by Mimi Riser
Chapter 4
Turning up the lamp didn’t help. It brightened the room, but Tabitha’s thoughts grew blacker with every erratic beat of her heart. Alan had been gone about thirty minutes, she estimated, yet it may just as well have been seconds so intensely could she still feel the scorch of his body, taste his lips, sense his energy. It was like being branded, she thought, furious with him for marking her and herself for letting him. Even if she escaped now, she’d never really be free. Wherever she went, whatever she did, she would have to carry his memory with her. The rat.
Shaking her head in a hopeless effort to clear it, she paced the room—from end to end, side to side, corner to corner, and back again. Wrapped up in the sheet, wrapped up in anxiety, glancing at the door and dreading his return…glancing at the bed and longing for what she dreaded… Boiling in such an emotional stew, the sudden crack of the door banging open hit her like a gunshot.
She jumped, tripped over a trailing corner of sheet, and stumbled forward and sideways before catching herself with both hands on the edge of the dresser. Left to its own devices, the sheet slipped down off her breasts, and she stumbled again in the hasty grab to pull it back into place.
“Need some help?”
The offer was made cheerfully enough, but the reek of stale sweat and fresh whiskey that came with it almost turned her stomach inside out. And the meaty hand that latched onto her arm sent a polar chill through her veins.
“Don’t you ever knock?” She jerked away from the grip with a sharp twist.
“Why bother? ’Tis all family here, Cousin Tabby. We’ve nothin’ tae hide fray one another, and we share and share alike.” Dunstan stared at the swell of her breasts beneath the satin and licked his lips.
Eww…
“Get out.” Tabitha watched him the way a cornered cat watches an advancing dog, every fiber tensed for fight or flight, whichever opportunity came first. The moron ought to know she wasn’t easy prey. He still wore the scratches she’d given him when he and Duncan had locked her in the prison tower.
“Aye, tha’ reminds me,” he slurred, not so drunk he couldn’t read her expression. “I owe you somethin’ for t’other day!”
A heavy hand lashed out, delivering a vicious slap before she could dodge it. The blow hit her on the jaw, knocking the wind out of her and sending her hard into the dresser. She grabbed at it for support, trying to spin clear, but the back of the hand cracked into the other side of her face, driving her to her knees. The room started to tilt, and she struggled to stay conscious, barely aware Dunstan was dragging her down beneath him by her hair. He let go of it to clamp down on her throat while his other hand tore away the sheet.
Jagged nails raked a raw path from her breast to abdomen. “Here’s some o’ your own back, you wicked cat!” He bit her shoulder with enough force to draw blood.
Pinned fast and battling for breath, Tabitha had bigger concerns. The grip on her windpipe was choking her more than Dunstan in his drunken anger realized. Or maybe he did realize—but she preferred to give him the benefit of the doubt; dealing with one murderer per night was about all she could manage. More likely, Dunstan was just a stupid, lecherous lout with a wounded ego and a sore nose.
Wham! She slammed the latter with the heel of her hand.
He yelled, drew back and gave her several more blows that nearly knocked her eyes out of their sockets, but her lungs expanded with the needed air—gasp—because to strike her, he’d had to let go of her neck. He grabbed her wrists instead, locking them together in one huge, sweaty hand, straining them high over her head. His free hand fumbled his kilt aside. His hairy knees began forcing hers apart…
“This be for Alan. Stake me out, will he? I’ll stake his bride tae the floor!” His breath made her feel like she had her face stuck in a sewer.
Tabitha gagged, then as something ungodly grazed her thigh, started screaming for all she was worth.
Not half so loudly as Dunstan, however, as a yowling, black fiend landed on his back in a furious frenzy of fang and claw. He bellowed like a wounded bull, rolling over and crushing the creature beneath his bulk, but it scrambled free, clawed its way over his head and drove straight for the man’s throat.
Dunstan lumbered to his feet and floundered about the room, trying to free himself from fangs that refused to let go. For something that was really only a good-sized house cat, the animal fought with the studied ferocity of a full-grown panther. It seemed to know exactly what it was doing, and it clung to him like some crazed devil-leech straight out of the darkest depths of hell. It strained toward his jugular, like it had done this sort of thing many times before, like it reveled in it, craved it, and only a long drink of hot spurting blood would be able to appease it.
