Beyond the Highland Mist

by Karen Marie Moning

  “For now. When she’s cured, I touch her all she wants.”

  “She is the key word there.”

  Adam laid his palm against Adrienne’s cheek, intently studying the wound on her neck. “I need boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens.”

  “Bring me boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens,” the Hawk roared at the closed door.

  “And I need you out of this room.”

  “No.” There was no more finality in death than in the Hawk’s refusal.

  “You leave or she dies,” Adam murmured, as if he’d merely said “It’s raining, had you noticed?”

  Hawk didn’t move a muscle.

  “Sidheach James Lyon Douglas, have you a choice?” Adam wondered.

  “You have all my names. How do you know so much about me?”

  “I made it my business to know so much about you.”

  “How do I know you didn’t shoot her yourself with some obscure poison that isn’t even Callabron but mimics it, and now you’re faking a cure—all so you can simply steal my wife?”

  “Absolutely.” Adam shrugged.

  “What?” Hawk snarled.

  Adam’s eyes glittered like hard stones. “You don’t know. You must make a choice. Can you save her at this point, Lord Hawk? I don’t think so. What are your options? She’s dying from something, that much is plain to see. You think it’s Callabron, but you’re not certain. Whatever it is, it is killing her. I say I can cure her and ask a boon for it. What choice do you have, really? They say you make hard decisions look easy. They say you’re a man who would move a mountain without blinking, if he wanted that mountain moved. They say you have an unerring sense of justice, right and wrong, honor and compassion. They say, also”—Adam grimaced at this—“that you are passingly fair between the sheets, or so one woman said, and it offended me in great sum. In fact, they say entirely too much about you for my liking. I came here to hate you, Hawk. But I didn’t come here to hate this woman you claim as your wife.”

  Adam and Hawk stared at each other with barely harnessed violence.

  Adrienne cried out sharply and shuddered in Hawk’s arms. Her body convulsed, then tensed as if pulled taut on a rack. Hawk swallowed hard. What choice? There was no choice, no choice at all.

  “Cure her,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

  “You grant my boon?” the smithy asked.

  “As we agreed. Only if she chooses you.”

  “You will place no restrictions upon any time she chooses to spend with me. I am wooing her from this day forth and you will not caution her from me. She is free to see me as she pleases.”

  “I am wooing her too.”

  “That is the game, Hawk,” Adam said softly, and Hawk finally understood. The smithy didn’t want his wife handed over freely. He wanted a contest, a battle for her favors. He wanted an open challenge, and intended to win.

  “You will hate it when I take her from you, dread Hawk,” the smithy promised. “Close the door when you leave.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT A MAN’S WORLD CAN BE TURNED inside out before he even has a chance to see it coming and try to stop it, Grimm?”

  Hawk had started drinking the moment the door had shut on his wife and the smithy. He was trying with determination to get head-reeling, feet-stumbling, bellyaching drunk and was not succeeding.

  “Do you believe he can cure her, Hawk?”

  Hawk puzzled a moment. “Aye, Grimm. I do. There’s something unnatural about Adam Black, and I mean to find out what it is.”

  “What do you suspect?”

  “I don’t know. Grimm, I want you to find out everything about the man you can. Talk to everyone on the estate until you get some answers. Where he came from, when he came here, who he’s related to, what he does all day. I want to know about every breath he draws, every piss he takes.”

  “Understood, Hawk.”

  “Good.”

  They both turned to stare at the door to the Green Lady’s room. It had been hours since the smithy had closed the door. Not a sound had escaped since.

  “Who would try to kill her, Hawk?” Grimm puzzled. “Mad Janet was practically a recluse. According to the gossip at Comyn keep, fewer than five people ever saw her. How could a lass so far out of circulation offend anyone enough to invite murder?”

  Hawk rubbed his head tiredly. His stomach was churning and the Scotch wasn’t helping. On sudden impulse he rolled the bottle away from him, toward Grimm. “Don’t let me have any more. I need a clear head. I can’t think right now. He’s touching her, Grimm. He could be bathing her, gazing upon her. I want to kill him.”

