Until the Knight Comes (6 page)

He folded his arms, doubt all over him. “What then, my lady?”

Mariota swallowed, keenly aware of his men bustling about the bailey. “I simply thought to dwell here in solitude—like you,” she said, trying hard not to fidget. “It was ne’er my intent to deceive you. For truth, I sought these walls because I believed you did not exist!”

A glint of amusement lit his eyes. “Then I vow we share more than one might venture, since I find the existence of a
wife
equally astonishing.”

He paused and the gleam turned cynical. “Aye, not to be believed. And nigh as inexplicable as why a woman of gentle birth would hie herself into such a dark glen as this?”

“Why, indeed?” Mariota quipped, nervousness edging her voice. “There are reasons aplenty, do not doubt it.”

“Even so, do you not fear broken men, my lady?” He towered over her, the wind whipping his plaid, tossing his hair. “Caterans who skulk through empty lands such as these? Burning and pillaging as they go?”

“Are
you
such a man?”

Surprising her, he laughed, and the brief glimpse of warmth proved . . . devastating. “I have told you who I am,” he said, serious again. “’Tis who
you
are, that I would know.”

“I am Mariota of Dunach,” she admitted, her heart clenching on the name. “And I was raised to fear little, though I am wise enough to avoid the notice of such marauders as you described.”

“And how?” His brow shot upward. “By hiding away and claiming to be lady of this keep?”

“I will not deny that . . . deception,” she owned, guilt pinching her again. “Cloaking myself with what I believed to be an empty title seemed harmless. In especial, if doing so might warn off unwanted . . . attentions.”

Kenneth looked at her, admiring her spirit even as he strove not to be swayed by the fetching gold flecks in her enormous, sea-green eyes.

Something about her summoned images of hot, tumbled bedding and rich, satisfying sensual sport.

Worse, a trace of vulnerability that made him want to protect her.

Frowning, he forced himself to recall other green eyes. Ones not near so luminous and vulnerable as Lady Mariota’s, but potent enough to chill his blood and banish unwanted bestirrings.

“So-o-o, Mariota of Dunach,” he began, “whose bothersome attentions drove you here?”

She drew a deep breath. “I misspoke,” she admitted. “’Twas not unwanted attentions that brought me here, but . . . wrath and superstition. I was to be sacrificed—given in offering to the Each Uisge of River Inver. Some might scoff at water-horses and other such mythical beasts, but those who believe fear them mightily. I escaped only because Nessa took great hazards to rescue me.”

“I see,” Kenneth said, the weight of his knightly spurs suddenly tremendous.

Not that it mattered.

He’d just stepped into a whirl of chaos and honor demanded he dwell there.

The ancient code of Highland hospitality fettered him, binding him to grant her sanctuary. As did his newly bestowed knighthood. That, and his inability to walk past a woman in need.

A compulsion that had often caused him more than his share of grief.

So he blew out a frustrated breath that felt uncomfortably like resignation. “The effort it took you to come here was trouble well spent,” he heard himself saying, his voice sounding like a stranger’s. “You will be safe at Cuidrach, I promise you.”

But she didn’t seem to hear him, her gaze sliding past him into the hall where some of his men had stripped to the waist and were taking turns at the steaming cauldron. Sir Lachlan, the contented-looking loon, was already full submerged in a hastily readied bathing tub.

A rickety-looking contrivance set discreetly in a darkened alcove and clearly meant for his own bathing pleasure as well as his captain’s.

“You needn’t offer to bathe me,” he said, noting her flush. “I will leave such niceties to my captain. A dipped bucket from the castle well will suit me fine.”

“I thank you, then—and for everything,” she said, the color in her cheeks deepening. “But your men, will they not look askance at me after I’ve . . . now that I’ve—”

“Named yourself lady of the keep?” he supplied, his gaze on the band of white skin at the base of the third finger of her left hand.

A revelation that sent heat pouring into his loins.

“Och, nay, they willna mind,” he said, certain of it. “They’ll relish your presence, my lady or no.”

