“It must be the Sassenach soldiers from the fort,” said a deep-voiced woman behind Duncan, and he glanced around in disbelief to see Cook sweep into the hall from the side door, wielding a meat cleaver and rolling pin. Her kitchen battalion followed, stout-hearted young scullery maids armed with the domestic artillery of soup ladles, skillets, and toasting irons.
“If it’s British soldiers we have nothing to worry about,” Duncan said brusquely. “They know who I am. They’ve probably only come to offer me their services as a professional courtesy, and we will not attack them.” His gaze swung back to Marsali. “But if one of those suitors you reduced to quivering cowardice had an armed escort riding behind him, then we are in trouble.”
It had been so long since Castle MacElgin had faced an invasion of anything more threatening than mice that the men had forgotten how to react. Valuable seconds were squandered as they argued over whether to hide behind the flowerpots or under the table, to flee to the dungeon or up the stairs. The clamor of men in the courtyard decided the matter: There wasn’t time to run or hide.
Duncan cringed at their frantic efforts to arm themselves, plucking knives out of the fireplace, snatching pewter platters from the table to use as shields, darts from Donovan’s harp. Cook and her kitchen helpers, positioned strategically around the hall, were obviously better prepared, and sober. Edwina had confiscated an ancient spear from the wall.
Duncan grabbed Marsali just as she pulled out her own pistol and propelled her back into Johnnie’s arms. “Take her to the woods.”
Marsali’s eyes widened indignantly that she was to be excluded from all the excitement. “But I’m one of Cook’s—”
“Protect her and Lady Edwina,” Duncan told Johnnie curtly. “And make them put those weapons away.”
Johnnie nodded, surprising Marsali with his wiry strength as he dragged her by the arm toward the side passageway. “I don’t want to go!” she protested, knocking into Edwina in her struggles. “I want to stay and help the chieftain.”
“The chieftain can take care of himself,” Johnnie said impatiently, scowling as Edwina accidentally jabbed him in the side with her spear. “And I dinna want to go either, but it’s that or…”
His voice died in the sudden hush that fell over the hall. The flagstones of the outer passageway rang with the approach of booted feet. A lot of feet. Marsali took advantage of Johnnie’s distracted inattendance to break free and creep back to Duncan’s side.
He flung out his arm and thrust her into the table, blocking her body like a shield as the footsteps stopped outside the door.
Chapter
17
He stared across the hall with his hand resting on his scabbard. The rigid set of his rugged features did not reveal that he was prepared to kill the first man to make a move toward the girl who stubbornly refused to leave his side. The girl who was probably going to cause a mass slaughter before the sun rose again over this stupid castle.
The heavy iron-studded doors burst open with such force that nearly all the candles on the table guttered and expired in dancing wisps of smoke. By a trick of light upon shadow, the remaining flames highlighted the tall brawny figure who posed with swaggering pride in the doorway. Young, roguishly handsome, with streaming blond locks and a red-gold plaid secured with a gaudy gold-lion broach, he swept a long assessing look around the hall.
And stopped dead on Marsali, breaking into a boyish whoop of delight.
Duncan heard her gasp in recognition. Then she started forward until he caught a handful of her lace skirts and yanked her back to his side. She threw him an irate frown over her shoulder, her lips pursing in a pout.
Somewhere in the castle a clock chimed midnight. The arrogant intruder snapped his fingers, and two fawning attendants bustled around him, brushing off his plaid, giving his flowing golden mane a few flicks of a bejeweled comb. The young man stepped through the doorway and paused, allowing his audience to absorb the full impact of his arrival. Moments later a dozen retainers swelled into the hall like a cloud bearing an Olympian deity, six on either side of his golden magnificence, kilts swaying above big knobby knees.
“What an entrance,” Edwina said in admiration. “What timing.”
“What a fool,” Duncan said with a cynical scowl. “Who the hell is the clown?”
No one answered him.
No one, in fact, seemed to remember he existed.
