Fergus glanced across to where Marina sat beside the bed, sketchbook in hand, although she hadn’t opened it. That was something else that had changed. She didn’t draw anymore, or at least not just for the pure joy of it.
Her father was talking about a book he’d read. Over the last few evenings, the burden of conversation had fallen on Ugolino. Whether he noticed the strain between Fergus and Marina or not, he seemed content to fill the lengthening silences.
Fergus remained at the small table where he and Marina ate each night. Over the rim of his wineglass, he observed the woman he wanted. Wanted more with every day. Gloom hung about her the way a rainy day hung about the glen.
“How is your work going, Marina?” Ugolino cut off his critique of the novel, as if realizing he was talking to himself. “You never say.”
The question made the lassie start. Fergus had a suspicion that her thoughts weren’t much different to his own—and no jollier. After all, she’d admitted she wanted him, despite having no intention of yielding. “I’m making progress, Papa.”
“That’s good. Are you finding plenty of scenes to please His Grace?”
When Marina looked shifty, Fergus was surprised. While they were out on the hills, she kept her head down and sketched diligently. “I’m making the preparatory drawings. Once I’ve decided on my final subjects, I’ll do the color studies.”
Ugolino turned to Fergus. “This is how she works, painting a draft from life, then finishing the picture in her studio in Firenze.”
“How interesting.” Though he was sincere, Fergus’s flat response sounded like sarcasm. A couple of days ago, Marina would have called him on that. Now she didn’t seem to notice.
“Can I see what you’ve done?” her father asked. “Perhaps I can help you choose.”
Her hands tightened on the sketchbook, as though she feared Ugolino might rip it away. “There’s plenty of time yet, Papa.”
Her father looked puzzled. “You always show me your work.”
“Not this time,” she said with a hint of sharpness, rising to her feet. She wore the pink dress again, the one that showed her bosom. All night, the display of satiny olive skin had taunted Fergus.
Now that bosom was heaving with disquiet. He wondered why.
Preparing to escort her as he did every night, he stood, too. More torture. Saying a polite goodnight on the threshold of her room highlighted the futility of all his hopes.
He crossed the room to take her arm, waiting for her to stiffen under his touch. Be damned if he’d give up what few miserly contacts propriety allowed him. The chance to hold her arm, to lift her onto a pony, to pass her a glass of wine when, with luck, fingers might brush.
Hell, it was like a slow death by starvation.
He and Marina said their goodnights to Ugolino, then they were outside in the corridor.
“You don’t have to walk me to my door.” She pulled away, clutching her sketchbook to her chest like a shield.
Fergus stepped back, because the temptation to grab her became too powerful. “It’s all ye permit me.”
She looked stricken, and her knuckles whitened. “Oh, Fergus, I hate how things are between us.”
He braced to hear her say she wanted to leave. In truth, he was surprised she’d stayed this long. His heart felt like a stone.
“Is your work going well?” he asked, when she didn’t fill the pause with a request for his traveling coach.
“Dio, you know it’s not.” Her eyes were dark with suffering. For God’s sake, if resisting him made her so distressed, she knew how to cheer herself up. He was keen to cooperate.
He waited again for her to announce her departure. After all, painting was her reason for living.
“You havenae looked happy with what you’ve done since that first day.” When her pencil had flown so fast across the page, it was like she raced time to get the details down. Afterwards she’d glowed with satisfaction.
Over the last days, the glow had gone. He wished he could take her in his arms to soothe her roiling unhappiness.
Except they both knew that if he started with comfort, that wasn’t where he’d finish.
“I haven’t been.” Another reason for her to move on. The smile she summoned was a mere shadow of what it used to be. “Perhaps tomorrow will be better.”
“Perhaps.” He sounded as convinced as she did, which wasn’t very. Then he realized what she’d said. So he faced another day of this hell. He was in such a confused state, he was delighted to hear it.
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Aye.” He stared at her, willing her to give the smallest sign that she wanted his touch. The heat rising in his blood threatened to incinerate him.
This was always the worst part of the day. The time where he left her without a caress, and she retired behind a stout oak door to sleep alone. When in any correctly ordered universe, she’d lie in his arms until dawn.
Those fathomless black eyes met his, and he wondered for a flaring instant if this might be the night she relented.
The blazing second disintegrated into ashes. She turned and lifted the latch. “Goodnight, Fergus.”
He didn’t answer. Sour disappointment crammed every unspoken word in his throat. Without a backward glance, she disappeared into her room.
With aching tenderness, Fergus leaned in and pressed one hand against the closed door, spreading his fingers as if he reached through the wood. Then with a heavy sigh, he trudged away.
Chapter Thirteen
Marina sat on a green hillside overlooking a pattern of sunlit islands in a silver sea. She’d never seen a finer view, but her pencil lay motionless in her fingers and her heart failed to lift as it always did in the presence of beauty.
Since Fergus had kissed her, every day had been like this. She frittered away her time, while aware that this could be the last spell of good weather before she went home to Florence. It was both urgent and imperative that she finish her sketches, then return to make detailed studies of the dozen scenes she chose for the duke’s pictures.
