The Beast of Clan Kincaid

by Lily Blackwood

  “Then by all means,” Magnus replied sardonically. “I won’t beg you to tell.”

  But if there was a way, through Magnus, to make the Alwyn back down …

  She took several steps toward him. “He bears a secret mark, known only by those few who survive from his father’s council. He, himself, did not even know the importance of the mark until they told him. More than that, I cannot say.”

  Magnus’s brows gathered. “What sort of mark?”

  “A very distinctive tattoo,” she answered in a confidential tone. “But I won’t tell you where and you mustn’t tell anyone what I’ve said. If you are my friend, Magnus, you’ll promise that you won’t.”

  He blinked slowly, and swallowed hard.

  “Where is this tattoo?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I already told you, I won’t tell you where,” she retorted. “To do so would be disloyal to my husband. It’s a secret that only a few Kincaid men know, and would swear to, that identifies the ancient line of the Kincaid.”

  His shoulders straightened, and he searched the darkness, as if for Niall. “Take me to him.”

  His voice was strange … intense.

  “Why?” she asked

  “I’ll only tell you both.”

  She led him over the stony earth, to a smaller fire a distance away, where Niall sat with the Kincaid council, three old men who elbowed each other and smiled when she came near. Only for their smiles to fall away when they realized it was an Alwyn who accompanied her.

  Her husband stood, looking sternly at Magnus.

  “Niall,” she announced. “Magnus wishes to speak to you.”

  “Yes?” he asked, his eyebrow going up dismissively.

  “I would speak to you alone,” Magnus said, glancing at the men sitting there. “You and Elspeth.”

  Niall set off across the grass, but did not go far, only a brief span of paces. Magnus and Elspeth followed.

  “This is far enough,” said Niall.

  “Whatever,” snapped Magnus. “Have them all hear, if you wish.”

  He covered his mouth with his hand, and looking at Niall warily, he said, “Elspeth says you bear a distinctive tattoo, identifying you as a son of the Kincaid.”

  Niall glanced darkly at Elspeth. Instantly, she was filled with enormous guilt. Why had she even mentioned it?

  “I did not describe it,” she said defensively, lifting a hand. “I would not do that.”

  “You must tell me what it looks like,” Magnus demanded.

  “I will not,” answered Niall sharply, his eyes flashing a warning.

  Magnus closed the distance between them, and the two men stood looking eye to eye.

  “It’s very important. I need to know.”

  Elspeth looked at Magnus in confusion.

  “I can’t imagine why,” Niall answered, looking angry now—so angry Elspeth feared he would tell Magnus he had to leave, and that they would part as enemies.

  “Curse you, Kincaid.” Magnus tore at his own tunic sleeve, wrenching the loose linen high to reveal his muscular arm. Lifting his elbow over his head, he stepped closer. “Does the damned thing look anything like this?”

  Niall stared at his arm, his eyes widening.

  “Good god,” her husband uttered hoarsely, lifting a hand to his mouth, his eyes shining.

  “Oh, Niall.” Elspeth whispered, her heart pounding. “Magnus?”

  At a distance, the Kincaid men rose to their feet.

  * * *

  Hours later, Niall pulled Elspeth into their chambers, which were dark save for the fire. Stopping there, at the door, he kissed her before leaving her to go to the window, where he pushed open the shutter and looked out on the night landscape of his lands.

  Elspeth joined him there, wrapping her arms around his waist.

  “My brother,” Niall said, holding her, his voice hushed. “I still can’t believe it. Magnus … Faelan, is alive.”

  So many questions remained unanswered, such as how Faelan came to be living among the Alwyns, and known as their laird’s bastard son. They were answers even Faelan did not know.

  “I’m so happy for you,” Elspeth whispered. “And him. My friend, all these years. What a wonderful shock.”

  “Indeed.”

  Though their reunion had been a happy and emotional one, Faelan had been understandably shocked and had insisted on secrecy for now. He had left Inverhaven in the night, just as he had come. But he and Niall would soon meet again, as brothers, to decide what must be done.

