Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] (11 page)

She
did move, pushing up on her elbows now that he’d freed her arms, and the motion caused his cloak to slip a bit, giving him a wondrous glimpse of the top swells of her lush, creamy breasts.
A low groan—nay, in truth, more the growl of a starving predator—rose in Iain’s throat, but he battled it back, disguising it as best he could behind a pitifully lame excuse for a cough.
She peered at him, something in the depths of her green gaze giving him the uncanny sensation that she knew his cough had been a ruse.
That perhaps she knew as well that everything about him was a ruse.
Knew, too, saints forbid, that he struggled against a raging desire to yank his cloak from the well-rounded globes of her breasts, exposing their sweetness to his full viewing pleasure.
Indeed, the urge to do so made his hands tremble.
But if she suspected, she glanced discreetly aside, and Iain used the moment to squeeze a much-needed gulp of air down his constricted throat.
Her
throat tightened with equally intense emotion, hot, painful, and bitterly sweet, for his daring rescue touched her more profoundly than she ought allow. His tender ministrations to her wounds poured warmth of purest, molten gold straight into her heart and pricked the backs of her eyes with scalding heat.
Biting her lip, Madeline stared hard at the distant blue line of the Highlands, and willed the unshed tears not to spill. At length she turned back to him, her vision once more clear, but still far too vulnerable to long-un-quenched needs inside her for her own good.
Far too vulnerable to him.
She stared up at him, saw his own struggles mirrored in the tense set of his jaw and the slight narrowing of his peat brown eyes. Her gaze not letting him look away, she lifted a shaky hand to the well-worn warrior’s hauberk he wore over a finely woven linen tunic.
Finely woven, and of highest quality . . . as was the leather of his hauberk, despite signs of wear.
More the trappings of a braw Highland laird than what he seemed.
Watching him carefully, she withdrew her fingers . . . but not before lighting them briefly on the finely tooled sword belt slung low on his hips. The belt, like his padded leather hauberk, appeared well worn but of superior craftsmanship.
“You are no ordinary pilgrim, sir,” she said, not surprised when a brief flare of pain flashed across his hand some face.
A faint smile, a sad one, flickered over his lips. “And you, sweet lass,” he began, gently skimming his knuckles down her cheek, “are you a true postulant?”
“I am on my way to enter a nunnery, aye,” Madeline confirmed, a shiver of regret rippling through her at his evasive answer and the necessary half-truth of her own.
“Will you tell me your name if not who you are?” she asked, not wishing to prod too deeply, bespelled or nay.
Not when she held her own silences.
“I am Iain,” he told her, the smooth richness of his voice spooling through her, entrancing her just as thoroughly it had in the cathedral . . . and her dreams.
“Iain . . . ?” she urged, so beguiled by his golden warmth, his dark masculine beauty, and the mysterious yet so compelling air of sadness surrounding him. She could almost believe he’d manifested from some silver-tongued bard’s fireside tale of legend and romance.
Her gaze dropped briefly to his handsomely tooled sword belt again, lighting, too, on his equally fine waist belt, then the buttery-soft leather of his dusty but well-made boots. “You are Iain of . . . ?” she encouraged, for to possess such fineness—and his innate aura of power and grace—he could only hail from a very great house.
He looked away without answering her, and the humming silence stretched so taut its tension crackled in the cool afternoon air.
Madeline cleared her throat. “Please, good sir, I would know but who—”
“I am just Iain,” he said, glancing back at her, the flatness of his tone revealing far more than the few spoken words. “I’ve no style to tag on to my name, lass.”
Lest you wish to call me Master of Nothing.
The unspoken words hushed past Madeline’s ear, swift as the wind and lancing her heart.
“Then I shall give you one.” The sudden urge to do so welled up from the very roots of her soul. “A very fine style.”
He cocked a skeptical brow. “Say you?”
She nodded. “Aye . . . to honor your gallantry and valor.”
Another shadow passed over his face. “I must warn you, lass, nary a soul walks this earth who’d call me either gallant or valorous.”
Madeline bristled, the pain behind his words making her simmer with anger at whoe’er or whate’er had embittered him. “And heed you, sirrah,” she informed him, all fire and energy, her own cares momentarily forgotten, “Madeline of— . . .
I
am not a maid to be swayed by common opinion. I gather and hold my own.”
“Then, sweet lassie, you are not just fair to look upon but also of good and generous heart, and I . . . thank you,” he said, a faint but unmistakable catch in his deep voice. “So what style shall you give me?”
