Kate slept in fits and starts, awakening with her limbs shaking so hard her teeth chattered. She couldn’t seem to get warm, no matter how close she snuggled to the fire, even though its heat pricked her cheeks and scorched her knuckles as she gripped the blanket to her chin. It seemed forever before she heard MacNeill’s voice.
“Kate. Drink this.” He slipped his arm beneath her shoulders and lifted her, patiently trickling the water into her mouth. He was wet. Not damp but soaked through. And cold. So cold. The water wicked into her dress, setting her to violent trembling.
“I’m so cold,” she mumbled plaintively.
He eased her to the ground, and she curled on her side, trying to stop the quaking, watching him through slit eyes. He stood up, dropped the sodden cape to the ground, and with a quick, easy movement stripped his shirt over his head. Backlit against the guttering light, his lean body gleamed strong and sleekly muscled, broad and flat-bellied. The firelight prowled over his broad shoulders and curled around his throat but could not reach his features, leaving them in dusky shadow.
He knelt and gathered her against his naked chest. Already the heat of his blood had reached his skin, and now it sank into her, delicious and warm and life-giving. She should be mortified. She should be trying to free herself. Instead, she burrowed as close as she could physically get, wrapping her arms around his flanks and pushing her cheek into the dense muscle of his chest. She relaxed, absorbing his heat, accepting his body as her bed.
And slept.
Kit sank down with his back against the wall, his leg stretched out before him, Kate on his lap. Hesitantly, he stroked the hair back from her face. It curled around his fingers, silky and soft as kitten’s fur, black as oiled satin. He tipped his head back and stared unseeingly at the ceiling.
She slept on, perfectly relaxed, exquisitely vulnerable, sublimely undone. Deep within him, hunger awoke and prowled. Her soft contours melted against him, conforming to his hard angles like warm wax while, with a sigh of lush abandonment, she nestled her head beneath his chin. Her hand strayed up his chest, her fingers lax. Her breath sluiced across his skin, as gentle as the childhood dreams he’d never had, as sweet as summers he couldn’t remember.
He looked down. Her lips parted, her lashes trembled against the crest of her cheekbone as she dreamed. She was elegant and refined, even in sleep. What would the likes of him do with a creature like this? A creature whose main interest lay in finding someone to put her and her sisters back in paisley shawls?
Even three years ago he’d realized that the brief exchange they’d shared had been an accident. He shouldn’t have remained in the drawing room; he should have gone with the others. She shouldn’t have stayed with him. She had spoken to him as an equal, and he wasn’t. In any other place, at any other time, it wouldn’t have happened.
He’d left the Nashes’ York townhouse and headed for the docks, intent on getting drunk. He’d managed that, right enough, and woken to discover he’d been conscripted into the army and was aboard a transport ship heading for India. Now, if there was one thing a foot soldier in His Majesty’s army has, it is time to think.
He’d thought about two things, the first being Kate. There was no harm in it. The harm came in not knowing a fancy from reality. His burned skin and blistered lungs were real; the open sores that covered his feet beneath the ill-fitting boots were real; the salty rivulets that pasted his uniform to his back were real; the blood of the men who died was real. Aye. He knew reality, well enough. Kate Blackburn was a harmless diversion from it.
So he didn’t begrudge himself the pleasure of thinking of her; the midnight color of her eyes and the shimmer of the sun in her sable hair, her white skin and narrow-boned wrists and soft, plush mouth. She was just a place to flee when reality got a bit overpowering, was all. He never thought to see her again. He’d read the pride in her easily enough during those short minutes in the drawing room. She’d never send a yellow rose to St. Bride’s.
But there were times when the death and cries of the wounded, the memories of battle, were so vivid that he could not conjure her image. Then he thought of betrayal. Then he thought of the man who had murdered Douglas Stewart as surely as if he’d dropped the guillotine blade himself.
While Kit pondered the identity of the traitor, the army marched. The war with France spilled over into wars with Indian potentates and Russians and Spaniards. Before he was finished, Kit had seen dozens of skirmishes and battles. It really only needed a matter of time and a bit of luck before his “talents” were noted. What with officers falling in battle like wheat before the scythe, his skills were rewarded on blood-soaked ground with a battlefield commission. Not once, but thrice.
He was, he realized, a good commander. His men trusted him, depended on his judgment. But each time he was promoted, each time more men’s lives were entrusted to him, the betrayal in the past loomed greater and greater. How could he trust his judgment when it had been so blinding, so disastrously defective? It became an obsession with him. He had to discover the identity of his betrayer and confront him, and in doing so discover and confront his own failings. He had requested and been granted a leave from the army.
But Fate mocks intention.
