The Blood of Roses

by Marsha Canham

  “ALEX, PLEASE … PLEASE TAKE ME

  WITH YOU!”

  “If you leave me, I know I will never see you again. You will never come back. Everything will happen, just like in the dream, only I won’t be there to warn you!”

  “Nothing is going to happen!” he declared fiercely. “It’s a dream, Catherine, a nightmare! Nothing is going to happen to me, or you!”

  “But … it is so real,” she cried, her eyes round and wet, her lips trembling beneath the hail of kisses he assaulted her with in order to try to calm her.

  “It only seems real,” he insisted. “Because you’re worried about me. …” He took her face into his hands. “Please don’t ask me to do something I can’t do.… Can you understand how important it is for me to know you are safe, regardless of the madness going on in the rest of the world?”

  Catherine allowed herself to be drawn forward, allowed her lips, her every breath to be plundered by the savagery of his embrace. His hands raked up into her hair, scattering the pins as he freed the golden cascade and brought it streaming forward over her shoulders. Strong, determined arms lifted her then and carried her to the bed, where she was not permitted to speak again, not permitted a single thought beyond the ecstasy of their union.…

  HIGH PRAISE FOR MARSHA CANHAM

  Winner of the Romantic Times

  Lifetime Achievement Award

  AND HER PREVIOUS NOVEL,

  THE PRIDE OF LIONS

  “AN ELECTRIFYING LOVE STORY with characters that leap from the pages, breathtaking descriptions of Scotland’s awesome beauty, superb dialogue and fascinating details.”

  —Romantic Times

  “A TENSE, HIGHLY EXCITING ROMANCE… [that] travels from the opulent ballrooms of England to the Scottish highlands.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “ABSOLUTELY BLOODY MARVELOUS!”

  —Virginia Henley, bestselling author of Dream Lover

  “COMPELLING, EXCITING, AND RIVETING. When you talk about historical romance, it doesn’t get much better than this!”

  —Elaine Coffman, bestselling author of If You Love Me

  “CANHAM HAS DONE IT AGAIN!”

  —Nan Ryan, bestselling author of Outlaw’s Kiss

  Dell Books by Marsha Canham

  Midnight Honor

  Swept Away

  Pale Moon Rider

  The Blood of Roses

  The Pride of Lions

  Across A Moonlit Sea

  In the Shadow of Midnight

  Straight for the Heart

  Through a Dark Mist

  Under the Desert Moon

  The Last Arrow

  This book is dedicated to the astonishing number of concerned readers who wrote to me demanding to know if I just intended to leave all those loose ends dangling in The Pride of Lions.

  Now really, would I do that to you?

  “L’audace, et toujours de l’audace!”

  —motto of the ’45

  Blackpool, August 1745

  Prologue

  Catherine Ashbrooke Cameron stood in front of the rain-lashed window, her breath lightly fogging the inner surface of the glass pane. Outside the inn, the streets were all but deserted, the cobbles glistening under the steady downpour, the lights from the cramped, multistorey dwellings reflected in the shimmering puddles and bubbling runs of the gutters.

  She had been in Blackpool for four days—an interminable length of time for someone not normally noted for her patience. A crowded seaport, it smelled of fish and offal, of coal dust from the huge shipments exported south to London, of the countless unwashed bodies who labored tediously, day after day, to earn a few pennies with which to feed and clothe their families: not exactly the type of company the young and beautiful daughter of an English peer of the realm might be expected to keep.

  As she stared out the window, Catherine’s long slim fingers toyed absently with the enormous amethyst ring she wore on her left hand. It was her only solid reminder of the reality of the time lapsed since she had ridden away from her home in Derby five weeks earlier. Five weeks. It might well have been five years. Or five centuries. She had changed so drastically—things had changed so drastically: attitudes, circumstances, situations …

  Where she had once been careless and spoiled, pampered to within a razor’s edge of her finely honed temper, she now felt old and wise, experienced and mellowed far beyond her eighteen years. Where once an arrogant snap of her fingers would have brought any young man within a radius of a hundred miles fawning on his knees before her, she now knew that all the begging, pleading, hoping, and praying would not bring to her side the one man she ached to see.

