Cates, Kimberly (19 page)

"I'm glad, too, Gavin. I hope that my captivity can somehow help these children get away from all this madness. If they saw half the horror of what happened in the village today, it's little wonder they played those awful games and wanted to hurt me for all the pain they saw their mothers and fathers and their sisters and brothers suffer."

Gavin stroked the hair at her temple, his thumb skimming her cheekbone. "They didn't really want to hurt you."

"If I were them, I would have. I would have wanted to strike out at anyone who is English. When I return home, Gavin, I promise you that I will tell the Duke of Cumberland what is happening in the Highlands. The officers in charge will be horrified at what their underlings are doing. I know that you and Sir Dunstan are not—not on the best of terms. But Dunstan will listen to me. When I tell him what I witnessed, the slaughter of helpless women and children, I am certain he'll be as outraged as we are."

It was as if she were tightening a barbed cinch about Gavin's chest. She could see the pain shimmer even through the veil of his lashes. "I know you will do all you can to help them, Rachel."

The words should have lightened the strange burden of guilt in her heart for having misjudged Gavin, Adam, and the children. They should have been a soft benediction. Why, then, did she sense dangerous undercurrents threatening to suck her into wild waters she couldn't begin to understand? Still, she couldn't stop herself from reaching out to Gavin Carstares across that treacherous tumult of emotions.

The memory of the grisly games the children had played passed through her, unnerving her: Barna, his face contorted in a mask of hate and rage and blood lust, hurtling across the glen with the battle cry
I
am Sir Dunstan Wells
as he built his pile of corpses.

"I understand." Rachel said. "You believe that Dunstan is behind this, don't you?" Her fingers knotted in the folds of her skirts. Gavin's silence was answer enough.

She closed her eyes, attempting to picture her betrothed, his familiar features, the hawklike nose, the firm mouth, the resolute chin. She remembered the fierce pride in his face as he introduced her to the stark beauty of his family's castle near the Scottish border. He'd shown her a portrait of his greatgrandfather, who had earned the name Wildcat Killer, because in the years of the border wars, he had cut down so many of the Scots whom the animal symbolized.

She remembered Dunstan's silence as they passed the portrait of his father and older brother, cut down in the night to atone for the Wildcat Killer's sins. A life for a life.

It would be natural for Dunstan to feel some bitterness at the tragedy that had befallen his family, yet Dunstan was no zealot spending his life attempting to gain vengeance on the Scots. He'd built an exemplary military career, become one of the most powerful men in the king's army. He'd subdued the rebellion, and was struggling to bring order in the aftermath of war. Rachel had heard her father discuss a hundred times the fierce challenge of that mission.

"Dunstan couldn't stand by and watch such a thing happen!" she said with all the earnestness in her soul. "He's a soldier, Gavin, not a murderer, not some monster who would massacre innocent people."

"Because you love him?"

"No!" The denial tumbled out too hastily. Fire surged into Rachel's cheeks. She couldn't imagine why she plunged on. "I have some affection for Dunstan, and we—we have the same goals, the same values. He will make an admirable husband, and I, well, I would be an asset as a military wife."

"I see."

There was subtle censure in the words, Gavin's fingertips falling away from her face. The imprints where they had rested chilled, leaving Rachel oddly bereft and more than a little defensive.

"There is no reason why I shouldn't marry a man who is everything I want. Burning passion quickly fades to ash, leaving nothing between two people but bitterness. Marriage must be based on a foundation that will remain after the first blush of infatuation. Dunstan and I struck a practical arrangement that was most satisfactory to both of us."

Irony twisted Gavin's mouth. "Don't talk to me about practical arrangements, Rachel. My parents had a satisfactory arrangement. There were plenty of logical reasons why my father needed to wed my mother, but in the end, the price they both paid was far too high. I remember her, waiting for my father to visit—that eager light in her eye. I remember her trying desperately to please him, picking at the tiniest flaws she could find in me and in herself, attempting to mask them so that my father would approve of us both. She had given him her fortune, he'd given her his title, and they had conceived the heir required to continue the family name. The cold transactions took nine months' time. They paid for the rest of their lives."

