Timeless Desire (29 page)

The flames in MacIver’s eyes were fire now. “Not a Scot? Not a
Scot
? You are half Scot, you maneuvering English bastard. Would you deny your mother’s blood?”

“
You
did!”

MacIver grabbed him by the coat with his good arm and shoved him into the wall. A whiplash of pain flew up his buttock and back.

“You have given me no reason to believe you. None. You’re asking me to betray my men. To snatch a battle from their teeth. You have no idea what you’re asking.”

“I know what I’m asking. But you must. You must keep them from attacking.”

The man’s gaze burned into Bridgewater’s eyes, and he held the head of his cane aloft as if he would bring it down upon his grandson’s head with the slightest provocation.

“If you wish me to trust you, you will learn what it is to carry MacIver blood in you. If you wish me to act on your words, you will take the clan oath before the men here and claim your rightful Scots heritage.”

Bridgewater would be throwing his lot in with Scotland. He would be stripped of his commission, if not hanged.

“I cannot,” he said. “You of all people know what it means to have risen to a place where you command men. If the army discovers I have taken such an oath, I will be removed.”

Bridgewater saw the doom of his effort with each passing second. Then his grandfather’s grip slackened.

“Fine. You will take the oath before me. And you will marry the girl—here, now, before you leave. Show me you are not just a by-blow of that English blackguard. Show me you have enough MacIver blood in you for me to trust.” He released his hold.

Marry her?
Bridgewater’s mind raced. “But she is not mine to command.”

“One hour,” MacIver said. “Appear before me ready to meet my demands, or I shall let the clan chiefs know we have an English agent in our midst.”

P
ANNA OPENED THE DOOR AND LOOKED
B
RIDGEWATER OVER
. “H
EY
, whaddya know? No new injuries. That’s got to be a good sign, right?”

Jamie didn’t laugh, though Mrs. Brownlow smiled from her place on the bed. In fact, Jamie had the same look on his face that Panna remembered her brother had on his when he found out his wife was having twins.

“What is it, Jamie?”

He summoned a small half smile at her use of his Christian name, and a sprig of joy blossomed in her heart. But the sprig wilted when he closed the door and said, “Panna, we need to talk.”

The last time someone had said that, it had been Charlie after a routine checkup two weeks before their seventh wedding anniversary. Her throat dried. She knew she was being was ridiculous—Jamie could hardly have contracted a terminal illness in the last twenty minutes—but it was hard not to run down the same road.

He bowed to Mrs. Brownlow, whose tears had been calmed in his absence. “Would you be willing to give us a few minutes?”

“Hector would’na want me to leave her alone,” she said apologetically. “Not now.”

Not after taking Panna’s virginity, she meant. Panna saw the blood flood across Jamie’s cheeks, matching the warmth on her own. She had assured Mrs. Brownlow that Jamie had not hurt her or drawn her into anything against her will but had stopped short of detailing any more clearly what had gone on between them. Even in the eighteenth century, Panna clung to her right to at least some privacy.

Jamie cleared his throat, and the flush grew redder. “Please? A few moments. I promise nothing will happen.”

Mrs. Brownlow rose from the bed uncertainly, as if she were leaving a bottle of gin on a chair in an AA meeting. “I’ll be right outside.”

When the door closed again, Panna found herself feeling the same sort of awkward, charged current between them as if Jamie
had
seduced her, especially with the regret that lingered in his eyes.

“I am most sorry to have embarrassed you,” he said. “Twas most thoughtless of me to come to your room.”

She waved away his concern. “What were you going to do? You’d been shot, for God’s sake. Please don’t worry about it. I can deal with a little scrutiny. What happened with your grandfather? Will there be a battle?”

The regret in his eyes turned to worry, and his gaze turned toward the hills in the distance. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Jamie, what happened?”

He sighed. “I must ask you for a favor, though ‘favor’ is hardly the word to describe it.”

“Certainly. Anything I can do. What?”

“I do not think you will find it so easy to agree once I tell you. My grandfather was already quite angry, as you know. Then we fought about my mother.”

“Oh, Jamie.” Panna had held out a slim hope that once Hector MacIver got past his initial fury, the two men would reconcile.

“By the time I began to encourage him to cancel the attack, he was not inclined to put a lot of credence in what I had to say.”

“But surely to protect his men—”

“Protecting his men is just as likely to depend on
not
listening to me. Panna, he has no reason to believe what a captain from Her Majesty’s army says to him. The army has lied to the Scots too many times before.”

“But you’re his grandson. You’re blood.”

He gave her an amused look, his eyes as clear as the morning sky. “You sound like him. He’d be pleased.” He stepped to the window, his hands clasped behind his back. “And blood”—his eyes flicked over the sheets, still streaked with crimson—“is the bargain he has offered me.”

A chill went down Panna’s spine.
“Blood?”

“Mine—and yours. MacIver will try to convince the other chiefs to cancel the attack if I swear my oath to the clan—and you and I marry.”

“What?”
Panna felt dizzy.

“Tis the vengeance he exacts for my ravishment of you. He finds the sins of the Earl of Bridgewater too richly inscribed upon my character.”

