Jeames himself was all ears to know the answer to this question too. His lightheadedness was somewhat of a hindrance in his comprehending exactly what was going on, and he found himself having to catch up as these revelations unfolded.
“I know that it is love because only love would have made me give up my loyalty to William Ballantine and the circus. It has been all I have known for the last fifteen years. It has been my life. Coming here though, and meeting Jeames, has taught me that it is never too late to make a life of your own. It’s never too late to step off the road and stay awhile.”
Jeames, spurred on by this frank and brilliant admission of Beatrice, finally managed to get some of his own words in order.
“Faither, if it wasnae fer Beatrice here, we would nae have been warned of this. Even now we’d be in our beds whilst the people that we have contained down in the dungeon stripped the castle.”
The Laird considered this a while, his eyes not leaving Beatrice.
“Ye warned me son about this attack, did ye?”
Beatrice nodded.
The scene was disturbed then by the arrival of the physician.
“Up tae yer old tricks I see, Master Jeames,” the man said, coming to squat down by Jeames and setting down a large case.
“Oh, come now, I have nae had a stitch from ye in years,” Jeames said in a thick voice.
The physician looked at Jeames’s wounds; at the blood still seeping out of the one on his chest.
“Well,” he said. “That is about tae change I’m afraid,” he said.
Jeames caught eyes with Beatrice. It was clear to him that the equestrienne wanted to stay with him. He could read it in her eyes.
However, I daenae really want her to see me when the physician starts tae sew me back taegather.
Jeames looked up at his father. The older man nodded and laid a hand on Beatrice’s shoulder.
Beatrice stirred and looked up into the Laird’s face. She was still holding Jeames’s blood-soaked shirt in one hand.
“Come, lass,” he said. “We’ll leave the physician tae his work, I think. Time fer ye tae go tae bed.”
Beatrice looked at the Laird suspiciously.
“To bed, or to the dungeons?” she asked.
Jeames chuckled weakly. “Tae yer bed, is that nae right, Faither?”
The Laird smiled. “Aye, go tae yer chambers, lass. Try tae rest. Nae doubt me son will be askin’ fer ye in the mornin’. May be that tendin’ him might turn out to be a sorer trial that spendin’ a night in the dungeons.”
He ushered Beatrice from the room. Jeames watched her go. Then, as the physician reached for his needle and thread, Jeames reached for the whisky jug.
29
The following morning, Beatrice woke late, despite the fact that she thought she would never get to sleep, such was her anxiety at everything that had occurred. The sun was high outside the window as she hurriedly got dressed.
Must be closer to luncheon than to breakfast. I wonder how Jeames is feeling.
She made her way back to Jeames’s chambers, hurrying through the passages so quickly that she almost bowled Ables right over as he came around a corner bearing an empty tray of breakfast things.
“I’m sorry, Ables!” she cried as she flashed past, leaving the old man whirling in her wake like a leaf spinning in a stream.
Were those Jeames’s things?
Without bothering to knock on Jeames’s door, she slipped into his room and closed the door behind her.
Jeames was sitting up in bed. The windows were thrown wide, but his eyes were closed.
He is pale, but at least he is breathing. Things could surely have gone a lot worse.
As she padded slowly towards the bed, a smile appeared on Jeames’s wan face.
“Nay a single knock door and burstin’ in like a bull goin’ down tae drink,” he said, his eyes still closed. “Surely, that can only be one lass that I am acquainted with.”
His eyes opened and rested on Beatrice.
“Good God, but ye are quite the sight for these sore eyes,” he said.
Beatrice felt herself beaming. It was all that she could do to stop herself launching herself on the big Highlander. She managed to stop it though when she spied the bandages that were wrapped around his arm and swathed around his chest.
“How do you feel?” she said, instead sitting herself on the side of his bed.
Jeames grinned. “Very much like someone tried their hardest tae slice me into wee pieces last night,” he said.
Beatrice nodded. “You look like it,” she said, after a moment.
The two of them looked at one another and then, because sometimes in very serious situations that’s all one can do, they started to laugh.
“Nay, nay,” Jeames said gasping and wincing. “Nay, pleased daenae make me laugh. It hurts tae much.”
Beatrice looked away from the fine figure of the Highlander and out of the window. It was a perfect, cloudless day outside. The sort of day that juxtaposed with the severity of events of the night before.
“I’m glad that you are alright, Jeames,” Beatrice said.
Jeames nodded. “Aye, me tae,” he said. “I’m glad that nae blood was spilt, that is tae say, nobody was killed. None o’ my men, and none of yer friends.”
Beatrice reached out and took a hold of one of Jeames’s roughened hands. The knuckles were grazed on the back of it.
I wonder if that is where he struck William?
“What will your father do with them?” she asked.
