Fairy Tale

by Jillian Hunter

  He was important, and real, albeit reluctantly, to her now.

  As if she did not have enough problems.

  Two years before, her father and her fiancé had been killed supporting Duncan’s father in a plot to bring James III to the throne. Duncan’s father had been killed too, but that hadn’t stopped Marsali’s two brothers from taking over where Kenneth MacElgin had left off, hatching their own half-cocked Jacobite revolt last winter. Her older brothers, Adam and Dougall had not returned at all, and young Gavin had come back a cripple.

  Marsali could not bear to lose another loved one in these petty plots that were only doomed to failure. She wanted the British soldiers to go away forever. She wanted her nieces and nephews to grow up planning weddings, not funerals. She ached for the quiet pattern of their lives to resume. There was nothing that meant more to her than family. Grief upon grief had destroyed her future.

  Could this man who fought like a devil and looked like an archangel be the answer? Her heart hammered wildly with anticipation at the thought.

  For months her uncle had been predicting the dramatic arrival of the man who would restore power and dignity to the clan. Of course, Uncle Colum’s predictions were typically more wrong than right, but Marsali had a powerful feeling about this one; she needed to believe it.

  Desperation compelled her to give Duncan MacElgin a chance. Hope enabled her to sacrifice a little pride and physical labor to save lives. The fact that he was gorgeous didn’t hurt either. That everyone had believed him dead only enhanced his dark mystique.

  “Here.” Duncan’s deep voice broke her train of thought; she glanced up just in time to catch the sodden ball of his clothing he hurled at her, the action anything but heroic. “Carry those back to the castle, Marsali, and launder them before nightfall. My belongings should arrive in another few days.”

  “I can’t possibly carry all this on my horse, my lord,” she complained, striving not to stagger under the dripping load.

  He chuckled, sun-lines deepening at the corners of his eyes. Despite herself, Marsali had to admit that when he relaxed his guard, he looked a little boyish and far less threatening, an illusion that he proved could not be trusted by his next callously spoken words.

  “No, Marsali, you cannot carry that load on horseback. Which is why I intend to ride your mare while Lachlan tries to find my horse on the moor. He was frightened away by the boulders you rolled into our path.”

  “Speaking of boulders, these things weigh as much as a standing stone, my lord.”

  Duncan marched past her, his face unconcerned. “You’ll probably discover you have many hidden strengths as well as weaknesses under my guardianship, Marsali.” He almost added, out of habit, that he’d make a soldier of her yet, but he caught himself in time.

  She struggled to keep pace with his enormous strides, glaring at her grinning clansmen over the top of her wet bundle. Sniveling traitors who didn’t appreciate the noble sacrifice she was making for their sakes. “Excuse me, my lord, did you say ‘guardianship’?”

  “Like it or not—and I don’t—I am your chieftain, responsible for your behavior. Your actions reflect upon my leadership.” He vaulted onto her horse, smiling down into her small disgruntled face as if he savored the challenge of turning her into a drudge. “You’d better move, lass. It’s a long walk to the castle, and you’ve a full day’s work ahead.”

  “Nobody has ever ordered me around before,” Marsali said slowly, the shining image she had built of him in her heart already beginning to tarnish.

  His smile widened. “Ah, well, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?”

  Marsali did not move, watching him manipulate the horse with the same elegant conceit as he had her. And damn if the mare didn’t respond to his expert handling, prancing around the fragrant tufts of heather and bracken fern and carrying the gorgeous giant as if it were an honor. Resentment gripped her.

  She wondered suddenly if she ought to save herself from the situation by blaming one of her dimwitted cousins for masterminding the ambush. But what a sight Duncan had been, bare as a boiled egg, and fighting singlehandedly with that casual grace that had made his clansmen look like the unskilled buffoons they were. She couldn’t evict the elemental splendor of him from her mind. She had been entranced. Not only by his strength and physical magnificence, his sharply chiseled face and muscular horseman’s body, but by the aura of mastery around him, the raw energy of will that struck a spark in her own passionate soul. This was a man equal to any enemy.

