“The eternal pessimist.”
“The eternal fool, you mean. Was it so wrong to hope we could just come home and blend into the background somewhere?”
“You, my fine legendary friend? The Camshroinaich Dubh—the Dark Cameron—fade away with a wife and a brood of drooling children?”
“It was just a thought. And who mentioned wives and children?”
“It was just a thought. If you fade without a whimper, who will be around to fulfill the old prophecy?”
“What old prophecy?”
“The ravens will drink their fill of Campbell blood three times off the top of Clach Mhor,” Aluinn quoted. “It seems the Duke of Argyle is a superstitious man and believes, because of you, the ravens have drunk twice already.”
“I had almost forgotten that old fishwife’s curse.”
“So had I until Archie reminded me. Rumor has it the Duke wakes up out of a sound sleep, frothing at the mouth because he swears he has seen you standing over his bed with a dripping clai’mor in one hand, Malcolm Campbell’s head in the other.”
“If he chooses to believe the two-hundred-year-old ravings of a lunatic, who am I to enlighten him?”
“Allow me to enlighten you, in that case. Something else Archie told me: Gordon Ross Campbell is Malcolm Campbell’s bastard son.”
“His son?”
“Sort of changes the perspective a little, doesn’t it?”
“It sort of makes me feel as if the curse is on me, not them,” Alex muttered. “That makes two men I should have killed when I had the chance, but spared out of a blind sense of Christian charity.”
“Two men?”
Alex thought of Hamilton Garner and the corner of his mouth pulled down, “Maybe I’m just getting old and soft. I should have aimed my sword true, used my fists harder … and taken my peace of mind when it first tempted me.”
Aluinn had no doubt the common factor in all three instances had long blonde hair and violet eyes. “What are you going to do about Catherine?” he asked quietly. “I am loath to dwell on the obvious, but you are going to have to do something one way or the other, and soon.”
“I wasn’t aware there was an ‘other.’ ”
“Isn’t there?”
The silence stretched out, broken only by the faint ticking of a clock somewhere in the shadows.
“You only think you can read my mind, old friend,” Alex said. “And this time you’re dead wrong.”
Aluinn leaned back and half-closed his eyes. The candlelight was not kind to the smears of fatigue under his eyes or the bloodless cast to his lips. “Dead wrong, eh? If you say so.”
“I say so.” There was another lengthy pause. “Even if it were possible …”
“Yes?”
“It could never work.”
“Why? Because you are infallible as well as legendary? Because you expect everyone to have the same thickness of armor around their hearts as you do?”
A tic shivered in Alex’s cheek. “You don’t understand.”
“You are right, Alex. I don’t understand. For fifteen years you have been killing yourself on the inside, blaming yourself for what happened, and I don’t understand.”
“Aluinn, for Christ’s sake—” The sudden creaking of the door interrupted what he was about to say and he turned, the look on his face so shockingly stripped of all defenses that it sent Deirdre’s hand fluttering up to her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to intrude.”
“No intrusion,” Alex said quickly. “Please, come in. I was just about to leave anyway. Aluinn … I’ll look in on you later; try to get some rest.”
“Alex—”
But he had already brushed past Deirdre and vanished into the darkness of the hallway.
“I m-mustn’t stay,” Deirdre stammered and backed toward the door. “I’ve left Mistress Catherine in her bath and—”
“Please,” Aluinn said wearily, rubbing his temple. “Don’t go. Sit with me for just a few minutes. Talking to Alex these days is like … seeing how long you can hold your hand over a flame without pulling it away.”
“I know what you mean. My mistress’s temper is as short as a fuse.”
She had agreed so readily, Aluinn looked over and smiled. “Please, won’t you come all the way in?”
“I … I really shouldn’t. I only came to see if … if you wanted for anything while I was in the kitchen. I was going to get some broth for Mistress Catherine and … and …”
“Actually”—his gaze darted to the nightstand—“I am a little thirsty. There is water in the jug, if you wouldn’t mind.”
