His lips curved. “Something like that. Go on, drink.” His hands moved to her mouth.
Jamee closed her eyes and drained every warm drop, her lips nuzzling his palm. She swallowed, tasting the faint metallic bite of iron and salt and probably a dozen other minerals. Heat teased her mouth, then plummeted, filling all the hidden corners of her heart as Glenlyle’s spell was cast irrevocably around her.
Ian’s damp hands settled over her breasts and cradled her with infinite tenderness. “Are you seduced yet, lass?”
“Almost. Maybe with some more encouragement…”
He raised her in powerful hands and carried her to the spring. “Legend says that this spring arises from deep within the earth, its waters purer than anything found above ground today. And this is the heart of the castle, Jamee. We keep this locked for safety, since whoever controls this spring controls Glenlyle.”
She realized what he was saying, just how much he was offering her then.
Control over this place and himself, as Glenlyle’s lord.
“What I’m trying to say,” Ian whispered raggedly, “is that I adore you. Admire you. Respect you. Like you.” His mouth settled on hers. “Love you.”
Words failed her. Her vision grew blurred. “That’s some love potion, McCall,” she said unsteadily.
“Now you have to answer.”
“Do I get to answer now? Any way I want?”
“Anyway and anything. All except for no,” he muttered.
She pulled him into the water. Slowly, she slid down along his rigid frame while the soft waves bubbled up around them. Her hands moved up his arms and closed over his shoulders while she wrapped her long legs around his waist and brought him all the way home inside her.
“What I’m trying to say here, McCall,” she said breathily, “is that I adore you. Want you wildly. Desire you madly.” Her back arched as he began to move inside her, slow, shuddering strokes that left them both breathless. “Couldn’t even think about living without you.”
“I might hold you to that.”
The current played around them, a silken counterpoint to the deep, pounding rhythm of his body inside her.
Jamee’s hands closed. Desire spun a silver path within her. “Hold me to it,” she ordered. “Forever, McCall.” Her blood sang. Her skin burned.
And the fit of him was smooth, aching perfection.
“No matter what,” she whispered as need broke free and drove her high, then swept them both down into oblivion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“THERE’S NO ANSWER.” Duncan slammed down the telephone and sank back in his chair.
Kara drummed worriedly on his desk.
“I’ve been trying since midnight. Dammit, this isn’t like Ian.”
“Have they found the other man yet?”
Duncan shook his head. “My contact in Edinburgh says they’re close, but still no definite confirmation. It’s just not like Ian to be out of touch, especially at a time like this.” Duncan looked out the window, where snowflakes swirled over the lawn. “I’m going to take the helicopter up there,” he said.
Kara stood up promptly. “In that case, I’m going with you.”
“But—”
His wife’s face turned mutinous. “And don’t even think about arguing with me, Duncan MacKinnon.”
SMOLDERING PEAT.
Wind gushing up through the glen.
Two lovers who slept before the hushed breath of dawn.
Jamee turned and snuggled into the pillow. A muscled thigh pressed against her hip and familiar hands stroked down her back. From somewhere in the distance she seemed to hear a crow call shrilly from the glen.
For now. For tomorrow. For all eternity.
Time twisted and turned in on itself, bent by ancient dreams that felt no older than yesterday. She sat up, blinking.
No thatch roof.
No smoking fire. Only a lover whose warm body lay pressed against hers.
Jamee took a slow, ragged breath as her dreams scattered. For a moment, the past was so close that it smothered her. Longing swelled within her like a scream as she remembered the regret in Maire MacKinnon’s eyes.
So near. So familiar.
Jamee looked down and saw her hands shaking. Images of a man’s face danced before her. Even now, she felt the mark of his lips and the cry of his voice in the furious climax of love.
Delusions brought on by stress? Or was there truly some message she was meant to read in the old portrait she’d seen at Dunraven?