Left sprawled on the floor, Tabitha followed the struggle with incredulous eyes while she groped a hand up under the dresser. Somewhere…there. Her fingers closed around something hard and smooth. She inched it out, her breath coming in ragged snatches, then pulled to her knees and gazed down.
It was a fancy carved piece of hardwood, about the length and thickness of a baseball bat. It was the broken bedpost. But to her it was the end to this nightmare.
Struggling to her feet, she grasped it with both hands and staggered toward Dunstan just as he finally ripped the cat off his neck and hurled it into a wall. The animal dropped to the floor in a hissing, spitting crouch, and the wild-eyed man lunged forward to stomp its head in. But Tabitha lunged faster, swinging with all her might, and it was his head that cracked, instead. Not literally, though.
Unfortunately.
Studying the man’s motionless, but obviously breathing form, she decided that since he had mostly rocks between his ears, all she’d done was to rattle them a bit.
She hovered above him another moment, poised like a batter awaiting the next pitch, just in case he needed another crack, but his lights had been well and truly blown out. Dropping her weapon, she raced to the cat.
Who sat washing his face as though nothing had happened.
Tabitha scooped him up, hugging him against her chest with an almost hysterical relief. He snuggled into her, purring like a miniature locomotive.
“You brave, foolish, little angel”—tears splashed onto his fur—“thank you! But that was an awful chance you took. He’s so much bigger than you.”
The cat fussed his way out of her arms, padded over to Dunstan, sniffed him, then turned his back, lifted high his tail, and sprayed the unconscious man square between the eyes. His way, apparently, of saying, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Blinking up at Tabitha, who was suddenly racked between laughter and sobs, his glowing eyes seemed to suggest, “Don’t you think you should be leaving now? We won that battle, but let’s not press our luck.”
“Good point.” She sniffled and stumbled back across the room to collect what was left of her sheet.
Not until she was tucking it around herself did she realize she was angrier with Alan than she was with Dunstan. The latter was only a drunken fool. Alan was the shameless villain who’d deliberately stranded her in such a vulnerable position in the first place. If she’d been properly dressed, she could have dodged Dunstan before he’d ever laid a finger on her.
“It’s this damned sheet that caused the whole thing! It keeps slipping and tripping me,” she complained to the cat through a new flurry of frustrated tears.
He gazed at her a thoughtful moment, then snagged Dunstan’s monogrammed kilt pin with a neat front paw, tore it loose, and batted it across the floor to her. “Will this help?” his eyes asked.
Tabitha blinked away her tears, staring from the cat to the pin and back again. “You are utterly extraordinary.”
The cat’s glowing gaze narrowed into a smug, feline sort of grin. “Yes, I know. It’s a specialty of mine,” he seemed to say. “Now run along. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I’ve repaired my weaponry.” He began an industrious sharpening of his claws on Dunstan’s thick shoe leath
er.
Securing her makeshift toga with the gilt pin, Tabitha threw the longest edge over her shoulder and groped her way through the dark passages that led out of the keep and into the fresh night air she needed to wash Dunstan’s stink out of her nostrils. The cat never did follow. But then, she was beginning to get used to that.
By the time she reached the outside door, she had barely enough strength left to shove through onto the ramp and down to the inner courtyard below. After staggering half a dozen steps over soggy turf, her knees gave way in front of a narrow bench deep in the shadows of a wall. She collapsed onto it, feeling like a burst balloon. The adrenaline that had been keeping her on her feet and masking pain had finally fizzled out, leaving her all too aware of how horribly she hurt.
There was something wet and sticky trickling down her face, and both eyes were starting to swell shut. Her torso burned where he’d raked her, and the bite on her shoulder was throbbing and oozing more sticky stuff. Worst of all was the pounding ache in her head. It felt like a war zone in there, like someone was setting off blasting caps inside her skull. Or cannon fire, or gunshots or—
Pow! Pow!
It took two shots in rapid succession to alert her to the fact that someone was firing a gun.
Through bleary slits, Tabitha peered ahead into the gloom and saw a small, buzzing cluster of people standing a dozen yards away in a circle of smoky torchlight. None of them appeared to have noticed her yet. They were all too engrossed in the surrealistic burlesque show being performed high over their heads.
Perched like a big yellow canary bird, and singing like one, too, Mary MacAllister was balancing on the narrow upper ledge of the nearby generator tower, offering a lovely rendition of an old Scottish folk tune for—Tabitha could only assume—the entertainment of her Texas cousin.
