Richard
rubbed his fingers together in anticipation, greedy for the moment he saw
destruction in Kane's eyes. The same blazing humiliation, the utter desolation
the Irish knight had left in Richard's own.
The
sound of horsemen riding up made Farnsworth straighten, and he all but bolted
down the stairs to greet his reluctant bride.
But
when the door opened, no terrified beauty spilled in, only the curs he had
hired to abduct her, the three looking bewildered, shaken, and chagrined.
"Where
is the girl?" Richard snapped.
"She
was too close guarded! A bleedin' army couldn't a taken her!" a bald man
whined.
"We
had 'er in hand, and some damned fool servant dodged betwixt us. We shot him,
certain sure, but it gave the girl time to get away."
"Aye,
an' the shot brought a score of people runnin' from the ball. We were lucky to
get away with our very skins."
Frustration
and rage raced like venom through Richard's veins, the emotions all the more
potent because they had seethed inside him, hidden for so long. The thought
that Kane had bested him again was acid in old wounds. The knowledge that he'd
been thwarted when he'd been so close to his goal was infuriating.
"You
fools! You incompetent fools! I should shoot you myself!"
One
of the men eyed him warily, a hand flicking to the hilt of a knife.
"Damnation,
you're not worth bloodying the floorboards," Richard raged. "Get out,
all of you. If I ever see your faces again, or if you ever breathe a word of
this night's work, I swear I'll shoot you where you stand."
The
men bolted out, and Richard turned to see the vicar staring at him owlishly, a
damn annoying smile on his vacuous face.
"Whatcher
goin' t' do now, friend? Yer ladybird seems to have slipped the net."
"I'm
going to snare her myself. And when I do..." Richard's jaw set grimly.
"I shall repay her a hundredfold for the inconvenience she has caused
me."
"I
suppose you're goin' t' walk right up t' Sir Aidan's doorstep an' say how d'ye
do?"
"Exactly.
It's time I made a most concerned call upon my beloved stepsister. She will be
delighted to see me. She always was."
With
that, Richard stalked to the chamber in which he'd planned to bed his bride. He
flung his clothes into a portmanteau. If he hurried, he could reach Rathcannon
before nightfall.
* * * * *
Exhausted,
Aidan made his way up the castle stairs. How many times had he passed by the
crests knitted into the very bones of Castle Rathcannon, ornamenting doorways
and mantels, turrets and grand ballrooms?
More
often than he'd admitted, even to himself, he'd felt the subtle rasp of guilt
against him, the excruciating sensitivity a thief must feel when taking out a
stolen treasure, breathless because of its beauty, while his hands felt soiled
by the knowledge that he had no right to touch it, to hold it.
It
was the same clumsy awe he'd felt for Cassandra. An awe that reached new
heights in the wife who waited for him in the bedchamber that had been the
scene of Delia's darkest betrayals—and that now, with biting irony, held his
own most fragile hopes.
He
clamped his good arm around ribs that throbbed and ached from the blows he'd
taken from the butt of Gilpatrick's scythe, the pain exacerbated from the
jolting ride along dark byways. The gash cleaved into his shoulder arced a
ribbon of liquid fire from his collarbone to midbicep, his legs dragging like
lead weights of pure exhaustion. But neither the beating he'd suffered, nor the
wounds he'd sustained could match the battering he'd received in places far
deeper, where fists and cudgels and blades could never reach.
Nothing
was what it seemed. Gilpatrick, his sworn enemy, had attempted to save Aidan's
daughter. Rathcannon, the bastion of safety built to protect Cassandra, had
almost been the scene of her abduction. Delia with her poisonous beauty had
made Aidan swear never to trust another woman. Yet now, half broken, bleeding from
wounds no one else could see, Aidan had brushed aside the worried queries of
Sean and Gibbon, Mrs. Cadagon and Mrs. Brindle, and instead of going up to
Cassandra's tower, was rushing as fast as he could toward the one person he
needed to see, to touch, to tell.
