Bride of the Beast (9 page)

Without a word, he took her hands. Turning them, he trailed the backs of his fingers over her reddened palms.

"May the saints smite me here and now would I dare allow your hands to grow as calloused as a simple scullion's," he vowed, a slight pulsing in his jaw revealing an inner tension held masterfully in check.

An equally tense silence descended, a palpable quiet so heavy Caterine could almost hear her heart knocking against her ribs.

"I've told her the same myself," Eoghann's genial voice broke the spell. He glanced at Caterine's tub-bound stepson. "Isn't that the truth of it?"

James nodded. "We still have servitors enough to see to such tasks would she allow them to do so."

A wide grin spreading across his lined face, the seneschal bobbed his head. "See?" He beamed at the English knight. "It gladdens my ears to hear you tell her so. She won't listen to us. Mayhap she'll heed you."

"I shall do my utmost to convince her," Sir Marmaduke said, the warmth of his hands on hers near scattering her wits and sending dangerously delicious tingles shooting up her arms.

"The arrow has yet to be loosed that can persuade me to fall prey to honeyed words," she found her tongue at last, aided by the ill-timed surfacing of other Sassunach voices.

Harsh male voices ordering her to do their will lest they suffer more sorrow on her than the mere taking of their pleasure.

Distant terrors, resurrected by the Englishness of the man who meant to champion her.

With a speed borne of her shame, she yanked her hands from his grasp, snatched the water pail and dumped its contents into the nearest bathing tub.

She let the empty bucket slip from her fingers and met Sir Marmaduke's unperturbed countenance with a long hard stare. For good measure, she tossed an equally hot glare at the seneschal.

"Bardic prose and courtly verse are the purest folly," she fomented, spurred on by a parade of leering faces rising cruelly from the depths of her soul. "I ceased listening to such gushing at a tender age and will not be persuaded to do so again."

She paused for emphasis. "Most especially not from English lips."

To her mortification, a flare of sympathy, or mayhap regret, flashed across Sir Marmaduke's scarred face. Coolly ignoring her outburst, he simply lifted a brow.

"Dare I suggest, my lady, that perchance the men who sought to impress you with fair words did not possess deep enough hearts to put enough of their own into winning yours?"

His words, smooth and rich, embraced her, beguiling her with startling ease and pouring warmth and light into corners of her soul that had never known a shred of gallantry. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but he'd already moved to stand before James's washtub, his withdrawal leaving her oddly bereft.

It was as if all the light in the kitchen had followed him, leaving her to stand alone in the dark. Even the warmth of the cook fire seemed to have cooled.

Waving a careless hand at Eoghann when he peered oddly at her, she stared after the Sassunach, uncomfortably drawn by the surprising rush of pleasure his silvered words had spent her, sharply conscious of the tantalizing tingles still rippling across her palms and up and down her arms.

He
seemed wholly immune to the turmoil he'd unleashed in her. His features perfectly controlled, he addressed her stepson. "Sir Alec and several others are making a renewed search of the castle and grounds. If a second intruder yet lurks here, they will find him."

James's fingers ceased lathering his hair. "I was mistaken," he said, casting a sullen-eyed glance at Rhona rather than meet Marmaduke's gaze. "There was only one."

Paying scant heed to their exchange, Caterine stared down at the toppled pail. Water trickled over its rim to form a growing stain on the stone floor.

A stain as dark as the one stamped so indelibly on her heart.

A heart she could not give to an Englishman.

Much as she might be persuaded to want to.

I am a man of boundless patience.

She tensed in surprise. The words, his words, had sounded as clearly as if he'd murmured them in her ear. Yet he still stood across the room, calmly conversing with her stepson.

Not sharing private revelations meant for none but her to hear.

Rest easy, my lady. I respect and revere women. Never would I force you to do aught against your will.

The words came again. Less substantial than an angel's sigh, but oh-so-sweet, they slid past her ear to caress a part of her no man had ever before touched.

Imagined words.

"I promise you, it is naught but your own heart's desire I would see done." Not imagined.

Simply low-voiced and smooth.

Seductive.

And irrevocably English.

Despite herself, Caterine basked in the warmth of his assurances. Imagined or nay, they touched off yearnings she'd held back too long. She looked up, fully expecting to see his all-knowing gaze fixed on her, but he merely turned away from James's washtub with a half-shrug.

"As pleases you, my lady,
" she thought she heard him say, but already he'd returned to his friend's side. He stood with his broad back to her, whatever emotions might plague him, well hidden from view.

Eoghann walked away as well, mumbling to himself about chores needing his immediate attention.

"Yon water grows cold and our guests await their ease," Rhona's voice seemed to come from a great distance. Caterine nodded absently, her attention riveted on the tall
knight across the room. He was unbuckling his sword belt and the simple act seemed so blatantly ...
intimate.

A strange prickling sensation sprang to life deep in the lowest part of her belly. A warm pulsing that grew and spread the longer she watched his hands work at the low-slung belt's buckle.

He caught her staring and tilted his head, calmly watching her watch him. "You do not expect us to bathe in our soiled clothes?" he asked, and the heavy leather belt came free.

When he reached for the hem of his dark-stained tunic, Caterine's nerve shattered. She swung around, near colliding with the fly-catcher, a honey-dipped rope hanging from the ceiling.

Embarrassed by her clumsiness, she swatted the dangling nuisance out of her way and stared pointedly into the cook fire. Its flames crackled loudly, wholly unaware of the mad whirling of her senses. Tongues of red and gold licking innocently at the fat logs piled on the blackened hearthstone.

