Ladies Prefer Rogues: Four Novellas of Time-Travel Passion

by Janet Chapman

  “Iain!” The shock of hearing his name snapped him from his thoughts. It was Gordon’s voice. Gordie, his lifelong friend. And though it didn’t fill the void in his chest, Iain felt his heart beat once more. “Look sharp!”

  Three gulls were an omen, and Gordie took advantage of the distraction. He burst through the line of villagers, a dirk in his hand, his brother Niall close behind. Guns swung from their sides. Iain recognized the old matchlock muskets. They’d belonged to the boys’ father.

  Their matches were lit. Iain could smell the burning cord. Niall’s was tied around his wrist and it swung as he ran. The rope singed a woman as he passed, and she screamed, startled.

  The humming of the crowd boiled into loud, confused chatter. People pushed in different directions, beginning to panic.

  Iain’s eyes went to Cassie. Lord Morrison took her shoulders in hand. Her body canted at an unnatural angle, tucking closer to his chest.

  Was she, even now, pulling closer to the old man?

  And then Morrison turned her, wrenching her away sharply. There was a flash of silver between them.

  Cassie’s hands clutched at her chest. Vivid scarlet bloomed along the ice blue of her dress.

  “Cassie!” Iain choked on his scream.

  Her eyes met his. A thousand things flashed there. Love, sorrow, desperation, terror, apology—all conveyed to him in her single glance. And then, like a snuffed candle, those vivid eyes went blank.

  Iain felt her go. Her soul, which had been tied tight round his heart, snapped from him. Cassie, inexplicably, was simply gone.

  He couldn’t make sense of it. He stood, frozen for what felt an unbearable lifetime in the stretch of a lone heartbeat.

  And then he saw the blade jutting from her perfect breast. “No!” he howled, watching helpless as she crumpled to the ground.

  Grief seized his body and he cried out, arching back hard, like a baying wolf. He knocked back into the laird, and the man stumbled and tripped.

  Gordie rushed in, taking the MacLeod’s place at Iain’s back. Iain felt the cold kiss of a dirk slicing him free of his bonds. Felt a musket shoved into his hands. The wood was cool, and he realized his palms had been sweating and hot.

  Two of MacLeod’s men sprang toward them, slamming into Gordie from the side. His friend caught himself before he fell, spinning into a crouch, his dirk in hand. Gordie was quickly backed up by a knot of villagers.

  It seemed not all had stood with the laird.

  The sound of hissing steel drew his eyes. Iain whirled in time to duck the wide swing of the MacLeod’s broadsword.

  The musket was warm now, in his hands. He guessed Gordie would have it loaded, the match already set for firing. Iain raised it, pointed it at the laird.

  The man grew still, his sword poised in the air. “If you think I’ll let you live, peat boy, you think wrongly. You stole from me. Cassiopeia was mine to give to Morrison. But she’s dead, and so you’ve stolen from him, too.”

  Iain’s response was quick, and his voice had the calm certainty of a man already dead. “Cassie belonged to no one.”

  He fired.

  The crack sent the already nervous crowd exploding hysterically in all directions. Yet the scene before him remained slow, a sluggish, surreal unfolding of events. The laird’s body reverberated from the gunshot. The lead ball to his chest splayed him open, propelling his shoulders back, spinning MacLeod to the dirt. And to hell below.

  There was one other man whom he’d see dead that day. Iain scanned the crowd; it was pandemonium. But Lord Morrison was nowhere in sight. He’d surely run, like the coward he was.

  There was a cry, and Iain recognized Gordie’s brother. The boy’s voice had not yet changed and its frantic pitch rose above the din. Niall was in trouble.

  Iain tossed the musket down. He’d gotten a shot off, and the weapon was no good to him unloaded.

  Niall was cornered against the cart. An unarmed man stalked him, circling like a cat ready to pounce. The boy was terrified. He still held his father’s musket, and it was near as tall as he. His hands shook as he tried desperately to slide the match into the thin clamp of the gun, but the cord trembled in his useless fingers.

  Ramming the man aside, Iain leapt to Niall’s aid. He grabbed the musket and pulled the match from where it was tied about the boy’s wrist.

