“Her betrothed was killed, along with her father and her brothers, in an uprising two years ago.”
“Aye?” Jamie shook his head in sympathy. “Well, four more valiant deaths in the name of the Cause. Marsali has reason to be proud.”
“You’re missing the point,” Duncan said impatiently. “They were unnecessary deaths. Marsali has reason to be sad and furious at the waste of life.”
“But what else is a life for, my lord?” Jamie asked in genuine astonishment. “Would you not protect your castle if it were attacked by the Sassenachs?”
“Of course I would, but—” Duncan broke off in frustration. Why waste his breath explaining the fine points of military strategy to this empty-headed carpet knight? James Francis Edward Stewart would never usurp the Hanover king on the British throne. The Jacobite lairds were too scattered and poorly armed for a war with England.
“A man of your experience understands the glory of battle, my lord,” Jamie said craftily.
“I understand the glory of peace,” Duncan said with a frown.
“Peace?” Jamie scoffed. “They’ll be no peace, what with England stuffin’ its laws down our throats. One way or another, they’re going to kill us. Ye suggest we should die without even a fight?”
“I suggest you should value the lives of your clansmen more.”
Jamie looked uncomfortable, clearly not in agreement but afraid to argue with the chieftain. “I want to marry Marsali,” he said sullenly, like a child being denied a sweet. “Ye’ve no reason to refuse me, not when ye’re dangling her like a carrot to every man for miles.”
Duncan controlled the urge to push his fist through Jamie’s pouting face. “Does she want to marry you?”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Jamie asked in surprise. “Dozens of women do.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Duncan said, a snide note creeping into his voice. “Perhaps her standards are higher than those dozens. Why do you want to marry her?”
Jamie hesitated, apparently more used to action than self-analysis. “Because she’s Marsali, that’s why. Because she isna like the others.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” Duncan murmured with an ironic smile. The fool had captured the essence of her unique charm.
“Can I have her?” Jamie demanded bluntly.
Duncan straightened, releasing a breath. “That’s to be decided in the hall before the clan.”
“Well, everyone likes me,” Jamie said with an arrogant grin. “What’s to decide then?”
Duncan’s smile was not encouraging. “The final decision is mine to make, Jamie. And I haven’t decided if I like you yet.”
As Jamie stomped off in a huff through the weeds, his kilt swaying around his knees, Duncan turned to the garden wall. “You can come out now, Marsali.”
There was a silence, then the crackling of dry leaves as she crept out into the open with a sheepish smile. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, my lord. I really wasn’t.”
“Of course not.”
“I was trying to find the kittens again. Your bellowing frightened the wee things out of their wits.”
Duncan stared down at her. There were leaves and a few feathers from her discarded tiara in her hair. The wine stain had blossomed into a crimson starburst on her gown. The hemline had unraveled another inch. She looked sweet, defenseless, and enchanting. Why wouldn’t Jamie want to marry her?
“It looks like midnight came earlier than we expected, Cinderella.”
“I’m sorry all your plans for marrying me off came to nothing,” she said, scratching her nose.
He noticed that she held Jamie’s pigskin leather glove in her hand. “A love token already?” he asked dryly.
“What? Oh, this. Jamie was letting the kittens hide in it. I’ll have to give it back. You were spying on us, weren’t you? You should be ashamed of yourself, a chieftain.”
Ashamed, aye, he was that and more. Ashamed, jealous, confused by the ambivalence of his feelings for her. He lowered his voice. “You like him a lot, don’t you?”
“Everyone likes Jamie, my lord.”
“Yes, so everyone keeps telling me. But the question is, Does Marsali like Jamie?”
She crushed a leaf with the toe of her dirty pearl-seeded slipper. Her face was cautiously noncommittal. “Do you want me to like him?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I like him, Marsali.”
She lifted her head, looking puzzled. “But you told Jamie… It doesn’t?”
“No. I’m not the one who’s going to marry him. You are.”
Her eyes widened. “Am I?”