"You said she was a merchant's daughter. They were ill suited. Dunstan and I share common ground."

"If you marry Dunstan Wells, Rachel, you will suffer more horribly than even my poor mother did."

Rachel shivered, a blade of ice slipping into her spine. Her eyes widened as she looked into Gavin's. They had always been so open, so honest, so filled with compassion. Now his eyes were filled with dark promise and scathing helplessness.

It frightened her.

"You don't understand." She was insistent, but her voice carried an undercurrent of panic. "Your head is full of poet's dreams of perfect love, like you read about in those lovely books you cherish. But it's no more real than the unicorns painted on the pages. It's pleasing to look at and to think about, but it's foolish to believe you can capture it for yourself."

"You believe that love is mythical? A pretty legend?"

"What do you believe love is?"

"If a man loves, he carries the image of his lady in his soul until it is woven so tightly into his spirit that to tear her free would be to destroy himself, to hurt her would be taking a knife blade to his own body, to betray her would be to sell his soul to demons far more cruel than Satan himself."

The air seemed to thin until she couldn't breathe. Where had Gavin Carstares learned of such otherworldly devotion? His treasured books? His own dreams? Or from a woman who had taken his heart into her hands and drawn out such precious emotions? The thought seared deep.

"You learned this from experience, then?"

"I learned it from watching my father and Adam's mother together. They loved—truly loved. I owed my poor mother my loyalty, and God knows, I felt her pain. Still, the love between my father and Lydia awed me. It was the most amazing, miraculous, beautiful thing I'd ever seen."

"Why didn't you run out and seek it for yourself? As your father's heir, isn't it your responsibility to marry?"

"The day my mother died, she begged me not to make the same mistake that she had. No fortune, no title, no treasure on earth was worth spending eternity alone."

Rachel could imagine the sensitive boy Gavin must have been, wanting desperately to heal everything he touched, wanting to close the wounds in his mother's soul with the brush of his hand. Why was it Rachel suddenly needed to heal him?

"But your mother wasn't alone. She had you."

"It was almost as if she were afraid of me as I grew—as if she would somehow taint me with the poison of her merchant background if she came too close. I know that her own family had filled her head with dictums about how she was to comport herself in my father's house. She was to behave like a great lady, not shame them or her new husband. The only problem was, she was a sweet, simple girl, with no idea how a lady should act. So she did exactly what the servants ordered—and earned their unending contempt. She fought to be the type of woman my father wanted, and made him despise her with her overeagerness to please. She corrected my behavior— that was allowed. But my nurse insisted that it was unhealthy and unseemly for a noblewoman to hover over a child—it made the child weak and cowardly, and the mother too drab for her husband's company." Gavin turned and paced to the open door, where the night beckoned. She barely heard his words. "Rachel, there were times that I hated her. I blamed her for allowing everyone in the house to trample over her, but now I know she never had a chance against them."

Rachel crossed to where he stood, his scarred back gleaming in the rushlight, his stallion, obscured by the darkness, whickering in soft greeting.

"I promised her that I would wed for love, or not at all."

"And you never loved?"

A hush fell, the silence thickening. "What if I did? It wouldn't matter anymore. What would I have to offer any woman? From the time of Adam and Eve, a man has wanted to shelter the woman he loves— provide for her, shower her with joy and warmth and treasures, make a life together in a houseful of children."

Rachel could imagine all too clearly a rambling manor house filled to bursting with the love in Gavin Carstares's heart. The children—his mismatched set of orphans—would be scrubbed clean, frolicking and bickering, tearing through flowerbeds and painting beautiful designs while their father guided their hands.

The image overlaid the one she'd always held of her life with Dunstan, a pact struck for the greater glory of England. Dunstan, the right arm of the military. Rachel, the perfect officer's wife—one who would never shame herself by crying when he marched off to war but would face it like a soldier, stoic eyes fixed upon her duty. One who would teach her children not to burden Papa with their tears, despite the fact that they might never see him alive again.