Except, gauging by his body language, the Texas cousin wasn’t entertained. From his position on the long ladder, roped against the tower so it couldn’t be toppled, Alan apparently was either trying to climb onto the ledge with Mary, or coax Mary into boarding the ladder with him. Neither endeavor seemed to be progressing very well. Dunstan had been wrong, Tabitha noted, squinting up at the moon and torch lit pair. Mary did not have a loaded revolver. Mary had two revolvers.
However, she was only holding one at the moment. The second was tucked into a holster of the heavy cartridge belt buckled jauntily over her billowy, yellow negligee.
“O, ye take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye—”
Pow!
Alan ducked as the third shot in several minutes whizzed past his ear.
“For me and my true love will never meet again on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond,” Mary finished plaintively. She glanced sideways at Alan as the top half of his head peered warily over the ledge, her elegant brows suddenly knit together in some sort of mental distress.
“Oh dear, I’m so sorry, Cousin Alan. That wasn’t right of me at all, was it?” She gazed at him with fretful concern.
“Aye. But you missed me, so there’s no harm done. Just hand over the guns and come down like a good lass, and we’ll forget all about it,” he said soothingly as the rest of his head, followed by his shoulders rose cautiously before her view. With painstaking care, he began hoisting himself onto the ledge.
Pow!
The fourth shot drove him back to the ladder in a hasty scramble.
“You silly thing. Men really are so stupid sometimes.” Mary fanned the gun smoke away from her face with a graceful hand. “I was referring to the song. You’re lower than me at present, so I should have done it, ‘You take the low road, and I’ll take the high road.’”
And she sang the entire tune, with all its verses, over again, making the necessary corrections, and keeping Alan glued to the ladder with the aid of two more erratically aimed bullets.
“There! That was much better and far more appropriate, don’t you think?” she asked, as the last notes drifted eerily away in the storm washed air.
“Aye,” Alan agreed, a dangerous edge sharpening his voice. “And the best part is you’ve now emptied both cylinders.” With a quick, catlike motion, he swung himself onto the ledge and grabbed for her.
She skipped lightly out of reach. “Ah, you can count to twelve, I’m so impressed! But it hardly matters. I’ve lots more cartridges.” She giggled, and then bit her lip in concentration as she fumbled with the revolver in her hand, evidently trying to determine how it opened for reloading.
Alan made another grab. “Give me that! You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“No, no, no—don’t help me. I want to figure it out for myself.” Mary danced three more steps away.
Easily working her way around the ledge, she continued fussing with the weapon, always staying just beyond Alan’s reach and cheerfully chortling to herself. “Ah ha! So that’s how it opens. How cunning. Now, I wonder which end of these is the front?” She slipped one of the cartridges out of the belt and squinted at it.
“Mary, those aren’t toys. Give them to me!” Alan was obviously doing his best to overtake her, but the narrowness of the ledge put a man of his size at disadvantage compared to the slender redhead.
“Don’t call me Mary.” She pouted, turning the bullet this way and that. “I told you before, I’m Cassandra.”
“Cassandra, then,” he growled.
“No… After hearing you say it, I don’t think Cassandra will do, either. It’s too cumbersome.” She paused, and he must have thought he had her, but it was only a tease. “I think I’ll call myself Monique, instead. That way I can keep the same initials, and I won’t have to change my monograms. I do believe in being practical.”
“Then be practical now and come down from here. You shouldn’t be playing with Geordie’s Colts. He’s going to be very angry with you.” Alan almost slipped as he missed another grab.
“He’s angry already, but it won’t do him any good. These aren’t his Colts any longer. They’re mine.” Monique laughed, pausing again to let Alan make up the distance he’d lost by slipping.
“How do you figure that?” he bit out.
“Because last night I had three aces, and he only had two.”
It was Alan’s turn to pause. “Five aces total? You cheated him?”
“Don’t be absurd.” She smirked. “No one has to cheat Geordie at cards. It’s too easy to beat him honestly.” Clumsily, she began to fill the Colt’s chambers. “One of my aces was a One-eyed Jack. One-eyed Jacks were wild last night,” she explained—and gave a startled shriek as part of the tower wall abruptly fell away behind her and she toppled inward.
