She was a fool to let herself feel anything for him, especially when she feared he felt nothing in return. Oh, Alex enjoyed holding her and touching her and putting himself inside her, right enough. But he was careful not to offer her anything more of himself. She had tried to keep her soul apart from her self, but even in that she had waged a futile war. When Alex made love to her, it was all of herself that lay beneath him.
He frowned and moved restlessly in his sleep, something he did more and more lately. He must be remembering. It could not be long now before the end came. She reached out to lay her palm on his bristly cheek.
He thrust her away forcefully and said “No!” His eyes flew open, and she glimpsed a look of horror on his face before he turned away. His breathing was choppy and his face bore a sheen of sweat.
“Who did you think I was?”
“Another woman,” he said. “One whose touch I did not like half so much.” He tried to smile, but failed woefully.
This time she was the one who frowned. He reached out to smooth her forehead with his thumb. “It is nothing to worry you, Kitt.”
“You’re remembering,” she said.
“Yes. A few things.”
“Do you know where you come from? Do you know who you are?”
He sighed and sat up, revealing a powerful chest and shoulders that had only gotten broader as he worked in the fields beside her clansmen. She resisted when he tried to draw her into his arms, but not for long. She pressed her nose against his burnished flesh, inhaling the scents of hardworking man and good Scottish soap. She could feel time running out.
Kitt wanted Alex to make love to her, but it would have been only for the pleasure of it. She must deny both of them until the time was right again for her to conceive. “ ’Tis not the right time, Alex,” she murmured against his throat.
“Not the right time for a kiss?” he said, suiting word to deed.
Kitt felt her blood begin to thrum and threaded her fingers into the rough curls on Alex’s chest, as she had been yearning to do ever since he had sat up. “We shouldna do this, Alex.”
“Why not?” he murmured against her throat. “It will bring pleasure to us both.” His strong hands, long since callused by the hard work he did in the fields, roamed over her body, bringing pleasure with every rough, but gentle, touch.
“Carlisle has invited us to tea this morning. We havna time—”
It was the last thing she said for a very long while.
Alex had stayed in Scotland long beyond the time when he was certain of who he was. He should have gone home to Blackthorne Abbey. There were reasons why he had not.
First, he had wanted to prove to himself and to the Scots that Blackthorne was not the unfeeling bastard everyone thought he was. While there must have been a reason why he had raised the rents thrice in a year, he had not yet remembered it. He had done his best over the past months to ensure the harvest was more fruitful than it had ever been, and he had stolen from his own coffers what was needed to ensure there was no more starvation.
He had made friends of the Scots by bending his back to work alongside them, by sharing their joys and trials and tribulations—including their hatred for the English duke who had brought them to such a pass. He only hoped when the truth was known they would remember his present help and not the harm he had done in the past.
He also stayed because he still had no recollection of the circumstances under which he had left his home and family to take ship, nor any idea of how or why he had been beaten up and thrown into the sea. It was courting danger to take himself home before he knew for certain what awaited him there.
More and more his dreams were filled with painful incidents from his past that suggested his life in England had been one he might very much have wished to escape.
His brother had betrayed him.
His daughters were not his own.
And it was possible he had murdered his wife.
In the dream from which he had just woken, Alex had stood in the candlelit shadows of a marble stairway arguing with Penthia in hushed tones, trying not to wake the rest of the household. She was drunk, her eyes unfocused, her words slurred. She had reached for him with hands curled into claws, screeching at him like a bird of prey. When he threw her arm aside, she lost her balance … and fell.
He saw her tumbling in his mind’s eye, her body flailing as she tried to stop her descent. She was raging at him, shrieking in fury, until she cracked her head against the marble stair at the bottom and the sound abruptly stopped.
To his shame, for one instant, he had hoped she was dead, so that once and for all the pain would end.
For seemingly endless moments, the only sound was his own harsh breath heaving in and out of his chest. Then doors began to slam, and he heard footsteps on the upper wooden floors.
He had seen the pity in the eyes of his servants as they passed by him like ants on a mission to retrieve a doomed insect and carry it back to their nest. They knew what his wife had been. He could have strangled Penthia long ago, and they would not have said a word. They rallied round him now, calling for the doctor and carrying Penthia’s broken body to her room.
“ ’Twas a terrible accident,” his valet Stubbins said as he urged him to his bedroom. “Her Grace must have lost her footing in the dark.”
They were not even going to say she was drunk, he had realized. They were going to spare him even that small humiliation. He had not argued. He had sunk into the chair by his bedroom window and turned his face against the wing cushion to muffle his sobs of grief.
He had not cried for his wife, but for what might have been. If she had loved him even a little. If she had not tempted his brother. If she had borne him children who were his own.
He understood now why Kitt’s deception hurt him so much. He had already been betrayed by one woman who had married him for profit. And he understood now why he had found himself so unwilling to speak of his feelings to Kitt. Quite simply, he did not trust her to love him back.