Her heart began a dull thudding.

The look he'd fixed on her had been anything but innocent.

The
clunk
of his belt dropping on the floor, an explicit challenge.

The sound of his tunic being drawn over his head, an affront that sent thrilling streaks of pleasure jabbing into a deep-seated core of pure female need she hadn't been aware she possessed until this very moment.

Stretching her hands to the fire, she used the pretense of warming them to keep her back to him and the two empty bathing tubs looming so close behind her.

One of them soon to be occupied by him,
naked.

Her cheeks flamed at the notion, her entire body heating up.

Another sword belt hit the floor, followed by the soft rustlings of a second tunic being stripped off.

Lachlan
's belt and tunic.

Or
Lachlan
's belt and
his
hose, for the soft rustling sounds could just as well have been Sir Marmaduke rolling down his leggings.

" 'Twas only my young friend's shirt," his richly timbred voice solved the mystery.

And proved to Caterine he could indeed read her thoughts.

Beside her, Rhona held her own hands toward the flames. "It ill becomes you to appear so inhospitable, my lady."

"Inhospitable?" Caterine shrugged out of her cloak. "Would I have poured the last of our precious lavender and thyme oils into their bath water or lined the tubs with fine linen did I not wish to be hospitable?"

Rhona shrugged. "You have not exactly encouraged them to revel in the warmth of your welcome."

Agitation rising in her breast, Caterine tossed her mantle onto a nearby table. "Were I as unwelcoming as you claim, would I have hung our best drying cloths near the fire so they may dry their bodies with wanned toweling?"

"There are more ways to warm a man than by offering him heated bath linens."

Tell me how,
a silent voice pleaded from the most secret corner of Caterine's heart.

As if she'd heard, Rhona's gaze lighted on James. "Watch how I bathe him. You would be wise to tender your champion the same care."

"I have bathed enough men—" Caterine began, breaking off when her friend walked away. "Wait! 'Tis I who always assist James...."

Left alone, the ancient laws of hospitality bore down on Caterine's shoulders, a crushing weight, sacred and not to be ignored.

The intimacies she must spend on the English knight danced across her conscience, as real as if she'd already dipped her hands into his bath water and, even now, smoothed them over his wet skin.

In truth, he merely lounged against the far wall, watching her in disconcerting silence, branding her with the heat of his stare. Raw masculinity poured off him in such extremes that simply being in the same room with him made every inch of her thrum with crackling anticipation.

Caterine turned aside to smooth her trembling hands on her skirts.

I
have naught to fear... 1 have seen scores of bare-bottomed men.

The backs and the fronts of them.
She mouthed the words, a silent litany, her palms growing more damp with each beat of her heart.

She had no cause for alarm.

Many were the knights and nobles she'd granted such attentions.

"'Tis but a custom, my lady," came his voice again. Deep, smooth, and much nearer. "A mere courtesy, the execution of which means nothing."

Caterine swallowed hard at his lie. He erred. The execution of this particular courtesy would cost her much.

And not in the way he'd believe were she to voice her hesitation.

Her acquiescence sealed, she locked her gaze on his. He stood not four paces away, one arm slung about his friend's bare shoulders, his own broad chest equally clothes-free.

And so perfect, her knees went liquid at the sight.

His hard-muscled magnificence, every taut well-defined plane, stole her breath and sent a floodtide of stunned surprise spiraling through her.

Wave upon wave of something so intense, so thoroughly different from anything she'd ever experienced, she could only stare.

A dusting of crisp dark hair arrowed down the sculpted tautness of his abdomen to disappear beneath the rolled waistband of his braies. The light woolen cloth, still damp from his rigors in the bailey, hugged his muscular thighs and clung to his maleness in such a brazen manner, nary a secret remained about the grandness of his virility.

Finding her voice at last, Caterine... gasped.

He
smiled.

A slow and lazy half-smile of such bone-melting potency the wonder of it reached clear inside her soul to the secret place her gasp had come from.

The place she hid her dreams.

He
hid nothing.

And nothing could stop the waves of tight-pitched anticipation rippling through her the longer she stared.

"Heavenly saints," she breathed at last, her throat going unbearably dry.

"They had nary a hand in it, I assure you," he said, a bitter edge marring the beauty of his voice.

And slicing through the mysterious bond his oh-so-seductive gallantry had been weaving of her long-slumbering desires.

Hopes and dreams so deeply buried, she'd forgotten she'd ever spun them.

Lifting a hand to his face, he trailed long fingers down the scar slashing across his left cheekbone. "Dear lady, the good saints had their backs turned the day I was thus blighted, but they watch over me now, I assure you."

She looked away, heat flooding her cheeks.

"And as they guard me, so shall I guard you." He skimmed his knuckles down the curve of her cheek. "Your person, your home, and your sensibilities."

"My sensibilities?"

He nodded. "The bathing ceremony is a much appreciated custom amongst men of breeding, but I am not an old done man incapable of tending my own needs."

There is naught old and done about me,
his heart proclaimed, demanding her ear.

"Nor am I injured," he said, tempted beyond all reason by the sensual promise of her lips. "I can bathe myself."

"I am sorry." She had the good grace to blush, and her high discomfiture turned her eyes a deeper shade of blue.

So dark a blue, he released her at once lest he drown in their sapphire depths.

She touched his arm and his breath caught at the simple contact. "You truly do not mind?"