"Don't play the buffoon with me, you arrogant Irish buck, or I'll show you just how deep I'm willing to cut to find my prey."
"Your prey? And just who is this fox that he takes half an army to hunt him down?"
"You know full well whom we seek and why. Your brother, fugitive from His Majesty's justice."
"Justice?" Tade chuckled, leaning over to drop the unfinished chunk of bread into the babe's tiny fist. "That explains everything. It's impossible to be fugitive from that which doesn't exist. Ryan, here, couldn't—"
"Damn you, Kilcannon," Rath exploded, his face puffing scarlet as his coat. "I'm not after babes and well you know it! It's Devin we want. And I swear I'll tear these walls down with pickaxes to find him if I have to! Men—"
The command Rath had been about to give was lost in a shriek as Deirdre stumbled forward. "Devin?" she cried. "He's alive?”
Every eye in the room snapped to her face, and Maryssa watched in astonishment as the girl clutched at her throat, her thick honey-gold lashes fluttering closed as she drooped gracefully into a dapper young captain's arms.
The startled officer's sword clattered to the floor, his hands barely catching her as she sank to the floor. But the heavy, thunking sound of another metal object clunking against the wooden planks shattered the sudden silence like the crack of a musket. Maryssa stared in clutching fear as the side of Deirdre's apron bulged out, the outline of the pistol clearly visible beneath the thin cloth. It was a deadly gambit, Maryssa sensed in that instant, designed to distract the soldiers from their search in the desperate hope Devin could find some way to escape. Yet the danger to Deirdre herself with her scarce-concealed gun. . .
For all the girl's spirit, Maryssa could see Deirdre’s eyelids twitch, and sensed that this girl— who had probably never fainted in her life— was now terrified. A flash of movement caught Maryssa's eye. Tade reached for his knife hilt, and she knew in that instant that if he reached it he would die. Knew, too, that she couldn't let him.
"Out of my way, knave!" She swept in front of him, knocking him off balance as though he were a cur in her path. The fingers that had been a finger’s breadth from the gilded dagger crashed against the wall, any hope Tade might have held of slipping the blade out in secret dissolving as the soldiers' eyes locked on the two of them.
"Halt, wench!"
"Halt?" Stiffening her spine in Lady Dallywoulde's most haughty manner, Maryssa pushed past the stocky soldier who had stepped in her way, stamping around him to face Rath in high dudgeon. "You dare command the daughter of Bainbridge Wylder about as though she were some Irish trollop?" she demanded, praying her pounding heart would not beat its way out of her chest. "My father will have your hide for this!”
"Wylder?" Rath barked a laugh. "And what would the lord of Nightwylde's daughter be doing dressed in peasant rags warming herself at Kilcannon fires?"
"The lord of Nightwylde's daughter was all but killed by the most disgusting mount in the manor's stables." Maryssa's chin jutted upward. "The wretched beast wandered off, then threw me into a lake where I all but drowned." She let her gaze flick scornfully about the room, her voice wavering just an instant as her eyes flashed over Tade's murderous glare.
"Considering the low company I've had to suffer since this Kilcannon person brought me here, I was beginning to wish I had drowned." She forced a disdainful sniff, patting her curls in the fashion she had seen the vapid court beauties adopt. "Can you imagine? They wanted to take me back to Nightwylde in a donkey cart! And now, when I dare hope that I am to be rescued from this hovel and accorded the respect I deserve from honorable Englishmen, I am slandered and degraded!"
A tiny quiver crept into Maryssa's voice, and she hoped Rath would interpret it as wounded dignity rather than the fear it was.
Revulsion prickled her stomach as his pig eyes sank deeper into their folds, their eager, slavering light skimming over her body as though it were a prime haunch of mutton. When he raised his gaze to hers, his features were schooled into a careful mask of deference and a genuine approval that made Maryssa want to retch.
"My dear Miss Wylder, what you must have endured, being stranded in such crude surroundings! Can you find it in your heart to forgive my men and me this unconscionable breach of manners?"
"I shall consider it if you will escort me to my father's estate at once. These clothes make my skin itch. Heaven only knows what kind of creatures are crawling inside them."