Kate stirred suddenly, and he stilled when she lifted her head and peered drowsily around, rubbing the silk crown of her head against his jaw, still more asleep than awake. He stopped breathing altogether until her head dropped heavily to his chest once more, her lips against the base of his throat.
And he thanked God that he knew what was real and what wasn’t.
SEVEN
UPON AWAKING IN UNFAMILIAR SURROUNDINGS
“SO PRETTY, KIT. I ALMOST ENVY YOU.” The voice was no more than a murmur. Something cool and dry caressed the side of Kate’s neck, fluttered across her collarbone, and drifted lower… She shifted, rolling away from the familiarity, groggy with fever and exhaustion.
“But why envy you when I can take whatever I want of yours?” His breathing was light, too, excited.“Including your life.”
The phantom fingers hooked beneath the edge of her bodice, pulling it lower. She flinched against the unwelcome intimacy, struggling to wake. The phantom hand caressed her breast languidly. Something moved close to her face.
“Tell Kit to enjoy the roses.” A mouth touched hers—She gasped, bolting upright.
In the corner of the black room something shifted, a darker blot dissolving into the corner. A sound like a soft laugh—or was it the wind in the smoke hole?— trembled across the air.
She struggled to her feet, light-headed and disoriented. She shivered, looking about. There were still a few embers in the hearth. They hadn’t been there when she’d woken. Unless someone had been standing between her and the fire.
Fear jerked her into full wakefulness. She turned, stumbling over MacNeill’s regimental jacket.Where was MacNeill?
She spied a short flight of stairs and staggered up them on wobbly legs. “MacNeill!” she croaked. Her throat rasped painfully, and the effort made her dizzy. “MacNeill!”
No answer. She started down a long, dim corridor, a shaft of moonlight piercing its length. She limped forward, passing room after empty room. All dark. All silent. Like tombs awaiting their tenants.
Finally, she emerged into a huge entry filled with dim gray light. She looked up. Three stories overhead a huge gaping wound in the roof revealed a dark, bruised sky. Clouds drifted across the face of a half-gone moon, and a cold, bitter wind spiraled down from above, stirring the leaves at her feet and tossing her hair about her face.
“MacNeill!” The wind caught her feeble cry and carried it away.
No one answered.
Her worst fear taunted her with pricks of panic: He’d left her. Abandoned her.
Not again. Please. She blinked back tears, refusing to cry even though her thoughts kept unraveling like mist in the wind and her legs felt like jelly, and the cold was sucking the last bit of heat from her and… and she saw a faint flicker of light.
He hadn’t left her.
With a sob, she hobbled toward the lighted room, dizzy and disoriented, her heart pattering like a snared rabbit’s. MacNeill stood inside, his back to her, the burning brand he held lashing the room’s dark walls.
“MacNeill—” Her greeting died in her throat as she took in the scene. A massive oak table lay on its side, its surface scarred with deep cuts, as if an ax had been taken to it. What might have once been benches or chairs lay in splinters. Glass shards covered the floor like a jeweled carpet, and dinted pewter trays and cups lay twisted at the base of scarred and notched plaster walls.
“What happened in here?” she asked.
“It looks,” MacNeill said calmly, “as though someone was unhappy.” He raised the brand he carried and illuminated the walls higher up.
Kate recoiled. Three feet above them a dagger pinned the carcass of a rat to the wall. Twined around the desiccated creature’s neck was a quartet of flowers, dried and shriveled, but still identifiable as roses. Small yellow roses. She put a hand behind her, groping for the wall.
MacNeill lowered his torch and the gruesome little corpse disappeared. His gaze swept over the room, noting, discarding, missing nothing, searching.
“Who did that?” she whispered “Was it him?”
He turned his head, regarding her intently. “Who?”
“There was a man in the kitchen when I woke. He said… your name and then he said he could take anything of yours he wanted, including your life. Then—”
He swung around. “Then what?”
“He touched me.”
“The hell he did!” He strode toward her, a suddenly furious and formidable looking Celtic warrior. He grasped her upper arms, staring down into her face. “Are you hurt? Did he violate you?”
For a second she didn’t take his meaning. Of course she’d been violated. Then she understood. Her face burned. “No. No. He just touched me…” Her hand fluttered to her loosened bodice.
MacNeill growled savagely, releasing her and looking about.
“And said to tell you to enjoy the roses.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘Tell Kit to enjoy the roses.’ ”
Once more he swore. He reached out, gripping her shoulder and spinning her around, setting her world tilting.
“How dare you!” she protested, batting feebly at his arm, but his grip was like steel and he heeded her objections not at all. “You can’t—”
“I can.”
She set her heels, in her exhaustion and fear stumbling, and would have fallen to her knees but he was already sweeping her up against his broad chest, carrying her easily as he left the room and moved into the corridor, still managing to hold the torch.