Norah.
Never,
from the time he'd been a boy, had he allowed himself this shattering need to
pour all that he was into another person's hands. His father had taught him
young to mock such tender feelings, that nobility and honor were only disguises
for weakness and stupidity, that to reveal the vulnerabilities in one's heart
was like baring a jugular to a ravening wolf.
God
knew, Delia had seared the truth of his father's words into every fiber of
Aidan's being during the storm-tossed night he had raced after the coach,
poison spreading through his body as he clung to sanity by the frayed thread of
his child's cries of terror.
Yet
in the midst of the standing stones on the Hill of Night Voices, Aidan had
bared his throat to his enemy and received, not the expected death blow, but a
hand, offering to aid him. In the child whose birth had destroyed his first
marriage, Aidan had found his own salvation.
In
the marriage bed with a bride he had never wanted, he had found not lust, not
even something so simple as passion, but rather a mystic elixir that had pushed
him beyond the mere limitations of flesh and need and desire, into a realm so
wondrous he was still shaken by the power his solemn-eyed bride had unleashed
in him. A power, a beauty that had been magnified a thousandfold in the
enchanted reaches of Caislean Alainn.
Miracles—they
were all miracles he didn't deserve. Chances to make things right, where he had
failed for so very long. Hope—or, a voice inside Aidan whispered, the final
torment of hell itself, dangling salvation before his eyes, something decent
and good after so many years lost in darkness. Salvation he could glimpse,
grasp with his unworthy hand, for the merest heartbeat, before the jeering
fates ripped it away.
He
turned down the corridor that had once mocked him with Delia's recriminations,
to the bedchamber that had once echoed with the groans and pleasure sounds of
his wife with another man, and realized that now there was only a kind of quiet
peace, a soft expectation. Welcome.
At
Norah's door, he released his ribs long enough to turn the latch and steal into
the chamber quietly, so quietly. What he saw in the guttering light of the
candles stole his breath away.
Half
hidden by the bedcurtains, Norah lay on the bed where Delia had betrayed him,
her fingers pressing something soft and white against her cheek. His cravat,
Aidan realized with a jolt as he took a step toward her. She'd been crying
against it; salty tracks of tears were dried upon her cheeks.
The
knowledge that this woman had wept for him was more humbling than anything
Aidan had ever faced in his life. The certainty that he was unworthy of even
one of her tears raked through him, leaving more pain in its wake than the
scoring tip of Gilpatrick's scythe when it had cut into his shoulder.
He
crossed to the bed and reached out his fingertips to feel the petal softness of
her cheek, so warm and alive.
He
needed her. The knowledge ate like acid inside him, the raw vulnerability the
most terrifying emotion he'd ever faced in his life. The trust he placed in
her—this woman of gentle dignity, sweet, quiet courage—was the most delicate
spindle of spun glass, indescribably beautiful, bright, and yet so fragile, it
seemed it must shatter with the merest brush of his hand.
"Norah."
He breathed her name, watched her come awake with a start. Her eyes flashed
open, disoriented, tear-reddened, and shadowed with desperation and pain, and
he knew in that instant what she had suffered for him. She cried out, a choked
sound of joy, flinging herself against him with a sob. White-hot pinwheels
radiated out from his ribs, the wound in his shoulder igniting afresh, but he
didn't care. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against him,
drinking in the warmth, the vibrancy, the sweet, sweet honesty that was his new
bride.
She
was touching him everywhere, his hair, his face, as if she didn't believe her
eyes. "Aidan! Sweet God in heaven, you're alive!"
Had
anyone ever greeted him thus? Emotion crushed his throat. "Hush,
ladylight," he whispered, stroking her dusky curls with his bruised hand.
"I'm fine."
"Did
you find the—the men who tried to hurt Cassandra? You were gone so long, I was
certain you must have found the rebel—"
"I
found Gilpatrick. He isn't responsible for the attack. He is the one who tried
to warn us."