Jamee felt the rise and fall of Ian’s chest in sleep. The gentle sound of his breath was barely audible over the soft murmur of bubbling water near the cushions where they lay.
She turned silently, careful not to wake him. Stretching, she caught a handful of spring water. Her reflection stared back at her, broken by tiny ripples. As she stared at the fragmented image, Jamee heard the drum of hoofbeats and the cry of anguished voices.
She closed her eyes, feeling the loss of a woman who had walked these stone corridors centuries before. Like the restless water, memories stirred from deep in her consciousness. Moved by an instinct she could not name, she envisioned the weaving that she had finished only that afternoon. Since her arrival at Glenlyle, the colors had called to her, great streaks of fuchsia and purple laid over squares of plum, teal and gold. Some compulsion had drawn her to her loom, where her restless shuttle had spilled out row after row of vibrant cloth. Now Jamee realized why.
The weaving she had recently finished was not meant for Dunraven at all, but for Glenlyle. Only after she had seen Glenlyle for herself could the design be completed.
Her hands shook. She thought of another dawn, another woman whose gift had been in vain.
This time Jamee must not fail.
THE DAYS STRETCHED BY, as cold and cheerless as the wind that growled down from the north. Maire stayed at her loom, driven to create while she fought the despair that came to her every night in dreams. Heather-green and wild crimson ran in slashes beneath her shuttle, but even the bright colors could not touch the shadows that woke her gasping from sleep.
Each day, she waited for news of the MacColl men who had marched out to war. And every night, no word came in answer.
Her last weaving was finished late one afternoon when she heard voices outside her cottage. The doors were flung open and snow drifted inside on the wind.
She had hoped for Angus. Instead it was one of her brothers, bold and confident with a smile that had won him more than one night in the arms of a willing Highland beauty.
“I’ve come to take you back to Dunraven, lass.”
Maire crossed her arms at her chest. “Nay, not yet. I’ve still more weaving to finish.” It was a lie. Her work was nearly done, but she would not tell her brother that. Meeting Coll at Dunraven would be impossible.
She stood up and rubbed her throbbing back, then tossed another wedge of peat onto the fire.
Her brother’s face hardened. “Who is the man, Maire?”
She stiffened. Had the gossip finally reached the halls of Dunraven? “’Tis no man. I’ve work to finish, as you well know.”
He ran one hand over the fine plaids strung completed at her loom. “’Tis a lie, Maire. Only a man could have put such a light in your eyes. Only a lover could have left such a burn on your cheeks.” He turned away and paced silently, stopping at the door. “It’s Coll, isn’t it?”
Her pale face was answer enough.
“Then you should know that they’ve come back,” he said harshly. “Only two hours ago, they made their way up the glen. The few that were left, at least.”
Few.
The room spun. Maire reached out, anchoring one hand against the solid beam of her loom. She did not ask how her brother knew.
Coll.
She swept up her shawl and turned wildly toward the door. Her brother stopped her, one hand clenched at her wrist. “Will he marry you, lass? Or is your love only for shadows, a thing of shame to him?”
“Maire, come back. You can’t go up there. No MacKinnon has ever gone to Glenlyle Castle.”
“Then maybe it’s time one did,” she said hoarsely.
DARKNESS LAY HEAVY over the deep forest. The moon was gone, the stars twinkling coldly behind a thin veil of clouds as Jamee made her way along the path toward the cliffs. She had left Ian sleeping in the vast bedroom beneath the stone arches of the highest tower and crept past Angus, who was drinking a cup of black coffee in the quiet kitchen. One of Ian’s security men watched the front gate, but she had slipped past while he made his rounds down the hillside. It had been easier than she’d feared, for his worry was for strangers trying to enter, rather than for visitors trying to leave.
She moved by instinct, driven by a vast, wordless sense of dread. It was danger, and yet not danger. It was fear, yet something worse—something that trembled just beyond the edge of her knowing.
At the cliffs she would find her answers.