Several moments of tremendous banging, scuffling and crashing ensued, punctuated by enraged feminine screams and a few genuine shouts of pain—none of them from a woman’s throat.
Inching along the outside ledge, Alan peeked through the opening, winced at what he saw, retraced his steps, and hastened down the ladder.
He made it to the ground only seconds before Simon Elliott staggered out the bottom door of the tower with Mary-Monique slung over his shoulder. The lanky blond’s tie was gone, his collar was crooked, and his jacket was torn. He had a bump on his forehead and a scratch on his cheek. His cargo was hissing and spitting like an alley cat, furiously trying to reach one of her two revolvers, which were jammed into the waistband of his trousers.
“I’m afraid not, little girl. I’ll give them back to you when you’re old enough to learn how to use them properly.” He delivered a swat to her upturned derriere that made her eyes pop.
“Beast! I detest you,” she hissed from her inverted position.
“That’s quite all right. You’re not one of my favorite people either.” Grinning, he swung her down to her feet with a little jolt. “Now, why don’t you go to your room. It must be way past your bedtime. Would you like me to come along and tuck you in?”
She gave him a glare that would have flayed the flesh from his bones if eyes were razors, stormed
several paces toward the keep, saw the figure huddled on the bench, and went whiter than the satin sheet it was wrapped in.
“Oh my God! Tabitha, what happened to you?” She raced to her side.
Tabitha glanced up into Mary’s blurred, stricken expression and tried to smile, but the current state of her face wouldn’t allow it. “I enjoyed your performance. Almost applauded,” she joked through swollen lips.
With a laugh that sounded more like a sob, Mary sat next to her. “Honey, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t quick enough,” she whispered, gathering the girl into her arms.
Too fuzzy to figure out what she was talking about, and too shaky to sit upright, Tabitha collapsed against the silk clad shoulder. Its owner might be nutty as a fruitcake, but she was also acting sweeter than one. Why? Tabitha didn’t know and didn’t care. It was a relief to have the comfort.
She felt Mary tense, and didn’t even have to hear his angry growl to know Alan was suddenly looming over them.
“I thought I bid you stay in the room. What the devil are you doing here—dressed like that?”
Tabitha battled back a scream. Oh yes, dressed like this, the way you left me—naked and defenseless—a sitting duck for the first drunk who decided to try his luck!
With a furious moan, she buried her battered face deeper into the billowy negligee. “Make him go away,” she mumbled.
Mary’s already tense form stiffened into steel. “With pleasure,” she muttered under her breath.
Tabitha felt one of the woman’s hands shift and close around something small and hard beneath the folds of canary silk. How funny, I was as wrong as Dunstan. Mary hadn’t had two guns; she’d had at least three. The third one felt like a Derringer in a garter holster. Was that what the well-dressed Boston belles were wearing this year?
“I think you’ve already done quite enough for one night, Cousin Alan,” she said with a curious, glacial calm. “Leave us alone now. I’m going to take Tabitha to my room.” She pulled both of them upright, holding Tabitha against herself with a lithe, athletic strength that was almost as surprising as the hidden weapon.
Alan bit back a curse, obviously fighting to control himself, and just as obviously losing the battle. “Listen, lassies, I’ve had all I’m going to take from either of you. Enough is enough! Mary, you can go to your room, or go to blazes. I don’t care, just so long as you go there now and go alone. And Tabitha, you are coming with me!”
A hand flashed out, yanking her away from Mary, his fingers not rough exactly, but digging into the bite wound on her shoulder with enough pressure to make her cry out. Mary flew forward and pulled her back, shoving her half behind herself and steadying the girl with her left hand while the right was still buried somewhere in the froth of yellow silk wafting about her in the cool night air.
“If you want her, you’ll have to get past me.” She spoke with an icy poise that made her sound as though she faced situations like this regularly for sport. “Beating an innocent girl… I should have shot you when I had the chance,” she added in a tone softer than death.
The innocent girl heard it, but the assumed beater’s attention was suddenly riveted elsewhere. He was staring at a now exposed swollen and bloody face—with an expression of unspeakable black rage fast darkening his own.
“Who?”
One word. That was all he said, but the sound of his voice sliced through Tabitha like a knife. His figure towered before her, fuzzy and wavering, his face a dim blur with two sparks of deep golden glow searing out of it. Squinting into them, Tabitha felt a furious wave of adrenaline wash through her, tightening her knees and drawing her upright. “You! You did it!” She grabbed onto Mary as her legs went watery again.