  “If he is alive, then perhaps Cullen is as well,” she said, looking up at him.

  He kissed her head, and stroked her hair. “I fear it is almost too much to hope for.”

  “But hope, we must,” she answered, going up on her toes to kiss him.

  He bent, and the smile left his face. He drew his thumb along the underside of her jaw.

  “There is something I want to give to you,” he said. He took something that had been tucked into his belt. Holding her hand in his, he closed something hard and smooth inside her palm.

  Opening her hand, she saw that she held a Kincaid badge. A smaller version of the one he wore. The wolf’s emerald eye glimmered in the night.

  “It is the badge I wore as a boy. I want you to wear it, if you will.”

  “Of course I will,” she said, smiling.

  “Even though you are a MacClaren,” he teased.

  “Nay, Niall,” she answered. “I am a Kincaid.”

  He helped her fasten the brooch to the bodice of her gown, his touch slow and lingering, transforming into a caress against the upper swell of her breast … her throat … her cheek. Going up on her toes, she kissed his jaw.

  “I love you,” he said, his hand touching her hair. “More than myself. Because of you … everything seems possible. I still don’t know what will happen. What our future will bring. But for now, this is all that matters. This life we are beginning together, you and me, and our people. Our daughters and sons. I will do everything within my power to protect and defend it.”

  “As will I.” Bringing her hand up beneath his, she pressed a kiss to his palm. “I love you, Niall.”

  He let out a low growl of pleasure, and bent to kiss her. She sensed the arousal growing up between them, and as proof, he urged her gently … seductively … backward toward the bed.

  “I can’t get enough of you,” he murmured huskily. Catching her waist, he kissed her lips, more urgently. “I will never have enough of you.”

  “Nor I of you,” she answered, her body and soul responding. “Take me to bed, husband.”

  She gasped as he lifted her off the ground and carried her the rest of the way. There, in deeper shadows, he kissed her gently … sweetly, and she sighed, feeling blissful and utterly complete.

  “I love all of your kisses,” she murmured, her eyes aglow with love.

  “All of them, you say?” he teased, pressing her back against the pillows.

  “Every … single … one.” She pulled him close and kissing his face, pressed her lips near his ear and whispered. “But truth be told, I like it best when you kiss me like a beast.”

  Read on for an excerpt from

  THE REBEL

  OF CLAN

  KINCAID

  Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  Prologue

  Magnus stared back into the face of the man, who until this moment he had considered to be the most arrogant, most self-important, son-of-a-sow he had ever had the misfortune to encounter.

  His scalp tightened and the night around him seemed to convulse as he tried to make sense of the words he had just heard.

  “Did you hear what I said?” said Niall Braewick stepping closer, his features blackened by shadows, the bonfire blazing behind him. “That mark on your arm proves you are not the Alwyn’s bastard, as you have been led for all these years to believe … but that like me you are the son of the murdered Laird Kincaid.”

  Magnus’ pulse ramped aga
in, hearing the words repeated.

  He lifted a hand to the back of his neck … to his mouth … and shifted stance, rendered unsteady by the tangled snarl of emotions blasting up from his soul.

  The Laird Kincaid. A legendary Highlander who years before had voiced opposition to the crown—and afterward died violently, under the most mysterious of circumstances, along with his wife, his warriors …

  And his three young sons.

  He had heard the ghost stories. The songs the bards sang. All were dead. Slain. Buried in some secret haunted grove in the forest known only to those Kincaids who had survived the slaughter that fateful night, and who afterward had taken to the hills beyond Inverhaven, living life like savages rather than submit to another clan or laird.

  Lairds such as his father—not his father?—the Alwyn, and their neighbor, the MacClaren. Men to whom the Crown had granted the “forfeited” Kincaid lands in the aftermath of the massacre.

  And yet the Kincaids had come down from those hills. All around him, in the present, the “savages” celebrated their victory against the defeated MacClaren, in the orange glow of the bonfire and the shadow of Inverhaven’s castle walls, which in a day, they had shockingly reclaimed, with the backing of Niall’s mercenary army.