The Duke of Portofino was paying her a fat fee, and more important, he was a noted art collector, an influential voice in Italian cultural circles. When he’d offered her this commission, she thought that at last she broke through to a career at the highest level. She’d been overjoyed and flattered to say yes.
Now her pencil felt as dead and unwieldy as a brick, and the magnificence around her wouldn’t transfer to the page. She wished she’d said no to artistically minded noblemen and stayed in Florence where she made a good living, selling her work to local aristocratic families and rich travelers.
Except in her heart, she didn’t wish that at all. Because if she’d never come to Scotland, she’d never have encountered Fergus Mackinnon. He was unlike any man she’d ever met, and he became the measure by which she’d judge all men in the future.
The wisest thing would be to leave, even if that meant bearing with Fergus’s company as far as one of the houses on Skye where the duke had arranged an introduction. But as with her art, so with her ability to make decisions. She couldn’t summon the will to go.
Right now, she was alone. Her host wasn’t in sight, although given how he occupied her thoughts, he might as well be. Fergus never hovered by her side, but took the chance with all this hill walking to consult with his crofters and shepherds. As someone who also had a purpose—before she came to Achnasheen anyway—Marina admired his diligence. Macushla and Brecon had come out with them, but had soon disappeared across the hills to pursue mysterious canine affairs.
With a sigh, she considered the few uninspired lines she’d set on the page. Perhaps the problem with this sketch was the angle of the view. She rose, dusted off her skirts and climbed the hillside.
When she’d been sitting, she’d heard running water. Now she saw a stream tumbling toward a cliff, then over. Perhaps a dramatic waterfall might awaken her dormant urge to draw. She forded the water and edged around for a better l
ook. This had definite possibilities. She ventured closer to the edge.
Marina was so busy studying the landscape for artistic potential, that she forgot to look where she was going. The heel of her half boot, wet after wading the burn, skidded across a bare patch of rock. With a scream, she plunged over the escarpment.
* * *
Fergus was checking recent repairs to a small stone bridge when he heard Marina’s shrill cry. Immediate fear froze him on the spot. These hillsides were steep and dangerous, and even folk who knew them came to grief.
He shook himself out of immobility. His heart racing faster than the water rushing down the mountainside, he dashed back to where he’d left Marina. When the dip in the ground proved empty, terror like he’d never known turned his guts to water.
“Marina!” he shouted. “Marina, for God’s sake, lassie, answer!”
The breeze whipped his words away, and for the first time in his life, he felt small and powerless in this rugged landscape he’d always loved. The burns were swollen, and the towering Mare’s Tail waterfall had turned into a torrent. If Marina had slipped into that, they’d be bringing her broken body up from the stony riverbed at the base of the cliff.
Why in Hades had he left her alone? It was agony to be near her, but he’d promised to keep her safe. If he lost her…
“Marina! Devil take ye, answer me!”
In a black fog of fear, he stumbled up the brae. He was the Mackinnon. These glens and hills were his domain. He wouldn’t permit them to steal his woman away.
“Marina!”
Was that a reply? Between the rushing water and the strengthening breeze, he couldn’t be sure. He ran to the brink of the waterfall, his belly clenching at the thought of seeing a crumpled figure hundreds of feet below.
Nothing.
“Marina, darling, talk to me.”
“Fergus, help me. I’m stuck.”
Gratitude made him stagger. She was alive. Hope more intoxicating than Bruce Mackenzie’s best whisky pulsed through him. But when he scanned the bare hillsides in a frantic search, he couldn’t see her.
Puzzled, he struggled to work out where her voice came from. “Where are you?”
“I’m caught on a ledge, but I can’t get up without help.”
He already moved toward the sound. “Are you hurt?”
“Only a few scrapes and bruises.”
He whispered a prayer of gratitude. “Keep talking so I can find ye.”
“I was trying to see the waterfall, and I fell.”
“You’re not safe out on your own,” he said, although he was too relieved to be angry. That moment when he’d peered over the cliff would live in his nightmares. He’d been convinced she’d left him at last, and in the most permanent way imaginable.
Compared to the fact that she was alive, nothing else mattered, not even the purgatory she’d put him through these last days.
“Right now, I might agree with you.”
“Did I hear right?” He was too worried to appreciate that this wry banter echoed the way things used to be between them. “Signorina Marina Lucchetti agrees with one of my conclusions?”
“Yes, it’s a miracle.”
He followed the sound of her voice and realized it rose over the lip of the cliff. Now he was near the place where she’d lost her footing, he saw broken bracken and torn grass that bore witness to how she’d scrabbled to stop her fall.
“I’ll raise a flag to mark the occasion when we get back to the castle.” He dropped to his stomach, not trusting the edge to hold his weight.
“If you get me out of this, I’ll help you.”
As he looked down, any urge to smile forsook him. Instead, icy fear dug its claws into his flesh.
“Good God, lassie, what have you got yourself into?” He struggled to sound as if terror didn’t tangle his intestines into knots.
She turned her dirty face upward and managed a smile. By heaven, she was gallant. She put the men he knew to shame.