Alan scarcely acknowledged the answer. He seemed to view it as hysterical raving. “Never mind. I’ll find out for myself.” His gaze burned over her, reading every mark, every drop of blood as though it were a volume of information, while she glared defiance back at him.
Neither of them noticed they’d become the new show for the courtyard audience. Only Mary was aware of the growing number clustering about them. Her eyes never left Alan, but she knew the position of every kilted clansman, every tartan-shawled woman hovering near. The only person she missed somehow was Simon Elliott, who suddenly was just there, brushing against her right side and startling her so much her hidden hand nearly jerked free.
“You’re right,” he whispered, grinning, as she quickly shoved the hand and what it held farther into the yellow folds. “That probably would not be a wise move.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She blinked at him with wide-eyed innocence and just the right amount of feminine pique.
“Yes, you do.” He grinned again. “And you know I’ll be watching you closely from now on, too, don’t you?”
She managed a very attractive, little blush. “All men watch me. They can’t help themselves.” She pouted prettily. “My beauty attracts them, like moths to a flame.”
“Mmm…yes,” Simon murmured, smoking her from head to toe with a visual assessment that turned the blush genuine. “That’s another good reason for it.”
He sauntered past her into the shadows, leaving Mary looking like a gambler who had just accidentally dropped all her cards face up on the table and was trying to convince herself that no one had seen.
Beside her, Tabitha was struggling to keep her uncooperative legs under herself and marveling that it could be so hot and so cold at the same time. She realized she was probably suffering from shock, but somehow that knowledge didn’t make the symptoms any easier to deal with. The only silver lining in the cloud was that she could hardly see Alan anymore. The courtyard and everyone in it were swirling into one big patchwork haze.
“Please, d-don’t let me pass out,” she moaned to Mary. “I don’t trust what will happen if I faint again.”
“Stand back! Someone get her some water,” Mary ordered. She resettled her charge onto the bench and began fanning her.
Tabitha felt her hair being pushed back off her face and shoulders, and cool air stinging the now exposed bite wound. She also felt Mary almost drop her and heard the young woman’s enraged shriek:
“Oh my God, he’s bitten her! She’ll get rabies!”
The noise yanked her back into enough reality to be disturbingly aware of Alan kneeling before her and glaring hard at something golden fastened in the sheet just below the wound.
The kilt pin.
“Dunstan.” Alan snarled the name like it was the vilest of curses.
He snarled it just as its owner happened to be lumbering out of the keep in an absolute idiocy of bravado. Dunstan had tidied himself up a bit and decided, apparently, that if he acted as though nothing had occurred, no one would be the wiser. He was that stupid. Or that drunk. Or both.
“Aye, cousin?” He staggered toward the cluster of people like a big, smelly, unknowing lamb on its way to the slaughter.
Though “slaughter” was perhaps too pleasant a term for what it might have been if two men hadn’t leapt on Alan to hold him back.
And then two more.
And two more…
In the end, it took seven hearty Highlanders several long, hellish moments to drag their laird to the ground. Even then an extra one was needed to keep him there. That one was Uncle Angus.
“Hold, lad— Hold!” he bellowed, doing a powerful bit of holding, himself, with a heavy hand buried in Alan’s hair. “If he’s guilty, Dunstan will be duly punished. But by MacAllister law, nay by yours!”
Straining furiously against the kilted tonnage pinning him to the damp earth, Alan gave a solitary, inhuman cry of defiance. It ripped through the great courtyard like the scream of a wounded panther, almost shattering the walls and hitting Tabitha with the force of a bullwhip. In the dazed, dizzy state of her shock, she felt, suddenly, like she was reliving something—some ghastly, heartrending experience. But she couldn’t remember what. She only knew it was something that had happened right where she
was then, in the castle’s inner yard, and that somehow she’d heard that cry before.
“Even the laird canna change this! D’ye understand me, lad?”
Tabitha heard Angus’s question and Alan’s answering snarl of “Aye” as if the voices came from another world. She stumbled through the next moments like she was barely in them, like the whole thing was some weird, wavering masque, and she was simultaneously one of the players and one of the spectators.
