. They were both shaking as she burrowed into him with a broken sob. For a long time, they lay together in the sunlight as the horror slowly receded.
Once he’d caught his breath, Fergus released her and rolled onto his side. His heart galloped with exertion and remembered panic. And relief so overwhelming, it set his head spinning.
By all that was holy, he’d done it. He’d saved her. There had been stages when he’d feared he’d lost her forever. The world would turn into a grim, lightless place without Marina Lucchetti to tease and taunt him and make him glad he was alive.
“Are ye all right, Marina?” he asked in a raw voice, looking down into her ashen face. Her eyes were closed, tears stained her cheeks, and her chest heaved as she fought for breath.
When she didn’t answer, he feared that she’d been injured after all. “Marina?”
After a fraught pause, she shifted gingerly on the grass and opened her eyes to stare back at him. “Kiss me, Mackinnon.”
He frowned, ignoring the choked plea. Fear must have made her delirious. “Are you hurt?”
She frowned back. “No.”
“Are you able to stand?”
“I’m sure I will be.” Her lips tightened in impatience. “Cielo, did you not hear me?”
“A spoken thank you is enough, lassie.”
“You’ll get one of those, too.” She flung out a trembling hand and clutched the front of his shirt, stained and torn after his efforts on the edge of the escarpment. “But if you don’t kiss me this second, I swear that when I do stand up, I’ll push you over that blasted cliff.”
Fergus’s heart slammed hard against his ribs and left him reeling with hope and disbelief. For pity’s sake, he’d tried to do the right thing, but honor only extended so far. He surged forward and grabbed her in unsteady hands. His mouth crashed down on hers.
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
* * *
When Marina had been trapped on the ledge, fear turned her very blood to ice. Even after Fergus saved her with that prodigious demonstration of strength and determination, she still felt cold.
With the first touch of his lips, heat blasted her. Heat and relief and gratitude and life.
Life, above all.
Because she’d come terrifyingly close to death when she fell down that mountain. And she didn’t want to die. She wanted to seize life by the scruff of the neck and shake it until it gave her everything she asked for. She wanted to laugh and dance and learn and feel, and test her mettle against whatever the world could throw at her.
More than anything else, she wanted this man.
She curled her arms around him and gave herself up to his kiss. He shifted closer, moving over her body. But when his weight pressed into her, she heard a distinct crackle from the region of her chest.
Puzzled, Fergus raised his head. “What the devil…”
Lost in the hot ferocity of his kiss, she stared up at him. “What’s the matter?”
He frowned and placed a hand over her torso. “Are ye wearing armor, lassie?”
After the storm of life and death she’d just passed through, the question made no sense. “Armor?”
With deft swiftness, he unbuttoned the jacket of her walking suit to reveal the sketchbook she’d tucked into the waistband of her skirt. He gave one of his short laughs. “I should have known.”
To her regret—she’d waited days for him to kiss her, and what he’d done so far hadn’t come near to answering her craving—he sat up and tugged the book free.
Abruptly Marina’s haze of pleasure faded, and she remembered why she didn’t want anyone snooping in her drawings. Her elation at surviving her ordeal evaporated, and all the old fears and complications came tumbling back in its place. “Put that down,” she snapped.
He ignored her. “I cannae believe that in the midst of balancing on a cliff edge, you took the trouble to keep this safe.”
She scowled at him and sat up, snatching after the book with an unsteady hand. “It’s precious.”
With little effort, he kept it out of reach. She cursed the long, powerful arms that had proven her lifeline on the cliff. “Obviously.”
“There’s nothing of significance to see.”
He shot her a narrow-eyed look and rose to his feet. “Really?”
“Really.” She stood, too, less smoothly. Now that the shock of her fall receded, her body became a mass of aches and pains. She was stiff and sore, and bruises began to blossom all over her.
“Give it back to me, Fergus.” Stretching out her hand, she
strove to sound casual. “You can have no interest in my scribblings.”
He didn’t comply, blast him. “On the contrary, I want to see what you’ve been up to, while I’ve been pining after you.”