The glass, she saw, was within easy reach, as was the pitcher, but she walked to the side of the bed anyway and poured it for him.
“I confess I am a little surprised you would care one way or another for my well-being. Pleasantly surprised, to be sure, but still …”
“I was only wanting a chance to … to thank you properly for what you did yesterday,” she said quietly.
“What I did? As I understand it, I should be the one thanking you for keeping me from bleeding to death.”
“It would not have been necessary if you hadn’t thrown yourself after the brute who tried to snatch me off my feet.”
“Well …” He remembered and offered up a mock frown. “I suppose you do deserve a mild scolding at that. You were supposed to stay inside the coach.”
“I am not one to cower with my hands over my head, just for the sake of a few ruffians. Eight brothers I have, and not a one able to pull my hair or knock me down in a fair fight.”
“I can believe that,” he mused, prodding the faint bruise on his jaw. “You have a damned fine left hook.”
She warmed under his smile, then, remembering the glass she was holding, offered it to him, uncomfortably aware of the tremors in her hand. Even worse, the gray eyes were staring at her hard enough to drain away all the sensation in her fingers.
“Do you want the water or not?”
“I want it,” he murmured. He closed his hand around the glass, engulfing her icy fingertips at the same time, and although she tried to balk at the contact he held firm.
“Will you sit with me awhile?”
“I mustn’t. Truly. My mistress is waiting for me.”
“Just for a few minutes. Please. The last request of a dying man.”
She extricated her hand and smoothed the folds of her apron. “You shouldn’t joke about such things. They could come true.”
Aluinn smiled and took a sip of the cool water. The effort seemed to drain his reserves, and he closed his eyes.
Deirdre found herself holding her breath. With his long, bronzed lashes and sand-colored hair, he was almost beautiful. His tanned skin was smooth and stretched evenly over high Celtic cheekbones. A faint stubble of fair bearding covered the angular jaw and led down to the reddish-gold cloud of hair that exploded across his chest. The muscles beneath were hard, the skin supple, with bands of precisely molded sinew narrowing to a trim waist and flat belly. Below that, below the line of the blanket, it was left to her imagination to surmise what might be seen there, but she had no difficulty envisioning the long legs, steely with muscle, furred with the same fine coppery hairs as his wrists and forearms.
With eight brothers she had indeed thought herself immune to the mysteries of a man’s body, but the one lying before her now was so overwhelmingly seductive, it made her mouth dry and her palms damp. She could no longer believe he was evil. Dangerous, perhaps, but not evil. And not a cold-blooded murderer. Not him, and not Alexander Cameron.
“What did you mean when you said he had been killing himself on the inside for the past fifteen years?”
The gray eyes opened slowly.
“I was not eavesdropping deliberately,” she said. “But I was fully through the door before I could do anything about it. You needn’t tell me if it’s a great dark secret, it’s just that … well, it might help if one or both of you stopped treating e
veryone as if they were your enemies.”
“For the past fifteen years everyone has been our enemy. Moreover, Alex is a very private man; he does not find it easy to offer up his trust at the best of times. Neither do you, for that matter.”
Deirdre laced her fingers together and studied them. “You have not given anyone any reason to trust you. You have forced my mistress to compromise herself. You have dragged us both across half the length of Britain against our wills. You very nearly were the cause of getting us all killed yesterday, and goodness knows what might happen between here and home again—if we are ever allowed to go home again, that is.”
“Alex gave his word, and I have never known him to break it. If he has promised to send you and your mistress home, and if you still want to go, he will see that you get there.”
“If we still want to go?” she queried softly.
“People change their minds.”
“Not my mistress. She has it firm in her mind that Mr. Cameron is a spy and a murderer, and so far he has done nothing to defend himself against either charge.”