  Iain shoved the match into the serpentine clamp. But he saw too late that Niall’s trembling hands had spilled black powder over the pan, along the top of the weapon. Too late he saw the shadow of it, smudged black along his hand.

  The match caught the powder. There was a strange eternity between the feel of his body catching fire and the thunderous clap of the explosion. He’d covered his eyes, he guessed, for he smelled the acrid smoke before he saw it, a thick gray cloud that enveloped him.

  And it burned. White-hot pain. He burned. It seemed his brow melted with it, his hand was paralyzed from it.

  “Christ, Niall, what have you done, lad?” Gordie was suddenly by Iain’s side, shouting.

  Iain felt his friend’s hand on his good arm. Felt him pull. The three of them broke free of the mayhem, and they ran.

  And they ran to the water, where a small sloop awaited them. Awaited Iain.

  A privateer in search of a cabin boy, paid in potatoes and whisky to wait for Iain’s escape.

  But there was no escape, Iain thought, as the boat pushed into the Atlantic. He studied the burnt claw of his right hand, held clenched in a bucket of seawater as if it were a foreign thing, separate from his body. No, there would be no escaping who he’d become.

  MacLeod had been wrong. Iain MacNab wasn’t a thief.

  But now he was a killer.

  Seven

  He leaned down.

  Would she stop him? Would she let him kiss her?

  It would be their first. He would be her first, if she let him.

  His heart pounded in his chest. Cassie was so lovely, poised before him. Her eyes clung to him, her lips gently parted.

  Might she? Would she?

  He eased closer. She was soft and warm in his arms. The breeze drifted across the wide, treeless field, chasing to the Callanish stones, swirling her scent to him, something like sunshine and sugar and fine things. The experience of her bore into him.

  “May I kiss you?” he whispered, and wondered if that truly could’ve been his voice. It sounded ragged, unused.

  “A simple kiss? Is that what this is about?” She leaned into him, her eyes lit with mischief. She reached around his neck, twining her fingers in his hair.

  His skin shivered at the sensation. His body went rigid, frozen with disbelief, with joy.

  “Why, Iain MacNab, I think I will—”

  “MacNab!”

  There was a pounding.

  “MacNab! Sir!”

  He woke with a start. Where?

  The ship. It bobbed and pitched gently. Timber planks creaked overhead.

  He was somewhere in the North Sea.

  Twenty years gone by. Cassie dead these twenty long, hopeless years.

  There had been pounding, he realized, and scrubbed his hand over his face.

  “Aye, I’m coming,” he shouted. His voice was hoarse from sleep, and he put enough snarl in it to send whoever the man was away. “Bang once more and it’ll be your stones I nail on my door as a knocker.”

  “Aye, John . . . MacNab ... Sir.”

  John. He scowled and rolled from his bunk. He took a slug of ale from a pewter tankard. It was sour and flat, but it washed the sleep from his throat.

  He was John now. Not Iain. He was a man without a country. And so bore the Englishman’s version of his name.

  Never again would he be Iain. Iain, the name he’d heard so often on his mother’s tongue. A proud name. A Highland name.

  If Cassie would never again speak it, then never again would he hear it.

  He tipped the empty tankard up. Light from the porthole glimmered across the pewter. He tilted the mug until he
saw his reflection waver dully on its surface.

  His eyes flicked from the reflected shadow along his cheek to the matching scar on his right hand. Both burnt forever black from that powder charge exploded in his face, so many years past.

  He would only ever be John now.

  Black John MacNab.

  Eight

  There was a thump on the timber overhead. The sound of a man dropping from a height. Then another thump, followed by the heavy patter of running.

  MacNab pulled himself from his thoughts and heard the shouts he knew would follow.

  The schooner. His men would’ve spotted the schooner again. The one they’d been chasing. But it kept eluding them. Two masts, full-sail to the wind, disappearing like a wraith in the fog.

  Her hold was full of goods. A cynical smile curled the corner of his mouth. “Goods” were precisely what he was after.

  He quickly rolled into his plaid, knotting it at his shoulder with a leather thong. He refused to wear the traditional sailors slops. Though their billowy leg and cuffed knees enabled a man to climb the rigging with ease, MacNab much preferred navigating the deck in his breacan feile.