The two kittens attacked his ankle, little claws drawing blood. “That hasn’t been decided. I can’t give him an answer until I know whether you like him enough to marry him or not.”
She pondered his odd tone. Could the chieftain be jealous of Jamie? The thought brought a teasing smile to her lips. “Well, Jamie is very handsome, isn’t he? He does have that long golden hair.”
“He’s a veritable Rapunzel. I tremble with envy.”
He was jealous. Marsali couldn’t believe it. “He has lots of money.”
“Most of which he probably spends on combs and coiffures.”
Marsali tried not to laugh. “He’s a strong man, for all his vanity. Nothing like you, of course. But did you see the size of his shoulders?”
“God, I could squash him like a cockroach,” Duncan said without thinking.
“When he was only a baby, he used to catch the boulders his father rolled down the hillside.”
“That explains it. One of them must have rolled on his head.”
She sighed deeply, plucking a feather from her headdress and letting it float to the ground. “He’s going to be chieftain when his father dies.”
“If he lives that long,” Duncan said wryly. “At the rate he carries on he might not live past your honeymoon.”
“At least he doesn’t think he’s a lobster,” Marsali murmured when it seemed she had run out of other compliments to add to Jamie’s character.
Duncan gently shook the kittens off his foot. His voice was gruff. “You seemed to like him well enough when you were sitting alone together on that bench.”
Marsali smiled at the memory.
“He kissed me,” she confessed softly.
Her mysterious smile was killing Duncan. The smile of a young girl infatuated with the man who wanted to marry her. Duncan wondered what the hell was wrong with him. It was perfectly normal for her to be attracted to Jamie. What was abnormal was his reaction, the resentment bordering on irrational rage. Wasn’t this what he had wanted?
“From the silly look on your face, you must have liked him kissing you,” he snapped before he could stop himself.
“I liked it well enough.” She shook her head in confusion. “But something wasn’t right.”
A strange pain gripped Duncan’s heart as he stared down into her face. A voice of logic in his head warned him to stop the conversation before it led to trouble. He told the voice to shut the hell up.
“What wasn’t right, Marsali?”
She shrugged, pretending to stare down at the kittens chewing on her slippers. “It wasn’t… well, it wasn’t you.”
Duncan stared at her as if he had been turned to granite. “What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
He took her chin in his hand and forced her small face to his. “Don’t tell me never mind, lass. What are you saying?”
Her gaze clung to his, her eyes bright and uncertain. “He isn’t you, my lord, that’s all. When Jamie kissed me, I didn’t feel the way you made me feel that night in the cave. I suppose it’s just as well. I’d hate to spend my life with a man whose kisses left me that unbalanced.”
There was a moment when Duncan should have said something wise and discouraging to put emotional distance between them. He could have counseled her not to trust too much in her feelings. Marriage, he ought to say, should be built on a more substantial foundation. But the wor
ds refused to come. The shock of what she'd said had immobilized his mind. Her confession had sent a spear of longing straight to the center of his heart and ripped it wide open. His gaze drifted over her, touching her eyes, her tempting mouth, her body.
He let the silence lengthen.
“I’m expected to return to my regiment at the end of the summer,” he said at last, as much to remind himself of the fact as her. “I would prefer to know you’re taken care of before then. But if you’re not, I will go anyway.”
The hope that had blossomed in her heart wilted like a tender bud under a winter frost. She pulled away from him and leaned back against the rose trellis, its thorny, untended stems framing her face. “Jamie isn’t you, my lord,” she said with a faint catch in her voice. “But I think he’ll do, after all.”
Duncan did not move for twenty minutes after she ran out of the garden. If he’d moved a muscle, he would have caught her before she could escape. He would have finished the seduction Jamie had so clumsily initiated. She deserved finesse and infinite gentleness. His body and brain ached with the tension of desiring her and repressing it. In this untidy abandoned garden, she had been in her element. A bedraggled fairy princess who had bewitched and tamed the dragon in him. Her faith in him had challenged the raging beast of self-hatred in Duncan’s soul but had not won a surrender. He could not imagine a man of his dark experience being entrusted with a girl like her.