  “So do it, when he’s done curing her,” Grimm said easily.

  “I can’t!”

  “Then I’ll do it for you,” Grimm said, ever faithful.

  “Nay. We made a pact.”

  “You made a pact with him?” Grimm’s eyes flared wide. “Damn it all to hell, man! You never break a pact. Why would you be so foolish to make a pact with a man you can’t stand?”

  “He can save my wife.”

  “When did you come to have such feeling for this Mad Janet you swore never to take to wife anyway?”

  “Shut up, Grimm.”

  “What’s the pact, Hawk?” Grimm persisted.

  “He wants Adrienne.”

  “You gave him Adrienne?”

  “Grimm, no more questions. Just find out anything and everything about this man called Adam Black.”

  “Be assured, I will.”

  “You are flawless, beauty,” the smithy said as his coal-black eyes raked over her nude body twisted in the damp sheets.

  “Flawless lalless,” Adrienne pooh-poohed dreamily. The heat was ebbing, slowly.

  “Decidedly lawless.”

  He couldn’t know. Not possibly. “What do you mean by that?” She struggled to form the words, and wasn’t certain she even made a sound.

  “Just that there must be something criminal about a woman so beautiful,” he replied archly.

  “Nothing criminal about me,” she demurred distantly.

  “Oh, beauty, I think there is much criminal about you.”

  “There is something just not normal about you, Adam,” she mumbled as she tossed restlessly.

  “No,” he replied smugly, “there is certainly nothing normal about me. Give me your hand, beauty, I’ll show you not normal.”

  And then there was cool water, frothy ocean upon powder-white sand. Whisper of gentle surf rushing over the beach, cool sand beneath her bare toes. No ants, no rack, no fire. Just peace in her most favorite haven in the world. The seaside at Maui where she’d vacationed with her girlfriends. Beautiful, blissful days they’d passed there with fresh-squeezed orange juice and endless summer jogs on the beach, bare feet slapping the edge of the tide.

  And then the stranger images. Scent of jasmine and sandalwood. Snowflake sand dotted with fuchsia silk tents and butterflies upon every bough of every limb of every rowan. An improbable place. And she was lying in the cool sands and healed by tropical lapis waves.

  “Beauty, my beauty. Want me. Feel me, hunger for me and I will slake your need.”

  “Hawk?”

  Adam’s anger was palpable in the air.

  Adrienne forced her eyes open a slit, and gasped. If her body had obeyed, she would have shot straight up in bed. But it didn’t obey. It lay flaccid and weak upon the bed while her temper shot up instead. “Get out of my room!” she yelled. At least her voice hadn’t lost its vigor.

  “I was just checking to make sure your forehead cooled.” Adam grinned puckishly.

  “You thickheaded oaf! I don’t care why you’re in here, just get out!”

  Finally her body obeyed a little and she managed to get her fingers around a tumbler at the bedside. Too weak to throw it, she was at least able to slide it off the table. Glass crashed to the floor and shattered. The sound mollified her slightly.

  “You were dying. I cu
red you,” Adam reminded.

  “Thank you. Now get out.”

  Adam blinked. “That’s all? Thank you, now get out?”

  “Don’t think I’m so stupid that I don’t realize you were touching my breasts!” she whispered fiercely. At the abashed look on his face she realized he had indeed thought she’d been unconscious. “So that and my thanks are all you’ll be getting, smithy!” she growled. “I hate beautiful men. Hate them!”

  “I know,” Adam smiled with real pleasure and obeyed her dismissal.

  Adrienne squeezed her eyes shut tightly but upon the pink-gray insides of her eyelids shadows arose. Images of being held between the Hawk’s rock-hard thighs, wrapped in arms that were bands of steel. His voice murmuring her name over and over, calling her back, commanding her back. Demanding that she live. Whispering words of … what? What had he said?

  “She lives, Lord Buzzard—”

  “Hawk.”

  “Both birds of prey. What difference?”