  And though his clothes were of the Highlands, his colors were not. His was a custom tartan, black and gray, unique to him alone. Colors to match the coal black sheen of his scars and the shadow of a storm-roiled sea.

  The shouts intensified, and he flew from his cabin up onto deck. He was greeted by a glorious sight. They’d found that big beauty of a schooner. With a crisply elegant topsail and a greedy belly that’d be full for the taking.

  The schooner tacked hard to port in an effort to escape. MacNab saw her name up close, painted red on the stern. Morrison’s Pride. A chill beaded his skin.

  A memory flashed to him. His Cassie, tucked into the arms of Lord Morrison. He remembered the way she burrowed into him.

  Surely the name was mere coincidence . . .

  The bigger ship caught the wind and pressed full speed, but their efforts would be hopeless. Though just a one-mast cutter, MacNab’s Charon was sleek and fast, bearing twelve guns and forty souls, and she sliced through the water like a shark.

  “Ready about!” MacNab shouted. He bound across the deck to the wheel. The timber planks were polished to a honeyed sheen, smooth like glass beneath his bare feet.

  His first mate stepped aside quickly to let him take over steering. The wind whipped, and seawater pricked sharp and cold on his face. MacNab tasted brine and found he’d a smile on his face.

  “Hard a-lee!” he shouted again. He spun the wheel, and the canvas grew slack. Sails flapped madly and the rigging clanged, making a sound like a storm-whipped flag.

  The boom swung about, and his crew instinctively ducked. There was a sharp snap, and then a single heartbeat of perfect silence as the wind caught the sails once more.

  “Man the guns!” he cried, and men scattered to their stations. He’d get a broadside off, aimed straight for the Morrison’s rigging. The trick was to disable the schooner enough to board her, but not so much that she’d fetch a lesser purse. “Fire as she bears!”

  Soon the rhythmic thumping of the starboard guns shook the deck, six claps of thunder cascading fore to aft, boom, boom, boom. Plumes of gray smoke cleared, revealing the Morrison’s foremast splintered but not sheared through.

  “Flank! Flank!” MacNab ordered, and his Charon came about hard, slamming into the side of the larger ship. The impact resonated up the wheel to his shoulder. He let a grin flash.

  The cries of Morrison’s crew rose over the din like screeching gulls. They ran about in a mad attempt to rally. He’d take advantage of their disorder and strike fast. End it fast.

  “Hoist the grapnels!” he called, and lines flew up and over, their hooks snagging in rigging, in sails, on timber. Men swung and leapt onto the schooner’s deck, their violence graceful, their faces ecstatic. MacNab gestured to his first mate to take back the wheel, and he followed quick on their heels.

  He grabbed a rope and leapt, unsheathing his blade as he flew, a slow-motion ballet over a sliver of open sea, roiling gray and white beneath him. He landed on the deck, looking for a fight.

  A few of his sailors were climbing the rigging, skittering across the ratlines like monkeys, slicing as they went. Thick hanks of rope whistled, plummeting to the ground, and canvas fell at their feet in a thunderous ripple.

  The schooner was his for the taking.

  “Mercy,” he ordered. “We give quarter!”

  A pirate maybe, but he was no barbarian.

  He bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to dive into the melee. A loud bark of a laugh called his attention aft. One of his sailors had just run a man through. He waved his broadsword triumphantly in the air.

  But that’s not what held MacNab’s attention. The man who’d been stabbed was staggering along the deck. Blood seeped through the blue of his thigh-length fitted jacket, and the grisly pattern of it burst and spread like a blooming flower.

  Another image flashed to him, the same rich scarlet on blue. In his mind’s eye, he saw Cassie’s hands gripping at her chest. He remembered the terror in her eyes, and then worse, the emptiness.

  Pain skewered him, and MacNab wished it were a sword that’d impaled him, rather than these unbearable memories.

  He bared his teeth. He needed to focus on the task at hand. “If there’s a devious dog among them,” he snarled to his men, “send him by the boards.”

  His crew clamored a blood lust that MacNab pretended not to hear.