  Still, an undeniable conflict had begun to rage inside her, pitting emotion against intellect. As proud and beautiful as Duncan MacElgin appeared, he conducted himself with a cold inflexibility that did not bode well for the clan. He might have learned self-control since his youth, but had he learned compassion?

  True, the clan needed a cool head to stop its decline into chaos. But that cool head also demanded the tempering balance of a warm heart. And if Duncan’s history gave any hint to his present emotional state, he would be a ruthless leader. Physically strong but empty within. She shivered, imagining how he could misuse such power, how easily it could ensnare the unwary.

  The danger lay in his personal magnetism. A man like that could persuade his followers to do anything. Look at her, trudging about with his damned laundry, following him like a lost kitten.

  She couldn’t decide what to do. Her instincts had never misled her before, but then she had never been tested like this. Was it not said that indecision was the Devil’s own dance?

  “Hell,” she said, and she tossed the heavy bundle back into the tarn.

  No sooner had she enjoyed the deep satisfaction of watching his lace-edged lawn shirt sink to the bottom of the tarn again than Duncan wheeled the mare around and cantered back toward her.

  She bit her lip, a shiver of hot-cold apprehension raising gooseflesh on her skin as he reined in before her. She’d done it now.

  “Not an act of insubordination already, Marsali?” he asked, allowing the horse to press forward until Marsali balanced herself with her heels tottering over the tarn.

  “I slipped on the moss and dropped your things,” she lied baldly, defiantly crossing her slender brown arms over her chest.

  He raised his eyebrows and tried to judge her age, staring involuntarily at the faint outline of her figure revealed by the wet patches of water that marred her pale blue muslin gown. She was a small sprite of a thing, fine-boned, with curves in the right places, and she seemed far too delicate to be leading Highland ruffians on ambushes. The strange thought came to Duncan that he could crush her in his palm like a butterfly, if she ever allowed herself to be caught. She possessed an ethereal quality that he couldn’t reconcile with her outrageous behavior and boldness of character.

  Her character was in fact what his betrothed, Lady Sarah Grayson, would undoubtedly call common. But in the depths of this young woman’s sea-mist eyes, in that low impertinent voice, Duncan had detected a disturbingly “uncommon” intelligence and refinement that defied bloodlines. Marsali had managed his maneuvers with the instincts of a rival general. Even now he sensed she held the upper hand.

  If he hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn he was about to walk into another ambush, something infinitely more complex and dangerous than what he had just escaped.

  He scoffed inwardly at the notion. “I’m waiting,” he said, with an aristocratic dip of his head. “Let’s see how fast those little feet of yours can march across the moor.”

  She spun from him, muttering under her breath, and bent to retrieve his clothes from the tarn. Then, just as she had restacked the wet bundle back into her arms, she felt something flat and cold prod against her behind.

  She pivoted, outraged, this personal insult more than even she could bear, considering herself an unusually tolerant person. But it was not his big hand fondling her backside, as she had imagined. Instead he was holding his heavy sword, hilt down, toward her. Against her will she raised her gaze,
absorbing a stunning view of powerfully muscled thigh and torso, before she reached his austere face.

  “You’ll need to carry my sword too, lass,” he said, sounding hugely unapologetic. “I’m afraid it’s frightening the horse.”

  “I don’t give a—”

  “Careful, lass. I don’t tolerate swearing from my servants.”

  He wheeled the mare back toward the moor before Marsali could set him straight on her position in the castle. She blew out a sigh and glanced back up at the crag. Her cowardly clansmen had retreated like rats into the shadowy crevices of the mountain pass where many of them lived. Most of the clan, herself included, preferred the bleak elements to the gloom of Castle MacElgin, which seemed to have fallen under a dark enchantment of anarchy and abandon.

  Eun alone remained to protect her. Eun, who belonged to her uncle the wizard and who obeyed only Colum’s wishes, and then only half the time at that.

  The hawk swooped down to trail above her slow awkward march toward the castle. Its overshadowing presence reminded Marsali that she could turn to Uncle Colum’s magic in handling the MacElgin. In the event her own plan to handle him failed.