  “A buzzard is a scavenger. A hawk selects his kill as carefully as a falcon. Stalks it with the same unerring conviction. And fails as frequently—which is never.”

  “Never,” Adam mused. “There are no absolutes, Lord Hawk.”

  “In that you’re wrong. I choose, I adhere, I pursue, I commit, I attain. That—that, my errant friend—is an absolute.”

  Adam shook his head and studied the Hawk with apparent fascination. “A worthy adversary. The hunt begins. No cheating. No tricks. You may not forbid her from me. And I know that you tried to already. You will recant your rules.”

  Hawk inclined his dark head. “She chooses,” he allowed tightly. “I will forbid her nothing.”

  Adam nodded, a satisfied nod as he plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his loose trousers and waited.

  “Well? Get thee from my castle, smithy. You have your place, and it is without my walls.”

  “You might try a thank-you. She lives.”

  “I’m not certain you aren’t the reason she almost died.”

  At that, Adam’s brow creased thoughtfully. “No. But now that I think on it, I have work to do. I wonder … who would try to kill the beauty, if not me? And I didn’t. Had I, she would be dead. No slow poison from my hand. Quick death or not at all.”

  “You’re a strange man, smithy.”

  “But I will soon be most familiar to her.”

  “Pray the gods she is wiser than that,” Grimm mumbled as Adam stalked off into the dim corridor. Night had fallen and the castle lamps were still largely unlit.

  Hawk sighed heavily.

  “What deal did you make with that devil?” Grimm asked in a voice scarcely audible.

  “Think you he may be?”

  “Something is not natural about that man and I intend to find out what.”

  “Good. Because he wants my wife, and she doesn’t want me. And I saw her wanting him with a hurt in her eyes.”

  Grimm winced. “You are certain you don’t want her just because she doesn’t want you and he wants her?”

  Hawk shook his head slowly. “Grimm, I have no words for what she makes me feel.”

  “You always have words.”

  “Not this time, which warns me truly that I’m in deep trouble and about to get deeper. Deep as I must to woo that lass. Think you I’ve been spelled?”

  “If love can be bottled, or shot from Cupid’s bow, my friend,” Grimm whispered into the breeze that ruffled in Hawk’s wake when he entered Adrienne’s chamber.

  In the weeks to come the Hawk would wonder many times why the Rom, whom he trusted and valued, and whom he had thought returned those feelings in kind, had never come to tend his wife during those terrible days. When he spoke to his guard, the man said that he’d delivered the message. Not only didn’t the Rom come, they were conspicuously absent from Dalkeith. They made no trips to the castle to barter their goods. They spent no evenings weaving tales in the Greathall before a rapt and dazzled audience. Not one of the Rom approached Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea; they kept to their fields, out past the rowans.

  That fact nagged at Hawk’s mind briefly, but was quickly lost in the thick of more weighty concerns. He promised himself he would resolve his questions with a trip to the gypsy camp once his wife was fully healed and matters with the strange smithy were resolved. But it was to be some time before he made the trip to the Rom camp; and by that time, things would be vastly changed.

  Adrienne drifted up from healing slumber to find her husband watching her intently.

  “I thought I’d lost you.” The Hawk’s face was dark, glistening in the firelight, and it was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. It took her several long moments to shake loose the cotton stuffing that had replaced her brain. With wakefulness came defiance. Just looking at that man made her temper rise.

  “Can’t lose something you don’t have. Never had me to begin with, Lord Hawk,” she mumbled.

  “Yet,” he corrected. “I haven’t had you yet. At least not in the sense that I will have you. Beneath me. Bare, silky skin slippery with my loving. My kisses. My hunger.” He traced the pad of his thumb along the curve of her lower lip and smiled.

  “Never.”

  “Never say never. It only makes you feel more foolish when you end up taking it back. I wouldn’t want you to feel too foolish, lass.”

  “Never,” she said more firmly. “And I never say never unless I’m absolutely one hundred percent certain I will never change my mind.”

  “There are a lot of nevers in there, my heart. Be careful.”