“Dae with who?”
“With my friends,” Beatrice said. “In the dungeons.”
Jeames frowned. “Ye have nae heard?”
Beatrice’s mouth went dry. “Heard? Heard what? I have only just risen from my bed.”
Jeames squeezed her hand. “Calm yeself. The news is good, far better than ye might expect.” He cleared his throat. “Me faither released all of those who followed Mr. Ballantine nae long ago. He had ‘em all interviewed and came tae the conclusion that they did nae act out of outright malice or greed, but because Ballantine swayed ‘em with promises of riches and better lives.”
“He just let them go?”
Beatrice was amazed. Staggered. She had never heard of anything like it, not where the nobility was concerned. In her experience, the aristocracy rarely passed up a chance to remind commoners just how powerless they were.
Jeames actually chuckled briefly at the look on her face.
“He decreed that they were free tae go, so long as they never set foot on MacKenzie land again. What did ye think me faither was goin’ tae dae? Have them all hung drawn and quartered?”
Beatrice shook her head. “I don’t know what I expected, but it was not this.”
“Me faither is nae a man who needs to rule with the iron hand. Sometimes it is better tae try fer some compassion. It does nae sound like any of those involved actually profited directly from whatever it was that they stole.”
Beatrice got up and walked to the window. “No. Always it went to the circus. It went to feeding and clothing those who performed in it. As far as I know.”
Beatrice paused, but then asked the question that had been burning in her mind before she had slept and as soon as she had awoken.
“What of William?”
“Mr. Ballantine?”
“Yes. What does your father plan to do with him?”
In spite of all the stress that Beatrice had been put through at the hands of the ringleader, despite the way that he had behaved the previous evening, she still found that she had a tender spot for him in her heart. She would not see him come to harm if it was, in any way, possible.
“Well, he was the instigator o’ the whole mess, Beatrice. He could have killed someone…” Jeames seemed to consider his words. “He almost killed me, come tae think about it.”
“So?” Beatrice asked. Her nails dug into her palms as she braced herself for the answer.
“He’ll be held a while i
n our dungeons. Then, when me faither deems it, he shall be released. He is nae an evil man. More a man molded by circumstance and fate, who made some bad decisions that got away from him.”
Beatrice felt tears of relief burn under her lids as she closed her eyes and breathed out a sigh of relief.
“Thank God,” he whispered, her voice slightly strangled. She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
She looked out over the sparkling green country that stretched out away from the castle. The emerald grass, the heather and bracken that looked like clusters of dark green night-shadow that had forgotten to disperse with the coming of the sun, the glittering silver threads of the little streams and rivulets that ran through the lush moorland… It all made for quite a picture.
It’s beautiful and my heart yearns to stay. But, can I?
Beatrice gazed out of the window at the exceptional view, her eyes running along the saw-toothed mountain ranges that looked purple in the distance.
“Beatrice, will ye come here, lass?” Jeames asked form behind her.
Beatrice turned from the gorgeous vista and padded over to sit back down on the edge of Jeames’s bed.
Jeames held out his hand and Beatrice took it. To her surprise, Jeames pulled her to him.
“Careful!” Beatrice scolded him, as the Scotsman groaned at the strain he had just put his chest through. “What do you think you’re doing, hm?”
Though Jeames had dark circles under his eyes, there was the same old mischievous, keen glint in them that Beatrice found so alluring.
“The thing wi’ fights, wi’ bein’ hurt, is that it puts things into perspective,” Jeames said. He pulled Beatrice closer so that she lay next to him on his wide bed.
“Is that right, Jeames?” Beatrice said, softly. “A fine philosophy, perhaps, but that still doesn’t explain what it is you think you are doing.”
“I’m takin’ up where we left off in the pools,” Jeames said. “It’s like we have been sayin’ all along, we should live like we daenae ken what tomorrow will bring.”
He pulled back the bedcovers and Beatrice slipped in beside him.
They kissed for a while. Moving against each other very slowly and gently. The tension building up and up between them. Beatrice found herself panting. She was hot in her leather and suede equestrienne outfit that she had chosen to wear that morning.
This is no time to stand on ceremony, I suppose.
Holding the injured Highlander’s eye, Beatrice reached down and wriggled out of her tight leather riding trousers. She pulled them out from under the covers and tossed them on the floor.
Jeames smiled at her. “I think ye’ll find that I rather beat ye tae that punch, though the physician had tae help me out o’ my kilt.”
Beatrice laughed softly.
This might be the last time that we can physically be together… So be it.
Carefully, with delicious slowness, she slipped her leg over and across Jeames’s waist. Jeames moaned, but whether it was from desire or pain, Beatrice did not know.
Beatrice was biting her lip. Her hazel hair hung down in front of her eyes. She could feel the heat of Jeames’s ardor between her own thighs.