  And they promised vengeance against the Alwyn next.

  “We are not enemies, you and I.” Niall—now installed at Inverhaven as the laird of Kincaid—grasped his shoulders, hard. “You are my brother.”

  Magnus’s childhood friend, Elspeth MacClaren, who only two days before had been tricked into marrying the Kincaid and who now claimed to love the warrior with all of her heart, moved to stand at her husband’s side, her eyes wide.

  “The mark on Magnus’ arm matches yours?” she asked in hushed amazement.

  The secret mark, a wolf’s head located on the underside of his arm, tucked high under his shoulder, seemed to burn on Magnus’s skin. He stood rigid and silent, almost wishing he could take the moment that he had revealed it back. He had only come to see if Elspeth was safe and well after her father’s defeat. Instead, in a blink, the world had turned upside down.

  Him, a son of the Kincaid?

  A birthmark, his mother … or the woman who had called herself his mother for all these years, a one-time mistress of the Alwyn, had whispered. A devil’s mark that he must never show to anyone.

  But later, when he was older, he’d known that wasn’t true.

  He’d realized that the mark etched on his skin—the one he could barely see himself for its peculiar location—had been placed there not by the Devil, or even by God, but by man.

  Others moved close, their faces wavering in the light of the bonfire. Old men, young men. All Kincaids, all enemies of his clan.

  Not his clan? Not … his enemies?

  “The secret mark!” exclaimed a one-eyed old man, his bushy gray eyebrows going up in amazement.

  “Is it true?” demanded another, pressing close, shoulder to shoulder with others doing the same.

  Magnus broke free of the Kincaid’s hold and stepped back, turning away from the smothering weight of their collective curiosity and expectations, away from the light of the fire and into deeper shadows where they would not see the bewilderment on his face.

  “Aye, it is true,” Niall said behind him, nodding. “Look for yourselves. He is one of three sons—the second son, if I judge correctly. His name is not Magnus.” He spat the name, as if it were an offense. “But Faelan. Faelan, my brother. Do you remember nothing of our childhood?”

  Faelan … it was an ancient Irish name, meaning little wolf. A saint’s name.

  My little wolf, the man in his dreams had said with warmth and affection. A man whose face he could never recall upon awakening, but whose spirit even in waking times seemed to reside in his soul.

  “None of this makes sense,” Magnus uttered beneath his breath.

  All of it made sense.

  He rubbed his palm between his eyes because suddenly he hurt there from thinking so hard, from trying to understand how his life, just like that, could fall away and be replaced by another.

  A life. A family. A proud ancient legacy.

  Having lived all his life, as he could recall it, as the unrecognized and unwelcome bastard son of the Alwyn, should he not feel satisfaction? A sense of belonging, at long last?

  But he did not.

  Because it was a lost life. An unknown family and clan. An ancient legacy lost to violence, treachery and blood. His family, taken from him. A lifetime of memories, stolen.

  A gentle hand touched his shoulder, and he flinched.

  Elspeth said, “Magnus … Faelan? Oh, I don’t know what to call you! I can only imagine how you must feel.”

  He turned, looking down into her pale face, before looking beyond and higher, directly to her husband, who remained fixed to the same spot, arms crossed over his chest, his mouth tight, looking at him guardedly, perhaps even with suspicion, as if he did not understand his response or lack thereof.

  “I have questions,” Magnus answered, in a guttural growl. “And I would ask that you give me time, so that I might have answers.”

  Elspeth nodded, her eyes soft with sympathy. “But it makes sense, don’t you see? You must have suffered some injury that night or soon after, and that is why you remained mute for all that time, for years after, not speaking. That is why you don’t remember.”

  Yes, that. There had always been missing time. Missing memories. A blurry, indistinct blot at the center of his existence. A blot that even now remained.

  “I do remember … some things,” he murmured.