Alex had brief glimpses of his children that might have tempted him to go home. Reggie defying him, her half boots scuffed, her hair ribbon missing. Becky looking to him for approval, her ribbon perfectly tied and her half boots shined. The two of them tightly holding hands, a united front against the world—and him. When he returned, he was determined to be a better father.
But there was a third compelling reason to stay where he was: Someone was trying to kill him.
He was safer here, where there were fewer places for an assassin to hide, than he would be back in England. So far, there had been two “accidents” in which he had narrowly escaped serious injury. The first had nearly killed Kitt as well.
They had been hunting deer in the hills when a shale rockslide had buried them. Kitt bore the brunt of the falling stone, and she would have suffocated had Birk not been with him to help dig her free. He had realized as he brushed the dust from her pale cheeks, and she opened her eyes to look up at him, that he could not bear to lose her.
During the second attempt, he had barely averted being stabbed when Cam had shouted a warning against a sneak-thief at a traveling fair. He had a scar along his ribs to show for it. It was only later that he noticed that Kitt’s shawl had a jagged tear in it.
Alex had begun to think perhaps someone wanted them both dead. Except an accident only yesterday had been a more obvious attempt to kill him and only him.
He had bought mounts for himself and Kitt with some of the money he had stolen from the duke’s treasure, and they rode together each morning. Someone had cut his stirrups nearly through, so that when he took a jump, he had gone flying and nearly broken his neck.
It was impossible to place blame without catching the villain in the act. Ian was too openly hostile to be engaged in such underhanded attempts on his life, Alex thought, though he certainly would benefit from Kitt’s death. And Mr. Ambleside had nothing to gain from the duke’s death that Alex could see.
He felt sure Carl
isle was the real culprit, since he would benefit most directly from the duke’s death by exercising the contract that allowed him to purchase the duke’s property. It was only a matter of time before Alex obtained the evidence he needed to bring charges against the earl in the House of Lords.
Last but not least among his reasons for staying in Scotland was his wife.
Alex had been too young and inexperienced to avoid falling in love with Penthia. He knew better now. He understood the pitfalls of giving a woman that kind of power over him. Especially when he suspected Katherine MacKinnon had married him for reasons as underhanded as any that might have occurred to Penthia before she became Duchess of Blackthorne.
What he found so reprehensible in Kitt’s behavior was her pretense of caring. At least Penthia’s dislike had been open and obvious from the moment they were married. Perhaps Kitt pretended to care for him because she needed him to couple with her to get the one thing she truly wanted from him—a child to inherit Blackthorne Hall.
Alex understood quite well that once Kitt had gotten herself with child, she would reject him. After all, Penthia had rejected him once she became duchess. But he had not been able to keep from putting himself inside her. He had told himself he could easily walk away when it was over. And it would be over once she was pregnant. He knew that.
But she would gain nothing from her deceit. He was determined to keep her from using his child to gain Blackthorne Hall.
There was one slight glitch in his plan: He had fallen deeply, irrevocably in love with her.
Alex glanced at Kitt, as they walked the last half mile to Carlisle Castle to take tea with the earl, and wondered when liking had turned to love.
It might have been at the fair in July. He had been stripped to the waist and greased like a pig to wrestle Angus, while Kitt stood by and cheered him on, her face flushed with delight as she shouted, “Hold him, Alex! Dinna let him get you down!”
When he had won the prize, a pretty yellow hair ribbon, he had crossed to her, dirt and grass still clinging to his sweaty flesh, and tied the satin into her long black hair, fumbling with the bow as though he had never tied one before. It was a public way of staking his claim on her, and as she stood trembling in his shadow, he had felt both possessive and protective.
She had surprised him by kissing him on the mouth in front of everybody. Her clansmen had cheered them both—The MacKinnon and his blushing handfast bride.
Or it might have been on the day the last sheaf of wheat was cut. It was unlucky to be the one to cut the last sheaf, so all the shearers lined up and threw their sickles at the same time. Kitt had explained that since the harvest had come early this year, the last sheaf was called a maiden sheaf. Part of it would be kept until the first horse foaled to ensure fertility in the coming year.
“You might want to keep it under your pillow,” he’d whispered.
She had blushed a fiery red and run away.
He had watched as she and the other women dressed up the sheaf of wheat as a maiden with ribbons and finery and put it at the head table during the Clyack, or little winter feast. He had stood up midway through the meal and drunk a toast to the Maiden, as was the custom.
He had been looking at Kitt when he said, “May the crops be plentiful, and the bairns be healthy.”
She had kept her lashes lowered and bit her lower lip. It was the only sign of guilty knowledge—of the wrong she was doing him—he had ever seen on her face.
Or it might have happened during kirn, the celebration of the harvest that followed the cutting of the last sheaf. Cam had challenged him to retrieve the brass ring that had been dropped, along with a useless button and a more useful sixpence and other odd trinkets, into a bowl containing an intoxicating punch called “meal and ale.” As Alex soon discovered, as he performed an act similar to bobbing for apples, one swallowed a great deal of the lethal brew in order to find the prize.