  Catherine raised a finger and traced a path along the slippery glass, following the bright slither of a raindrop as it meandered down the outside of the pane. She felt numb, detached from the world, as if the events of the past five weeks had never happened. But the sparkle of the amethyst ring was proof that they had. The faint, lingering bruises that still marred the ivory perfection of her body were proof that they had. The tears that filled her eyes and burned at the back of her throat at the slightest provocation were proof that something had happened. Her brother Damien, who had arrived in Blackpool that afternoon to escort her the rest of the way home to Derby, had needed only five minutes alone with her to isolate the cause of the drastic difference in her demeanor. However, already plagued with guilt over the part he had played in condemning his sister to what must have been weeks of pure hell, he had misread the tension that shivered through her slender body.

  “If that bastard Cameron forced you to do anything against your will, I’ll kill him myself,” he had announced savagely.

  Catherine had opened her mouth to expound on just how dreadfully she had been used and abused—certainly the Catherine Ashbrooke of a few weeks earlier would not have hesitated to capitalize on her brother’s guilt, or to use it mercilessly to win his sympathy and pity—but she could not do it.

  “No. No, Damien, it isn’t what you think. He … he did not do anything to me that I did not want him to do. In fact, in the beginning, he did everything he could to avoid me. He treated me like baggage, he ignored me, he rarely spoke to me unless it was absolutely necessary. And I truly believe he would have kept his word to annul our marriage as he had promised and send me home as soon as he was safely through the border patrols, but …”

  Damien’s hands had tightened on her shoulders, forcing her to look up into his pale-blue eyes. “But what?”

  “But … I would not let him,” she cried softly. “I begged, I pleaded with him to let me stay in Scotland, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “You begged …? Good God—” His voice had softened with disbelief. “You’ve gone and fallen in love with him, haven’t you?”

  Catherine raised huge violet eyes to his. It was no use denying it. Hands that could not control their trembling were flung up and around her brother’s shoulders, and her whole body was wracked with sobs.

  “It was not supposed to happen. I don’t even know how it happened, or why it had to happen to me, but yes. Oh yes, Damien, I do love him. I love him and I hate him and … and … he had no right to do this to me! No right at all!”

  Damien had been helpless to do more than hold her and soothe her as best he could. Catherine knew there was no earthly way to explain what had happened, how she and Alexander Cameron had progressed from adversaries to lovers in an apparent wink of an eye.

  “I love him, Damien. It is a terrible, hurtful, wonderful feeling, and I do not understand how it can be all those things at the same time, but it is.”

  “Does … he feel the same way?”

  “Yes,” she said, a little too quickly, her voice a little too high-pitched. “Yes,
he does. But he’s stubborn, and he doesn’t think I would be as safe in Scotland as I would be with my family in England. There is the best bit of irony, would you not say?” She laughed bitterly and accepted the handkerchief Damien offered, wiping at her streaming eyes and nose. “He didn’t seem to care too much about my safety once he knew I had discovered he was a Jacobite spy and forced me to travel north with him as his hostage. He was rude and arrogant, and … and … he kept me so damned angry all of the time, I did not have much chance to be frightened. But when I was … frightened, I mean … he was always there, and somehow … I wasn’t frightened anymore. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “For you, my dear Kitty?” Damien had smiled. “Perfect sense. And I should have known something like this would happen, dammit. I should have been able to see it that very first night.”

  “I had no idea you were a romantic, brother dear.” She sniffed. “Or that you believed in love at first sight.”

  “I’m not, and I don’t. But you had a look on your face that evening when Hamilton Garner confronted the pair of you out in the garden, one that screamed at anyone who cared to listen, that you had never been kissed quite like that before. I daresay it was what prompted the haughty lieutenant into challenging your bold Scotsman to a duel.”

  Catherine experienced a flooding of color into her cheeks. “Hamilton recovered from his wounds, I presume?”

