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he entire clan came running out of the castle as soon as the ragged party appeared on the promontory road. A moth-eaten MacElgin standard was hoisted from the parapets. At first, as Duncan heard the cries of excitement across the barbican, he allowed himself the ludicrous fantasy of believing himself welcomed home the conquering hero.
Overwhelmed, he stopped in his tracks. He had waited for years for this tribute. His head held high, he began to move toward his kinsmen, resentment melting away with every step he took. He had rescued their princess. They liked him.
“It’s quite a welcome.” He squeezed Marsali’s hand, drawing her to his side. “Look at that. Cook must have been too hard on them while I was gone. They’re glad to see me. We’ll have a banquet tonight to celebrate our betrothal. They’ll enjoy that.”
She gave him a coy smile. “Actually, my lord, I think it’s me they’re shouting for. They’re calling my name.”
“You? You. Oh. Of course.”
Had he taken leave of his senses? Men, women, and children practically trampled him in a wild stampede across the drawbridge to reach the tiny woman standing in his
shadow. The chickens in the moat fluttered and clucked raucously. No one even noticed him.
He stood unmoving, like a rock stack in a rush of incoming tide. The clan hefted Marsali in the air and bore her toward the keep. She gave him a helpless little wave as she disappeared over the drawbridge. Duncan folded his arms across his chest and watched her, a scowl settling on his face.
Johnnie tramped up behind him. “Home at last. I’m dying to get out of this dress.”
“They don’t even know I’m here.” Duncan gave a self-deprecating laugh at his own immature sense of disappointment. “Well, what did I expect? A miracle? Hell, I don’t care. They’re always going to hate me.”
Johnnie shook his grizzled head. “I think they’re rather fond of ye, if ye want the truth.”
“Fond of me.” Duncan swept up his skirts, shooing a chicken out of the way. “God, that’s a joke.”
“Look at it this way, my lord: If they didna like ye, you’d be standin’ in a shower of arrows by now. Being ignored means ye’re part of the clan. It’s the best ye can expect.”
D
uncan leaned against the doorjamb of Marsali’s chamber, staring with longing at the dainty figure sprawled across the bed. She opened her eyes and gave him a lazy smile, the covers slipping down around her waist. His gaze moved over her body, possessive, dark with passion, claiming every beautiful inch of her as his own.
“You’ve shaved,” she said softly as he reached her side. “And changed.”
He set down the bottle of French brandy and two goblets he’d bought on the nightstand. “I’ve sent for the old priest. We’ll be married in the morning. Can you possibly stay out of trouble that long, lass?”
She pushed up against the pillows. Her auburn hair tumbled in curls around the demure lace collar of her nightdress. “I’m too tired to get into any trouble tonight.” He sat down beside her, brushing her hair from her shoulder, tracing his forefinger along the edge of her ear. She trembled with pleasure. “I’m never too tired for this.” She stared up at him, her luminous eyes bold and
expectant in the half-light. He leaned into her and captured her face in his hands, his heart beating in hard painful strokes with hunger for her. His kiss was slow and deliberate, a torment of sensual self-control.
He tangled his hand in the silky tumult of her hair and moved over her. The muscles in his neck knotted with the intensifying sexual tension in the air. He dragged a deep breath into his lungs “I love you,” he whispered against her mouth. “I want to sleep with you tonight.”
Marsali sagged back against the pillows with a deep sigh. Desire flooded her body, pooling in the secret places with an aching that bordered on pain. Her breasts tingled, awaiting Duncan’s touch. The fragrance of sea air and male musk caught her senses spellbound.
“Marsali, why is there mist coming in through the windows?”
“I’m not responsible for every change in the weather, Duncan,” she said, resenting the distraction; she’d been waiting all summer for him to seduce her. “Perhaps it’s the ghosts. Cook said they were very active while we were gone.” She pressed her palm to the hard wall of his chest. “Duncan,” she whispered in a husky voice.
“There aren’t any ghosts.”