Her back pressed into the side of the hill. Her feet balanced precariously on a narrow ledge that looked none too secure. On either side, she spread her arms against the rock wall. One hand curled around a protruding boulder. The other maintained a white-knuckled grip on a spindly sapling growing over the void. Below her, the hill fell away in a series of jagged ledges.
“A mess.” He was close enough to hear the panic beneath her jauntiness. “I need a big, strong brute of a Scotsman to save me. Fate has a sense of humor, it seems, and mocks my claims to self-sufficiency.”
“Aye, that’s fate for you,” he said, assessing her plight with sharp eyes. What he saw made his chest constrict with dread.
He could rush back to fetch one of the ponies and a rope, but he doubted he had time. As if to confirm his decision, Marina shifted an inch, and a shower of gravel rattled down the cliff.
“Will you trust me, Marina?” he asked as calmly as he could manage.
“Yes.”
This was no time to appreciate her swift confirmation. “I can pull you up, but you’ll have to turn around and climb toward me.”
God above, let his plan work. He could try to tug her to safety as she was, but she’d be dead weight on his arms, and he couldn’t risk the ground beneath him crumbling away.
“I can do that.” He hated to hear the quaver in her voice.
“Be careful, mo chridhe.”
“I promise that, at least.”
“Don’t wait.” This time, his voice held no false bravado at all.
Despite his command, she didn’t move straightaway. To Fergus watching from above, the few seconds’ delay lasted forever. Then gingerly she released her grip on the rock and started to shuffle mere inches at a time on the same spot as she tried to turn. More gravel came loose and bounced down the rock face. With every second of waiting, Fergus felt like he aged a millennium.
“Please talk to me, Mackinnon,” she muttered.
With his heart in his mouth, he wasn’t sure he could muster a single word. But her courage deserved any tribute he could pay. He struggled to swallow the terror blocking his throat and defied heaven to snatch her away before he had the chance to kiss her again. “Do you ken what I thought the first time I saw ye?”
Her fingers dug into the rock behind her as she shifted with infinitesimal movements. “That somebody needed to take me in hand and show me who’s in charge.”
He made himself laugh, because he knew she wanted him to. It was even less convincing than her attempt at a smile. “Och, I did think that within five minutes, but that wasnae my first reaction.”
“What was?”
Fergus cursed that she remained out of reach. Holding her while she moved would do wonders for his peace of mind. “I thought a woman with such flashing eyes belonged in my bed.”
“Eyes?”
“Aye.” He paused. “Although I have a recollection that I might have given your bosom a wee bit of attention, too.”
A choked laugh escaped her. “You’re such a man, Mackinnon.”
“Aye, well, a man is just what you want right now.”
“I have a horrible fancy that’s what I want anyway,” she muttered.
Before he could question that astonishing admission, one of her feet slipped. She gave a broken cry as he surged down in a futile attempt to catch her, barely saving himself from falling, too.
With half-disbelieving horror, he saw her fumble at the sapling. The frail tree bent to an impossible angle. Surely it must break.
By a miracle, it held, and Marina’s other hand scrabbled then found purchase on the rock face. Each second stretched into an eon, as she flung herself face-forward into the cliff.
It took him a few seconds to realize that she was safe. At least for the moment.
The breath he sucked in felt like broken glass. “Don’t…don’t scare me like that again, lassie,” he said, unable to stop his voice cracking.
Her brief laugh sounded more like a sob. “I wanted to check you were wat
ching.”
“I was watching, all right.” His voice deepened. “You say you trust me.”
“Yes, I do.”
If he got her out of this, he’d remember that. “Then lift your arm as high as you can, and I’ll take your hand.”
Without hesitation, she did. By God, she was a woman in a thousand. He dug the toes of his thick leather boots into the ground behind him and prayed to heaven with a fervor he’d never demonstrated before, that he was strong enough to hold her.
Because the possibility of losing her was anathema. He’d known her little more than a week, but in that time, she’d marked him indelibly. He refused to relinquish her to death’s greedy clutches, when he needed her to stay this side of heaven.
Fergus reached over the lip of the cliff and grabbed her wrist in a hold so tight, it must hurt. He wasn’t taking any risks of his grip slipping. “You have to let go of the tree.”
This time, Marina did falter. She lifted her disheveled dark head, and he met dark eyes burning with fear and defiance. Right now, fear was paramount. “If you drop me, I’ll never forgive you.”
He prayed she’d live. He prayed his strength would prevail. He prayed that she wouldn’t discern how close failure loomed.
“As if I’ll let you fall,” he scoffed. “Then I’d miss out on your humble thanks for saving your life.”
“Saving me for the second time,” she said in a thick voice. “That must count as showing off.”
“My granny always said things come in threes. I hope you dinna mean to prove her right.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Take my hand, Marina,” he said. “I willnae let you fall.” Let that be the truth.
“Per l’amor di dio, don’t let me go.”
“Never,” he said, as if he made a sacred vow.
Something in his tone must have convinced her to take the risk, because with a jerky movement, she released the sapling. For a sickening moment, she clawed upward before he caught her other wrist in his hand.
Fergus took a massive breath and summoned every ounce of strength he could muster. “I’m going to pull ye up, but if you can use your feet as well, it will be grand.”
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