Lord of the Isle (9 page)

“I never meant to drive you to do that,” he said at last, finally able to face his own callous impatience and his inability to trust other people. Orphaned by war, and exiled by political expedience, Hugh had lived all his life alone, trusting only Loghran. Women were to be used. He was no better than Kelly. In some ways, he was worse.

“I’m sorry, Morgana. I only meant to frighten you, to make you believe my threats were real. The truth is, I could never raise a hand against you or any woman for that matter, not even were punishment deemed necessary by law or common sense. I am a man, and it comes easy to make such threats when fear holds me in its grips.

“I wanted you to tell me the real reasons why you feel you must go to Dunluce. It was wrong of me to use such underhanded
methods. What I did was worse than anything Kelly did to you today. I’m sorry. I won’t hurt you again.”

Hugh swallowed, then continued. “I give you my word of honor that you will be safe from all harm so long as you are here at Dungannon and in Ulster. If you will tell me when you must be at Dunluce, I will move heaven and earth to get you there on the very day you want to be there. No questions asked. We will just go. You and I. All right? Will you accept my word on that?”

Her head moved ever so softly under his hand.

“Is that aye?” Hugh asked, resting against the cold stone wall.

“Yes,” Morgana whispered.

“All right.” Hugh accepted that as answer enough. He wrapped both his arms around her and held her, asking for nothing more from her.

Some while later, the chill of the stone wall at Hugh’s back roused him to the discomfort of stiffening, pressurenumb limbs. Morgana’s breathing was as even and effortless as a sleeping kitten’s.

“I’m not asleep,” she told him.

“You were,” Hugh said, challengingly.

“No. I’ve been thinking, that’s all.”

“Thinking? Next you’ll tell me I was snoring.”

“You weren’t. You’ve just been very quiet, waiting for me to say something.”

“I told you. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“I must be at Dunluce by high tide on May the tenth. Grace O’Malley is going to meet me at the Mac Donnell’s stronghold.”

“I see.” Hugh took a deep breath, filling his lungs at the same time he told his numb legs to go back to sleep. She was a tall, full-bodied, flesh-and-blood woman, no sylph.

“Dunluce is twenty leagues north,” Hugh continued. “I could ride that in a day, if pressed. We will leave Dungannon on the seventh, if that suits you. With you riding with me, I can afford to make a more leisurely progress. If it suits
you, I’ll have Susana’s seamstress make you clothes for the journey—a new riding habit and gowns, to impress Sorely Mac Donnell. He’s a right terror of a Scotsman, and deserving of his title of the laird of the Far Isles. He’s been at war with England personally for fifty-eight years, and his rebellion has cost him two sons and three wives. He’s a good example of how not to rule one’s lands. I didn’t know he was friends with Grace O’Malley.”

“They aren’t friends. O’Malley trades with him,” Morgana explained. “I think I’d better get up now. My legs have gone to sleep.”

“Oh, Morgana, what am I going to do with you?” Hugh said, more for himself than for her. He shook his head and let his arms drop. A moment passed before she moved off his lap. The rush of blood to his ankles was absolute agony. He didn’t so much as breathe. She sat beside him, stretching her legs out, bending at the waist to reach down to her feet and rub them.

“I don’t think I can stand up.”

“That makes two of us,” Hugh admitted, gnashing his teeth. “Just wait. It will pass.”

Morgana sat very, very still, grimacing when the needle-and-pins sensation peaked. “Sweet Saint Brigit,” she gasped.

“I second that.”

Hugh rubbed his knees hard with his hands, but didn’t dare press farther down, toward his deadened feet. He cast a longing glance across the room to the guttering candles on the gateleg table. A half-full bottle of wine enticed him to try getting onto his feet. There was whiskey in the solar, if he could drag his useless legs that far and snare the decanter off the sideboard.

“Would you like something really strong to drink? Something that will blot out everything else? I would.”

“What would that be?” Morgana asked.

“Whiskey,” Hugh said grimly. “It’s in the solar. My legs are rubber. I can’t get them to work.” He could feel nothing from his knees down. Nothing.

“I’ll get the bottle.” Morgana managed to stagger to her feet. They felt very peculiar, hot and numb at the same time, but she could stand. Hugh’s sort of collapsed, even though he was only picking one leg up, behind the knee. “Don’t. I’ve heard of people breaking bones when they tried to walk on sleeping limbs. I’ll bring the bottle to you.”

