Dark of the Moon (20 page)

He didn't release her immediately but stood holding her hands and staring at her sleep-flushed face with a besotted smile on his face.

Not having the energy yet to engage in the tug-of-war it would take to free her hands, she let them remain in his as she struggled to banish the remnants of sleep. A sound that was somewhere between a grunt and a growl caused her to look beyond Cormac toward the tall shadow to which he seemed to have been talking earlier. The shadow stepped forward and resolved itself into Connor. He seemed to be in a temper again, his arms crossed over his chest and his aqua eyes glinting unpleasantly as they rested on Cormac's hands holding hers.

Registering the thunderous expression on his face, Caitlyn felt the peace her solitary afternoon had given her recede, to be replaced by an anger of her own.

"So, you've been sulking in here, have you? We've spent most of the past two hours searching for you!" There was a furious note to his voice, more furious than the situation justified. Caitlyn wondered if he were still nursing a grievance from the night before, and ruefully supposed that he was. Then he lifted his gaze from her hands, still linked with Cormac's, to her face, and she was taken aback as pure rage flared at her for a moment from those devil's eyes. Caitlyn blinked at him in surprise. His lids dropped, and when they lifted again the emotion was carefully banked. An idea hit Caitlyn with the force of a brick. As she considered it, her heart began to pound. Meeting Connor's smoldering eyes with a limpid look of her own, Caitlyn switched her attention to Cormac, smiling warmly at him. She meant to test this new notion of hers without delay.

"Have you been searching for me?" she asked sweedy, beaming her nicest smile on Cormac. Never before had she had occasion to use her female attractions, but she found that the knack came to her instinctively, without her even trying for it. " 'Tis sorry I am if I worried you." She squeezed his hands slightiy. Cormac looked dazzled.

"I—I—it was Conn," he blurted.

"Oh, Connor," Caitlyn said in a dismissive tone, as if Connor didn't matter in the least.

Flicking a sideways glance at the object of her experiment, she was pleased to see that Connor looked increasingly grim. It was all she could do to contain a triumphant smile. She was nearly certain now that her intuition was right on target: what had exacerbated Connor's temper past the point of control (he night before and made him so angry now was Cormac's attention to her.

Connor didn't like it. Why, she hadn't quite decided, but it was an extremely pleasant notion and she meant to take full advantage of it.

"The next time you decide to take a nap in the straw, you might have the kindness to tell someone first. We've lost half a day's work looking for you." Connor growled the rebuke.

Glancing over at him, Caitlyn saw that his hands were balled into fists and jammed into the pockets of his breeches. A little flicker of excitement flamed to life inside her. This new game of baiting Connor could prove extremely interesting.

"Why did you bother? You must have known that I was somewhere about."

"1 thought you might have taken it into your head to run away again." The admission was gruff. A patch of shadow had shifted so that Connor once again stood in darkness, making it difficult to tell too much about his expression in the brief look she allowed herself. Cormac was still holding her hands; Caitlyn's fingers were going numb from the pressure of his grip. She tried to disengage without being too obvious, but in the end she had to tug her hands from Cormac's hold. Cormac let her go with obvious reluctance.

"Now, why would I do a thing like that?" Caitlyn smiled at Cormac, looked fleetingly at Connor again, and started for the ladder. The skirt of her yellow-striped dress swished against the straw covering the boards of the loft «s she moved.

"Why indeed?" Connor's voice was ironic as he watched Cormac follow Caitlyn, giving every indication that he wished to tenderly assist her down the ladder. She managed to get down without his help, though she purposely gave him a sweet smile for offering it. Cormac climbed down behind her, with Connor swinging down last.

Outside it was just dusk, though the inside of the stable was full dark. Caitlyn did not need Cormac's guiding hand on her elbow as they made their way out into the open air. She would have told him so too, in no uncertain terms, if it had not been for the game she was playing with Connor. As he was walking on her other side, she wasn't even sure that he knew of Cormac's tender grip on her elbow. But then, knowing Connor, she rather thought he did.