Madeline glanced away, her mind whirling. She stared out across the heather to the long, unbroken line of distant hills. Her own beloved Highlands, resplendent in the late-afternoon light. Away on the horizon, they stared back at her, blue, shadow-chased, and gilded with palest gold.
A fine, warm gold.
Madeline smiled.
“I have it!” she announced, turning back to her shadow man. “I shall style you Master of the Highlands.”
Chapter Six
M
ASTER OF THE HIGHLANDS?
” Gavin MacFie’s astonishment hung in the air. He rubbed his bearded jaw, somehow managing to appear flummoxed, amused, and reproachful in one. “Did I hear aright? You do not jest?”
Iain ignored him.
His own face hard-set, he leaned broad shoulders against the cold gray stone of St. Thenew’s Chapel and peered up at the wispy clouds scudding across the late-afternoon sky . . . his fate and the fine mess he’d made of it taunting him from across the now-deserted kirkyard.
Drawing a deep breath, he turned his attention on the small, yew-enclosed burial ground.
She
whiled there, safely ensconced within its green-shadowed quiet, her fairness shielded from view by the broad-spreading branches of the ancient, sheltering trees.
Iain crossed his arms, his awareness of her so palpable he could taste it. His pulse a steady roar in his ears, he imagined her there, partially or wholly unclothed, even now washing the blood and horror from her sweet limbs
with buckets of water he’d drawn for her from the holy well.
Her presence stole across the little kirkyard to spool all around and through him. She fired his senses, numbed his wits, and posed a ceaseless thrumming challenge not just to his manhood, but to the very beats of his heart.
Every last one of them.
Each single breath he drew.
His mouth suddenly dry, he pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed shut his eyes, seeking the familiar solace of darkness . . . if only for a moment.
Sakes, but he even
scented
the lass. Her light, heathery scent wafted about him, bewitching him with all the subtle mastery of a queen of the fey.
Clenching his fists, his eyes still tightly closed, Iain tossed back his dark head and knew the full power of the Bane of the MacLeans. Its formidable might rode him hard and furious, roaring through him, almost a living, writhing thing, its crackling intensity unnerving him more than little else had in all his days.
Even the tinkly, splashing sounds of her hasty ablutions flooded his mind with a barrage of images searing enough to have the punctilious MacFie sputtering in shock if he dared reveal their piquancy.
His own dark side, the heated one left so long unattended, reveled in the images, clinging in particular to a most delectable one of sparkling water droplets netting the lush, red-curled abundance he knew he’d find at the juncture of her shapely thighs.
When his mind’s eye parted her legs a bit, and encouraged one glittering drop of water to break free of the red-gold curls and trickle slowly down the tender flesh of her inner thigh, Iain’s maleness jerked and leapt, the whole aching length of him stretched and filling to near bursting.
God’s eyes!
He meant to cry out, his capitulation to the clan Legend underscored by the choked groan that escaped his throat instead.
Clearly believing him seized by a bout of shortness of breath, Gavin thwacked him on the shoulder. “Master of the Highlands?” he repeated, dutifully hammering Iain’s upper back with the flat of his hand.
“Folly, pure folly, such a title, and I think you’ve gone full addled if you expect anyone to heed it,” he declared, the words and his infernal shoulder pounding shattering the sensual haze, blessedly breaking its witchy spell.
Iain glared at him. “And I think your ears are stuffed with wax,” he shot back, his chest tightening with vexation.
“I told you I did not style myself thus,
she
did,” he sought to explain, relieved to detect no sign of a quaver in his voice. “She claimed she wished to honor me for my valor and gallantry.”
MacFie’s russet brows lifted, but drew together just as quickly. Scratching his beard, he peered at Iain as if he wished to say something but, thinking better of it, chose to hold his tongue.
Iain met his narrow-eyed perusal with a scowl.
“Rest assured I informed her I can lay claim to neither quality,” he said, tight-voiced, the truth of the admission a lance jab to his tattered pride.
He turned aside, drew a hand over his mouth and chin. Gavin’s astonishment irritated him more than it should have. Until recently, he hadn’t cared a whit what anyone thought of him.
Truth to tell, he
liked
the style and wanted to savor the sentiment behind it if only for a wee bit. It’d been so long since a lass had paid him a compliment or looked on him with wonder and awe brimming in her eyes.