Nor could he imagine entrusting her to anyone else. He suspected he could search the whole of Scotland and come short of a suitor who met his approval. He could have even killed Jamie MacFay and slept that same night with a smile on his face.
He isn't you, my lord.
Dear Christ, help me. How that innocent statement tempted him.
He gazed up at the castle as the raucous strains of off-key singing wafted into the garden sanctuary. Marsali was strong and resilient. She would forget him in a few months and settle down into whatever life he chose for her.
His own life was another matter. Happiness had evidently not been part of the master plan for him. Still, there were plenty of other battlefields to conquer. There were prizes to claim, accolades to add to his name, dozens of women to satisfy the physical. At least now he could forge ahead with the rest of his life, satisfied that he’d repaid the debts of the past to the best of his ability. At least now he would not fall in love with a woman he could not have.
The shadows from the torchlights in their tarnished iron sconces accentuated the harsh resolve on his face. The decision had been made. The determined glitter in Duncan’s eyes gave no hint of the anguish that pitted his emotions against his better judgment. To look at the chieftain in all his ruthless hauteur you would never guess that he had a heart, let alone that it was silently breaking inside his massive chest.
Marsali would wed the MacFay.
The MacFay…
Duncan halted halfway down the passageway. An odd noise had interrupted the intensity of his thoughts. The husky tones of a man’s voice and a woman’s soft responsive laughter. Jamie and Marsali. He turned his head and stared down in horror to the shadowed corridor that led toward the turret staircase.
Two figures were entwined on the lower steps. Dear God, the uncouth swine was banging her on the stairs like a lowborn whore. Their soft moans of passion and intimate laughter drove into Duncan’s mind like nails. He didn’t stop to think. He reacted from a fury spawned by helpless frustration and possessive rage.
He had never experienced such jealousy. Not even as a boy when he had stood half naked and shivering, peering into other people’s huts and gazing like a wolf at the warm nourishing food on their tables. Not even when he had watched the affectionate rough-play between the other fishermen and their sons on the beach, and the best he could coax out of Fergus was an angry cuff on the head or a curse.
The emotion ravished his control. It burned like black smoke in his system and curled into his gut until his stomach muscles clenched. It clouded his vision and swathed his ability to reason in a murky haze. Primal impulses drove him toward the stairs.
He had unsheathed his sword before he could stop the reflex. A horrifying thought flashed through his mind: He might not be Fergus’s flesh and blood, but he had inherited the bastard’s uncontrollable temper. He was going to murder Jamie MacFay. The trauma of it would haunt Marsali for the rest of her life, and Duncan didn’t care.
He stood over them, as still and darkly ominous as a raven’s wing. His voice fell into the sounds of their love-making like an ice floe. He jabbed the tip of his sword into the taut curve of Jamie’s bare buttock.
“Pull down your kilt and defend yourself, MacFay. I’m not killing a man in that degrading position.”
The prone figure beneath Jamie gasped and struggled to push him off. Jamie jerked his head around in outraged astonishment, his face slack with lust.
“Who the bloody hell—”
He gaped down at the sword tip that was pointing at his chest. His eyes black with anger, he pulled down his kilt and unfolded his burly frame to face Duncan. The woman sprawled out below him covertly straightened her brown fustian skirt and edged upward on her elbows into the concealing gloom of the stairwell. She looked terrified by the killing fury on the chieftain’s face.
Duncan’s gaze brushed over her trembling form in cold silence. Not Marsali, but the misguided clanswoman who had popped bare-breasted out of a barrel on his first night home. He felt a pang of disgust for her indiscretion, and sadness too, that her lack of self-worth reduced her to servicing a virtual stranger on the stairs. But more than anything he felt a sense of relief so acute his head reeled with it. It wasn’t Marsali.