  “He was on his feet within the week, out scouring the countryside with his entire regiment of dragoons, only to discover the mysterious Mr. Montgomery and his newly acquired bride had vanished without a trace. He was well on his way to tearing up the roads between here and London when confirmation of Prince Charles’s landing in the Hebrides reached government ears. Colonel Halfyard rushed Garner’s captaincy papers through and ordered his regiment north to reinforce the garrison at Edinburgh.”

  “Edinburgh?” Catherine gasped. “Hamilton is in Scotland?”

  “I thought that might tickle your sense of irony further.” Damien nodded. “And if the rumors we have been hearing prove to be correct, if the clans are arming and preparing to support Charles Stuart in his quest to reclaim the throne for his father …” He paused and sighed expressively. “It could well bring Hamilton Garner and Alexander Cameron face-to-face over crossed swords again.”

  Catherine shivered, remembering the twisted look of hatred on Hamilton’s patrician face as he had sworn revenge on the man who had not only humiliated him in a duel of honor but had then married the plum of Derbyshire. Catherine’s father, Sir Alfred Ashbrooke, was not only a prominent Whig and elected Member of Parliament, but his circle of friends and acquaintances could have furthered an ambitious man’s career to the top of the mountain … and if nothing else, Hamilton Garner was an ambitious man.

  “A fine pair of scoundrels we Ashbrookes turned out to be,” Damien offered mockingly. “You, the daughter of one of Hanover’s staunchest supporters in Parliament, wed to the brother of the single most influential Jacobite chief in all of Scotland; me, the vaunted son, learned solicitor, and heir to one of the oldest, richest seats in England”—a slight deprecatory laugh broke the seriousness of the speech—“on the verge of being hustled to the altar under less than auspicious circumstances so that my bride might deliver me a legitimate heir.”

  Catherine’s astonishment had been genuine. “Harriet? Harriet is—?”

  “Indeed she is. Rather beautifully so, I might add. But if you thought Father’s rage was monumental on the eve of your unexpected nuptials, you should have seen his chins quavering when he learned of his son’s indiscretions. He wanted us to marry with all due haste, of course, but Harriet would not hear of it. Not until she had heard some word from you, that is. Now, perhaps, she will consent to unlock her door and emerge from her rooms.”

  “A baby!” Catherine had cried then.

  “A baby,” she whispered now, smiling wistfully as the echoes of the conversation faded behind the insistent tattoo of the rain. She should have been stunned, she supposed, to learn of her friend Harriet’s condition. Conceiving a child out of wedlock was sufficient grounds to have a young woman banished from her home, treated as a leper in civilized society, and reduced to a beggar’s lot in ignominy. But Catherine was not as shocked as she might have been two months before, just as she was no longer ignorant of the effects of wild, blissful passion on the otherwise sane and reserved emotions of a well-bred young woman of quality. If anything, she was a little sad—sad and irrationally envious that Harriet was already able to prove to herself, and to everyone else, that her love was real. That it wasn’t just a dream. That it wasn’t a lapse, or a moment of insanity, and it wouldn’t fade away as if it had never been.

  Catherine closed her eyes and felt the tears well over her lashes. She had no such proof. There was no child, only a hollow ache of loss, of loneliness. Had it all been a dream? Had she just imagined the warm, wonderful sensation of being loved and wanted? Had she only felt so alive and freed from the stifling confines of her own inadequacy because Alexander Cameron had swept into her life like a storm and could not help but leave it in shambles?

  Her body knew beyond a doubt that she was no longer an innocent—dear God, she burned with shame and longing just to think of what a single touch could do to her pride. What a few words, whispered in passion, could do to the peace of her mind.

  “I love you Catherine. I know you are angry with me now and you may not believe it absolutely, but I do love you. What is more, I swear on that love—and on my life— that I will come for you as soon as I possibly can.”