As the three of them walked toward the house, no one spoke. When they reached the stoop and Cormac finally let go of her elbow so that she could climb the stairs, Connor said abrupdy,

"I'd like to see you in my office after supper, Caitlyn, if you please."

She deliberately climbed the stairs to the stoop before she turned back to face him. Cormac was ascending behind her, and she stood aside for him to pass. He stopped right behind her, waiting, listening. Caitlyn paid him no heed. Her atttention was all on Connor, who still stood on the ground looking up at her. With three steps between them, she was the taller by a head.

Looking down into those narrowed aqua eyes, she allowed herself the smallest of pensive smiles.

"If you're meaning to apologize for your behavior last night, there's really no need," she said with sweet provocation. "I've already forgiven you."

Then with that masterly shot she turned on her heel and went into the kitchen for supper.

Connor did not speak to her again during the meal, so she occupied her dme by flirting impartially with Rory and Cormac. Liam was rather harder to flirt with—he had a disconcerting habit of looking at her suspiciously when she smiled at him—but still she tried her best. It was amazing how easily flirting with males came to her, she thought, considering that she had been the next thing to one herself less than a year and a half before. But there was nothing complicated about it: a smile and a sideways glance, a touch of her fingers on a hand or a shoulder, and Rory and Cormac at least seemed enslaved. Mickeen watched this byplay with sour disapproval, while Mrs. McFee expressed her opinion with a series of loud sniffs. Connor, if he noticed it, seemed not to. Caitlyn vowed to redouble her efforts, and succeeded in bedazzling Cormac into pouring gravy all over the table instead of on his plate as he stared at one particularly blinding smile.

When supper was over and the d'Arcys and Mickeen stood up to leave the table—much as Caitlyn hated it, it was part of her duties to help Mrs. McFee clean up— Connor glanced over at her.

"In my office, Caitlyn," he said softly. Caitlyn returned his look for look. It entered her mind to refuse, just to see what his reaction would be, but she rather wanted to hear what he had to say, and besides, she hated kitchen duty. So she meekly followed him up the stairs, conscious of the younger d'Arcys' eyes on her until she was out of sight.

Connor opened the door to the office and stood back for . her to precede him. Unused to chivalrous gestures from him—Connor was far more likely to treat her like another of his young brothers than like a lass—Caitlyn still managed to walk past him with aplomb. He closed the door behind her, his movements deliberate. She watched with growing uneasiness as he lit the lamp on the scarred desk with the taper he was carrying, then blew the candle out and set it aside. She was not quite at ease with Connor all of a sudden. He seemed almost a stranger to her, a tall, handsome, masculine stranger. Watching the play of candlelight on the lean planes of his face, she was struck by how grim he looked. Grimmer than she would have expected him to be if all he meant to do was dress her down tor her role in the fiasco of the night before. Perhaps she had carried her flirting with his brothers just a little too far. ...

"Sit, please." His tone told her nothing as he indicated the worn leather chair in front of the desk

Again, by not sitting down until she was seated, he was treating her as he would a full-grown lady. She had seen him perform such courtesies for Mrs. Congreve and had secretly sneered. But she found that it was very pleasant being on the receiving end of his good manners and essayed a tentative smile at him as she sat down.

Connor did not return her smile as he took his own seat in the matching leather armchair behind the desk. If anything, he looked bleaker than ever. Propping his elbows on the desk, he clasped his hands together and rested his chin on his hands. For a long moment he considered her without speaking. Caitlyn finally squirmed under his unrelenting gaze. As if that were the signal he had been waiting for, he leaned back, pushing the chair a little away from the desk so that he could stretch out his long legs comfortably in front of him. The chair gave a creak of protest at his posture. His fingers drummed on the wooden arms. His eyes met hers again, distant under frowning brows.

"Caitlyn." He finally broke the silence with her name, then said nothing else. His eyes never left her face as he seemed to mull something over in his mind.

" 'Tis my name." His uncharacteristic hesitancy was making her nervous. To conceal her apprehension from him, her response was flippant. She met his eyes, questions and defiance mixed in her expression.

