The Ravishing One (21 page)

“Fill that big pot standing over the hearth with water,” Thomas told Gordie, “then heat it. As soon as it’s hot, haul it up to milady’s chambers.”

“But what’ll I do with it then?” Gordie asked.

Thomas huffed in annoyance. “I’ll empty the rain barrel from the backyard and bring it here. Ye’ll empty the water in that.”

“You expect me to bathe
in a barrel
?” Fia asked.

He turned on her. “I don’t care if you bathe or not. That’s as good as ye’ll get whilst in my home, lady, and ye ought to be thankful for that.”

She returned his glare placidly. “Why is it, do you suppose, that since arriving here you’ve reverted to that extraordinary accent? It isn’t even Scottish, really. Sort of a conglomeration of accents. Where were you transported to, anyway? The Colonies?”

“I … I don’t know what you mean,” he stated in clipped, impervious, and extremely British tones. He looked at Gordie, who was snickering behind his hand. “Get on with it!”

The lad bobbed his head and scooted through the open door and down the hall, leaving Thomas with Fia.

“Well?” she said, arching one brow.

He stalked out of the room.

“I’ll get the bloody rain barrel. You stir the fire.” Thomas tramped out into the dusk and rounded the corner of the house. He found the barrel and tipped a foot of brackish water out of it before hefting it to his shoulder. As he did so he glanced up. A light sprang to life in the corner room above. A second later Fia’s dainty silhouette grew larger as she approached the window. She dipped down, and Thomas knew she was smelling the cowslip blooms.

The remnants of his anger faded as he watched—anger not at Gordie or Fia, but at Carr for his willful neglect and misuse of his only daughter.

No one had ever given her a simple flower, and Thomas wanted to know why the bloody hell not.

Even the most obtuse man alive could not have misread the surprised pleasure that had suffused Fia’s usually enigmatic features, making them for one moment something more than ravishing, something uncomplicated and clean and honest, something breathtakingly
pretty
.

She moved away from the window and he readjusted the weight of the barrel on his shoulder, the side of his mouth drawing up in chagrin. He’d been standing beneath the girl’s window mooning over her like a green lad. Worse, he was jealous of Gordie for being the first to give her cowslip. Not because the act had so obviously touched her, but because it had awoken a response in her he’d never thought to see:
kindness
.

There was no way around it. Fia had been kind to Gordie, tacitly agreeing that she—and he, he remembered with surprise—had wondered about the length of the lad’s absence. And she hadn’t balked a bit at staying in that nightmare of a room Gordie had arranged. In fact, he suspected Fia had guessed Gordie’s involvement before he’d even admitted it. She’d shown compassion in dealing with the boy. His expression turned quizzical.

Kind?
Sensitive? With naught in it for her?

This was dangerous. Fia, unaffectedly pleased and laughing, impulsive and charming and
kind
, was dangerous. Even more dangerous than the Fia who’d calculatedly purred well-rehearsed double entendres as
she slithered against him. And
that
Fia had already been far dangerous enough.

He stopped at the kitchen door and kicked it open, his thoughts in a whirl. He’d an acute sense of having just sailed into uncharted waters. And he was certain there could be no going back.

Chapter 17

H
aving caught a glimpse of herself in the dressing table’s mirror, Fia disrobed as soon as Thomas left and was waiting in dirty chemise and limp petticoat when he returned, for once absolutely innocent of calculation. But if she’d for a moment forgotten her stated intent to seduce Thomas, he hadn’t.

He took one look at her in her unprepossessing dishabille, scowled fiercely, and mumbled something about someone called MacNab taking care of her. Before she could frame a reply, he left.

She’d finished her bath—an undeniable luxury, despite the rain barrel—and was dressing in fresh clothes when a knock sounded at her door. She opened it to find a tray of food at her feet. Ravenous, she gulped
down the food, expecting Thomas to appear at any moment. He didn’t.

The next day, she waited in her room for him to come scratching. He didn’t. She took both her midday and evening meals alone in the bedroom.