Beneath her arm, she carried her tapestry, a blaze of colors meant as a benediction. Or a healing.
Bony claws of gorse slapped her ankles as she stumbled through the darkness. The ancient stones were slippery with frost and she kept drifting from the narrow path.
But Jamee straightened her shoulders. She would offer her wish for Ian, here among the shadows of his past. And she must do it now, by darkness, before it was too late. Her mind screamed that the danger lay before him now, not her.
The wind moaned through the pine trees, bending the branches low before her. Jamee thought of clutching hands that reached out from the past.
So close now…
THE GREAT HALL was shrouded in shadows, veiled with smoke. Bowls lay overturned on the long wooden table and dogs lay sleeping beside the dying fire. Maire clutched her shawl tighter about her face as she searched the great room.
An old man sat hunched before the fire, a goblet caught in his gnarled fingers.
The laird of MacColl.
Maire plunged forward. At the hearth, the dogs growled softly and raised their heads.
“Where is he?” she rasped. “Where is Coll?”
The old man looked up. His eyes were broken chips of darkness. “Who are you to ask?”
“One who cares,” Maire whispered. “One who loves him.”
The old man made a drunken, despairing movement with his hand and the wine goblet toppled to the table. He poured another with shaking fingers. “Many are those who have loved my son. And none more than I.” His voice hardened and he emptied the goblet in a single movement, then straightened, staring at his visitor. “Your name—give it to me now.”
Maire drew herself to her full height. “My name matters not. What matters is Coll. Let me see him, I pray you.”
The laird of MacColl made a low, furious sound. “Too late. Too late for words or seeing. What’s done is done.”
Fear pressed at Maire’s chest. “No,” she whispered.
The man sat staring into the fire. Maire had the sense that he had forgotten her existence. “Broken, all of them. Our enemies were warned. Well-prepared, they cut us down one by one. Dear Lord, the noise. The slaughter.” His voice broke and he threw the goblet into the fire. Light spilled off the jeweled rim as the last of the wine hissed onto the embers.
“No!” Maire watched blindly, her nails digging into the wool of her shawl. “My cloth, it was to protect him. It should have kept him safe.”
Her words seemed to rouse Coll’s father. “Yours? What croft are you from that I do not know your voice? I should have seen you here at the castle before. Are you from Angus’s people across the glen?”
“Where is Coll?” She hurled the question like the great claymore Coll wielded in battle.
He sank forward, his eyes mad with loss. “Gone. Just like all the proud MacColls who marched away from the glen.”
Dead. Coll was dead.
The hall blurred. The fire bled to cruel orange and black. He was gone, slain without her feeling it. Somehow that knowledge was the bitterest of all.
She threw up her hands. “No,” she moaned.
“The laird is right. Coll is gone.” Leather shoes moved softly behind her and Maire caught the scent of musk and roses. “Dead. Because of you,” a woman’s voice said hoarsely, “you cursed MacKinnon.”
Maire shrank back before that fury. “There was nothing of darkness in my work.”
“You lie! The cloth you made was evil, loomed for our clan’s destruction. This cloth.” The woman threw a length of wool at Maire, who caught it, frowning.
“No,” she whispered. “This is not my work.” The pattern was weaker, crooked. The colors were faded and pale. There was no joy to the sett and no life.
Maire ran her hands over the fabric, shaking her head. All the prayers she had bound into warp and weft, whispered night after night as she worked, were missing from this indifferent counterfeit. “What have you done with the cloth I made for Coll?”
“We took this from his body. He wore it when he fell.”
Maire dropped the wool, chilled. The edges were crooked, slashed by knife strokes.
An oppressive sense of evil settled over her. “What foul trick have you played on Coll?”
The laird rose and shoved away his chair. “So you are a MacKinnon. My son lay with a MacKinnon whore and now he is dead.” He pulled a jeweled dagger from his cloak, the blade gleaming in the shadows of the hall. “For this you shall die, witch.”