Rachel swallowed hard, feeling as if she'd spent a lifetime encased in a thin sheet of ice, her emotions numbed, her dreams chilled, her eyes blinded by great heaps of expectations she had never taken time to examine. Not until Gavin Carstares had warmed the cold shield with his dry humor, his tenderness, the unfulfilled longing all too evident in his mouth, his eyes, his hands.

Have you ever loved?

What would it matter if I did? What would I have to offer a woman?

Only his heart, his soul—only the tender passion in his hands and the dreams in his eyes. Only his pain.

And his exile.

A woman would have to be mad to fall in love with a man who was one heartbeat away from a traitor's death—who might one day die before a ravening crowd of spectators, eager for the entertainment of watching a man be hung, drawn, and quartered.

Rachel recoiled. The image of Gavin being tormented thus was unthinkable. It shook her completely. Of their own volition, her hands swept up to trace the lines of exhaustion about his mouth, his face, his flesh warm beneath her hands.

"Don't." He pulled away from her touch, his mouth a hard, white line.

"Don't what?"

"Touch me. Look at me as if..."

"As if what?"

He pushed his fingers through his hair and swore as the cuts snagged and tore open afresh. "As if I know the answers. As if I— I don't know the answers, Rachel. I don't know a damn thing, except the need to get the children out of Scotland, to save as many Jacobite soldiers and their wives and mothers as I can. That is all I know, except that whatever I do, it will never be enough—I can't save them all."

"You know about other things, too." Rachel whispered, feeling as if she were edging out into uncharted waters, uncertain for the first time in her life what to say or do, uncertain what it was that she wanted. "You know about love, Gavin."

He winced.

"And you were right, I don't know anything about it. Not the kind spun of unicorns and princesses and magic."

"Someday you'll find a man who will teach you, Rachel, one who'll give you all the beauty and wonder you can hold and who'll love you as you deserve. Just give yourself a chance."

"But how will I know?"

"When he kisses you—as if he were tasting an angel. When he bares his soul to you and trusts you with every vulnerability in his heart. When he makes you unleash all the beauty, all the passion—the softness and strength that you've kept buried between your father's rules and your own sense of duty."

God in heaven,
Rachel wondered, unnerved,
does Gavin Carstares have any idea that he's just described himself?
She raised her face to his, the warmth of his breath on her skin, heat rising across the curves of her breast, up her throat, to spill into her cheeks.

"I've never been kissed as if I were an angel," she said, drowning in his silver-misted eyes. "I suppose it would be unfair to hold my beaux at fault. I'm stubborn and proud and, after all, they were too busy attempting to come up with crazed feats of courage to waste much energy on the quality of their kisses."

"Then they were damned fools. They should have been thinking about kissing you every waking moment, dreaming of the way your breath would catch at the first brush of their fingers, the way your eyes would soften, your lashes sweep down just a little. They should have been imagining your lips parting, as their mouth drifted against them, tasting heaven. Not shyness, no maidenly rot of drawing away—you'd be as infernally brave in the discovery of love as you are in every other facet of your life."

Rachel was afire, a liquid heat drizzling from where his breath brushed her skin, to pool in secret, feminine places he'd managed to touch without moving so much as his hand. Longings that could never be fulfilled were mirrored in Gavin's eyes. And she knew in that instant that he had been dreaming of that kiss, late at night when he'd lain upon his heather pallet, an arm's reach away from her. So close...

It was madness to hunger for his touch this fiercely. It was dark dishonor to court his kiss when she was betrothed to another man. Gavin was a man as impossible to hold as one of myth or legend—this chance to taste his mouth was as fleeting as a shard of rainbow trapped in a raindrop as it fell into the ocean.

Her heart almost beat its way out of her chest as she lifted her gaze to his, let her own roiling emotions show there, unhidden for the first time. "Show me, Gavin," she pleaded. "Show me how it feels to be kissed as if I were an angel."

"I can't." He forced the words out of his smoke-seared throat.