Dunstan was led forward, mumbling some sullen, fretful nonsense about her being a witch and cursing him with her evil eye. Which Mary parried with “No, you idiot, I’m the witch, and if you don’t shut up, I’ll turn you into something worse than the disgusting toad you already are!” He had ended by accepting his fate stoically, however, not even trying to argue most of the accusations Tabitha had been required to state in front of all.
That had been the eeriest part, having to stand and recite what he’d done while that sea of curious eyes splashed over her—that and Dunstan’s abrupt rousing to deny the part about the cat. His wounds were from her, he had insisted. She’d fought him like a cat, that was all. Even in her haze, Tabitha found that unnerving. Why should he lie about the cat of all things?
“That’s not true! I was in no position to fight, that’s why he got as far as he did.” Foggy and fuming, she’d tried to make someone believe that. Good heavens, they were all staring at her like she’d just sprouted whiskers and pointed ears.
“Forget it, honey. What difference does it make? You must have been so frightened, you didn’t realize everything that was happening.” Mary guided her back to the bench. “All right, you vultures, the show is over,” she declared. “Shoot that oaf, hang him, chop his head off, or whatever you do with mad dogs and get it over with, so Tabitha can be tended to and rest!”
Storming to her feet, she hauled Tabitha up beside her and started steering the girl toward the keep. She gave a startled little cry when a quick hand stopped them—and Tabitha gave a loud one as she felt herself swung up into a muscular pair of arms.
“Take it easy, Miss Jeffries. I’m merely offering some gentlemanly assistance. You don’t look in any shape to navigate the ramp,” sounded a familiar drawl. A lazy grin beamed down at her.
Tabitha heaved a relieved sigh and sank back against the man’s solid chest while he carried her up the foot ramp to the keep’s second floor entrance. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but it cheers me tremendously to see you, Mr. Elliott.”
“At least one of us is happy about it,” Mary muttered, and promptly choked on a second cry, as the trio’s way was blocked by the figure Tabitha had least wanted to see.
Burning amber eyes glinted dangerously into Simon’s cool gray ones. Like fire and smoke, Tabitha thought as her heart threatened to skip the next several beats.
“If you’re really a wizard, Mr. Elliott, prove it to me now by making him disappear,” she groaned into his lapel.
Both men ignored the request. They looked like two stags in a face-off. Except they were locking gazes instead of antlers.
“Thank you for your trouble,” Alan said to Simon, as though gratitude was the last thing on his mind. “But I can handle things from here.” His arms lifted to take her.
“You’re welcome, but it’s no trouble at all. I’m happy to be of service.” Simon grinned, swinging his armful to the side and preparing to step past.
“’Tis a service she doesn’t need.” Alan blocked them again. And he was not grinning, the armful noted.
“Yes, I do!” she insisted, locking her own arms around Simon’s neck as Alan started to pull her away.
An ear splitting whistle pierced the air. Three heads turned with a start, just in time to see Mary withdrawing two fingers from her mouth, her eyes blazing blue sparks.
“What do you think she is, a rope in a tug-of-war?” She thrust herself between Alan and Simon. “Cousin Alan, be reasonable. Leave Tabitha with me tonight. She needs a woman’s care. You’ll only upset her more.”
“I’ll upset you, lassie, if you don’t step aside.” He latched onto Mary’s forearm with an intimidating grip.
The grip popped open, and so did his eyes, in astonishment, as her free hand shot out and landed an expert chop on his wrist that must have rattled his teeth.
Too late, Mary realized the mistake. She glanced over her shoulder to see Simon’s smoky gaze studying her. Her own eyes began blinking, as though fighting back tears. “Oh, ow”—she sniffled—I hurt my hand.”
“I’m so sorry. Would you like me to kiss it for you and make it better?” Simon offered with a grin.
“No. But I’ll tell you what you can kiss, if you’re not careful,” she answered with a sinister sweetness.
His grin broadened. “Mmm…if it’s what I hope it is, I’d enjoy that even more.”
“Eww...” Mary gagged, a horrified blush staining her face. “You’re disgusting.” She pivoted back to Alan. “So are you! Both of you are disgusting. All men are pigs,” she told Tabitha, neatly prying her loose from Simon and helping her to stand. “We don’t need any of them.” Holding her chin in the air and her arms protectively around Tabitha, she tried to guide the girl through the keep’s smaller, foot-passage entrance.