Maire barely heard, looking down at the cloth on the floor which was dark with Coll’s dried blood.
“Your sorcery with the loom has brought this death upon us,” the laird thundered. He swayed drunkenly, then braced one hand on the long table. At his feet the dogs moved nervously.
Then his voice rose in a furious command.
Men strode from the stairwell and the arched side doors that led to the kitchen. In a matter of seconds, three dozen clansmen stood with weapons in hand, awaiting orders.
“Take her out,” the laird cried. “Take the witch to the cliffs. Her evil will stain Glenlyle no more.”
Maire barely felt the cruel fingers closing around her arms. She barely sensed her body lifted, dragged from the smoky hall.
There was no point in feeling or in fighting.
With Coll dead, there was no point in anything at all.
JAMEE HEARD THE SEA somewhere far below her, a low, steady drumming. The stars were gone now, veiled by clouds.
The night was still. The wind was still.
Fragments of memory burned through her head and she knew with blinding certainty that an old tragedy was about to be repeated.
Blackness stretched before her. Jamee felt the rugged outline of the stone well and eased to the crown of the hill. No one would bother her. The security team was assigned to guard the front gate, which was the only place the castle could be penetrated.
She looked east, watching for the first faint specks of pink that would hail the dawn. Her gift would be given then. With it the past would be laid to rest, she prayed.
It was her only wish, offered up in the still of the night with a heart of fierce and focused intensity.
Something moved behind her. Darkness parted and resolved into a hard, angry body. Cold laughter spilled over the hillside.
“How nice of you to come, Ms. Night.” A hand dug into Jamee’s neck, shoving her toward the ragged edge of the cliff.
No one saw her stumble.
No one heard her cry, which was drowned out by the thunder of the waves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SOMETHING WOKE IAN from odd, fragmented dreams filled with peat smoke and the stamp of horses. He remembered the agonized cry of a woman.
He sat up sharply, his breath coming fast. “Jamee?”
Something brushed against his foot.
“Where are you, Jamee?”<
br />
The moon was gone. No light filtered through the glass windows of the master bedroom high beneath the north tower.
Again came the brush of warmth against his leg. Definitely fur. A pair of amber eyes blinked, glowing from the darkness. Cat’s eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Ian snapped, feeling like a fool for talking to a cat.
The eyes moved. A moment later, something clattered to the floor beside the bed.
Frowning, he turned on the bedside lamp, then reached down for the hard plastic outline of his beeper. Even as he touched it, he felt the vibration of an incoming message.
Cursing, Ian fingered the dial and read the luminous number.
Duncan.
The phone was just where it had fallen, wedged between his shirt and two damask pillows. Jamee’s clothes were gone. Ian stabbed out a number.
No response. The phone was completely dead. A cut line?
He pushed to his feet. Instantly waves of pain dug at his forehead. Dreams tangled his logic, playing at the corners of his vision. From somewhere deep within the castle’s heart he seemed to hear a woman’s voice, raised in grief.
The sound shook him, phantom and yet truer than the stones beneath his running feet. He had a sudden memory of pain burning through his chest, dealt by an enemy’s blade. He thought of a man who had lain in fever, caught on the very edge of death. He had failed her then. And he had lost the woman known as Maire MacKinnon.
Ian’s hands shook as he found his way to the Great Hall and pounded up the stairs to his office. The phone line was dead there, too. Cursing, he shouted for Angus and the security officer in the castle courtyard.
“Jamee’s gone,” he snapped. “Take two men and search the castle. Send the rest out over the grounds. Have one of them use a cell phone to find out why Duncan MacKinnon paged me.” He didn’t stop for further explanations. The cold stab of fear at his chest told Ian that only perfect logic would save Jamee now.
THE CAT’S FOOTING was sure and certain even on the sharp rocks. He inched through the darkness, eyes burning as he relied on the ancient senses of a hunter.
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