Jeames put his hands on her hips. Beatrice bent down to kiss the bandaged man; her lips brushed against his, once, twice, she pushed her face against his and, as she did so, Jeames pulled her down on top of him.
They came together with a shared gasping groan. Beatrice ground down, the urge to be as close with Jeames as it was possible to be filling her.
They rocked backwards and forwards, afloat together on a sea of desire and lust and hopeless longing for one another. Jeames kissed down her neck, Beatrice’s hair forming a curtain around both of them.
Beatrice pulled off her shirt and threw it down alongside her trousers and Jeames cupped her breasts as she sat back and let her body dictate the pace of their coupling. She moved, faster and faster, as something inside her began to build.
With a simultaneous cry of ecstasy, both she and Jeames stiffened. Jeames’s back, in spite of his injuries, arched. Beatrice’s nails dug into the Highlander’s thighs as she shook atop him.
Afterwards, they lay spent in each other’s arms. The bandages swathing Jeames’s chest were soft on Beatrice’s cheek.
“And what do I do now, Master Abernathy?” she asked. “What would you have me do? Do I stay and watch you and Lady Brùn get married and live happily ever after?”
The only answer she received was a soft snore. Looking up, she saw that Jeames had fallen asleep. She smiled tenderly, gently stroked the recovering Highlander’s stubbly cheek and slipped from the bed.
“Rest,” she said. “We’ll talk later.” She kissed him on the cheek, dressed and left.
* * *
Jeames had been on the receiving end of many disapproving and exasperated looks from his father. So, when he walked stiffly into the herb garden that evening, as the Laird was walking out, and received a stare that told him plainly that he was a pig-headed young fool and should be in bed still, he did not pay too much attention to it.
“Faither,” he greeted the older man, his voice still modulated by pain.
“Son,” the Laird said. “Where are ye off tae?”
“Just felt like a bit o’ air, ye ken.”
“Oh, aye,” the Laird said. “And I s’pose that the fact that ye can see down into the herb garden had nothin’ tae dae wi’ ye comin’ down here?”
Jeames pale faced flushed a slightly healthier shade of pink, but he held the Laird’s gaze defiantly. “Might have had somethin’ tae dae with it, aye.”
The Laird’s eyes twinkled at him. “I thought it might have.”
Father and son stood at the entrance to the herb garden and looked at each other for a long moment. Eventually, Andrew Abernathy spoke.
“When ye think tae ask her, lad,” he said. “Daenae hesitate. When ye have, ken that ye have me full support, as ye have always had.”
Jeames frowned. “What’re ye–”
But his father had already ducked inside the door and into the castle. Jeames stood for a moment, trying to wrap his head around what his father had just said.
“But ken this tae,” the Laird’s voice echoed out of the stone passage. “Ye’ll be explainin’ yerself to the other party concerned, nae I!”
Still puzzling over what his father had been on about, Jeames walked slowly and stiffly down the path, breathing deeply of the mint and bay and myriad other herbs as he brushed past them.
He found Beatrice, as he knew he would, sitting on a bench shaded by an arch of sweet-smelling honeysuckle. He had spied her from the window of his bed chamber chatting on the bench with his father, and it had been the sight of her that had propelled him from his bed.
Jeames sat next to the equestrienne, who smiled as he kissed her unabashedly on the cheek.
“I saw ye talkin’ tae me faither,” he said.
“Yes,” Beatrice replied. “Your father is a good man to talk to when one has as confused a head as I. He does not shirk away from asking questions. His silences somehow invite you to talk.”
Jeames grinned. “Aye, he is a wise beggar, that one. I saw him just afore. He said somethin’ queer that I am still tryin’ tae decipher.”
Then, looking at the wonderful figure of Beatrice sitting amidst the golden, sweet-scented flowers of the honeysuckle, Jeames realized exactly what his father had been talking about. There was only one possible thing that he could ask this woman. He could not help but grin like a fool at his father’s ability to see to the heart of a man.
Although, as far as that goes, I am his son and he kens me better than any other person in this world.
“What are you laughing to yourself about?” Beatrice asked, an amused frown on her face.
Jeames shook his head and took her by the hand.
“Nothin’. Just somethin’ me faither said,” Jeames replied.
“What was it?”
Jeames looked at her, his
eyes roving around the face that had become so dear to him. “A blessin’, I think,” he said.
The Highlander took Beatrice’s other hand in his. Out across the heathland, the lowing of one of the wandering Highland cattle came faintly to their ears whilst, over their heads a golden eagle rode the air currents looking for its supper. A gentle breeze blew through Jeames’s black hair.
Awakening His Highland Soul (Steamy Scottish Historical Romance) Page 28