She shook her head, unable to speak. She’d hardly considered another marriage, so absorbed had she been in simply trying to outrun the pain the last two years. She was very fond of Jamie, but fondness did not equate to marriage, not in her world. Besides, did he think—did either of them think—a marriage here would commit her to this time? “Oh, Jamie, I—”

“Twould not be a real marriage,” he said quickly. “I know you don’t love me in that way.”

She didn’t know what to say. They’d known each other a day and a half. Despite a confusing maelstrom of attraction, desire and admiration, she could hardly contradict him.

“And I myself have no high opinion of such a covenant,” he added.

“You don’t believe in marriage?”

His gaze fell. “I had no example from which to learn, save my father and his wife, and to me their marriage seemed only a wall built to protect their riches and keep out those like my mother and me who attempted to attack it. I have no interest in such a thing.”

“So you’re saying we would marry with no thought of upholding the vows.”

“Panna, I am quite sensible of the fact that you are an unwilling visitor here—”

“Unexpected,” she said softly. “Not unwilling.”

“—and that I must deliver you to the chapel and back into the hands of those you have left.”

She thought of Charlie and that empty bed.

“Even if I believed in the covenant of marriage,” he said in a careful voice, “I could not have it with you. So, aye, if you are willing to accept the vow for the day or so it might take me to return you to the chapel, traversing the space of three centuries will put an end to it.”

As if time or space could erase such a vow.

Panna was not a deeply religious person, though the things she did believe she held close to her heart. She knew one thing for sure, however: If she stood at an altar and pledged her troth to Jamie, it would be a pledge she carried with her to some degree forever.

“Jamie, think about what you’re asking.”

“I know what I’m asking. And I know it’s not fair. But there are people whose lives will depend on it. Clare’s father died in a clash with the clans. So did his brother. Reeves’s sister was left a widow with four children. He supports his own family and hers. In a battle of any size, there are at least a dozen men who die. In the battle the army and the clans will undertake, it could be ten times that. I do not have the right to ask you, but I will not shield you from the truth, either.”

She thought of her brother fighting in Afghanistan and how she prayed each night for his safety. What would it be like to lose him? What would it be like to know that there was a woman somewhere who could have saved her brother’s division from certain death, but hadn’t done it? Panna would be furious—beyond furious. Who wouldn’t trade a mere wedding promise for the life of a man? Panna would have given anything—anything, including her own life—to save Charlie. How could she refuse the same succor to another wife or sister?

Jamie looked at her, his face as grave as she had ever seen it.

“And you say this vow will mean no more to you than it does to me?”

A muscle moved at the edge of his jaw. “No.”

She nodded. “I’ll do it, Jamie.” Even if it meant one more vow life would keep her from upholding.

His shoulders relaxed and he threw his arms around her. “Thank you.”

Panna squeezed him back, and when their eyes met, she found it impossible not to lift her mouth to his.

For a long moment the world stood still—no earl, no chiefs, no war, just her and Jamie in the morning sun.

“Ooh,” she whispered when they parted.

In response, he pressed his fingers along her ribs and made a tiny noise of agreement deep inside his chest.

An unpleasant thought struck her, and she lifted her head. “Oh, Jamie, I just realized you said you had to swear an oath. What does that mean?”

She could feel the beating of his pulse under her palms. “It means I accept my place in the MacIver clan.
That
I can do. Hector MacIver is my grandfather, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Unfortunately, taking an oath also means I put the needs of the clan above anything else.”

She knew enough from what she’d read of blood oaths to know that they were not taken lightly—not by those taking them, nor by those administering them. “But the army . . . ?”

“Aye, the army and England. I have already taken oaths. I cannot to swear to anything that would displace those.”

Here she was, worrying about the promise she’d make to a man she’d likely never see again, when he was struggling with something much harder. “Then how can you do it, Jamie?”

“Making a blood oath to the MacIvers will save hundreds of men, if not thousands, Panna—Scots and Englishmen alike. For that by itself I would swear my allegiance to the devil, let alone Hector MacIver. But I do not think such an oath violates my duty to England. For years I have circled treason and looked into its ferocious jaws. I do what I do because I love my country, just as I love the kinsmen of my mother. I can navigate the murky waters of these loyalties just as long as I keep myself pointed in the direction of peace, which represents the best outcome for everyone.”

She looked at him, a man who decried the church, standing before her with a black eye, a swollen lip, a body savaged by wounds from battles present and past. This man held peace before all else and was willing to sacrifice his soul to help deliver it.

“Oh, Jamie.”

He pulled her to him again, and she lost herself in his kiss. She would gladly make a vow to him, enthralled to be in his orbit, if only for a few more hours.

The door opened. Mrs. Brownlow’s face fell. “Jamie Bridgewater—”

He held up his hand. “No more reproofs. Now is the time for congratulations. Panna has agreed to marry me.”

Mrs. Brownlow cupped a hand over her mouth, happiness bursting from her round face. Having already foreseen what was coming, Panna reached for the handkerchief and handed it to her.

“Och, Jamie,” the older woman cried, the tears beginning anew, “your mother would be so happy! I wish she were here.”

He clasped Panna’s elbow. “I do, too.”