Hugh didn’t want her to step out of his sight. That was the trouble. How was he going to sleep, if he had to watch her day and night? What if she got it into her head to jump again? He wasn’t certain his apology had reached her. He bit down on his tongue, holding all those doubts inside him.

She left the bedchamber, and was gone way too long to suit him. “Did you find it?”

“No.” Morgana called back through the open door. “The lights have all died out. I can’t see a thing. Where is the sideboard? On my left or on my right?”

How am I supposed to know that? Hugh wondered.

“T
ell me—” Hugh caught hold of the door frame, needing its support “—do you think that I can actually see through walls, woman?”

Morgana yelped, so startled by the proximity of Hugh’s voice in the dark that she dropped the decanter. The crystal crashed to the floor, shattering into pieces. Pungent liquor perfumed the heavy air.

“Oh, no!” Morgana gasped. “Look what you made me do! How could you sneak up on me like that? I’ve broken the crystal to pieces!”

“Lady,” Hugh grumbled as he caught her waist, staying her from bending down to pick up the broken pieces, “you are the only person I’ve ever met who could accuse me of sneaking up on them. I haven’t a quiet bone in this great, uselessly huge body of mine. Whew!”

Hugh turned his nose away from the spreading stench of potent whiskey, lifting Morgana clear of the path of glass. “Come with me. We can’t stay here breathing these fumes. We’ll both expire in it. I’ll send a servant to mop up the mess.”

“But I can’t just leave it,” Morgana protested. “I made the mess, and I’m certainly big enough to clean it up.”

“Nonsense!” Hugh dismissed her concern. “I won’t have cut fingers added to your catalog of injuries. Enough is enough, lady.”

Hugh O’Neill, Morgana was rapidly learning, was one very determined and stubborn man. His grip around her waist was as sure and steely as it had been when she dangled from one hand over the rocks and the lake. He marched in the direction of the bartizan stairwell, carting her like a sack of grain slung across his hip. “Where are you taking me?”

“Upstairs,” Hugh answered. He set her on her feet on the steep, winding steps. From the topmost floor, the resounding chimes of his clockwork marking the hour of midnight echoed down the cylindrical bartizan.

He paused at the landing to take a key from a pocket in his doublet, unlock a door and open it. Morgana peered around his shoulder into the cavernous dark chamber. Two dim and smoky oil lamps that were suspended from crossbeam rafters provided the smallest amount of light necessary to make out the chamber’s details.

Hugh slipped his hand behind her back, gently nudging her over the threshold into the room.

“Why are you taking me here?” Morgana asked. The chamber was fitted out for only one use, sleeping. A monstrously huge bed dominated it.

“Do you hear the clock?”

“Yes,” Morgana replied.

“It’s midnight. It’s time we both went to sleep.”

“But there’s a perfectly good bed already made up for me, downstairs.”

“Aye, and you just spilled a whole bottle of whiskey in the anteroom. I’d have to wake the house to have the room cleaned and aired. To tell you the truth, Morgana of Kildare, I doubt if I could close my eyes the whole night long if I allowed you beyond the hearing distance of my ears. So, for my own peace of mind, I’ve decided you’re going to sleep right here with me.”

“Sleep with you?” Morgana sputtered. “I will not!”

“Aye, you will.” Hugh stepped across the threshold and closed the door. He stuck his key in the lock and turned it.
Pocketing the key once more, he dusted off his hands as if to say, That settles that.

Morgana glared heatedly at him. “I am not going to sleep in this chamber.”

“Oh, yes, you are.” He put his fists to his hips, matching her scowl and towering temper.

Morgana sucked in her breath. “I don’t believe this! You just said, not one quarter hour ago, that you wouldn’t harm me in any way. Now listen to yourself!”

Hugh rubbed a weary hand across his face. His whiskers rasped on his callused palm, telling him he needed another shave. “Listen carefully to what I say, Morgana. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep. You need to sleep. I’m not going to touch you or harm you, but
you are sleeping here.
I’ve made up my mind about it.”

Morgana had never heard such an audacious, irrational order in her whole life. In the span of several heartbeats, no rebuttal came to mind quick enough to prevent his stalking across to a jumbled Welsh dresser, muttering, “I’m going to have that drink, too. Speak up if you want one, as well.”

He snatched a bottle off the highest shelf, uncorked it and tilted it over the rim of another glass. Amber liquid gurgled out the spout. “Well? Yes or no? Am I drinking alone?”