He had worn a grin as silly as any schoolboy when he came up, face dripping, and turned to Kitt with the ring in his teeth. She had blushed like the veriest maiden as he had marched over to her, grabbed her hand, and placed the ring on her bare ring finger.
The grin had faded from his face, and from hers, as he realized the import of the symbolic gesture. They were handfast, it was true, but setting a ring on her finger had made their union all the more real.
He might have lost his heart to her later that same evening, when she danced for him. He had sat at the head table, his eyes mated with hers, as she moved with nimble grace to the music of the pipes. He had been swept up by the mournful sound and had seen in her elegant carriage the pride of a people unconquered despite Culloden. A fine sheen of perspiration had glowed on her brow, reflected by the bonfire around which she danced.
He had taken her hand before the pipes had died and walked with her into the shadows, as other couples had done.
And made love to her.
It was then that he knew his heart could be broken again.
If he’d had any doubt at all of what a dangerous game he was playing, it was gone after St. Bride’s day, which was celebrated the first day of February with various rituals beseeching St. Bride to bring the earth back to life after the barren winter.
He had been entranced at the sight of Kitt sitting beside the hearth rocking an empty cradle and singing a lullaby. It was an obvious prayer to St. Bride to help a seed take root in her own barren womb.
“Do you really think that will work?” he’d asked skeptically.
“ ’Tis the custom,” she replied.
“Does it work?”
“I dinna know,” she whispered.
But it was plain she was willing to try anything. Because they had been together for a great many months, and while many others had conceived since the fall, she had not.
He had let her finish the lullaby, enjoying the soft, lilting melody, before he reached out his hand and said, “We shouldn’t let your efforts go to waste.”
She had stared at his hand but didn’t reach out to take it. “Sometimes I think ’twill never happen because …”
Because she had tricked him into marriage. Because the couplings were done for a corrupt reason.
He could have spoken the thoughts aloud, brought everything out into the open, and yet he had not. He had fought back the rage inside him. Bit back the accusations he wanted to utter.
She doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as she gets what she wants. How is that any different from Blackthorne’s ruthlessness?
Maybe God was punishing her. And him. Because so long as she did not conceive, he would keep coming to her bed. And this marriage of utter inconvenience would go on.
Chapter 18
“Give up, Mr. Ambleside. Concede defeat in this matter and save us both from ruin.”
Mr. Ambleside clucked his tongue at the earl. “My dear boy, it is true our efforts have not—”
“Our efforts?” the earl said in a choked voice. “My only crime has been a silence I yearn to break. I was never a willing party to murder. You know that. Some higher power must be protecting the duke. There can be no other explanation for his continued existence. How many of your attempts on his life have fallen short of the mark?”
“Actually, it is only four, and I do not think he can be aware of more than three.”
The earl groaned. “Three. It might as well be seventy and three! The damage is done. I tell you, he suspects me. And I am innocent!”
“Not entirely.” Mr. Ambleside sat in a lumpy wing chair watching the young man pace in the drawing room at Castle Carlisle.
The earl stopped before Mr. Ambleside. “You are right. I am not entirely innocent, because I have remained silent in order to save myself from your threatened accusations of complicity. But no longer. Do you hear me? I will have your word that these attempts on the duke’s life will end, or I will—”
Mr. Ambleside moved like a snake, rising from his chair and backhanding the young man, his ring biting into Carlisle’s r
ight cheek and drawing blood. “Coward. Fool. Idiot. I will not have my plans ruined because you don’t have the courage to keep your mouth shut.”
Mr. Ambleside immediately regretted losing his temper, but he could feel the clock ticking on his lifelong dream. Time was running out. It was nothing short of amazing that Blackthorne had not regained his memory in all these months. His luck was bound to end sooner or later, but he did not intend to give up until it did.
The earl was gripped by a fit of trembling, but Mr. Ambleside determined it was only the result of rage, and not fear, when the young man grasped him by the throat and began to squeeze. At which point, Mr. Ambleside conceded he had stepped seriously amiss with the earl.
While Mr. Ambleside had been able to impose upon Clay Bannister’s youth and inexperience to place him in a compromising position, it seemed the young man had no intention of remaining a pawn forever in the treacherous game they played. In fact, it seemed if he were not allowed to withdraw, he would soon declare himself the winner by eliminating the other party to the contest.
“I … can … not … breathe,” Mr. Ambleside managed to gasp, both hands clawing at the earl’s implacable one-handed grip.
Another moment and he would have blacked out. A moment beyond that and he would have been dead. A knock on the door was all that spared him.
The loud, abrupt noise brought the earl to his senses. A look of horror and disgust crossed Carlisle’s face before his fingers loosened.
Mr. Ambleside gasped a desperate breath and grabbed at his bruised throat. “I will not impose further upon you,” he rasped through his crushed vocal chords.
He had already started for the door when Carlisle said, “Come,” to whoever had knocked.
The door squeaked open and the butler announced, “The MacKinnon and his wife are here to see you, my lord.”
Unfortunately, the butler had not left them waiting in the front hall. As the door swung farther open, Mr. Ambleside found himself face-to-face with his nemesis.
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