Marsali was practically champing at the bit to fling her exuberant self at the charismatic arrival. His clansmen were gleefully fighting for the honor of being the first to greet the bold Highlander who stomped like a social conqueror into the hall, drained the glass of wine Effie handed him, threw out his musclebound arms, and shouted at the top of his voice with a lustful smirk.
“Someone give Jamie a candle and let him look at the lassie in the light! The wee brat had better be worth his journey here, or there’ll be hell to pay!”
“Jamie!”
“Jamie MacFay, ye big stupid lout! Ye’re looking bigger and more stupid than ever!”
“If we’d kenned ye were invited, we’d have met ye on the moor!”
“Aye, and left me wanderin’ about bare-arsed in front of the woman I’m to wed,” the popular blond newcomer joked back with a good-humored grin.
“Ye’ve lost touch, Jamie,” one of the kitchen maids shouted from the post she’d abandoned. “Nowadays ’tis Marsali who leads the men on the moor.”
“Aye?” Jamie said, staring with renewed interest at the dainty figure in lace who stood impatiently beside Duncan. “Well, that’s another point in her favor.”
Banging his goblet down on the table, he began to advance on Marsali like a lion who’d spotted its mate and would not be deterred. Duncan straightened, his hand tightening unconsciously on Marsali’s skirt.
“A friend of yours?” he asked in a wry undertone.
“We’ve met several times, the last when I was eleven,” she whispered, watching Jamie closely. “He and his father visited the castle while you were away at war. Jamie is heir to a chieftainship in his own right just like you were, my lord.”
Jamie was prevented from reaching them by the numerous clansmen who darted forward to clap him on the back, by the women who flirted and begged him to dance, by his own retainers who intercepted him to polish one of the brass studs on his pigskin boots, to clear an overturned chair from his path.
“He looks too young to be heir to anything but his first pony,” Duncan said in a disgruntled voice. “Where are his father’s land holdings?”
“In Dunlaig,” Marsali murmured, reaching up her hand unconsciously to smooth her tangled hair as Jamie approached her.
Duncan raised his eyebrow at the feminine gesture. Was she actually preening for the young peacock? He looked up slowly, squaring his shoulders, pleased to find that he stood at least three inches taller than the man who came to a swaggering halt before him.
“Jamie MacFay,” he said in a neutral greeting that gave no hint to the irrational resentment simmering beneath its deep tones. “You’re a long way from home, lad. Did you get lost?”
Jamie tore his gaze from Marsali and glanced up at Duncan as if noticing him for the first time. His cocksure grin slipped a notch at the gleam of hostility in the chieftain’s cold blue eyes. He puffed out his chest and challenged Duncan’s stern expression of established authority with a grin of reckless youth.
“Did Jamie get lost, he asks?” Jamie snorted, looking at Duncan as if he were a hermit who’d just stumbled into civilization after a fifty-year hibernation. “Was a MacFay born who couldna find his bearings in his sleep?”
Duncan granted him a cool smile. “But I don’t recall sending you an invitation.”
“An invitation?” Jamie clasped his hands to his heart in wounded disbelief. “And since when does a MacFay need an invitation to Castle MacElgin? Besides, I’m here on business.”
“Business?”
“Aye.” Jamie’s gaze strayed back to Marsali�
�s small expectant face. “I’ve come to claim my bride. We’ll discuss the financial details later—after I do a bit of wooin’.”
Jamie didn’t bother to await the chieftain’s response to his brash announcement. His self-confidence would not have accepted a rejection in any case. Before either Duncan or Marsali could react, he had grabbed her hand and ordered the entire hall to celebrate their betrothal.
Gay music erupted to accompany the wild cheers that followed a brief stunned silence. MacFay’s retainers partnered themselves with the warm and willing MacElgin kitchen maids under the watchful eye of Cook. Duncan’s lids narrowed as he watched Jamie whirl Marsali about the hall, all white lace and bewitching laughter at Jamie’s primitive display of male possession.
“Well,” Edwina said in a flat voice behind Duncan, “it looks like you’ve gotten your way after all. She likes him. He likes her. Why aren’t you grinning and clapping in relief with the others?”
