by Amanda Scott
To that end, he had brought them to Dunwythie Hall a sennight before to observe the progress of his early plantings, the estate’s crops being a primary source of his lordship’s wealth in an area where few men had any wealth at all.
Despite her recently acquired knowledge, Mairi was reluctant to cross words with the sheriff’s brother. Just meeting that magnetic gaze of his made her feel precariously vulnerable, as if without effort he had melted her customary defenses.
As Mairi sought words to explain that the two men must await her father’s return and deal directly with his lordship, without offending Robert Maxwell or rendering herself more vulnerable yet, Fiona said, “Surely, the two of you should not be prowling about here for any reason without my lord father’s permission.”
“Did ye no hear him, lass?” William Jardine said, leering. “He acts for the sheriff. And the sheriff, as even such a pretty lass must know, has vast powers.”
Tossing her head again but managing, Mairi noted, to flutter her eyelashes at the same time, Fiona said, “Even so, William Jardine, that does not explain what right you have to trespass on our land.”
“Why, I go where I please, lassie! And I’m thinking that I may soon give your wee, beauteous self gey good cause to ken me fine.”
“Enough, Will,” his companion said as he continued to meet Mairi’s steady gaze but with a rueful look now in his distractingly clear eyes.
Despite her strong certainty that he would soon clash with her father, Mairi’s heart beat faster and heat from deep within warmed her cheeks.
Then the man smiled, revealing strong, even, white teeth. His eyes twinkled, too, as if he sensed the inexplicable attraction to him that she felt. Was he as arrogant and sure of himself, then, as his friend Will Jardine?
As he noted her slowly reddening cheeks and a certain quizzical look in her gray eyes, Rob was conscious of an immediate, unusually strong awareness of an emotion that he could not readily identify.
She looked small and fragile as she sat there on her pony, and so extraordinarily fair that the light dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks seemed out of place, as if she had been more often in the sun than usual. But as he gazed into her eyes, he sensed serenity and an inner strength that warned him to tread lightly and made him glad he had made an effort to silence the impudent Will.
She seemed strangely familiar. He felt as if he knew exactly how she would move, what she might say next, and as if he recognized the soft, throaty nature of her voice and even the confident way she held her reins in her smoothly gloved hands.
It was almost as if he had thought of her often before, despite never having met her. As he stood thus transfixed, he realized abruptly that he was smiling. In fact, he was grinning like a fool, as if he were delighted to be meeting her at last.
Such a notion being plain daft, he tried to dismiss it and noted only then that her light blushes had deepened to painful-looking red and spread right to the roots of her hair. He had stared her ladyship right out of countenance!
Aware that reason might now exist, other than his command, for Will’s continued silence, Rob avoided looking at him and strove to keep his voice steady as he said, “In my concern for the lad’s rudeness, my lady, I fear I have forgotten the path our conversation had taken. Mayhap you can aid me.”
“You were attempting to explain how one determines what taxes a man owes,” she said quietly. “You are kind to do so, but as we are only women”—he noted that the younger lass shot her an astonished look—“you would be much wiser and doubtless accomplish more by explaining yourself to our lord father, sir.”
He would speak to Dunwythie later, but for now he smiled at her again, ignoring instinct that warned him he might be making a mistake to press her. “Surely your father has mentioned the size of this estate,” he said matter-of-factly. “Most men talk often of such things.”
“Not to their womenfolk, sir. In troth, I doubt you would take my word for its size if I could tell you. My father will be away until this afternoon, but doubtless he will tell you all you want to know when he returns. Come now, dearling,” she said with a glance at her sister and a nudge of her heel and twitch of her rein for her mount. “It is time we returned to the Hall.”
Rob did not try to persuade her to linger but watched the two of them until they vanished into the woods.
“Sakes, my lad, ha’ ye lost your wits? Ye stared at yon lass like right dafty.”
“Unless you want me to teach you some manners, Will Jardine, you’ll keep a still tongue in your head until you can say something worth hearing,” Rob growled.
“Och, aye, I’m mute,” Will said hastily, his eyes on Rob’s hands.
Realizing that one of them had formed itself into a tight fist, Rob drew a breath, let it out slowly, and relaxed his hand.
“Aye, that’s gey better, that is,” Will said with audible relief. “What do we do now?”
“We look at the other fields, of course,” Rob said, fighting a strong urge to glance again at the place where the women had disappeared into the woods.
What on earth was amiss with him, he wondered, that he could allow one young female to affect him so? One thing was certain, though. He must put the lass well out of his mind. To react in any other way, especially in view of Dunwythie’s defiance of the sheriff’s earlier demands, could lead only to trouble.
“I do not think we ought to have left without telling our men to see those two off our property,” Fiona said abruptly.