Aluinn watched the long, delicate fingers twining and untwining, “Tell me something, Deirdre, If you went back to Derby tomorrow, and if Lord Ashbrooke asked you what military preparations you saw and heard while you were traveling through Scotland—would you tell him?”
“Of course I would. It’s my duty, both as a loyal servant to my mistress and as a loyal subject to my king.”
“King George?”
The brown eyes sparkled. “He is my sovereign.”
“Ah, but what if you believed your sovereign to be unjustly exiled in Italy? What if you believed King James Stuart to be the rightful king of Scotland and England—and please”—he held up his hand to forestall the protest forming on her lips—“I do not want to argue politics or semantics or who is right and who is wrong. I just want you to offer me a straight and honest answer to the question. If you believed James Stuart to be your king, if your family had fought and died for that same belief, would you still look upon Alex and me as spies simply because we rode through England with our eyes and ears open?”
“Under those circumstances …” Her eyes sought his and she frowned. “Probably not. But loyalty to one king over another does not explain away a charge of murder.”
“No, it doesn’t. And there are two murder charges over Alex’s head, neither one worth the spit it would take to deny them.”
“He murdered two men?”
“It would have been three but for a small fluke of nature: The third bastard survived his wounds.”
Deirdre’s hands fell still. “You sound almost proud of the deed.”
“I am. I only wish I had been with him at the time. I would have made sure there were no flukes of nature to get in the way.”
A cold, hard edge had crept into his voice, and Deirdre was not sure she liked it. She was trying to understand, truly she was, but not only was he admitting the murders, he was condoning them.
“It happened the week of Donald and Maura’s wedding,” he explained, his head falling back as he stared up at the patterns the candlelight threw on the ceiling. “She is a Campbell. Her father and the Duke of Argyle are brothers. She met Donald while on a tour of France, and even though I’m sure they both did their damnedest to prevent it, they fell hopelessly in love.
“I should say here that the Campbells and the Camerons have been snapping at each other’s hindquarters for generations. Lochaber is a nice rich plum of land the Campbells would dearly love to absorb into their own territories. But since our clan has always been blessed with either warriors or diplomats for chiefs, the glen has remained in Cameron possession.
“At any rate, the wedding took place as planned, here at Achnacarry. As a gesture of goodwill a large party of Campbells was invited—an attempt to calm the troubled waters—including Maura’s cousins from Argyle: Dughall, Angus, and Malcolm Campbell.”
Aluinn paused, his features darkening as the memories crowded back.
“The ceremony went smoothly. Maura’s father, Sir John Campbell of Auchenbreck, had become genuinely fond of Donald by then and was actually supporting the union in hopes of making peace between the two clans. Argyle did not want that, of course, and took it as a personal affront, especially since he had previously chosen Dughall Campbell to be Maura’s groom. Have I managed to totally confuse you yet?”
Deirdre unconsciously moved closer to the bed. “Who is this Duke of Argyle? He sounds very important.”
“He is unquestionably the most powerful ally the Hanovers have in Scotland. He personally commanded the army that all but finished it for the Jacobites in 1715 at Dunblain. He is power-hungry, land-hungry, and not above a fair amount of cheating, scheming, and backstabbing to get what he wants—namely, the position of Prime Minister of Scotland when and if we come completely under English rule.”
“He does not sound like a very nice man.”
“He isn’t. And wasn’t. I expect his displeasure over Maura’s defection was communicated to the Campbell brothers, for the tension was so thick in the air that day, it made your ears ring. Yet for a while they seemed to be behaving. They filled their bellies with our food and ale, they sang, they danced, they even flirted with the Cameron women.”
Again he paused, as if in the telling he was also reliving the events as they unfolded.
