Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] (7 page)

Air so like that of home, her eyes watered . . . or would have if she’d been of a mind to allow such an indulgence.

And of a certainty she wasn’t, so she leaned against a square-toothed merlon in the parapet walling and blinked back the hot sting of tears before they could fall.

Beside her, Boiny dropped to his haunches and gave a deep-chested, elderly-dog grunt. He leaned heavily against her, well-pleased to sit even if his milky gaze revealed his sympathy for her troubles.

Fighting the hollow feeling inside her, Amicia stroked the dog’s soft, floppy ears and stared out to where the moon cast a silvery pathway over the night-blackened sea.

That
was what she needed . . . a magical path out of the darkness she’d awakened in. A path she’d need to forge for herself, that much she knew.

But how?

Her new husband was loath to keep her.

And a wee wisp of a fawning she-cat was bound and determined to keep him!

“You will soon be sending her away. . . .”
Amicia mimicked Janet’s trillings, her cheeks hot as flame despite the night’s cold.

She looked down at Boiny, knew heart-swelling gratitude for his company. “Did you hear her?” she asked him, her hand moving to knead the loose skin of his rough-coated shoulders. “Have you e’er seen such a display of well-honed wenchy wiles?”

Her pulse kicking up in agitation, she fussed with the fall of her cloak, silently cursed its heaviness. Pest and botheration, ne’er could any female save an undergrown, great-eyed beauty of delicate, nymphlike proportion pull off such an exhibition without appearing ludicrous.

Ire churning inside her, she leaned harder against the icy-cold granite of the merlon. Constricting bands of ne’er before experienced doubts and inadequacies clamped fast round her rib cage, squeezing with a vengeance.

Over and over again, the younger woman’s simpering echoed in her mind, taunting her.

“A plague on her,” Amicia mumbled, frowning out at the tossing seas.

Faith, with her
handsome height and bold form,
as her brothers were fond of describing her, she could never coo and simper at a man—any man—without looking, and feeling, an utter fool.

An ungainly and awkward fool.

Sighing, she dashed a stray raindrop from her cheek. How could she compete with a nemesis whose waist she could span with her own two hands?

By being yourself and trusting your heart,
the wind seemed to whisper, pausing in its racing fury to caress her cheek most gently.

Amicia blinked.

She tilted her head to listen, but naught else came. Too much of an Isleswoman to discount such an urging, however faint or fleeting, she lifted her chin, shoved back the hood of her cloak. The wind, once more speeding across the ramparts, tore at her hair and cooled her flushed cheeks, its buffeting might a welcome relief to the hot MacLean blood coursing through her veins.

A legacy she held in tight rein . . . most times.

Curbing it now—as best she could—she trailed her fingertips along the cold, damp stone of the crenel’s edge and considered her options.

Since time beyond memory, MacLean men were known to be blessed with all manner of traditions and enchantments to smooth their way to finding the ladies of their hearts.

MacLean women enjoyed no such boons.

They had to craft and hone their own devices.

They had to be strong.

So Amicia stiffened her spine. Without doubt, nary a one of her ancestresses would have cowered before the silly posturings of a wee snippet of a lass who ought have a care lest a good Highland wind blow her from the field of competition.

Feeling better, she pulled in another great, greedy gulp of the bracing night air, savoring its salty tang. She might be made to walk along a black precipice, but she would not tumble over the edge.

And if any fool sought to accost and push her,
she
wouldn’t be the one to lose her footing.

“Nor will I be set aside,” she announced to Boiny . . . and the plaudits of the keening wind.

“And I, my lady, have not yet decided aught about a-setting you anywhere.”

Amicia’s heart near leapt from her throat. She spun around, spied
him
standing just outside of the faintly lit arch of the tower doorway. He came forward with long strides and she nigh swooned at the sight of him . . . despite the unsmiling grimness of his handsome face.

He’d bathed, and his damp hair gleamed in the moonlight while the wind lifted the lower edges of his clean, newly donned plaid, each sweet glimpse of his legs revealing how powerfully muscular they had grown in the years since she’d last seen him.

Not that they’d not been well-muscled enough to melt a lass even then.