  As Duncan rode ahead to the castle, ignoring the wild beauty of the moor, he cursed himself for allowing a handful of savage, undereducated Highlanders to arouse insecurities he had spent years struggling to overcome. Blast them. He shouldn’t give a damn. Except that they were his people, linked to him by bloodlines and tradition too ancient to trace or to disentangle. He belonged to them as they belonged to him, the ties that not only bound but strangled.

  He cursed himself for coming back, for reopening the old wounds, for reawakening the old ghosts.

  He cursed that wrathful angel of a girl for standing up to him on the moor, challenging the years of rank and authority he had earned.

  In a corner of his heart, he’d hoped that, despite all the trouble he’d caused, he would be welcomed home a hero. A clap on the back to acknowledge his accomplishments. A tentative smile to signal his sins had been forgiven. His father opening his arms in forgiveness, inviting him back to the hearth. His half-sister, Judith, ruffling his hair in affectionate exasperation.

  What fantasy. What a fool.

  His father was dead. Judith had long ago escaped from this village to the peaceful seclusion of her island convent. His clan loathed him.

  He reined in the mare and glanced over his shoulder at the girl, a reluctant smile softening the harshly sculptured contours of his face. Her progress appeared painful. The sword slid every few steps into the masses of purple heather that edged the hilly track. To lighten her burden, she had donned Duncan’s boots over her own and was clumping along like an ill-tempered Puss-in-Boots. Every so often she would pause to curse Duncan to the heavens, the phrases pungent and inventive.

  Where had a girl like that cultivated the strength of will to stand up to a man of his experience? How had she learned the art of surrender without losing a shred of her ridiculous dignity?

  Duncan shrugged off the unwelcome sense of concern that threatened to cloud his clear judgment. He couldn’t afford to care or soften his stance with his future at stake. Neither forgotten nor forgiven, he had no reason to tarry longer here than he had to.

  Still, like it or not—and he didn’t—the chieftain had come home.

  Chapter

  3

  At first Duncan did not believe his eyes as he beheld the unsightly hulk of the thirteenth-century castle on the hill overlooking the sea. He told himself he was fatigued to the point of hallucinations. That couldn’t be a skull and cross-bones pirates’ flag flapping from the parapets in place of the MacElgin standard. Those weren’t chickens scratching in the dry dusty moat, the same ditch that had once been fed from fierce tidal channels to repel Danish invaders.

  He rode up the hill and through the barbican, dread creeping over him. A pair of hens fluttered around the mare’s hooves. He could hear a rhythmic thudding from behind the castle walls and the echoing refrain of raucous, off-key singing.

  He dismounted and threw a stone at the drawbridge. A few moments later a scullery maid in a shift and dirty apron appeared above him on the watch turret. Without warning, she hoisted a hunting horn to her mouth and gave it a deafening blow before proceeding to bellow down into the barbican at the top of her considerable lungs.

  “HALT!” she began, squinting down nearsightedly. “Be ye friend or be ye foe? For if ye’re foe, then away ye go, but if ye’re friend then ye’re bloody out of luck anyway because Archie is piss-pot drunk in the gatehouse, and I’m no lowerin’ that damned drawbridge again today by myself!”

  Duncan blinked, her strident voice ringing in his ears, and looked around him. From the corner of his eye he could see Marsali trudging up the winding road to the castle, and even though he could barely see her face, he suspected it reflected a wicked enjoyment at his predicament.

  “Abercrombie!” he shouted, banging at the drawbridge for the Lowland Scot steward the Crown had appointed to keep peace in the castle until a permanent owner could be installed. “Archie, or whatever your name is! Someone had better lower this damned drawbridge, and they had better do it now!”

  A surly-looking guard poked his head through the gatehouse window. “I’m no deaf. State yer business and be gone.”

  “My business, Archie, you drunken old coot, is to get into my castle and throttle every last one of you.”

  Archie leaned precariously out the arched window. “Who the Devil are ye?” he whispered, his voice rasping.