“Then why did I see one reaching under the bed for the chamberpot?”
He glanced down as he felt her hand sliding inside his shirt. With a dark smile, he unfastened the ribbons at her throat and brushed his callused palms over her soft white breasts. She quivered in response. His blood pulsed; he was burning to conquer, to bury himself in her sweetness. “I want to make love to you, lass,” he said with a groan. “I worship you, Marsali Hay.”
Pleasure danced along her nerve endings. She caught her breath as he dragged his mouth down her throat, teasing her with light playful love bites. His tongue flickered across her nipples. He lifted her against him, her fragile curves fitting to his hard torso. Marsali’s bones melted, and anticipation sent tingles down her spine.
“I am a woman ready to be worshipped,” she whispered with a smile.
He grinned, drawing back to the other side of the bed with an indrawn breath. “Tomorrow night.”
Her smile vanished. She bolted upright, indignantly dismayed. Her aroused body pulsed with frustration. “What?”
“The bridal bed, lass. You’re coming to it as pure as the proverbial dove.”
“Hell’s bells, Duncan,” she said grumpily. “That isn’t fair. I thought it was finally going to happen.”
He stretched out alongside her, staring at the delicate swirls of mist that wafted across the room. His heart thundered with a fierce need that was tempered by the tenderness he felt for her. She relaxed, snuggling into him. Their bodies touched in tantalizing restraint, their breaths mingled in the sweet chill air. Duncan closed his eyes, desire burning in his blood like the fine brandy he had found in the cellar.
“Tomorrow will be perfect,” he said after a silence. “You’ll have the wedding celebration your papa always planned, if not the prince he thought you deserved.”
“
T
he chieftain isna going to like this, Donovan.”
“Put the candle down on the nightstand, Suisan.”
“Och, look at the pair of them, sleeping in each other’s arms like bairns. Isn’t that the sweetest sight?”
“Watch out, Effie. The twins are headin’ straight for that bottle of brandy.”
Marsali stirred, the familiar voices penetrating the depths of her dreamless sleep. Resentfully she opened her eyes and stared up at the row of the curious but kindly faces observing her from either side of the bed.
“Do you all mind?” she said in a testy whisper. She burrowed up against Duncan’s big warm body as he slept like the dead, his leg thrown over her ankles. “I’m marrying this man in a few short hours. I don’t want to be yawning through my wedding vows.”
“I tried to warn them,” Effie whispered, pulling the pigs away from the nightstand.
“It’s the ghosts, Marsali,” Donovan explained.
Owen nodded from the foot of the bed, fatigue etching dark circles under his eyes. “We canna sleep fer all the din they’re makin’ in the guardroom.”
“It’s been like this every night since ye were gone,” Cook added. “We’ve even summoned the wizard to exorcise them, but he hasn’t arrived yet.”
Duncan made a noise in his throat halfway between a snore and a moan. Marsali patted him on the back. “The chieftain can’t be expected to solve every little problem in the castle,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep, all of you. And—”
She glanced up in alarm as a loud tinkling crash resounded through the castle. “What the devil was that?”
“The ghosts,” Cook said succinctly. “Giorsal is throwing a chamberpot at Bhaltair again. It’s the eve of the great battle when he was slain. Every year it’s the same argument between them, her begging him not to go, and then for the next six months she keeps everyone up weeping and cursing Bhaltair from the battlements because he got killed, and she killed herself.”
Duncan opened his eyes, slowly pushing up onto his elbows as he realized he had an audience. “What the hell are all these people—those pigs—doing in my room?”
“They’ve come about the ghosts,” Marsali said, plumping up the pillows and in a more conversational mood now that she was awake.
Effie sat down on the edge of the bed, hauling Ailis onto her lap. “They’re keeping me up, my lord.”
“Well, you’re keeping me up,” Duncan said, “and I don’t like it. Agnes, why have you let the situation get out of control?”
Cook settled down comfortably beside Effie. “I understood mine was only a temporary command, my lord. Anyway, even a chieftain has only so much control over the supernatural, and I didna presume to usurp your power, now that ye’ve returned again.”