“Alex was in love, as are most healthy seventeen-year-old young cocks. And Annie MacSorley was simply the most beautiful, the sweetest, the most sought-after lass in Lochaber. Half the countryside was in love with her, myself included, but it was Alex who won her heart, completely and absolutely. They were both smitten and as much in love as two people have a right to be. They had been handfasted the previous winter and planned to marry in the church later that summer—” The words backed up in his throat and he faltered. “Perhaps they should not have waited or been so secretive about it. Or perhaps we just should have found some reason to keep Alex away from the wedding, knowing how much he and Dughall Campbell loathed one another. At any rate, the trouble started when Annie and Alex slipped away to steal a few moments of privacy. The Campbell brothers saw them and followed.
“To make an ugly story short, they managed to sneak up on the lovers in the stables. They saw a chance for some crude fun and knocked Alex around just enough to leave him semiconscious. They tied him up and propped him where he could see while they took turns with Annie. One of them—I don’t know who—got a little rough and slammed her head against the stone wall. Alex was nearly insane by then and somehow broke free of his bindings. He grabbed a sword and attacked, killing the youngest—Angus—on the first pass. The other two fought back, and … frankly, I do not know how he did it, but when the bodies were discovered later that night, Dughall had been gutted stem to stem, and Malcolm … well, it would have been a greater mercy at the time for someone to have finished him off. Alex was more dead than alive himself, acting like a wild, wounded animal, not letting anyone near him or Annie. She died in his arms.
“The Campbells naturally claimed the ambush had been deliberate. All of them at the wedding swore that they had seen Annie flirting with the brothers and that she’d lured them into the stables where Alex was waiting to attack.”
“Did no one take Mr. Cameron’s side?” Deirdre asked in a shocked whisper.
“The entire clan was willing to put their swords with his; we would gladly have taken on the Campbells, the militia, the whole damned government at a nod from Lochiel. Donald agonized for weeks over what to do. Argyle had declared it murder and demanded a warrant be issued for Alex’s arrest. There was no possibility of a fair trial. To refuse to surrender him or to call the clan to arms to protect him would have laid the Camerons open to military discipline. Finally, knowing it was the only way to save Alex’s life and avoid a bloody clan war, Lochiel sent him to France to be with their father, Old Lochiel.”
“But … that was so unfair. He wasn’t guilty of murdering those men. He was try
ing to protect his wife.”
Aluinn agreed with a wry, weary smile. “And for the first ten years or so he expended most of his energy hating the world, seeking revenge in different bloody battles. He threw himself into every war he could find on the Continent, and when he ran out of enemies to fight there, he took us across the ocean to the colonies, where there were plenty of savages to oblige his thirst for mindless violence.”
“You have stayed with him all these years?”
His smile softened. “We were raised like brothers; it seemed the natural thing to do. Mind you, it did become a rather poignant test of friendship when the Duke put a price on his head and we were pressed to dodge assassins everywhere we went. I have a few scars I would prefer not to remember coming by and a nightmare or two that still chase me into a cold sweat. On the whole, though, we have managed to come through it with both feet on the ground.”
“The pair of you do seem to be indestructible,” Deirdre conceded. “I should think an army of you Cameron men could conquer the world, never mind England.”
“Why, Mistress O’Shea,” he murmured. “That sounds suspiciously like a compliment. Does this mean I have almost convinced you we are neither brutes nor beaters of innocent women?”
She lowered her thick, dark lashes. “I never truly thought you were either.”
“Never? Not even at the inn in Wakefield?”
“You hadn’t ought to have grabbed me. I don’t like being grabbed.”
“I shall endeavor to remember that.” He reached forward and his hand gently cradled the side of her neck. Against her instinctive resistance he drew her to him until her mouth was a breath away from his. He felt a shudder ripple through her, then another. A soft protest parted her lips as his hand shifted and he ran his fingers up into the silky brown waves of her hair. The kiss was long and impassioned, full of honest tenderness, and he was surprised at how sweet she tasted. Sweet and innocent and trusting, like someone who could forgive all faults and transgressions, someone who could offer her heart with no conditions, no pretenses.
He released her slowly, reluctantly, noting that even the pain in his shoulder seemed to have been eased by her touch.
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