"My men and I will deem it a privilege to deliver you safely to your father. But first let us give you the pleasure of watching His Majesty's army ferret out an enemy to the Crown."
Maryssa felt her palms go clammy as the soldiers ringed around the room tensed, readying for the search. With so much effort she thought her face would crack, she made her lips curl in distaste, letting her gaze stray to Tade, then dismiss him. "Colonel Rath, it would be a weak Crown indeed that found an enemy in these lowly creatures."
"The Irish are most deceptive to the eye, Miss Wylder, and sometimes"—Rath's beady eyes fastened on Tade—"winning to the heart. But rest assured that the man we seek is a criminal as vile and depraved as the devil himself."
The horror that whitened Maryssa's face was so real it left her chilled and numb. "What..." She barely whispered the word, wanting to ask what Devin was guilty of, then realizing she did not want to know. She swallowed, her gaze dropping to the floor.
"Miss Wylder, have you seen anyone else here in, say, the last three hours? A man a head taller than I, blond hair, blue eyes? On last report he was wearing black breeches and a frock coat, but he might have—"
"Nay.”
"You are certain?"
She could feel the tension in every Kilcannon, from little Katie to Devin, who was hidden away in the loft, but eclipsing all of that was Tade, the knotting in his muscles, the fire in his green eyes. He seemed to touch her, though they stood half a room apart. An enemy to the Crown, Rath had claimed. Devin— evil, depraved.
Maryssa forced her eyes to Rath's. "Colonel, I vow I've seen no one. Now, if you would kindly escort me home—"
"All in good time, my lady." Rath's eyelids narrowed, and as he scanned the room she could almost see his nose twitch, scenting its prey. “It will not take much time for my men to search this hovel before we leave. Something may have escaped your notice. Perhaps even now that devil Kilcannon lurks beneath a pallet or in a trunk."
"And perhaps the French army is hiding in the thatch straw," Tade observed with a brittle grin.
Maryssa hazarded a warning glance toward him, panic rising yet again in her throat as her gaze flashed back to Rath's paunchy face. "Do you judge me a liar, Colonel Rath?" she demanded, desperation choking her. "Or do you think me merely a fool?"
“No. I only—" Rath stammered, his neckcloth suddenly seeming too tight for his throat.
Maryssa clenched hanks of petticoats in fists that felt too stiff to move. "I was nearly killed, was dragged off to this mud hut, forced to wear rags, and very nearly had to be trundled home in a manner that would have battered my sensibilities, not to mention certain parts of my anatomy." Tears brimmed over her lashes, burning her cheeks in hot trails of fear. "But to be humiliated—called a liar—by you, an English gentleman—I'll not bear one more second of this outrage! Tear the cottage down looking for phantom criminals if you must, Colonel Rath. I'm going to Nightwylde. Now. If I have to walk every step of the way!"
"Miss Wylder, surely you cannot mean—Why, every brigand in Ireland frequents these hills. Just last night the Black Falcon—"
"Perhaps the Black Falcon will prove to be more of a gentleman than you!" Maryssa spun around and ran through the door. The thin facade of control she had held over herself melted in the misty night air, terror, desperation, and guilt causing her knees to quake until she was certain they would pitch her into a heap on the rocky yard. She could merely turn around, confess everything to the soldiers, and tell them Tade had threatened her into silence.
But it was n
ot Tade's rage that had stilled her tongue, not fear of his revenge. Maryssa bit her lip until it bled, welcoming the stinging pain. It had been their love she could not betray—Devin's, Tade's, Rachel's. No matter what Devin's crime, Maryssa could not have borne seeing the soldiers tear him away from his loving family, could not have borne the tiny Kilcannons' sobs, Rachel's keening.
Maryssa buried her face in her hands. She was aiding a fugitive from the Crown. A thief? Murderer? Traitor? No court in England would acquit her if she shielded a truant from justice. And her father would no doubt rejoice to be rid of her.
She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. Were the soldiers even now discovering the ladder to the loft? Piercing mattresses, piles of cloth with their sharp-honed swords? Tade—lightsome, rakehell Tade—would never let them take Devin without a fight. A hopeless fight. A fatal one. The image of his life-blood drenching the body that had pressed so warm against her own made Maryssa want to scream.