“I understand exactly how Giorsal feels,” Marsali admitted quietly, turning to look at Duncan. “I don’t want you to go to war again either. You’ve done your share of fighting.”
He pulled her against his shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “Nothing is going to happen to me.”
“My father said the same thing the day he joined the rebellion.”
No one spoke for several moments, out of respect for the man they had all loved.
Then Owen crept to Duncan’s side of the bed, lowering himself onto the mattress with a sheepish smile. “Have ye had a nice rest after all that rowing, my lord?”
“No. I haven’t had a nice rest, Owen. How could I rest when everybody and their pig is sitting on my bed? This is an outrage. Go away.”
Donovan squeezed down next to Owen. “But they’ll keep this din up fer hours.”
“I don’t care,” Duncan said. “This is my bed, and the entire castle is sitting on it. Get out. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, and I don’t want to hear any talk of ghosts again. It’s only mice in the walls anyway.”
There was a brief silence. Then one by one the intruders filed out of the misty chamber, muttering amongst themselves, the pigs trotting after.
“Have ye ever heard a mouse that cursed, Effie?”
“No, Donovan. I have not. I’ve never seen one that wore a dress either, or that could throw a chamberpot.”
“The chieftain and I wore dresses once,” Owen remarked with a reminiscent smile. “But then we weren’t ghosts. We weren’t even mice, fer that matter.”
“Poor Giorsal. She’ll lose her husband to battle all over again.”
The door closed on their whispered lamentations.
D
uncan and Marsali stared across the room, each pretending not to hear the dull thuds rising from the guardroom. The ghosts.
“You weren’t very nice to them,” Marsali whispered when silence came again.
“I thought I was very nice under the circumstances. That’s another thing wrong with this castle. The entire clan thinks it has the right to sleep in my bed whenever it likes.”
“Well, you are the chieftain.”
He was quiet for a moment, studying her face. He could hear Owen and Lachlan shouting at each other from somewhere in the depths of the castle. The sound roused in him an unexpected sense of affection rather than his usual
annoyance. Marsali, their love for her, was the thread that bound them all together.
And it was Marsali who, indirectly, had led him to Hannah, offering him another chance at redemption, for completion, and again that sense of coming full circle as if there had been a guiding hand of gentleness to lift him out of the chaos he had created. But only now had he stilled his inner struggling long enough to perceive it. Only now had he begun to awaken from the nightmare of his past.
At last he’d begun to fit the broken pieces of himself into a whole, and to his surprise, it didn’t form such a terrible picture after all. That night in the cottage, the violence and unhappiness that had preceded it, had cast a taint over his entire life. He had brutally murdered the man who had killed his mother. For the first time he could begin to forgive the act and see that the tragedy stemmed not from any inherent evil in himself as much as from evil circumstances.
He slid off the bed, casting a long regretful look over Marsali’s sleekly rounded curves, nestled temptingly in the untidy bedclothes. “I’ll bring the locksmith back,” he thought aloud, turning to the door. “I’m not having my honeymoon with a pair of pigs in the bed.”
“Don’t forget the ghosts,” Marsali called after him, but he didn’t hear her, and she wasn’t surprised.
Ghosts probably fell into the category of domestic matters in the castle. As the chieftain’s wife, it would be her duty to take care of them.
She waited until she heard Duncan’s footsteps fading down the circular slabs of the staircase. Then she leaped out of bed and ran to the door, calling, “Effie? Effie, where are you? I need your help!”
Marsali felt deep empathy for Giorsal. Poor woman. Bad enough to have lost your husband to a pointless battle, but to keep reliving your last evening together? What a miserable fate.
“What is it, Marsali?” Effie whispered, stifling a yawn behind her fist.
Marsali grabbed Effie by the elbow, yanking her out of her stupor. “To the guardroom. The ghosts deserve peace, Effie. So does the chieftain, and we’re going to help them find it.”