Duncan lowered himself into his chair, not bothering to reply. His dark gaze did not leave the dancers until he noticed Johnnie return to the table for his drinking horn. He snagged the lieutenant’s arm.
“Why do you like him so much?”
“Who, Jamie, my lord? Why, he’s a braw fine young fellow, son of the MacFay—”
“I know that.”
“And he’s a staunch Jacobite.” Cook came to stand behind Duncan’s chair like the queen mother. “Ye’d not catch any British soldiers carving up fields for roads in the MacFay holdings. The MacFays would fight to the death to protect their land.”
“Jacobites,” Duncan said. “And you approve of him too, Agnes?”
“I didna say that, my lord. He’s a hothead, a malcontent.”
Duncan glanced up at her in surprise. Even if the old battle-ax disliked him, she obviously harbored protective instincts for Marsali.
He turned his troubled gaze back to the dancers, sitting forward with a jolt of alarm.
The golden-haired man and the girl in white had vanished from his sight. Jamie MacFay had committed an act of sexual aggression right under his nose. It was insult beyond what he could bear.
He stood, his face like stone. “They’ve gone,” he said in disbelief to no one in particular. “He’s taken her without my permission.”
Johnnie took another drink, chuckling wryly. “And how’s he to be courtin’ her in a room full of people? Leave ’em be alone an hour or two, my lord.”
“An hour or two?” Duncan said grimly, pushing his chair back as his self-control threatened to erupt. “Leave them alone so that the arrogant lout can have his honeymoon before I’ve even agreed to a wedding?”
Edwina gave him a strange look. “They’re neither of them children, Duncan. What harm can there be if they’ve decided to take an innocent walk around the castlc or along the beach?”
“What harm could there be?” Duncan repeated. “I could write a damn encyclopedia of personal experience on the subject. Jamie doesn’t strike me as the type to restrain his sexual impulses. And Marsali, well, she’s like a wild strawberry more than ripe for the picking.”
He strode toward the door, angrily sidestepping the pig sauntering in his path. The din of shuffling feet and boisterous conversation faded to a dull humming in his head. In a moment of careless fun, a clansman inadvertently sent a dart whizzing straight at Duncan’s shoulder. He deflected it with the heel of his hand. The stinging pain drew blood but did not pierce the black fury that propelled him outside.
He didn’t know what he would do when he found them. Never in the frenzy of battle, never when defeat hung over his head like an ax, had he permitted his emotions to rule his actions. Not since the raw days of adolescence had he allowed himself the luxury of acting on animal impulse.
It felt damned good to let go of his control. Aye, he enjoyed the savage rush of feelings that flooded him like a red tide. It was enough that he had the right to decide Marsali’s future, and he’d be damned if some hotheaded oaf with swaggering hips would deflower her under Duncan’s nose. Like it or not—and, to his disgust, he was beginning to—he was the chieftain, and no one would lay a finger on Marsali without his permission.
Chapter
18
He found them alone in the castle garden, if you could call it that. Actually it was more like an overgrown witch’s forest of herbs, dead flowers, and waist-high weeds. A pair of playful white kittens sprang out at him from behind a wheelbarrow. He scooped them up and set them down in a rusty bucket before closing in on the sound of soft uninhibited conversation. He was ready to murder Jamie with his bare hands.
“You’ve grown into a rare fine beauty,” Jamie was saying in a low seductive voice that set Duncan’s teeth on edge because he’d used that same tone himself often enough in the past, and with success.
“Well, I’m not bad,” Marsali replied with the frankness that Duncan could only love. “I do wish I had more of a bosom, though. My brother Gavin keeps telling me I’m as flat as an oatcake. The chieftain is always scolding me to hold out my chest too.”
Duncan frowned. Now that was a little too frank, and untrue. She had a beautiful little body. He adored her perfectly sculptured breasts. Besides, he didn’t care for where the subject would inevitably lead; if he’d been in Jamie’s place he would have exploited her naivete to shameless advantage.