  “He’s Duncan MacElgin, your laird and chieftain,” Marsali announced, limping through the barbican and dumping her bundle against the wall to sit upon it, her head cradled in her hand. “And he’s not the most reasonable person I’ve ever met, Archie, so you’d best do exactly as he said. He made mincemeat of the others on the moor less than an hour ago.”

  Duncan turned to look down at her. “Thank you so much for the glowing introduction.”

  “Well, I—Oh dear, save your hide, my lord!”

  She broke off to leap at Duncan like a frog, snatching the reins from his gloved hands and yanking the mare back frantically toward the barbican gate, the horse’s hooves flattening his hat into the dust.

  Save his hide from what? Duncan wondered a fraction of a second before a horrible, grinding burst sounded from behind the castle wall and the drawbridge came crashing down straight for his head.

  He dove instinctively for cover, flinging himself up against Marsali and knocking them both to the ground. She groaned and went very still under his weight, a soft moan of pain from the impact breaking in her throat. Duncan had never felt like such an oaf. She was a fragile little thing, for all her fire. Concern that he had crushed her delicate bones with his clumsy weight stopped his heart until she dug her elbow into his stomach, grunting.

  “Get off me, my lord. You’re breaking my—”

  The thundering fall of the drawbridge to the ground absorbed the rest of her complaint. Clouds of choking dust sprayed them. Duncan was dimly aware of the agitated squawking rising from the ditch, acutely so of the rumpled girl who was giving him a knee in the groin and swearing like one of his soldiers. No sooner had he hauled her to her feet than a crowd of scrawny, frightened chickens descended on them, Marsali shooing them away by snapping the corner of her plaid at them with practiced ease.

  He brushed the dust off his arms, his voice furious. “I suppose this is where you get your supply of feathers for your nasty little assaults. What colossal idiot ordered the moat dammed off?”

  “Your own cousin Johnnie MacElgin,” Marsali replied with a grin, her hair and chin powdered with dust, her cheeks pink from the hike across the moor. “He said it was for the clan’s protection, as I recall.”

  Duncan arched his brow. “How ingenious. A handful of underfed chickens are meant to protect the castle?”

  Marsali blinked. For an intelligent man, he could be rather dense. “No, my lord, the chickens are happenstance. The
ditch was dammed up to protect your clansmen from falling drunk off the walkways into the moat while they were on watch.”

  Duncan closed his eyes for a moment, drawing a breath that sounded as it came from the depths of his soul. Marsali almost felt sorry for him. As bad as this appeared, he had no idea what horrors were hidden inside the castle. She hoped he was as powerful as he looked.

  Archie, the gatehouse guard, poked his shiny bald head through the window again like a tortoise. “The drawbridge is down,” he announced unnecessarily.

  Duncan slowly turned from Marsali to stare straight ahead through a veil of settling dust. The castle’s laundry—hose, trousers, tunics, plaids—hung from the portcullis’s iron grating to dry in the feeble sunlight. A slow flush crept upward from Duncan’s neck to stain his sharply chiseled face. Marsali suppressed a smile at his reaction. Aye, he was in for a big surprise, and she was bubbling with gleeful expectancy to witness the moment.

  “Raise the damned portcullis, Archie,” he shouted up at the gatehouse window.

  “Can’t. I have me orders! ’Tis laundry day.”

  “Orders?” Duncan repeated sarcastically. “You mean someone is actually responsible for this bedlam?”

  “Cook’s the only one who can give the order to raise the portcullis on laundry day,” Archie stated, about to pull back inside.

  Duncan’s flush deepened. “And what bloody good is it to lower the drawbridge if the portcullis remains closed, you moron?”

  “Look,” Archie said, his own tone getting nasty again, “ye’re the one who insisted I lower it, and I can’t see that it makes a bit of difference whether the damn thing is up or down, this being laundry day and Cook being a besom about such affairs.”

  That said, he retreated back into the gloom of the gatehouse. Duncan glanced down at Marsali, his face unfathomable in the shadows. “Give me your gun,” he said quietly.