  “Oh, Alex,” she whispered, pressing her hand and brow against the cold pane of glass. “I want to believe you. With all my heart I want to believe you, but …”

  She closed her eyes against the darkness and the rain, and imagined she could see him standing before her, silhouetted against the purpling haze of a Highland twilight. The wind would be tugging at the unruly locks of thick black hair, his gaze would be distant and unreadable, his mood as brooding and unpredictable as the misted mountain wilderness he called home. When he moved, it would be with the fluid, lethal grace of a panther, his body hard and dangerously deceiving so that one thought instantly of elegance and later, of shocking, explosive power.

  He was a loner and a renegade, yes, but his capacity for gentleness and compassion was boundless, as she had discovered. For too many years he had lived with the past locked inside his heart, hardening it like armor against any further intrusions. At the age of seventeen, he had witnessed the brutal rape and murder of his first wife, Annie MacSorley. In revenge, he had killed two nephews of the powerful Duke of Argyle, chief of Clan Campbell; for this he had been declared a murderer and forced into a fifteen-year-long exile.

  When Catherine had encountered him in the fogged, sun-streaked glade outside Rosewood Hall, he had been returning to Scotland, to his family’s home at Achnacarry Castle. Denounced as a spy, yes, in the sense that he had kept his eyes and ears open on his journey from France to Scotland. A traitor? He had no pressing, zealous political convictions of his own; rather it was his ingrained code of honor—unbreakable and unbendable—that was carrying him home to stand by the side of his Jacobite brother, Donald Cameron of Lochiel.

  Loyalty and family pride: two qualities to which Catherine had not given much thought before Alexander Cameron. Now she thought about them a great deal, for she was a Cameron too. He had made her one, in heart and body.

  “Mistress Catherine?”

  The soft voice intruded upon Catherine’s memories and, with a start, she straightened. She had not heard Deirdre come into the room, and her hands trembled icily as she smoothed them down a nonexistent wrinkle on her skirt.

  Deirdre O’Shea had remained steadfastly loyal throughout the harrowing five-week odyssey and had, at times, been Catherine’s only link with sanity. More than just an abigail, Deirdre had become a friend and a confidante, an ally, a fellow conspirator as well as unwitting victim. For as deeply smitt
en as Catherine was with Alexander Cameron, she was not blind to the stolen glances exchanged between Deirdre and the only man to whom Alexander would have entrusted their safety during the perilous sea voyage from Scotland to Blackpool: Aluinn MacKail.

  Tall and lean, MacKail had the appearance and soft-spoken manners of an academic—indeed, he wrote poetry and could speak six languages fluently. But he was also the only man Catherine had ever seen best Alex with a sword, and the only man whose character and strength had equaled Alex’s through fifteen years of shared exile.

  “Yes, Deirdre, what is it?”

  “Master Damien wishes to know if you will be taking your supper with him belowstairs tonight.”

  “I am not really very hungry.”

  Deirdre frowned, noting the residue of tears on her mistress’s cheeks. “You must eat something … to keep up your strength.”

  Catherine saw the concern in the soft brown eyes and attempted a faint smile. “Tell my brother I do not think I would be good company in public tonight. Ask him instead if he will join me in my room and share a small meal. We still have so much to discuss and so little time …”

  Deirdre reached out and touched her mistress’s arm. “You mustn’t worry. Master Damien knows what to say and do. You must trust him to know what is best for you.”

  Catherine’s smile faltered as Alexander’s voice stirred in her memory. “I leave it up to you whether you return to Derby as a wife or a widow. In either case, I am forwarding letters and documents to Damien.”

  “What is best for me?” Catherine murmured and turned to stare out the window again. “To pretend I am returning home for a visit to make amends with my family while my husband is away in the colonies on business … or to return as his widow, determined to put the scandal behind me and to get on with the rest of my life? Such generous offers, both of them, complete with estates and bank accounts—” She bit her lip to check the flow of resentment. Not so very long ago she would have crowed with triumph had she been able to present herself before her peers with such enviable riches. During his time in exile when he had masqueraded as Raefer Montgomery, Alex had accumulated an admirably healthy fortune—an attribute Catherine would have once deigned of greater importance in making a good marriage than almost anything else. Now, however …