  He sliced through the waning chaos, eager to blood his sword. But already only a handful of fights remained. Across the deck, knots of men knelt, yielding, accepting MacNab’s mercy.

  A man stood across the deck, gesturing wildly. He seemed the only one yet to realize the battle was nearing a close. His basket-hilted sword gleamed white in the sun. A full-skirted coat and tricorn hat announced him as the captain.

  MacNab glided to him like a magnet.

  His body cast the other man in shadow. The schooner captain turned, and his puffy, red face blanched gray.

  Every muscle in MacNab’s body seized. His breath stalled in his lungs, and his eyes froze, cold and flat.

  “You,” MacNab hissed. He gave a violent shake to his head. The moment he’d dreamt of for so long was strangely, finally here. For once, some odd trick of fate had smiled upon him. He would avenge his Cassie.

  He swung his blade down hard, and it was sheer luck that Morrison managed a block in time.

  “Peat boy.” Lord Morrison’s eyes widened. The man was old now, and full at the waist. His white hair had loosed from its knot and it haloed cheeks that were pink with effort. “You’re a pirate.”

  Peat boy. MacNab scowled. That part of himself was gone. Long dead. A tidal wave of memories buffeted him. He held his breath. Withstood them. Willed them to wash over and past.

  He was Iain the peat boy no more.

  “I prefer the term privateer.” MacNab spoke with forced nonchalance, delivering a hard, diagonal slash. He decided to toy with the man, enjoying watching his lips pale and cheeks redden from exertion. “So much more”—he swung his sword, aiming for the torso—“dashing, aye?”

  Commotion at the foredeck splintered their attention. A mass of young men and boys stumbled from the hold, blinking away the shock of sunlight.

  The haul of Morrison’s Pride was set free.

  It was what MacNab had been after. A load of boys and young men, stolen from Scotland, headed for indentured servitude somewhere in the Caribbean.

  It sickened him. He snarled, slamming his sword down in a vicious crosscut.

  Morrison parried, and with a shrug, admitted, “I’ve become a . . . gentleman of fortune.”

  MacNab unleashed with renewed hatred, his strikes growing less playful and more intent. He struggled between the urge to murder and the desire to see justice done.

  “These boys . . .” Morrison stopped speaking for a minute, weathering a fresh torrent f
rom MacNab’s sword. “Mere Glasgow urchins. It’s better this way. For them. In the In-dies.” Each phrase was accompanied by the clang of steel.

  “You traffic in slaves.” Iain fought the urge to end the man’s life with a single, simple sword thrust. But he wanted Morrison afraid, humiliated, demoralized.

  “Is this about Cassiopeia?”

  Grief sucked the air from MacNab’s lungs. It was always about Cassie. Everything was about Cassie. His heart felt like smoldering coal.

  MacNab reeled, and Morrison took advantage, stepping forward on a thrust. “She proved useless in the end,” the older man taunted.

  And so the Lord Morrison sealed his fate. His death would be a different sort of justice. He’d stolen Cassie’s youth, her joy. Stolen her. Cassie. Dear Cass, gone twenty years, dead by this man’s hand.

  MacNab was done toying with him.

  Morrison must have seen the shift, sensed it, because fear seized the man’s face, opening his mouth and pinching his eyes. “Oh . . .” he gasped, shuffling a desperate sidestep.

  MacNab shadowed him, assailing him, thrashing him, his sword relentless. His fury was a palpable thing. It wavered black at the edges of his vision. Their conversation was over.

  “I am done.” MacNab’s blade whined as it whipped through the air. It caught the thick flesh of Morrison’s shoulder. “This is done.”

  The lord winced. His eyes flared, like that of a desperate animal. He spoke, frantic words, more cutting than any sword. “She was worthless. I gave her a test ride. She lay like a dead thing beneath me. A cold fish. ’Twas like tupping a haddo—”

  MacNab’s blade stole the words from his enemy’s throat.

  Nine

  “I love you,” he told her, gazing down on her, her head in his lap. Iain combed his fingers through her smooth, yellow hair, spread it along the heather like rays of sunlight. He’d never tire of the soft silk of it in his fingers. “Aw, Cass, love, I could stare at you forever.”