He took her arm then, guiding her back into the hall, a scene now rife with warmth and domesticity, the very air gilded by the bare-bottomed brawn and muscled flesh of his weary but grinning men.

“Oh!” Her eyes widened on Jamie. Full naked and beaming, he was accepting a drying cloth from Nessa’s outstretched hand. “He is—”

“Aye, that he is,” Kenneth agreed, smiling for the first time since glimpsing
her
nakedness limned so seductively in the tower window.

A vision still tormenting and rousing him.

“Tell me,” he began, stopping to adjust the fall of his plaid, “did those poltroons in Assynt choose you as their Each Uisge’s victim because you are widowed?”

She blinked. “Widowed?”

He glanced at her hand, indicated the place where, until her flight from Drumodyn, Hugh the Bastard’s ring had adorned her finger.

Mariota swallowed, cast about for an explanation. One that wouldn’t brand her as a light-skirt. But then men began gathering at the fireside, flagons of ale in their hands, sweet ballads on their lips.

“Come you,” urged the new Keeper of Cuidrach, dragging her toward the merrymakers, “we shall speak of your travails later—for the nonce, my men will entertain us.”

But Mariota held him back, tugged on his arm. “Your men? Do you not sing then?”

“Me?” He flashed her a disarming smile. “Fair lady, I could not compose verse if my life depended on it. The moon would sooner tumble from the heavens.”

Mariota eyed him, her pulse holding still. “Most knights are well skilled in spinning poignant song, seducing with their words.”

“Not this knight,” he assured her. “You will see I am less practiced in the usual chivalric niceties.” He paused, cocking a brow. “Does my lack of a silvered tongue bother you, Lady Mariota?”

“Bother me?” She shook her head, her pulse now racing. “Nay, I am glad. Indeed, I say it a boon.”

A blessing that both relieved and unsettled her.

Several hours later, even as long, rough swells broke upon the rocks below the Bastard Stone and lashing rain swept Cuidrach’s cliff-girt shore, a gentler night curled round distant Drumodyn Castle. The soft mist drifting past its thick walls and stout towers at stark contrast to the turmoil gathering within.

And at the center of that storm, one man, Ewan the Witty, held court, his scowls sharp as the razor-edged steel of a sword, his deep voice booming.

“A red fox?”
he snorted, no trace of humor on his rough-hewn features. “Och, saints alive—I do not trust my own ears!”

Garrison captain to the recently murdered Hugh Alesone, he fisted his hands and frowned—as did every other bearded, plaid-hung follower and erstwhile companion-in-arms of the late, great Bastard of Drumodyn.

His still-faithful minions crowded the smoky, black-raftered great hall, their dark stares and fury aimed at one hapless member of their number.

Wee Finlay—the unfortunate soul whose supposedly light task it’d been to watch over a simple lute.

Albeit a priceless one.

A gold and gem-encrusted instrument of untold worth, come only shortly into their hands. Left behind, or forgotten in haste, when its owner, the conniving bardess who’d brought them such grief, had used its lure to bedazzle them long enough for her to free and abscond with their leader’s murderess.

Extinguishing the life of an innocent guardsman in the sordid process!

“A fox—bah!” Ewan fumed again, his eyes blazing.

“Aye, a fox, I’m a-telling you,” Wee Finlay shot back, his own glare equally hot. “And a cheeky creature he was, bold as the morrow.” He paused to wag a finger. “No one else set foot in this hall while the rest of you were away to Dunach looking for the Lady Mariota—for naught, I might add!”

“Hell’s afire!” Ewan roared at the top of his lung power, his face purpling. “You’d have us believe a fox stole in here and secreted the lute from yon iron-bound coffer? Spirited the treasure out from beneath your sniveling nose when you’d vowed to guard it with your life?”

Finlay thrust out his jaw and shrugged. “Foxes are cunning—would any amongst you deny it?”

“Mayhap ’twas a fine, sweet thatch of some
other
kind of reddish fur that caught Finlay’s eye?” another called out, sounding well pleased with his suggestion. “We all ken he has a soft spot for the lasses. . . .”