Alan back-stepped, yanked the door shut, and held it fast with one hand while he reached toward Tabitha with the other. The sudden tenderness of his tone hit her harder than if he had shouted. “Please… Let me take care of you. I’ll not do anything to hurt you further. I just want to be with you. ’Tis the only way I can be certain you’ll be safe.”
“She’ll be safer with me, than she will with you,” Mary argued as Tabitha shivered against her. “Why do men have to be so blind? She’s been too long without care already, and you’re standing here wasting more time! Stop being an idiot, Alan. Move aside!”
The door suddenly rattled on its heavy iron hinges. “Alan you say?” someone on the other side of it called. “Be that you, Alan MacAllister, holdin’ this door shut? Ye’d best open it, laddie, afore I take me stick tae you.”
“Molly? Thank heavens! I was just coming to find you. That miserable toad, Dunstan, attacked Tabitha, and she needs help,” Mary answered. “Probably your charm for warts, too,” she added thoughtfully.
“Tabitha, is it? Be that the lassie I sent the salve for t’other night? The one they say has just wedded Alan? I’ve nay seen her yet.”
“Yes, that’s her, and she’s ready to collapse. Make Alan let us through. He’s being a pigheaded lout.”
A soft chuckle sounded, then a stern: “Alan MacAllister, I bid you once open this door. Now, I’m biddin’ you again. If I hafta bid you a third time, I ken someone who’s gang tae be a very sorry and a very sore laddie. D’ye hear me, son?”
Alan heaved a tremendous sigh—“Aye, Grandmother”—and reluctantly stepped aside. “What are you laughing at?” He glowered at Simon. “Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be right now?”
“Actually, now that you mention it…” The other man grinned. “No.”
“Well, go there, anyway!”
Simon pasted on his wounded look (but not for long). “Oh, all right, if you’re going to be that way about it.” He dipped a slight bow to Mary and Tabitha. “Ladies, I’ll see you later.”
“Not if we see you first,” Mary muttered.
“Ah, but that’s just it, isn’t it? No one ever sees me first. I’m a wizard,” he told her, that lazy grin spreading slowly across his face. “I can appear in a puff of…smoke.” He watched a moment as every last scrap of color drained out of her, then turned and strolled off with a long, lanky stride.
“Drat. And here I’d been thinking he was just some nosy tenderfoot,” Mary murmured under her breath. “I’m going to have to rewrite this show.”
“Be you makin’ a new play, dear?”
A female Leprechaun? No, that couldn’t be right. Leprechauns were Irish. This was a Bodach, a Scottish pixie, perhaps?
One o
f the Wee Folk, anyway, Tabitha decided in her daze. The white haired woman smiling up at Mary was less than five feet tall and as wispy and delicate as a blade of grass.
“You know me, Molly, I’m always working on some drama or other,” Mary said, looking as though she was deep in the middle of one right then.
“Aye, dear, you’re a bonny, braw play actress. And this be me new granddaughter?” Her eyes crinkled for an instant as she seemed to read the whole of Tabitha’s injuries and half her thoughts in one practiced glance. “I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough welcome tae your new home, dear, but ’tis nothin’ I canna heal. Wipe that ugly frown fray your face, Alan MacAllister, and make yourself scarce. Mary and I will tend your bride. Your black looks be fearin’ the lassie,” she said. “I’ll send if you’re needed.”
“You won’t have to send far. I’ll be right outside your door.”
“Oh, ’tis one o’ them moods, is it?” Tiny hands on her narrow hips, Molly stood peering up and clucking her tongue at him. “Ah well, what canna be cured, mun be endured. Bring your bride alang then, you blackguard. But mind you go gentle. ’Tis a wicked knock on her head. If you worsen it, I’ll give you one tae match on your own.” Thumping her short staff on the floor with every step, Molly led the way deep into the heart of the keep, to her Stillroom filled with pungent potions, powders and salves, and fragrant bunches of herbs drying from the ceiling rafters.
Tabitha rode the entire way in Alan’s arms. And in agony, too weak to lift her head off his chest and having to listen to the steady beat of his heart throbbing a counterpoint rhythm to the painful pounding in her skull. There wasn’t a single part of her that didn’t hurt. But the sharpest ache of all was the one that stabbed through her with the horrible realization that part of her wanted this. She wanted to feel his warmth and his strength wrapped around her, holding her together, keeping her from flying into a thousand desperate fragments.