Morgana wanted to tell him yes, he was. She wanted to clobber him with something very large and preferably heavy, like an iron boat anchor. No such object appeared at hand in this austerely furnished room. There wasn’t even a chair or a stool or a trunk to sit on.

Making up her mind to be more perverse than he, she stomped to the Welsh dresser and snatched a glass off the countertop and thrust it out to him. He tipped the bottle and filled her glass to the rim, saying, “If that doesn’t put you to sleep, I know where there’s another full bottle that will.”

“Thank you very much!” Morgana snarled. He didn’t offer to drink to her health, and she surely wasn’t going to drink to his. As she brought the glass to her lips, she examined
the room. She identified the chamber as a pie wedge, partitioned out of one floor of the tower.

Apparently no architectural effort had ever been made to make the room more comfortable. It boasted no fireplace and no windows. Two cross-and-orb slits in the stone work would allow a defender to fire arrows onto attackers below. Those apertures explained why he’d brought her here. With the door securely locked, she obviously wasn’t going to jump out any windows or escape.

Morgana gulped a hefty swallow of the whiskey. This liquor burned the back of her throat. By the third swig, her whole mouth was numb. On the fourth, a cold sweat broke out across the back of her neck.

She stared rudely at him, watching his every move. He’d set his glass on the dressertop and begun disrobing. All sorts of thoughts, protests and demands clamored inside Morgana’s brain, as though there were ten different people inside her, each shouting to be heard above the rest.

She blinked. He unfastened his belt, rolled it into a coil and tucked it on one of the dresser’s cluttered shelves. Mesmerized, she watched his fingers deftly loosen the lacing of his doublet, tug the throat open enough to pull the garment off over his head. Her eyes widened as muscles across his back bulged and rippled their way out of the dark cloth, as if he were a snake shedding its skin. His head popped free, and he shook it negligently, making his thick, dark mane of hair fall back into place.

Morgana dipped her tongue inside the glass, lapping at the amber liquid the way a cat savors sweet cream, hardly even aware of what she was doing. She gulped a whole mouthful when he turned around, looking for her. His broad chest was completely exposed, and dark tufts of hair swirled across it, twisting into a needle-fine line that circled his navel, then slipped from her view, hidden by the concealment of his hose and trews.

He reached down, raising his foot to remove one soft-soled suede boot. The second he toed off and stepped out of.

“Come here, Morgana. I’ll undo your laces. You can sleep in your kirtle.”

“Oh, no.” Morgana shook her head. Her eyes were huge with his magnificence. She wanted to scream and cry. Why was he doing this to her? Tormenting and tempting her like this?

Morgana knew what perfection was. The classical Greek standards had been drilled into her mind long before she entered the rigid, structured environment of Saint Mary de Hogges’s Abbey. Knowledge of the arts, philosophy and humanities was part of the everyday life of a Fitzgerald son or daughter from the cradle onward. It had been thus for centuries.

So Morgana knew what the perfect man should look like beneath his clothes. And marriage, no matter how short its duration, had also schooled her in the pleasures to be had in a strong, virile man’s bed. Somehow, she managed to drag her gaze away from the man who stood before her, wearing nothing more concealing than a pair of knit stockings, which clung to his body from hip to ankle. She stared at the amber liquid in the crystal glass in her hand, wishing it were a mazer, a golden bowl in which she could see the future.

Not that she wanted to know her future. That was already a given. Her fate was sealed, as her father’s and her grandfather’s—as every Fitzgerald’s since 1534—had been sealed. All their lives were forfeit to England’s crown on a trumped-up charge of high treason. It was only a matter of time before Morgana was caught and faced her own moment of eternal truth. So, right this moment, she wanted to know Hugh O’Neill’s future.

Morgana tilted the glass once more, drinking deeply, her eyes never leaving Hugh O’Neill. Her head seemed to spin wildly. Her heart pounded heavily in her chest, slow and loud, its cadence rooted deep in preternatural elements of wind, rain, earth and fire, where time and logic held no meaning.

Catherine Fitzgerald raised her invisible hands before her grandniece’s eyes, begging softly,
Nay, nay, look not beyond this moment.

Stone walls faded. Hugh O’Neill stood before Morgana, alone atop a majestic rock fashioned into the throne of ancient kings. Around the hilltop, all the clans of Ireland circled, chanting, “Hail, Hugh, the O’Neill!”