Regret coursing through him like a deep and sullen river, Iain studied the lichen patterns on a nearby dry stone wall until the ifs and might-have-beens in his life ceased mocking him. The instant they did, he slid Gavin a long, pointed glare.
A blazing-eyed one piled high with all his frustration. “I am not some brazen cockerel out purposely to deceive hapless maidens with false tales of valor and prowess.”
Heaving a great sigh, he ran a finger beneath the neck of his tunic, wondering at its sudden tightness. Pondering, too, the fiery-haired beauty’s startling impact on him.
MacLean Bane or nay, he found himself torn between letting her admiration spill through him like warm and golden sunshine after days of cold, dark rain or cursing himself for having slung an ever-tightening noose about his own fool neck.
“Claiming the lass as your wife before all and sundry, and saddling me with one as well, puts us in a fine predicament, my friend,” Gavin asserted, pacing the grass, his words mirroring Iain’s own concerns. “The lasses, too.”
Iain rammed an agitated hand through his hair. “Think you I am daft?” he fumed. “Unaware of the consequences wrought by my own impetuous tongue?”
A tongue fair aching to tease and taste the sweetness of the bonnie maid’s creamy skin,
his not-to-be-checked MacLean heat embellished.
In especial the lush rounds of her breasts.
A tempting array of delight mayhap this very moment, naked, wet, and glistening . . . her hands moving gently o’er the succulent fullness as she washed herself.
His loins firing yet again, he fixed his gaze on the green birchwoods and gently rolling braes stretching beyond the kirkyard, struggled to shake off the lust gripping his vitals. He failed miserably.
Too deep, too all-consuming was his desire.
A frown settling on his brow, he strode after the pacing MacFie, easily catching up with him. “Have a care, lest you push me too far,” he hissed, hurtling the whole of his annoyance at the unsuspecting MacFie. “I am many things, and most not particularly worthy, I know, but I am not without conscience.”
“I ne’er implied otherwise,” Gavin spluttered. “None theless, I cannot stand idle and see you endanger two unprotected women.”
“You may strike me down here and now if that was my wont.” Iain bristled, a fine and frothing white-edged fury roiling inside him. “I sought but to
save
them. . . and did. I ne’er meant to cause them harm.”
“But you have, willfully or nay.” Gavin sighed. “Have you considered how they are to continue on their way after your bold claims?”
Iain opened his mouth, but snapped it shut immediately, his objections toppled before they’d left his lips. He
had
thought about such things . . . but not until after he’d declared the lass his wife.
Wife.
His wife.
Icy iron bands clamped round Iain’s chest, the implications behind the two harmless-sounding words squeezing the breath from him, and even stealing the light and warmth from the sun-dappled afternoon.
A cold shudder slithered down his back, its chill reaching inside to blast his conscience with blackest frost. His thoughtlessness had already cost one wife her life.
Imperiling another—his in truth, or nay—was out of the question.
“I spoke with the older one,” MacFie was saying, his voice coming as if from a great distance. Iain blinked, tried to listen. “Nella is her name,” Gavin droned on, seemingly unaware that an invisible bank of lowering clouds had blotted out the sun. “Nella of the Marsh, and she tells me they are indeed journeying to a nunnery, though she did not reveal which one.”
In a rare showing of distinct agitation, Gavin kicked at a tussock of grass. He wheeled on Iain, his hazel eyes snapping with reproach. “If they encounter any who witnessed your posturings this day—and you know they must—and we two are not at their sides, appearing to be their husbands, they could fall prey to all manner of illwishers.”
Iain blanched, the chill inside him spreading to coat his innards and freeze his bones. Saints, he actually felt the blood drain from his face.
But then a strange rumbling, almost liked muted thunder, rose hot in his throat, sweeping away the cold on a torrent of angry, heated words. “God’s blood!” he roared, planting fisted hands on his hips. “Think you I am so blinded by my own trials I cannot see hazards of the road?”
Two swift steps brought him nose-to-nose with the Islesman. “Pernicious cutthroats bent on rapine and other vices, ravening wolves and packs of long-fanged wild boar!” he railed, not bothering to cap his fury. “They all lie in wait for the unsuspecting, and ’tis well I know it.”
Gavin spluttered something, but Iain waved him silent. “Och, aye, such terrors abound at every bend in the road, and two unescorted females make easy prey,” he seethed, not caring if his wrath singed the other’s neatly clipped beard. “Do you truly believe I am too thick-skulled to ken I’ve compounded their vulnerability?”