Grateful that her sister had at least waited until they were well beyond earshot of their disturbing visitors, Mairi forced the powerful image of the truly disturbing one from her mind as she eyed Fiona gravely.
When the image threatened to return, Mairi said quickly and more firmly than she had intended, “You flirted dreadfully with Jardine, Fiona. Do not think I missed that. You know Father does not want us to have aught to do with that family.”
“Pish tush,” Fiona said without a hint of remorse. “I do not understand how anyone can imagine that such a handsome, charming gentleman can be other than a friend to us.”
“He may be handsome, but he was not charming,” Mairi countered. “He was cheeky and disrespectful, and he behaved as if he thought he had every right to treat you so. Truly, dearest, you should never respond as you did to such behavior.”
“Well, you are a fine one to speak, after blushing as you did at every word Robert Maxwell said to you.”
“I did no such thing,” Mairi said, devoutly hoping that she spoke the truth. She could not deny that she had responded in a most unusual way to the man. Even now, his powerful image intruded. Remembering his apparent inability to recall his own words to her, she nearly smiled. But catching Fiona’s shrewd gaze on her, she added, “If I did, I will not do so again. The Maxwells and Jardines are no friends of ours, Fiona. That is what we must both remember.”
“I think we should make them our friends,” Fiona said tartly. “Surely, making friends is better than remaining enemies.”
“It is not so much a matter of being enemies,” Mairi reminded her. “Prithee, recall what our father told us, that the difficulties have accrued over many years’ time, from the days of Annandale’s own Robert the Bruce when the Maxwells and Jardines sided with his greatest enemy and that of the rest of us here in Annandale.”
“Pooh,” Fiona said. “That’s just history and too long ago to matter to anyone. This is now, Mairi, and Will Jardine is one of the handsomest men I have ever seen. In troth, you have gone so long without an offer from a single eligible suitor that I should think you’d welcome the attentions of a man like Robert Maxwell. To be sure, he is old… at least five-and-twenty… and not nearly as fine-looking a man as Will Jardine, but you are only six years younger, and he is handsome. Moreover, you cannot deny that he intrigued you… in some way, at least.”
Mairi could not deny that she had felt a strong attraction to the man, so she did not try. Instead, repressively, she said, “Rob
ert Maxwell’s brother is the man so clearly abusing the power of his office in his attempt to extort money from the lairds of Annandale. We are well outside his Dumfries jurisdiction, Fiona. And as your handsome friend Jardine is clearly abetting them, we have naught to discuss.”
Fiona gave her a speaking look but said nothing further.
Sakes, Mairi thought as the image of Robert Maxwell filled her mind again, but the man had been much too sure of himself in a place he had no right to be.
Even so, Dunwythie would certainly send him on his way, and after he did, she would never clap eyes on Maxwell again. That thought, although it failed to cheer her, told her she was quite right in deciding to forget him.
THE DISH
Where authors give you the inside scoop!
From the desk of Kate Brady
Dear Reader,
One of the first things people want to know when they find out the nature of the books I write is, “What’s wrong with you?” I confess, for anyone acquainted with Chevy Bankes in ONE SCREAM AWAY (on sale now), it’s a valid question. Here we have a villain with serious mother issues, bizarre sister issues, and a folk song driving him to kill. Forget the fact that he stockpiles screams and travels all the way across the country to obtain the final entry in his collection.
So please, folks, allow me to go on record: I am generally a nice person. I am not prone to violence. I don’t have any deeply buried hatred toward my parents, nor do I have any deeply buried skeletons in my gardens. I have basically healthy relationships with my husband, children, sibling, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and neighbors. To be frank, my life is pretty darn dull.
I love it that way—heaven knows I wouldn’t want to face the type of excitement my characters face on every page. But maybe my basic normalcy is the reason I spin tales about larger-than-life characters. In most cases, they are people I would never want to meet, doing things I would never want to do. (Except for those Sheridan men… I admit it would be nice to meet one of them but, alas, they’re engaged with heroines far more beautiful and exciting than I.) When you write about people who don’t exist, the possibilities for perilous physical exploits and heartrending emotional journeys are infinite, and far more exciting than shopping for groceries or weeding those gardens.
So when I started writing ONE SCREAM AWAY, I knew I wanted three things: (1) a smart villain who would hunt down a heroine in some really creepy way for some really twisted reason, (2) a smart heroine with a secret past too horrific to contemplate and chutzpah from here to the moon, and (3) a smart hero so drop-dead gorgeous and profoundly tortured that you couldn’t help but cheer for him, even when he was being a jerk. Beyond that, I didn’t know much of anything and decided simply to follow the hero, Neil Sheridan, step by step, as he tried to solve a murder. I didn’t know so many innocent people would die before he succeeded, or that he’d unravel the truth about his own tragic past along the way. That’s one of the many joys of writing: discovery!