Most unnerving of all, the gusty wind carried his scent, teasing her with tantalizing little whiffs of damp leather, peat smoke, and whate’er unidentifiable soap he’d used. Traces of the wild night clung to him as well, and a wee touch of pure and earthy maleness.

Just enough to make her senses whirl, set her stomach all aflutter, and send her resolve to stand proud before him flying to the stars.

“A good eve to you,” she managed at last, raising her voice above the pounding of her heart. “I am pleased you came to join me.”

“As well that I did, I am thinking—if only to encourage you to abandon such an inhospitable corner of this cold, wet night and seek your bed, my lady,” he said, stepping up to her. “Though I will not lie to you . . . I did not come here seeking you. I simply felt a sore need for solitude.”

The words no sooner left his mouth than a burst of chill, damp wind hit Amicia full in the face, its wet slap underscoring the wisdom of doing exactly as he’d urged. But her MacLean determination held her in place.

“You are full blunt, my lord.” She met his gaze straight on, blinked a few raindrops from her eyes. “Know you, I value honest words and set them high above
affected
speech, however sweet upon the ears such might fall.”

“Saints be praised for that,” he said, ignoring—or mishearing—her true meaning, that of the wee jab at Janet that she couldn’t keep herself from saying.

“To my sorrow,” Magnus resumed, “I am not as adept with words as my youngest brother, Hugh. He has the golden tongue of the family as you have surely noticed if he still strolls about with his lute slung o’er his shoulder. I am none so gifted, but I try to speak my mind.”

Pausing, he glanced up at the night sky overspread by heavy, fast-moving clouds. “Just because I sought a quiet moment does not mean I am not gladdened to find you here.”

Amicia hugged herself against the cold, couldn’t stop one doubtful brow from arching. “So you could hasten me to my bed?”

“Hear me, lass, for I would not unduly hurt you,” he said, his ill ease almost pouring off him. “What you saw . . . or heard about my bath . . .” He broke off, rammed his fingers through still-damp hair. “Janet means naught to me. Not as you are thinking. I esteem her greatly, aye, and I owe her loyalty and more, for she is kin. But I love her as a sister only, that I swear to you.”

His bath.

A soothing pleasure aided by Janet’s delicate hand.

At the thought, green-tinged chills stabbed up and down Amicia’s back. Sweet Mary Mother, of his sincere-sounding speech she’d heard scarce little beyond those two damning words.

A hot-glowing flush sprang onto her cheeks. “If you would not hurt me, then do not send me away,” she stressed, disregarding her pride even if he wielded his own like an impenetrable shield. “I pray you, do not suffer me the shame or anguish of returning me to Baldoon.”

He raised a brow at that, but glanced aside, his face set as if carved of the same cold granite as his castle home. A long, awkward silence stretched between them, broken only by the soft patter of rain on the stone flags of the wall-walk and the hollow whistle of the wind.

“The only shame is mine to bear, my lady, for it will take me overlong to repay your brother the dowry moneys already spent.” He kept his gaze fixed on the distant horizon. “As for suffering, Doon is a well-favored isle, Baldoon one of the finest strongholds—”

“I bid you to honor my own perception of shame and suffering,” she countered, deflecting his objections as ably as a well-practiced knight parries an opponent’s sword thrusts. “Would you but know me better, you’d see the folly of your words.”

Magnus swallowed, moistened lips gone suddenly dry. “But I am thinking of you, lass,” he said, and hoped the words didn’t sound as insipid to her ears as they did to his own. “I would not keep you here, bound to a man without enough coin to feed you properly much less—”

“I will not go back.” She folded her arms, her dark eyes flashing rebellion.

Drawn by that fire, and the underlying note of desperation she couldn’t quite disguise, Magnus cursed himself for a fool, enchanted, when he should have been mightily vexed.

Ne’er had any female spoken thus to him, but the slight quaver in her voice and the rapid-beating pulse at the base of her throat belied her mettle, and saints help him, but he wanted to cradle her against his chest and comfort her.

Her scent—warm, womanly, and laced with a faint touch of heather—made
him
long for succor.

The dark, languorous kind he hadn’t enjoyed in more years than he cared to admit.