There was a swishing of steel and the sound of boots. She whispered half-forgotten childhood prayers, pleading with a God who had always seemed icy and vengeful.
"Miss Wylder.” Rath's stiff tone bristled with irritation as he strode up beside her. “We can hardly allow Bainbridge Wylder's daughter to go dashing off into the hills. If your comfort is more important to you than the escape of a desperate criminal—"
"At this point, Colonel Rath, I could cheerfully commit murder myself to get beneath the coverlet of my own bed," Maryssa said with heartfelt sincerity as Rath's command poured out of the cottage.
Yet even when the colonel settled her before him in the saddle, the soft, pudgy folds of his stomach flattening against her back, Maryssa could feel the cottage call to her. The cottage, and the green-eyed rogue inside it. She glanced back at the flower-draped whitewashed walls, trying to imprint them in her memory to be taken out and savored on listless, lonely days. But all she saw were the broad shoulders silhouetted in the shattered doorway, and the solemn, seeking face of Tade Kilcannon staring after her into the night.
* * *
Tade dug his fingers into the unyielding wood of the door jamb, fighting the urge to bolt into the yard and rip Maryssa from Rath's defiling arms. The taunts the English troops flung back as they mounted their horses found no chink in Tade's self-control, their voices only grating on his ear like those of whining children deprived of their game. In the room behind him he could feel his father’s rage as though it were a tangible thing, Kane Kilcannon’s hatred of all things English nurtured and tended all these years. He could hear Rachel's whispered prayers of thanks, sense the children's still-raw terror.
Yet it was the sight of Maryssa that knotted in Tade's belly, chasing the pale, frozen faces of his family into the shadows of his consciousness. Maryssa, her slight body bound in arms he knew had perpetrated a dozen separate horrors, her wraithlike face just visible over Rath's beefy shoulder. She peered back in such haunting sorrow, her changeable eyes clinging to the cottage with resigned pain, her moon-kissed features shaded with a fragile beauty that made him want to pull her into the shelter of his body, destroying all who would do her harm.
Tade stiffened as Rath bellowed an order and the English soldiers reined their mounts into position behind the colonel's gray gelding. Rath inclined his head toward Maryssa, an ingratiating smile curling his lips. Tade's fingers clenched, a fragment of the splintered door piercing deep into his palm. Cursing, he yanked his hand back and kneaded the injured place with his other thumb. Do her harm? Hah! Hadn't the girl made it perfectly clear that she was no "Irish trollop" for Rath's troops to abuse at will? Nay, she was an English lady who needed only to stamp her silk-shod foot to have an entire troop of Sassenach soldiers run trailing after her like a fat old dowager's lapdogs.
She was Bainbridge Wylder's only child—daughter of the richest landholder in Donegal, in half of Ireland. Didn't she belong with Rath, with these Sassenach soldiers who shattered Irish lives with no more thought than they had given the oaken door that lay splintered at Tade's feet?
Tade grimaced, suddenly shamed by his own cynical musings. God's teeth, he was sounding like his father, so bitter that he regarded even an act of compassion with doubt. For all her theatrics, this girl was no English belle whose nose was poked so far into the air she trampled over peasant babes in her path. She had lied to protect a man she had only just met, a man she knew had broken English law.
Did she, in her highborn naivete, have any inkling of what the gallant colonel would have done to her if his men had discovered Devin in the loft? Or had she risked all, knowing what punishment might await her? Tade shuddered inwardly at the thought of her delicate wrists cased in iron shackles. The little fool! The winsome, beautiful little fool! He wanted to hold her, wanted to shake her. And yet if she hadn't lied . . .
Tade's muscles tensed as he watched Rath knee the gray into a canter, the jarring movement nearly spilling Maryssa from the saddle. Though the space of the yard and three dozen horses lay between them, Tade could sense the fear in her slight frame, felt, too, an almost desperate urge to tear back the veils of darkness as they fluttered closed behind her.