I hope you’ll enjoy the first of the Sheridan stories as Neil tracks down Chevy Bankes in ONE SCREAM AWAY. And I hope you’ll be inspired to come back for more when his brother Mitch makes his debut in the next book!
Please feel free to visit my Web site at www.katebrady.net.
Happy reading,
From the desk of Margaret Mallory
Dear Readers,
While writing KNIGHT OF DESIRE (on sale now), I discovered how much I enjoy writing part of my story from the hero’s perspective. After years of guessing what men are thinking, I found it profoundly satisfying to know what was in my hero’s head and heart. I loved being able to show the reader why William does the things he does. (Men do have their reasons.)
The more surprising thing I learned about myself as a writer is that I like tortured love scenes. The hero and heroine’s misunderstandings and conflicts can be revealed with such high drama in the bedroom. (My parents and children will miss these scenes of wrenching emotion, since I am razor-blading them out of their copies.) Of course, the hero and heroine eventually are rewarded for their suffering!
Speaking of heroes and tortured love… Stephen, the younger brother in KNIGHT OF DESIRE, is the hero of my second book, KNIGHT OF PLEASURE (December 2009). Stephen is in Normandy fighting with King Henry (Prince Harry in book one), when he crosses swords (literally) with Isobel, a woman he wants but cannot have. Although we know Stephen has a hero’s heart beneath all that charm, our serious-minded heroine dismisses him as a knight of pleasure.
KNIGHT OF DESIRE is my first published book, so I would dearly love to hear from readers. I hope you will visit me at my Web site, http://www.Margaret-Mallory.com. Readers may be interested in photos I’ve posted there of Alnwick Castle, the Percy stronghold where my hero William grew up, and a wonderful statue of Hotspur, William’s famous half-brother. Hotspur, in full armor on a rearing warhorse, looks exactly as I imagined him.
From the desk of Amanda Scott
Dear Reader,
Bonnie Jenny—or, more properly, Janet, Baroness Easdale of Easdale—the heroine of TAMED BY A LAIRD (on sale now), sprang to life because I wanted to introduce the main characters of my new trilogy and its setting, Dumfriesshire and Galloway, without using the central story. That one will be the second book, SEDUCED BY A ROGUE, which comes out next.
Having based the new trilogy on fourteenth-century events described in an unpublished sixteenth-century manuscript in Broad Scot (a language somewhat like Robert Burns poetry only more indecipherable), I quickly saw that the research would take longer than usual and decided that some issues would be clearer to readers if introduced from more than one perspective. For example, in Scotland, unlike England, if a man had no sons, his eldest daughter became his heir. So a baron’s daughter, even with countless male cousins, could become a baroness in her own right, or an earl’s daughter a countess, with all the powers and privileges of the rank… as Bonnie Jenny does.
Thanks to incessant fourteenth-through-sixteenth-century warfare and raids causing the deaths of thousands of men in the Scottish Borders, women inherited with unnatural frequency. One might think such a lass would be in high demand as a wife, but that generally became true only after she had inherited. You see, until her father had actually died, folks assumed he might still produce a son.
However, Jenny’s father, having refused to remarry after the death of his beloved wife, raised Jenny to understand, as well as he understood them himself, the position and duties she would one day assume. So imagine her shock when he dies while she is still unwed and underage. Then imagine her even greater shock when her guardian (an uncle) and his wife decide to marry her to the wife’s younger brother in order to provide that obnoxious creature with a tidy income and—as they suppose— a fine, ancient title.
Because they have moved Jenny miles from her home in Easdale to their own home in Annandale, she believes she has no choice but to obey them. That attitude, however, lasts only until her betrothal feast. Repulsed by the man to whom they have betrothed her, Jenny escapes with the minstrel troupe hired to entertain their guests.
Her uncle, finding her intended groom incapacitated from far too much whisky at the feast, asks Sir Hugh Douglas, the lad’s older brother, to retrieve Jenny.
Sir Hugh, a knight, experienced warrior, and member in high standing of the all-powerful Douglas clan—and rudely awakened from well-earned sleep—curtly refuses. Because he is also a widower with a large estate of his own to manage, he takes little interest in his brother’s affairs and even less in Jenny’s problems. But Dunwythie persuades him by appealing to his sense of honor and family duty.
Naturally, being a strong-minded male with considerable ingenuity who rarely changes tack once he has made a decision, Hugh has made up his mind without giving a single thought to Jenny’s feelings. So when she politely but firmly declines his “invitation” to return with him to her uncle’s household, explaining that before she can do so she has a mystery to solve…
Well, let’s just
say that TAMED BY A LAIRD pits a powerful, rebellious young baroness against an equally powerful, determined baron and lets the sparks fly wherever they will.
Happy reading and Suas Alba!
http://home.att.net/~amandascott/