Mayhap never, were he honest.

He frowned, tried not to inhale too deeply. Or note the agitated rise and fall of her breasts.
Notably lush breasts.
Even the heavy lie of her cloak couldn’t hide their bounty. Magnus stifled a groan. Keeping her would prove a greater trial than any he’d ever faced on the tourney field.

Her indisputable charms would not be so easily ignored as the dubious offerings of the less than savory light skirts e’er so eager to spread their legs for jousting champions or, truth be told, any knight or lairdling with a
siller
or two to spare.

As if aware of his quandary and the power she held over him, she moved closer, her imploring gaze searing his soul. Sakes, he couldn’t budge a muscle if his life depended on it—she befuddled him beyond all good reason.

“I appeal to your knightly honor, sir,” she said, not batting an eye. “Please reconsider your desire to nullify our marriage.”

Magnus near choked. She had no idea of the kind of desire she unleashed in him.

“It is
because
of my honor that I would see you returned,” he said, lighting his fingers to the glossy black braid coiled over her ear. A grave error in judgment, for the cool silkiness of her hair launched an immediate assault on his fortitude. “I may be sore weary from what transpired at Dupplin Moor, but I am ever yet a man. Think you I could know you beneath my roof—as my own lady wife—and not touch you?”

She stepped closer. A ploy that worked, for those scant few inches of nearness and the dangerously seductive sensuality flowing out from her set his body on fire and had him beyond all coherent thought.

“You are much mistaken if you believe I am asking you not to touch me,” she was saying, her clean, heathery scent stealing his breath. “I only plead you not to shame me by sending me back.”

“I—” Magnus broke off at once and frowned. Now he could not even get words past his fool tongue!

“Or would you risk rekindling our clans’ old enmity by shunning me?”

The softly spoken words split through the sensual haze that had been fogging his wits. “’Twas a stolen bride that began the feud between our families, not a
returned
one.”

“A shunned bride is the greater insult, is it not?”

A surge of ill ease crashed through Magnus. He blew out a frustrated breath. Where he’d only hoped to soothe, he now stood on thinnest ice. There
had
been strife off and on between their clans for centuries—even if no one could say which clan originally stole whose bride.

The tradition had been born and every hundred years or so, a MacKinnon—or a MacLean—bride or betrothed found herself snatched away in the dark of night, ne’er to be seen again until her belly swelled with her captor’s get.

And so the feuding would begin anew.

“You are neither stolen nor shunned,” Magnus said, a great weariness settling on his shoulders. “Your brothers know that. They will not be looking to violate our truce when I but seek to uphold your honor.”

“My honor or your pride?”

Magnus could not answer her.

“There are other reasons I would ask you not to send me away,” she said after a few moments of silence. “I would appeal to you to spare me a future as a smiled-upon-but-pitied clanswoman at another woman’s table. I would have . . . I only wish a husband and family of my own.”

When he still did not answer, she peered at him, earnest challenge all over her beautiful face. “In return for keeping me, you may touch or have me any way it pleases you.”

This time, Magnus did choke. “This is madness . . . allowing you to stay,” he spluttered, seeing his doom in the quick flash of triumph in her eyes. “Purest folly.”

“Then you will not send me away?”

Wordless, Magnus shook his head.

“I thank you, sir.” She beamed at him, and even old Boiny, the mangy turncoat, looked pleased. “You shall not regret your decision, I promise you.”

His decision?

Magnus almost snorted. Instead, he merely inclined his head, and hoped it appeared as a tired nod rather than a defeated one.

“Dagda tells me she’s been planning a celebratory feast,” he said, hoping to regain some semblance of control in a world spinning fast out of his grasp. “Once it is held, I will join you in old Reginald’s chambers of a night, and you shall serve as Coldstone’s chatelaine. As befits my wife. If any question your position, I shall have words with them. But between us, my lady, in the sanctity of our bedchamber, I pray you not to expect much of me.”

“You are a true knight,” his newly accepted wife said, not needing many words.

A blind man could see that she reveled in her victory.

And that she wholly expected to tear down whatever safeguards and boundaries he’d just attempted to erect.