Morgana gasped, pressing her hand against her heart, feeling its resounding beat echoed in chant ringing louder than thunder in her ears. “O’Neill, O’Neill, O’Neill.”

Aye,
Catherine whispered in her niece’s ear.
Beware, my kinswoman. Wake not the dreamer. He is the one.

Morgana put the glass to her lips and drank again. She shook her head hard to clear it. Stone walls solidified. The chant echoed to silence. Hugh O’Neill glared at her as though she’d done something unforgivable.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “You look as though you’ve just seen a ghost.”

Had she? Morgana wanted to know.

“No ghost.” Morgana averted her eyes, taking a deep breath to calm herself. The future, perhaps, or the long-ago past. Or had she seen only what she wanted to see? As she had wanted to see a heroic warrior-savior in her moment of darkest need on the river. Did she want to invest Hugh O’Neill with all her dreams and her hopes, because she had no personal future at all?

Shaken, Morgana turned from him, seeking some place to hide.

The austere chamber offered no private retreat. So she must stand and face her own demons, and come to grips with the truth that her fantasies were just that—the vivid imaginings of a foolish and undisciplined mind.

Hugh finished his drink with a scowl at the woman. Heaven help him, but she was driving him to distraction. One minute he was consumed by the need to protect her, the next he wanted to wrap his fingers around her throat and
throttle her. It was all the things she
didn’t
say that were driving him out of his mind.

One minute her eyes blazed at him with adoration that could mean only one thing. The next she stared at him as if he was something strange and repelling.

Hugh couldn’t decide whether he wanted to toss her onto his bed and bury himself inside her or unlock the door and throw her out. If this kept up, something terrible was going to happen. The odds were running high that come sunrise they’d both be dead, behind his locked door.

No. He shook his head, clearing it of that idiotic and fruitless train of thought. He was not going to harm her. He was merely making certain that nothing did happen to her. Her mind wasn’t stable. Why else would any woman have thrown herself out a window?

Enough was enough, he told himself grimly. He set his glass on the dresser, empty. The bottle was empty. Her glass was empty. His bed was empty.

He crossed the room to her, took the glass from her slack fingers and set it next to the other, beside a jumbled stack of knit hose and leggings. Hugh caught her shoulder and turned her around, so that her back was to the better lamp.

His nimble fingers tugged on the bow knot at the bottom of her vest. It hadn’t been tied all that tight to begin with, but the struggle to keep her from winding up carrion for the crows on the rocks below his tower had bound the knots.

She swayed with each of the determined tugs necessary to loosen the cords. Once the knots were freed, it took only moments more to loosen the crisscross lacing encasing her long back. He drew the slack garment off over her head, as he’d removed his own tunic.

Her poorly coiled braids fell free at the same time he tossed her vest onto a pile of his clothes. Hugh’s mouth tugged in a wry smile at the way his possessions wound up in disorderly piles. He couldn’t be bothered with such trivial things, when so many important things preyed upon his thoughts.

It hadn’t ever mattered that he kept so few pieces of furniture in this room. He’d never used this chamber for any purpose other than to sleep an hour or two at the most. He lived in his loft, on the uppermost floor of this tower. That entire floor, and the open deck above, were where Hugh devoted his nights to the passionate study of the universe. Hugh wondered what Morgana thought of this utilitarian chamber, but he wasn’t going to ask.

Her fingers clutched at the throat of her gray silk kirtle. Without the vest, it had no more shape than a night rail. Hugh blew out the flame in the nearest lamp and crossed to the other. As he reached for it, he nodded toward one side of the bed, saying, “Do humor me by taking off your boots. I’ve got an aversion to being kicked in bed. You can take your pick of the pillows.”

Morgana’s head tilted to one side, her expression puzzled. Did he really think he could just order her to sleep and she would? Suddenly it occurred to her that she could just bide her time and wait for him to go to sleep. Then she could search his clothes for the key. It wasn’t necessary that she fight and argue to get downstairs. There were always other ways to get what she wanted.

She tried to remove her shoes the way he had done, by balancing on one foot to pull off the first. That feat wasn’t possible with hot Irish whiskey boiling through her veins. Her sweaty hand slipped off the heel of her boot, and she stumbled. Hugh caught her before she tumbled to the floor.

“Be careful,” he said. Strong fingers gripped her elbow, steadying her. Morgana still felt like she was teetering. She tried to tell herself that this was the reality, not the vision. The few times she’d had visions in the past had been the same. She had difficulty afterward separating what was real from what was not.