“I wouldn’t exactly say
soft,
” a barrel-chested man flung into the fray, his bawdy jest quickly followed by a burst of hoots, ayes and noddings.

Only Ewan the Witty didn’t share in their mirth.

His ill humor still rolled off him in great, angry waves.

“A drooling dotard would have proved a sounder safeguard for our treasure,” he owned, beginning to pace before the high table. “With Hugh the Bastard dead, we had sore need of that lute!”

Halting, he stared round the smoky gloom, his fierce gaze raking each man present.

“Myself, I think
she
came back to fetch the thing.” Going toe-to-toe with Finlay, he jabbed a meaty finger in the smaller man’s chest. “Like as not, she and her friend hid in the wood, knowing we’d ride straight to her father at Dunach, looking for her. Then, so soon as they saw us do just that, they crept in here, found you snoring on your pallet, and helped themselves to the lute!”

“I ne’er snored a day in my life,” Finlay objected. “And the sun won’t rise again if I slept at all while you were off on a fool’s mission.”

“A fool’s mission?” Ewan jerked his brows. “Aye, mayhap it was since the lady’s father insists he hasn’t seen her. And if she can’t be found, mayhap we ought just leave her be and sacrifice
you
to the Each Uisge?”

Wee Finlay glared at him. “You’ll ne’er see your precious lute again if you do!”

“Och, say you?” Ewan took a step closer. “How so? By all the powers of heaven, I am burning to know.”

“Because,” Finlay began, seeming to grow in stature as he spoke, “only I can recognize the fox that stole the lute.”

“‘Recognize the fox’?” someone scoffed from the shadows. “By his scent or by that red pelt that so bewitched you?”

“By his eyes,” Finlay returned, undaunted. “The creature had queer eyes.
Magic eyes.
”

A hush fell over the hall then, all bluster and chortles silenced.

Ewan caught himself first. “Here is odd talk,” he said, glowering at the little man. “God’s mercy on you if you are lying.”

“I ne’er spoke more true words,” Finlay insisted. “Find the fox that looked at me as if he could see to the back of my soul and you’ll have your lute.”

“The lute, and those two scheming women,” Ewan asserted, looking and sounding becalmed at last. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Later still, closer to the smallest hours of the night, Nessa slipped along Cuidrach’s stone-slabbed parapet, taking shelter in a tiny cap house at the far end of the deserted and silent wall walk.

Corbelled out over the crenellated walling and lit by the cold light of the moon, the turret-like room proved the perfect retreat for one such as she, a warm-blooded woman possessed of a wise head and a stout heart . . . at times weakened by cravings of the flesh.

Fool yearnings of the soul.

Aches and longings she oft wondered might ne’er lessen.

Even so, she pressed her hands against her breast and inhaled deeply of the chill night air, willing the return of her usual calm.

Instead, she caught faint strains of music drifting up from the hall and, stout hearted or no, something inside her stirred, for even after some years of widowhood, she hadn’t adjusted to being alone.

Her heart thumping, she glanced around the empty little room, imagining a pallet bed against one of the walls with two naked bodies writhing there. Intimately entwined, so close not the smallest sliver of space separated them, their sinuous movements silvered by moon glow, incredible pleasure sating them.

Almost feeling her phantom lover’s breath warm against her cheek, she steeled herself, banished her dreams back whence they’d come.

Like as not from too much of Sir Kenneth’s wine—an indulgence that now set her senses spinning.

Sure of it, she stepped deeper into the room’s shadows, out of the wind and rain, and sighed, drawing her cloak tighter around her shoulders.

She squared them, too, for just as this was not a night to spin pointless dreams, neither was it a prudent hour to peer into the past.

Hers, or Cuidrach’s.

Even if from this high vantage point, the ill-famed Bastard Stone could be seen thrusting its blackness into the heavens, its foam-girdled rocks shrouded in mist yet keeping constant, unsleeping watch.