Lunging for him, she slipped and nearly lost her balance. Her boots, still muddy from crossing the burn, lost traction against the thick grass. The sodden hem of her skirt slapped against her shins as she caught his arm. “Give it back to me.”
“You’re mighty keen to hide whatever is inside. Let me see why.”
“No…” she cried, but he jerked the sketchbook out of reach. The folio flipped open on a sketch of him standing on top of a mountain with the Cuillins of Skye rising in the background.
Bemused, he stared at the picture. “That’s me.”
She still hoped to escape the worst of the coming humiliation. “Just something I did in a spare moment.”
His frown deepening, he stepped out of her hold and began to flick through the pages, quickly at first, then more slowly.
Miserable with embarrassment, Marina gave up trying to retrieve the book. What was the point? It was too late to save her pride. He now knew her shameful secret.
Fergus raised his head and shot her another puzzled look. “They’re all of me.”
“Not all of them,” she said defensively.
The arch of his eyebrows said it all. “Everything close to finished is.”
The mortifying fact was that he was right. Over the past week, she’d tried to concentrate on the landscape, she really had. Achnasheen was as dramatic and beautiful as any country she’d ever seen. But every line she put on the paper to depict mountain or sea or tree lay lifeless against the white. While even the roughest sketch of Fergus Mackinnon conveyed a vigor and power that she’d never before achieved in a portrait.
Although she remained dissatisfied with her work. Some essence of the man continued to elude her. Which was why, or at least so she told herself, she kept trying to capture his image with her pencil.
Could her cheeks get any hotter? “It doesn’t mean anything.”
His glance was skeptical. “No?”
“No,” she repeated with emphasis, feeling childish and flustered, and worst of all, as defenseless as a chick that had fallen out of its nest.
Because while Fergus might be misguided in many of his opinions, he wasn’t stupid. He’d know what these drawings meant—that Marina thought about him night and day. That she thought about him so often, she couldn’t think of anything else.
“What about the duke’s commission?”
“I need to go away to finish it. I’m not getting anywhere here.” She raised her chin in a show of defiance. “In fact, I’ll go tomorrow.”
She waited for him to protest, as he had every previous time she’d said she must go. Then struggled not to mind when no objection emerged. Instead he studied her with shrewd eyes that seemed to see right through her bravado to the confusion and longing in her traitorous heart.
“So that I stop haunting your imagination?”
Diavolo, she was right. He understood exactly what those sketches meant. “If I don’t see you…”
“Maybe you’ll miss me.”
She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. The inescapable truth was that she would miss him. This stubborn, confident, commanding man held her in thrall in a way that nobody else ever had.
“I doubt it,” she lied, feeling even more like a gauche schoolgirl.
“Give it up, lassie. The evidence is all against you.” He stepped back and leafed through the sketchbook, taking his time to study each drawing. “You want me as much as I want you. The proof is here in black and white.”
Her hands opened and closed at her sides, as she fought the urge to fly at him and grab the book away. “You’re so smug,” she said through her teeth.
He paused at a watercolor she’d completed last night. It showed him talking to her father. The candlelight fell across his hair and face, creating a striking study in shadow and light. “I like this one.”
So did she, apart from what it revealed about her obsession with her dictatorial host. “It’s not bad,” she conceded grudgingly.
He closed the book and set it aside on a boulder. “You just kissed me as though you were dying, and I was your last chance at a breath.”
She’d thought her cheeks couldn’t get any hotter. She’d been wrong. “You saved my life.”
“So if Jock had pulled you off that cliff, you’d kiss him, too?”
“Maybe,” she said, knowing she fought a losing battle but too stubborn to give in. She was at least as stubborn as Fergus. That was one of the many reasons any affair was doomed before it began.
“Liar,” he said without rancor. Before she could protest—even if he was right—he went on. “What I cannae understand is why you’re putting both of us through this torment, when a simple yes opens the gates to heaven.”
She wanted to accuse him of conceit, while the bitter truth was that she suspected he wasn’t exaggerating. When he kissed her, she heard angels singing and the clouds parted in glory. Imagine what he could conjure up if they went beyond kissing.
“You know why,” she muttered.