“You shame yourself and the clan,” he told her in a voice of restrained admonishment that reduced her to tears. “Get yourself upstairs for the rest of the night.” He set his teeth as she scrubbed in speechless gratitude at her tearful cheeks. “And don’t tell anyone about this, lass.”
She disappeared in a flash, her face averted in humiliation.
Jamie watched her scramble up the stairs, raising his thick blond brows in amusement as he glanced back at Duncan’s face. From either sheer stupidity or bravado, he declined to comment on the sword that his host was holding unwaveringly to his chest. “She was followin’ me around all night. I felt sorry—”
“Shut up.”
Jamie scowled. “Now just a—”
The sword pricked through his plaid into the taut plane of his pectorals. Jamie wisely did as he was told.
Duncan’s gaze flickered to the broadsword Jamie had left carelessly lying on the floor. “Only a boy would leave his back vulnerable and his weapon out of reach for a moment’s pleasure.”
“Since when does a MacFay need to watch his back in a friend’s castle?” Jamie said in a belligerent voice.
“Since when does a friend dishonor a MacElgin clanswoman on the floor only moments after he has offered to love and protect another?”
Jamie smoothed back his long golden hair, his mouth turning down at the corners. “There’s no harm in a man takin’ his pleasure from a willing woman. Ye’ve done it often enough from what I hear.”
“I’ve killed a few men too in my day, Jamie. Have you heard that?”
“Damn, I was drunk. I dinna even remember that woman’s name.”
Duncan’s fingers squeezed the hilt of his sword, aching with inaction. “You didn’t sound drunk when you took Marsali outside.”
“I want Marsali Hay,” Jamie said slowly, suddenly realizing where the conversation was headed. “Aye, I do. She wants me too.”
Duncan ignored the unexpected pain those simple words invoked. “I doubt she’d want you if she’d caught you with your kilt rucked up to your shoulders.”
“Hell, it isn’t as if we’re wed yet,” Jamie retorted, his face reddening. “And if we were, it wouldna be the worst sin a man could commit.” He glanced down at the sword still aimed at his furiously pounding heart. “Would ye murder Jamie for seekin’
a bit of harmless fun in yer own home?”
A muscle contracted in Duncan’s jaw. “If you hurt Marsali…”
The echo of approaching footsteps interrupted his response. Jamie licked his dry lips in relief as the chieftain resheathed his sword and glanced at the small figure rounding the corner. A flash of white lace, a woman’s hesitant whisper.
“Are you lost then, Jamie? I warned you to walk with me, but would you listen? I know you drank an ungodly amount, but you’ve been over a half-hour in the privy…”
Marsali skidded to a halt, her innocent chatter dying into a puzzled silence at the sight of Duncan standing before her. She retreated a step at the brief glance of concern he allowed to flare in his eyes before all emotion faded from his face.
That look… She pressed her hand to her chest. That look, so replete with unspoken yearning, had caught her off guard and left her more confused than before. Surely she had misinterpreted it. Surely the naked desire in Duncan’s eyes had not been directed at her.
She whipped her head around, amazed to discover Jamie at the bottom of the stairwell, watching her gaze up at the chieftain with her tattered feelings on her face. He frowned at the bright smile she forced to her lips.
“Jamie.” Her voice sounded breathless and unnatural; the tension between the two men caught her in its crosscurrents. “So you were lost.”
“Aye.” He lowered his sullen gaze, looking hesitantly at Duncan before he reached down to the steps for his sword.
Marsali stared at him in puzzlement; he looked for all the world like a pouting schoolboy who’d just been scolded by his schoolmaster. And Duncan looked like—her gaze drifted slowly upward—he always looked: like a man. The powerful chieftain who could give her away on a silver platter to a stranger, and yet who could stare at her like a condemned man watching the last sunrise of his life.
“What happened between you?” she asked softly, glancing from one to the other.
Jamie raised his head. His faint smirk challenged Duncan to reveal the truth. And to his disgust, Duncan found he could not tell her. He’d cut off his left arm before subjecting her to that humiliation.
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