  “Your heart is a wrinkled prune. And I mean every blasted one of those nevers.”

  “Mean them as you will, lass. ’twill only make it that much more pleasurable to break you to my bit.”

  “I am not a mare to be broken to ride!”

  “Ah, but there are many similarities, wouldn’t you say? You need a strong hand, Adrienne. A confident rider, one not dismayed by your strong will. You need a man who can handle your bucking and enjoy your run. I won’t break you to ride. Nay. I will break you to the feel of my hand and mine alone. A mare broken to ride allows many riders, but a wild horse broken to the bit of one hand—she loses none of her fire, yet permits none but her true master to mount her.”

  “No man has ever been my master, and none ever will. Get that straight in your head, Douglas.” Adrienne gritted her teeth as she struggled to pull herself upright. It was hard trying to hold her ground in a conversation while lying flat on her back feeling ridiculously weak, looking up at this goliath of a man. “And as to mounting me….”

  To her chagrin and the Hawk’s vast amusement, she slipped back into healing slumber without completing the thought.

  Unknown to him, she more than completed it in her dreams. Never! her dreaming-within-the-dream mind seethed, even as she was drawn to the great black charger with fire in his eyes.

  CHAPTER 11

  “IT’S NOT ME SOMEONE’S TRYING TO KILL, ADRIENNE repeated.

  She was buried in mounds of plush pillows and woolen throws and felt helplessly swallowed by a mountain of feathers. Every time she moved the dratted bed moved with her. It was wearing her out, like being cocooned in a down straitjacket. “I want to get up, Hawk. Now.” Too bad her voice didn’t come off sounding as firm as she’d intended. It would have—it should have—except being in a bed while trying to argue with this particular man scattered her thoughts like leaves to a windstorm, into a jumble of passionate images; bronzed skin against pale, ebony eyes and hot kisses.

  The Hawk smiled, and she had to bite down the overwhelming urge just to smile blankly back, like some dim-witted idiot. He was beautiful when somber, but when he smiled she was in grave danger of forgetting that he was the enemy. And she must never forget that. So she put a lot of frustration to good use, and dredged up an impressive scowl.

  His smile faded. “Lass, it’s been you both times. When are you going to face the facts? You must be guarded. You’ll get used to it. In time you�
��ll scarce notice them.” He gestured at the dozen brawny men standing outside the Green Lady’s room.

  She shot a withering glance at her “elite guard” as he called them. They stood legs wide, arms folded across thin broad chests. Implacable, stony faces, and all of them with physiques that would make Atlas consider shrugging half his weight over. Where do they breed these kind of men? The Bonny and Braw Beefcake Farm? She snorted her disgust. “What you don’t understand is that if you’re so busy protecting me, the assassin is going to get whoever they’re really after. Because it’s not me!”

  “Do they call you ‘Mad Janet’ because you refuse to accept reality?” he wondered. “Reality is that someone wishes you dead. Reality is that I am only trying to protect you. Reality is that you are my wife and I will always keep you safe from harm.” He was leaning closer as he spoke, punctuating the phrase reality is with a sharp stab at the air directly in front of her. Adrienne compensated by shrinking deeper into her haven of feathers each time he stabbed.

  “It is my duty, my honor, and my pleasure,” he continued. His eyes swept her upturned face and darkened with desire. “Reality … ah … reality is that you are exquisitely beautiful, my heart,” he said in a voice suddenly roughened.

  His voice conjured images of sweet cream blended with fine Scotch, tossed over melting ice cubes. Smooth and rough at the same time. It unnerved her, flatly shattering what little composure she’d been hugging tightly around her. When he wet his full lower lip with his tongue her mouth went dry as a desert. And his dark eyes flecked with gold were a smoldering promise of endless passion. His eyes that were locked on her lips and oh, but he was going to kiss her and she would do anything to prevent that!

  “It’s time you know the truth. I am not Mad Janet,” she snapped, saying something, anything, whatever came to mind to keep his lips from claiming hers in that intoxicating pleasure. “And for the umpteenth time—I am not your blasted heart!”