Norah
gazed up at him, her arms still clinging, her eyes shimmering, soft. "But
I thought you were enemies."
"We
were bred to be. And yet... he's a good man, Norah. One I would want at my side
if I were charging into battle. One I would trust with my life. He already did
his best to save my daughter's,"
"Oh,
Aidan." Her palm curved about his jaw, tenderness and understanding
seeping through him.
He
felt so unsettled, off balance. "It isn't over. I have to find whoever did
plot against Cass. Gilpatrick gave me some information to begin with, and he
promised to send me word if he learned anything more. Whoever is stalking me is
a cunning bastard, one making a game of my destruction. There are wagers
involved. One regarding Cassandra. And... another about you."
"Wagers?
What kind of wagers?"
"I
don't know. The only thing I'm certain of is this: He wants to toy with me
before he closes in for the kill."
"He
must—must hate you. Is there an enemy you can think of? Someone so villainous—"
"I've
spent my life neck-deep in villains, Norah. Libertine blackguards who would
joyfully slit a throat over the turn of a card. I've done things I'm not proud
of, more than I can even remember."
"Aidan,
I don't believe—"
"That
I'm every bit the sonofabitch I told you I was the night you arrived
here?" A ragged sound tore from his throat, rife with self-contempt.
"Believe it, Norah. When I inherited Rathcannon, it was in ruins. I found
it vaguely amusing at first. I was a bold rakehell with London at my feet. I
didn't give a damn about the estate, my inheritance, anything. I was a soldier,
but I'd had a belly full of killing. The only other skill I possessed was at
the gaming table. I used it. Ruthlessly. To survive. God knows how many of my
opponents I could have ruined. We Kanes have always had an overdeveloped sense
of self-preservation, the devil take the price to anyone else."
"I
don't care about that Kane legacy. I know you."
Her
belief in him should have healed, should have comforted. Instead, it ripped
away the fragile coverings of scars long buried.
"You
don't know me at all," he grated. "I pray God you never do."
Shuddering need raced through him, that blend of desperation, panic, and
love—God, oh, not love—that he'd felt for his daughter, yet worlds different,
somehow agonizingly new, the emotions sharpened, honed even more intensely when
he looked into Norah's eyes. The need to protect her from himself was fierce,
and yet there was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to pour the truth
into Norah's hands, to take that final risk—that, by some miracle, she could
love him. In spite of the ugliness. In spite of what he had been, the past from
which he could never be free.
But
the hideous possibility of seeing her love for him change to revulsion, the
chance of feeling those hands that had been so magical, the most beautiful
things that had ever touched him, changing, shifting, shrinking away from him as
if he were something dirty, loathsome... God, the courage it would take to
hazard such a risk...
He
drew away from her, feeling as if he'd somehow tainted her, sickened by all
that he was, all that he stood for. He meant only to put distance between them,
so that he could drag the tattered remains of his guard about him, cover up the
places she'd bared in his soul with those exquisitely gentle hands.
He
raised his fingers to rake his hair back from his eyes, and he heard her breath
catch in her throat. Her face paled, her eyes widened, locked on his shirt.
"Aidan, you're hurt!" she gasped, staring at the blood-soaked tear in
his shirt.
"It's
nothing. The tiniest scratch." He attempted to brush her concern away, but
Norah scrambled out of the bed, her brows crashing together in such stormy
anger he almost smiled.
"I
barely get you healthy after your bout with the gypsy love potion, and you
charge out and get yourself injured again!" She attacked his buttons,
stripping the ruined garment from him. The cloth clung to the wound, and he saw
her catch her lip between her teeth as she tried to gently pull it free. She
flinched as she saw the eight-inch gash.
"It
looks far worse than it is, Norah," he said gently. "Trust me. It's
not as if I've never been wounded before."
Her
mouth trembled, and her eyes filled as they skated from the cut to a chest
covered with darkening bruises.