It was worse than horrible. It was ridiculous. It made no sense. She distrusted him, feared him, hated him even. Yet being held by Alan was like being held by a rock. It felt like coming home after fighting a war in some frightful, alien land. But how? How could it feel so right when she knew the whole thing was so utterly, awfully wrong?
She didn’t realize she’d been moaning aloud until she felt his lips grazing her brow and heard his low voice murmuring, “I’m sorry, dear, I’m trying not to hurt you.”
It was the final blow. It burst the dam of her control, and hot, salty tears flooded over her cheeks, stinging open cuts. “Damn you. Everything you do hurts me. Why can’t you just leave me alone? Let me go.”
He flinched, as though her words had been a knife thrust, and she felt his muscles tense.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, the tenderness of his previous tone gone. “’Tis not my intention to wound, but if that’s the way you feel, you’d best get used to it. There’s no escape, Tabitha—for either of us. You’re mine whether you like it or not. I’ll ride into hell before I’ll let you go.”
And I’m almost in hell now.
Tabitha struggled to choke back the sobs before they grew uncontrollable. None of her logical science training had prepared her for this turmoil. There was no logic here. She was out of her depth. And out of her mind. Alan’s declaration had sent chills down her spine—but not the icy kind. Nothing seemed to change her core reaction to him. Not anger, hurt, confusion… Despite it all, she was still beginning to feel that being in his arms was the only place in the world she was supposed to be.
Continued in Part 2…
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*
Sneak-peek
Excerpt from Part 2:
…Like placing one picture over a similar but not quite identical one, so the lines blurred together and it was difficult to tell where one image ended and the other began. That’s what the dream was like, Tabitha thought, as she lay between the sheets (sensible cotton ones, thank goodness), straining to remember it, her bruised eyes weighted shut with the effort.
Alan had brought her back to their room, as he called it, after Molly’s skillful doctoring of her injuries. She’d been too drained by then, and too dopey from the painkiller the herb woman had administered to care where she was. She had barely even noticed Alan unwrapping her improvised toga, slipping a nightgown over her head, and tucking her under the covers like she was a small child. Then he’d pulled off his shirt and boots and slid in with her, cradling her against him until deep sleep claimed her.
Which proved the worth of Molly’s potions. It was outrageous to think she ever could have slept in such a position otherwise, no matter how exhausted she was. Especially given the way Alan had spent the fuzzy interval before slumber rubbing her shoulders and stroking her back through the nightgown, and whispering soft words into her hair. Words Tabitha couldn’t remember now. And didn’t want to.
That tender side of Alan seemed the most devastating to her. It rattled her to the core, because it was so incongruous to the rest of him. And because she was so defenseless against it. His growling and bullying was something she could lean into, brace herself for, and at least try to resist. But how did you fight gentleness? It was like one of those snares that used your own weight against you. The harder you struggled to loosen it, the tighter it became. She could feel the whole frightening situation closing in on her like a noose around her neck. And that weird dream had only pulled the rope snugger.
Very weird, more like a memory than a dream, really. But a memory of something that had never happened to Tabitha. She’d been someone else in the dream, a girl slightly older than herself, who’d been locked in the tower room as she had, but during some earlier time. Tabitha had realized that because the tree outside the window had been so much smaller. She’d been squeezed into the window, staring out over the branches and waiting for someone, her heart pounding with a desperate longing and terrified dread at the same time. Who, exactly, she had been waiting for in the dream, she wasn’t sure, but she’d known it was a man, and that he was coming to rescue her. Although from what, she couldn’t remember, nor anything more than that.
The rest of the dream was a blank. Except for the last part of it. In the final moment before waking, everything had been pitch black around her and heavy with the odors of smoke and blood. She had felt frozen, unable to move, and she hadn’t known where she was anymore. Then came the horrible noise of someone or something screaming in rage—almost like Alan’s cry when they’d pinned him in the yard—and she had awoken with a jolt, the agony of it still ringing in her ears…
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About the author:
https://www.mimiriser.com
Mimi Riser is a longtime author of both fiction and nonfiction, including several series and spanning a variety of genres (with flavors ranging from sweet to spicy hot). Her books celebrate the upbeat, the offbeat, and “beating the odds.” She began life in the urban northeast, but now resides in the rural southwest with her best friend and husband Rob.