The third day, she wandered downstairs to an empty house, dressed in all the splendor she could contrive out of the few garments she’d brought with her. This, to be honest, was perhaps not so very “splendid” after all, for she’d found it impossible to lace her corset by herself to the degree necessary in order to produce the flamboyant figure that had so bedazzled men in London. And her filmy dressing wrap was not all that provocative, either, unless men found the sight of gooseflesh stimulating. She’d forgotten how chilly it was in the Highlands.

Still, the extra sleep she’d enjoyed had improved her looks. The texture of her skin was smoother, the whites of her eyes were as bright as porcelain, and the shadows at her temples and beneath her eyes had disappeared. She was definitely passable, and found it caused her no small amount of disappointment when Thomas did
not
appear at her bedchamber door begging for admittance.

By now she realized that not only was Thomas not returning for supper, he wasn’t returning to the manor at all.

On the fourth day, she found Gordie piling rocks around the house. A few questions ascertained that Thomas had given him the task of rebuilding the kitchen garden wall—thus, Fia suspected, keeping
the boy from her dire influence. On the subject of where exactly Thomas was, Gordie turned as mum as a post, mumbling, blushing, and finally darting away.

She’d no doubt that she could have gotten the information out of Gordie, but that would have landed the boy in trouble, and she was loath to drag the young man into … 
whatever
this thing between her and Thomas was.

She turned east, toward where she supposed McClairen’s Isle might be, but drawn to it though she was, she knew better than to try to walk that far a distance. She hadn’t needed Thomas’s warnings about highwaymen to scare her into staying where she’d been so summarily put. She’d lived in these lands. The face of poverty-inspired desperation was no stranger to her; her own father had been its author.

So she wandered back into Thomas’s unsoaped, unwashed, unscoured, unrinsed, and unwiped house, idly watching Gordie’s narrow sunburned back as he stacked stone upon stone around the place, until it finally drove her mad. Or to such madness as housekeeping was.

She removed corset and petticoat and donned a simple—and warm—dress and commenced to work, finding if not pleasure in the activity, at least the means to fall asleep at night without Thomas’s image haunting her.

That evening Fia finally met the hitherto unseen Mrs. Grace MacNab—a woman whose talents in the kitchen more than made up for her lack of prowess with a broom. The elderly woman eyed Fia with monumental disinterest, muttered, “Good. Now I’ll
not have to tote tha tray up tha stairs,” and went back to placidly stirring the pot of vegetables simmering on the hearth.

It took Fia somewhere under an hour to determine that Mrs. MacNab’s conversational abilities ranked somewhere below her housekeeping skills. But after one bite of the dour Scotswoman’s rich, savory stew, Fia decided that if a dirty house was the price one paid for Mrs. MacNab’s stew, it was a bargain.

When Mrs. MacNab
did
speak, she was invariably blunt, but she was also, with the exception of the perennially blushing and tongue-tied Gordie, the only person Fia saw. Thus, on her fifth evening at the manor, Fia was already in the kitchen when Mrs. MacNab arrived from wherever it was she lived.

“Ah! You’re early. Good. I’m famished,” Fia said, when the kitchen door swung open and Mrs. MacNab entered, a load of fresh vegetables piled in her plump arms.

“Did na’ eat yer dinner, then?” Mrs. MacNab asked, scrutinizing her closely as she dumped the produce on the table. “Are ye sick? Fer if ye are, I’d best send Gordie ta fetch the laird.”

“No,” Fia hastened to assure her. “I am fine. I just have a healthy appetite.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Mrs. MacNab agreed, shaking out a large, moth-eaten square of linen and tying it around her ample middle. “Well, if yer sure?”

“I am!” She could imagine nothing more mortifying than having Thomas Donne brought to her under false pretenses.

“Should I bring yer food into the dining room when it’s done?” Mrs. MacNab asked.

“No,” Fia said quickly, fearful of being excluded from yet another living creature’s company. She would never have thought herself so dependent on the simple solace one found in being in another’s presence. It alarmed her a little. “I’ll eat in here.”

Besides, she told herself, there was really no reason to dirty the dining room. Particularly as that very morning she’d spent a good three hours there, with the windows flung wide as she beat the heavy draperies and then swept the resultant dust from the carpet.

She didn’t fret over what ridiculous conclusions Thomas might make if he were to discover the means by which she’d taken to wasting the days. It was her experience that males seldom noted their surroundings unless they contributed directly to their discomfort.