  Drums beating. Fear. The flash of swords. And blood. For years his “mother” told him they weren’t memories at all, just nightmares that lingered in his mind. Nightmares that he must forget.

  “The memories never made sense before,” he said. “Now they do.”

  The Kincaid, his … brother—approached, his blue eyes vibrant with emotion.

  “Then stay and join me against the Alwyn. He bears responsibility for the deaths of our parents and our clansmen. Our father was no traitor, and ‘twas no honorable battle in which he and the others died. The MacClaren confessed his part, and in doing so, confessed the Alwyn’s as well. It was murder, plain and clear, inspired by greed to take our clan’s land and power.”

  Eyes wide with sadness, Elspeth whispered, “It is true.”

  The Kincaid clenched his fist between them. “There were others also, warriors with unseen faces and unknown loyalties, who came down that night from the hills—belonging neither to the MacClaren nor the Alwyn—who carried out the massacre. We must learn their identities.” His tone became more urgent. “Faelan, the Alwyn knows who they are.”

  It was too much. The thoughts crowding his mind. He needed time to think, to be alone, and decide what to do.

  One hand staving through his hair, he backed away, muttering, “I must go. I … I will … return when I can.”

  His boots crunched upon the path, as he stalked away from them, delving further into darkness.

  “That’s it?” the Kincaid called after him, his voice hollow with dismay and accusation. “You’re just going to leave?”

  Magnus stopped, and looked down at the earth. At the stones and dirt and grass beneath his leather boot. Kincaid land.

  His land. His legacy.

  Turning, he found them all gathered in a line, shoulder to shoulder, looking at him.

  He took several steps toward them, until he was close enough to look into his brother’s eyes.

  “I don’t know you.” Looking aside, his gaze swept across the faces of the others. “I don’t know any of you. You are strangers to me—and I’m angry about that.”

  Anger. Yes. That was what he felt. He wanted to rage. He wanted to punch a stone wall. He wanted to bellow until he was hoarse from it.

  “Then stay,” said the Kincaid, stepping forward out of the line. “Take your place here.”

  “Yes, stay,” Elspe
th pleaded.

  He shook his head and exhaled through his nose, commanding self-control as a fury such as he had never known reverberated through his veins.

  “A brother. A mother and father. A clan.” He lifted his hands, as the fire in his soul burned hotter. “It is all I ever wanted.”

  He paused, and clenched his hands into fists.

  “But it was stolen from me.” His heart thundered in his chest. “I have been grievously deceived. Because of that deceit, all these years I have lived at that lecher’s feet, a cast off. His bastard. His second best.” He again met Niall’s gaze, and slowly nodded. “Aye, there is revenge to be had against the Alwyn, brother—but know this. It is I who will take it.”

  Chapter 1

  “Awaken, child,” said a woman’s voice, low with urgency. The dim light of a lantern washed over the stone walls of Tara Iverach’s small chamber. “Your guardian sends word that he travels near and wishes an audience.”

  Tara pushed up on the narrow bed. The drab blanket fell away, exposing her skin to the chill. She shivered and seized the wool back against her neck and shoulders. Sister Agnes’ words echoed in her ears.

  Her guardian … Alexander Stewart, the powerful earl of Buchan … here, in this humble place?

  To see her?

  “You must be mistaken,” she said, her voice thick with sleep.

  She had never even met him. He had shown no interest in her in the five years since her parents’ deaths, when he had become responsible for her and her older sister, Arabel. Almost immediately he had summoned Arabel to be presented at court, while she had been delivered to Duncroft Priory where she had remained ever since, with only a rare letter from Arabel—once, perhaps twice a year—to remind her she had not been completely forgotten.

  “I wish that I were mistaken,” Sister Agnes replied with a peevish lift of her brows. “I would much rather be sleeping than tending to you. Now hurry. You must be ready before sixth hour prayers.”

  So it was true.

  Tara’s heart jumped, beating faster. What did Buchan’s visit mean? Would she be taken away from Duncroft? Would her life change somehow, from this day on?