Which Jamie did.
“Come sit on my lap, sweeting,” Jamie said, his voice coaxing. “I’ll have a wee look for myself and prove yer brother a liar.”
There was a long suspicious silence.
Duncan’s face darkened as he was forced into the untenable position of either exposing his hiding place to interrupt the inevitable next step, or of allowing Marsali to expose herself to Jamie MacFay’s sexual curiosity. He pushed aside the blackberry brambles to see what the situation warranted. A thorny tendril snapped back and hit him in the face as if to chastise him for interfering. He swallowed a curse and rubbed the droplet of blood that beaded on the end of his nose. This was the most ridiculous reconnaissance mission of his life.
“Oh, look, Jamie!” he heard Marsali exclaim. “They must have gotten out all by themselves. Aren’t they the sweetest things you’ve ever seen? Would you like to hold them?”
Hold them? Would you like to hold them? Duncan’s heart began to hammer so hard it roared like a tidal wave in his ears. Right then and there he decided he would throw Jamie in the dungeon for a few days to cool his overactive libido. Then he would send Marsali to the convent for some desperately needed moral guidance. The girl was as guileless as a—as a kitten.
“I’ve never seen a pair so white before,” Jamie said with a chuckle. “Aye, and aren’t they the softest things in the world?”
“Mind you don’t squash them, Jamie. They’re not used to being handled.”
Duncan could not control himself for another second. To hell with letting true love take its course. To hell with minding his own business. He burst out of the brambles like an enraged bull, his bellow of outrage shattering the tranquil intimacy of the two figures seated on the bench of the rose bower.
“Good heavens!” Marsali cried, lifting her free hand to her throat. In the other she was holding a tiny scrap of wriggly white fluff across her lap. “You scared the life out of me, my lord.”
“Aye, and the wee kittens,” Jamie observed as the second white ball scampered down his leg and disappeared under the bench.
Duncan blinked. As the black haze receded from his brain, he was shamed by the innocent scene he had defiled with his dark imagination. “I thought… I heard…”
Marsali rose with an admonishing shake of her head. “I rescued those kittens from my brother’s well, my lord. They aren’t used to being handled, and thanks to your yelling like an ogre, they probably won’t let anyone near them again. You really ought to control that temper.”
“Don’t raise your voice at me, Marsali. Get back inside.”
She put her hands on her hips. “What for?”
> “Because…” Duncan glanced over at Jamie, who had risen to stand next to Marsali, with his hand resting possessively around her waist. “Just go back into the hall, Marsali,” he said again, his face closed to debate.
Jamie gave her a fond pat on the backside. “Run along then. We’re going to talk man to man. To decide things.”
“To decide what?” she asked, her face suspicious.
“Go away, Marsali,” Duncan and Jamie said in unison. She did, reluctantly. The two kittens dove after the train of white lace hemline that had come unraveled from her skirts. Duncan shook his head disparagingly until she had disappeared behind a wall.
Jamie chuckled and clapped Duncan on the shoulder, affecting a confidential demeanor. “Ye might have waited a little longer before ye interrupted us. Jamie was just warmin’ up to a proper MacFay wooing.”
“I heard.” Duncan did not return the smile; he was thinking of Jamie’s hand on her derriere and of his around Jamie’s neck. “Unfortunately, you weren’t invited here tonight to woo her. In fact, you weren’t invited here at all.”
“But everybody likes me,” Jamie said, smoothing back his flowing blond tresses. “Especially Marsali.”
“Marsali is not the person you’re going to have to please.” Duncan leaned back against the trellis with his arms folded over his chest. “It’s me.”
Jamie’s grin faded at the chieftain’s look of cruel enjoyment. “I dinna like the sound of that, my lord.”
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you like. I also don’t like the fact that you have known her for years and have only now decided to court her. After learning she has an ample dowry.”
Jamie’s eyes flashed in indignation. “I’d have come for her before but her dad would never have had me. Always gave himself airs, he did. Anyway, I’d heard she was to be wed to someone else.”
Fairy Tale Page 19