“Suit yerself,” Mrs. MacNab said, disappearing into the pantry.

“Do you mind if I wait in here while you make the meal?” Fia asked hesitantly. She could so easily be rejected.

Mrs. MacNab reappeared carrying cheese and what looked like some dried weeds, which she deposited on the table alongside the fresh vegetables. “Makes no mind to me, lass.”

Mrs. MacNab then proceeded to chop, mince, hammer, pulverize, and otherwise lay waste to everything on the table before adding each ingredient in some arcane and complicated order to a skillet filled
with sizzling butter. The fragrance nearly sent Fia into a swoon.

Throughout all, Mrs. MacNab said not a word. Knives flashed, wooden spoons whirled, and by the time she was done flour dusted the air and the floor and every other surface. But after one taste of the delicious savory custard flan that appeared from the skillet, Fia would gladly have cleaned the tiles on her knees for another bite.

At the end of her meal, Fia pushed herself away from the table and casually asked the question plaguing her. “Where is Captain … Thomas?”

Mrs. MacNab dumped the lump of dough she’d been stirring in a huge earthenware bowl onto the table’s far end. She smacked the wad of dough, sending a puff of flour into the air. “Ye mean the McClairen.”

Fia regarded the stout woman curiously. “You do realize that clans have been abolished and the chieftains divested of their authority?”

“Oh, aye,” Mrs. MacNab responded placidly, rolling the dough with the heels of her hands. “So I hear tell. But tha’ means nothing to us.”

“Who is ‘us’?”

“Clan McClairen,” Mrs. MacNab answered with a touch of impatience. “Who else?”

“But I thought that C—” She caught back her words just in time. “I’d heard the McClairens were gone from these parts.”

“Aye.” Mrs. MacNab snorted, kneading away. “ ‘Gone’ is one way ye might put it. And we were, too. But
he
found us.” For the first time emotion
underscored the woman’s voice. “Found most of us in the Americas but some of us in the lowlands and a few, like me, were in Edinburgh.”

She paused in the middle of her kneading. “ ’Course, Jamie stayed here all along with old Muira and a few others that preferred to live like animals in the coves rather than run.

“But the rest of us, I’m shamed ta say, had scattered like cunny flushed from a warren after Carr informed on Ian McClairen and killed his McClairen bride.”

Fia’s head shot up. She forced herself to relax. To hear someone describe her mother’s murder so prosaically … She waited for the inevitable inner recoil that always accompanied the thought of her mother’s murder.

Was there a name for it? Like “patricide” or “matricide”? It seemed to her that there ought to be a specific term for the murder of a wife, and a specific name for the children of such a murderer. A brand of sorts to mirror the brand in her mind … and heart.

The pain and recoil came, but less insistently this time. The long-standing question still bubbled beneath the surface, demanding an answer she did not own—what had Carr’s blood bequeathed her? What did having a murderer’s blood in her veins make
her?

Always before she’d heeded whatever inner protective devices had kept her from examining those questions too closely. Now she tentatively examined the very peripheries.

When she’d realized who Thomas was, she’d understood the bitterness that had rung in his voice when
he’d spoken to Rhiannon Russell all those long years ago. Carr’s crime had been not only against a defenseless woman, it had been against a member of Thomas’s family—albeit a distant relation.

And if Janet had been Thomas’s relative, then that meant that Thomas’s people were, in some distant manner, her people.
Her people
.

The concept still surprised Fia. She had always considered herself uniquely alone—cut off from her brothers by her father and later cut off from her father by the truth. But suddenly she had … people. She stared at the homely, bovine Mrs. MacNab bent over her dough.

“Are
you
a McClairen?”

“Aye. I were in Edinburgh, working in a kitchen after me husband was killed at Culloden. The laird come down—oh, about five years ago now—and says he’s come to fetch me home to the”—she looked up, cleared her throat, and went on—“isle. We was spread far and few but somehow the laird found all of us that was left. He paid up fer them that be in servitude and bought passage home fer them that was far away.”

“And are there many?”

“La! Twenty-four of us. Twenty-three fer a while, but last spring Gavin’s lady had a son.” An unexpectedly tender smile appeared on Mrs. MacNab’s face.