Damn, she could never be anything to him. She was English. A fine lady with riches and a hundred servants at her disposal, a lady who would scarce deign notice a lowly Irishman, regardless of the fact that the blood in his veins was more noble than her own.
But Quentin Rath . . . he would be judged her equal, with his fine house and his commission, purchased with bloodstained coin from his admiral papa's purse. No doubt the despicable colonel would spend the whole ride to Nightwylde insinuating himself into her ladyship's good graces. He would be rapping at Nightwylde's door first thing next morning, his cockaded hat crushed beneath one sweaty armpit, an engraved calling card in his freshly manicured hand, and the wealth of Nightwylde tallied up in his greedy little brain.
And Maryssa? Would she simper about before Rath, striking her hand to her brow and wailing about her ordeal among the barbaric Irish, as though she had been tortured in the crudest of dungeons?
No. She had placed herself in danger to protect Devin, Deirdre. To protect him. She was no haughty witch, but rather a woebegone fairy who had strayed like a will-o'-the- wisp into his life, then fled back to the kingdom from whence she had come.
From the first she had stolen into his heart, her very name seeming to trail petal-soft over his lips, lodging inside him with an aching sadness akin to that he had felt the summer he turned eight and found an abandoned tinker's child huddled in the "castle" he and Devin had built in a tree. Even Rachel's expert nursing had not been able to save the girl. But when she closed her eyes in eternal sleep, somehow Tade had known even in his childhood innocence that she had not died from the buffeting of chill winds off the ocean or the emptiness in her belly, but rather from too little love, given too late.
Today, when Rachel and the little ones had poured out to greet Devin, Maryssa had stood in the shadows with the same look of haunting loneliness, so shy Tade had wanted to stroke soft roses into her cheeks, brush her lips with his own mouth, make her smile. But when Deirdre had flung open the bedchamber door and he had seen Maryssa framed against a backdrop of rumpled bedclothes, her body all but naked, golden with candle shine, he had wanted to tumble her back onto the pillows, take all of her, and give . . . give her things no other woman had touched inside him.
The sounds of the children behind him intruded on the dreamlike sweetness playing in his mind. He shut his eyes, wanting to hold as long as he could the vision of tumbled dark hair streaming over coral-tipped breasts, of wide, searching eyes. But the picture was shattered as a hand clamped on his shoulder, spinning him around to face the rage-contorted countenance of his father.
Tade gaped, stunned as his father’s hand arced toward him. Shock dulled Tade’s normally keen reflexes, making him too slow to escape the blow entirely. Pain shot through him as his father's hard palm glanced off his jaw. Pain that had nothing to do with the force o
f the buffet dealt him. He wheeled, fists raised, but Deirdre leaped in front of him, her eyes wide, tears of accusation flooding her cheeks as she glared at their father.
"Da! How could you!”
"No, Dee. I'll be fighting my own battles." Tade moved her out of his path, his eyes glinting as he fought the feeling of betrayal that cinched around his chest. An uncontrollable need to wound back flooded through him, his words as he turned to his father intended to cut as deeply as the lashes Tade had been dealt. "I'm a trifle too old to drag behind the cow byre, Da," he grated. "Or did it make you feel more a man? Ramming your fist into my face since you couldn't bloody Rath as you wanted?"
“If I had any sense I'd thrash you till you couldn't move! Because of your idiocy the whole family could have been cast into Rookescommon prison. That little English wench—"
"That 'little English wench' just saved our necks!" Tade snarled. "Rath must've suspected Devin was here before he rode in. If Maryssa hadn't distracted him, we'd all be trussed in chains right now, bound for a Sassenach gallows. And we'd be the lucky ones.”
"Aye, luckier than the girl would be, by far," Kane shot back. "Did you consider for a moment what harm could befall her? No. You just threw her into the middle of disaster, and now you blow up with pride as though you're a fallen hero. Do you think I want the blood of another Wylder woman on my han—"
Tade's head tilted in confusion, his eyes narrowing at the hint of bittersweet pain underlying his father's words.
The muscles in Kane's face jerked tight, throwing the stark planes into sharp relief. A shutter fell over his eyes, driving away the sadness until it seemed only shadings of Tade's imagination.
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