“You must tell me,” she said. “You promised. You swore! What is going on?”
“Then by all means, be it as you wish, ma’am.” His laugh was bitter and short. “You saw the rat with the flower necklet?”
“Yes.” She searched through the haze clouding her thoughts for— “They’re the same roses you brought us in York.”
“Yes. The person who skewered that rat did not do so by way of a love token,” Kit went on grimly. “I don’t know who he is or what he wants, but I will warrant well I do not want you here when I find out.”
He stopped in the center of the hall, his eyes fiery and intent. Conflict marked his hard face. “Damnation,” he muttered. “Damn it to a bloody hell.
“He knows,” he finally said. “He knows I can’t take the time to look for him. He’s taunting me. There are a thousand places for him to hide and I don’t have the time. Not with you here. Not with you so weak and… Bloody, bloody hell!”
Frightened by the violence of his words and in his face, Kate shrank in his embrace and at once the fire in his eyes died away, the coolness returned to his expression. “It is time for us to leave. But first—hold this.”
He handed her the torch, and she took it. He strode to the far end of the narrow passage, her body rigid in his arms. He shouldered open a heavy oak door and peered down a steep flight of stairs into blackness.
“Beg pardon,” he said and with a slight grimace against her anticipated outrage, took the torch from her and tossed her over his shoulder, freeing his hands. She didn’t disappoint.
“You can’t— Ah!” Holding the burning brand aloft, he started downstairs, each of her remonstrations checked by the jolt of his step on a tread.
The cellar hadn’t changed. Cobwebs still hung in thick sheets from the low, damp stone arches, and the sound of scurrying things still echoed eerily in the darkness. The smell of mold and dampness still thickened the chill air.
He set Kate’s feet on the ground, then leaned her against the wall, handing her back the torch. “Hold this and wait here.”
She took the torch without a word, blinking rapidly as though trying to focus her gaze. She was ill—whether from lack of food, cold, sleeplessness, he could not say. He only knew he had to get her to St. Bride’s as soon as humanly possible. Nothing else mattered. Not even
him
, damn his soul, though the need to find him, to punish him for touching her, raged within Kit like a living thing.
He turned back into the moldering cellar and, at the far wall, stopped and ran his hands across the pitted surface until he felt the raised edge of a masonry block. With a grunt, he pulled it free and thrust his hand into the revealed crevasse. From deep within, he withdrew a leather-wrapped parcel. He unwrapped it, exposing a long, heavy-looking blade.
“What are you doing, Kit?”
“Setting stores, Dand. You can’t be too sure when you’ll need a weapon.”
Dand laughed. “But here? Why? Ye fear the cattle might take up arms agin ye someday?”
“What is it?” Kate’s weak voice recalled him to the present.
“A claymore,” he said, lifting the cumbersome-looking thing as though it were its lighter cousin and eyeing its blunted edge with the eye of a connoisseur.
“Why do you insist on using that bludgeon, Kit, when you could use something with a bit of finesse?” Ramsey asked.
“Because a bludgeon gets yer point across a sight better than a hint.”
He lifted a leather scabbard from the same roll and strapped it on his back between his shoulder blades. With a hiss of steel, he slid the heavy blade into its sheath. “Now we leave.”
The intensity in his voice marshaled Kate’s scattered thoughts. She nodded, and this time when he scooped her up, she clung to him. Back in the kitchen, he gathered their belongings and took her outside. He left her next to an exterior wall, telling her to wait while he caught and harnessed Doran.
A faint thinning of darkness marked the eastern horizon. She stayed where he bade her, unpleasantly woozy, and felt the castle behind her, its oppressive weight and terrible patience. Uneasily, she turned and looked up and so for the first time saw the castle from without, its massive dimensions, the shorn roofline exposing the charred half walls of second-story rooms, the entire facade pockmarked with shadowed recesses and black, empty windows. High above, marsh grasses had seeded themselves amid the crumbling crenulations. The coarse stalks shifted in the wind, pale in the gloaming, like the spectral arms of little children beckoning to her to climb up to them, and behind that a dark figure—
“KATE!”
Startled, she wheeled. Too late, she heard the ominous rumble from above and then he was sweeping her up, driving her hard against the castle, his arms above their heads, pinning her to the wall as the sky rained rock down on them. She clung to him, her face pressed against the base of his throat, and felt his big body jar as pieces struck him. Not a shard touched her.
As abruptly as it had started, it ended. He pushed her away, holding her at arm’s length. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
He released his breath, his eyes rising to the treacherous roofline above.
“Did you see something? Someone?”
“I don’t know. I thought…” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
He dipped down and caught her behind the knees, taking her to the carriage and depositing her as the gelding pawed the ground. He climbed in after her.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To where it all began,” he said. “To St. Bride’s.”