He shook his head in disbelief. “Because ye dedicate your chastity to your art like a bloody Vestal Virgin tending the temple flame. I want to know what good your chastity does you.”
Right now, staring at this spectacular man and reading the desire in his eyes, she couldn’t think of a single viable answer. “It keeps me safe,” she said weakly.
He shook his head again, in denial this time. “Not good enough, Marina. You must ken that all the good stuff in life carries a hint of danger.”
“I’m not feeling wise at all right now,” she whispered and turned away as if the sight of all that male beauty scalded her. She knew she should say no, but she so wanted to say yes. This was like being ripped in two.
Giddiness made her head reel, and she fumbled for something to keep her upright. Her legs felt ready to crumple like paper.
“Marina, lass, I’m sorry. Forgive me for being a blockhead.” Strong fingers wrapped around hers as he stepped in front of her. “I shouldn’t harangue you when you’ve just fallen off a mountain.”
This moment now felt like falling off a mountain. There was that same dizzy terror, that same sensation of losing her connection with solid ground.
Both pride and common sense told her to reject Fergus’s touch.
If she meant to leave Achnasheen tomorrow, what use was prolonging the agony with more physical contact? But both pride and common sense grew more tattered by the second. So she clung to his hand and didn’t object when he caught her behind the legs and hoisted her high in his arms.
“Let’s get you back to the castle.”
“My work?” she said, even as she rested her aching head on his shoulder.
She drew an unsteady breath. Fergus smelled so marvelous. Fresh air and leather and lemon soap, and something that was him alone, a scent that she’d remember for the rest of her life.
“You mean all those drawings of me?”
She didn’t respond to the sardonic question. After all, what could she say?
He jiggled her as he picked up the sketchbook and passed it to her. Before she realized how revealing her actions were, she hugged it to her bosom like the most precious treasure in the world.
She waited for some mocking comment, but he merely settled her on her pony. “Let’s call a truce, Marina,” he murmured, staring up at her with a concerned expression. “You dinna have to be strong all the time.”
How wrong he was. She did. Even if right now, her strength didn’t strike her as an admirable quality, but the reason for her excruciating loneliness.
When he whistled for the dogs, they came streaking over the hill, barking. He caught the rein and clicked his tongue to the pony. She should tell him she was perfectly capable of riding her horse back to the castle, but it was so nice to have someone taking care of her
. Someone she lo…
She brought the traitorous thought to a shuddering halt. Blinking away futile tears, Marina stared straight ahead while the pony Fergus usually rode ambled after them. She’d developed a strong affection for these sturdy little horses with their stoic nature and broad backs. She’d developed a love for the wild landscape, too, however unsuccessful her attempts to paint it. She also liked the people who lived in this isolated valley. Jock and Maggie and Kirsty and Jenny, and the servants and crofters and shepherds she’d met.
She’d be sorry to leave Achnasheen.
The twist of her lips held scant amusement. Sorry? She’d be devastated. And not because she’d miss everything she’d listed, although she would. Her departure would leave her desolate, because she dreaded parting from the tall, red-haired man who led her pony along the rough track.
The man who made her want to hit him.
The man who made her want to kiss him.
As the castle came into view like something from a fairy story, Fergus’s astringent question echoed in her mind. What use was her chastity to her? If she gave in now, what harm would ensue?
She recalled that instant of brilliant clarity when she’d thought she might die. Her greatest regret then had been that she’d let fear overrule her desire for Fergus. During these long days in the hills, she’d come to trust him. Per l’amor di dio, he’d saved her life twice. Wasn’t it time to grant him the hero’s traditional reward, the favors of the rescued lady?
To her relief, he didn’t speak as they plodded through the hills. Only as he pulled the pony to a halt in the courtyard and lifted her from the saddle with more of that blasted consideration did he say anything. “You know, it’s rather sad that when you go, you’ll have only the painted version of me to remember, when for the sake of one small word, you could have all you want of the real man.”
The acerbic note to his words didn’t hide the aching regret underlying them. She bit back a choked whimper and stumbled as she reached the ground. Fergus caught her up against him before, to her chagrin, he let her go.
The Laird's Willful Lass (The Likely Lairds Book 1) Page 14