Finally he spoke, the words careful, measured. "First I must admit: you were in the right of it. I owe you an apology. I regret having struck you, though 'twas an accident, as I'm sure you know. Even so, had I kept a tighter rein on my temper it would not have happened. I beg your pardon."

The very formality of his apology disturbed Caitlyn. She eyed him uncertainly.

"You were provoked." She had thought that an apology would give her the upper hand.

Now she found that the game was all his, as it had ever been. In the face of Connor's baffling behavior, she was fast being reduced to a nervous child. He smiled a little at her unthinking admission, but still his eyes were bleak. He did not seem like himself at all, and the fact had her increasingly frightened.

"Aye, I was provoked. You seem to have a knack for doing that."

She thought she detected a note of humor in his voice and tried a faint smile while she searched his eyes in vain. He did not smile back at her, and if there had been humor in his face it was gone now. He looked completely serious, even a little melancholy.

"Caitlyn." The very way he said her name worried her. It was as if he had bad news to impart and was concerned how she would take it. Her eyes, suddenly huge, searched his. The black ring around his irises seemed to enlarge, making his eyes appear almost dark.

"We have a problem, lass," he continued after a brief hesitation. "It seems I should have foreseen this difficulty earlier, but surprisingly enough, I did not."

"What difficulty?" Apprehension was making it difficult for her to talk. From the regretful way he was looking lit her, she could almost suppose herself dead and in her coffin.

"Raising a lassie in a male household. Lassies are different from lads by their very nature, and lads are different when lassies are around. 'Tis natural for you to want to test your femaleness, and 'tis natural for them to respond to you. I want you to understand that no blame attaches to you for this. You've done nothing wrong."

"What are you saying?" A terrible weight seemed to have setded in her chest.

"For your own well-being I must send you away, lass." 11 was said with awful gentleness.

Caitlyn stared at him, kciry blue eyes huge in the whiteness of her face, her hands clenching in her lap until the nails dug into the soft flesh of her palms. Her agitation was such that she didn't even feel the pain.

"What?" The statement was so unexpected that it temporarily bewUdered her.

He went on quickly, ignoring her interruption and the distress in her face. " 'Tis no great tragedy, Caitlyn. I've no intention of turning you back into the world on your own. The good Sisters at St. Mary's in County Longford have a school for lassies. They'll take you in; I've a friend who said he'd see to the necessary arrangements. They'll leach you things: how to run a household, manners, how to go on. There are many things females need to know that we males have no notion of, it seems."

"No!"

" Tis all arranged, and 'tis for the best, lass. Believe me. I'd not do it otherwise."

"No!"

He went on swiftiy, as if to head off her protests with reasoned words. "No good can come of you staying here with us. A lassie's place is amongst other females, not randy young bucks.

You'll have tomorrow to gather your things and say your good-byes. We leave for St. Mary's Tly the next day."

Caitlyn felt as if a giant hand were squeezing her heart. Connor's eyes were on her face; they were dark with compassion. Compassion, when he was hurting her so badly that all she wanted to do was scream!

"You can't—you can't do this. If 'tis because of—of what happened the other night, it'll never happen again, I promise. I'll stay safe in the house when you ride out, and I'll never even look at Cormac, or Rory, or Liam, or anyone else you don't want me to, and I'll—"

He stopped her increasingly frantic babble with an upraised hand. " 'Tis not because you rode after us the other night, or what happened after. Tis not because of anything you've done.

'Tis because of what you are. You've grown up into a beautiful lass, Caitlyn, and we're all men here. Men, even the best of them, which I hold my brothers to be though I can't always claim the distinction for myself, can lose their heads easily around a beautiful lassie. There's trouble now, but it can be nipped in the bud. Think of the havoc you'd wreak if you stayed."

"I wouldn't. ..."

"You couldn't help it." The pronouncement was heavy. "Besides, think of yourself. The day will come soon when you'll want to marry and have bairns of your own. What decent man will take you when it's known youVe been living here with us alone? They'll think you've little virtue, and if one does take you, he'll likely value you less because of it. With the holy Sisters, your good name will be safe. And we won't be totally abandoning you, lass.