Devil Black (17 page)

“As if I would appeal to that trumped-up bastard!” Dougal fairly shouted the words, his rage overflowing. “I take care of my own troubles and fight my own battles.”

“And how are you doing at that, Brother?” Meg asked nastily. “MacNab has you in a slip knot. If you ride out with a band of men to meet him fairly, at arms, he will melt away and you will find no enemy.”

“At least that may keep the villain clear of my borders.” Dougal looked at Lachlan. “We will ride out at dawn—until then, let him freeze his balls off in the cold. I have fallen men to honor, and clansfolk to comfort.”

Isobel whispered, “What comfort can you give them?”

Dougal’s profile grew hard as iron. “All a laird has to offer—his vow to provide for them so long as I am able.”

A chill of apprehension snaked its way up Isobel’s spine. “Might you lose your lands over this? Could you lose everything?”

All three of them stared at her. Dougal pivoted on his heel to face her. “No one takes my lands!” he declared. “I may lose my honor, my standing, my head, but MacRae lands, where MacRae blood has been spilled, will remain. ’Tis a sacred trust.”

Isobel nodded. She had thought her father obsessed with the lands he oversaw in Yorkshire, lands that had come to him as her Scottish mother’s dowry, no doubt a throw-away entitlement on her maternal grandfather’s part. For, as she had come to see upon acquaintance with her husband, Scotsmen did not part with Scottish lands. The Yorkshire holding, profitable as it might be, had never belonged to her grandfather’s ancestors and was not tied to him by blood.

Looking at her husband now, Isobel saw MacNab might as well steal his limbs as deprive him of his lands—or emasculate him. Isobel needed to understand his feelings, and how deep they ran.

She lifted her chin and looked him in the eyes. “There is another solution.”

Impatient and enraged, Dougal barely acknowledged her. “Aye? How is that?”

“I could give MacNab what he wants, what he says he wants, that is, and stop this horror where it stands, before any more blood is shed.”

“You?” Dougal’s smoke-grey eyes narrowed in an unfriendly way. “Again, how?”

“By handing myself over to him.” The words sounded bolder and far braver than Isobel felt. In truth, the very idea sickened her and made her heart beat high up in her throat. Yet she found she would be willing to do even this, for his sake.

Meg gasped, and Lachlan’s head swiveled toward Isobel violently. But Isobel barely spared a glance for them. She continued to gaze into her husband’s eyes, looking for something she failed to see. Acknowledgement? Gratitude? Affection? Isobel’s heart clenched in disappointment.

What she did see was a flare of rage so bright it seared her. “You wish to leave me?” he roared. “Despite all you said? Now that he looks to prove victorious, would you rather throw in your lot with my fiercest enemy?”

“No!”

He reached out with one arm and cleared the table beside which they stood, sweeping it of cups, bottles, papers, and a candle that flared before going out.

“You decide your chances look better with MacNab, is that it? You look to abandon the ship I sail? You believe I shall be bested—again?”

“No, I—” Isobel’s heart fluttered, and she struggled for words in the face of what she now saw flare in his eyes.

He lowered his voice to an edge of danger, cutting as a blade. “Or is it you would simply prefer his bed to mine?”

Isobel reacted without thought and lashed out, intending to strike him. He caught her wrist before she could land the blow, and held her tight.

“So it is to be that way, is it? By how many means will you punish me?”

“You misunderstand me,” Isobel cried, not even attempting to struggle against his bruising grasp. “But you will not listen, stubborn savage that you are.”

He sneered into her face, “I am not in the mood to listen.”

“I can see that.” From the corner of her eye, Isobel saw Meg grab Lachlan’s sleeve, pull him to his feet and tow him from the room. Save for the guard who doubtless waited outside the door, she and her husband were alone.

“Can we not speak reasonably?” she appealed. “Can we not try?”

He swore and released her, turning away to the fire, giving her his back. “If you wish to leave me, do it,” he growled.

“I do not wish to leave you.” How could she tell him she wanted anything before that, and given the choice would sooner die than go to MacNab?

“If you wish to leave me go,” he repeated, “but I will never see you released to MacNab. Go to your father if you must—or to hell—but I will fight to the death before I see you in that animal’s hands.”

“Why will you not listen?” She walked round him and stared up into his face. “Much as you would deny MacNab the victory of gaining possession of me, I deny the possibility of you losing your lands and all you hold dear, just to keep me. These lands are your life’s blood, while you have not known me a month. Rather would I act to put an end to this conflict.”

“You cannot. The devil himself could not resolve what lies between MacNab and me. Is that what you truly think, that I would steal victory from MacNab by keeping you?”

“Yes.”

He searched her face. “Nay, Wife, but I would spare you the agony, torture, and abuse that befalls any female who comes to his—or his cur of a son’s—hands.”

“Aisla,” she said.

Pain flickered in his eyes. “Aye, Aisla.”

“What did he do to her? She was Bertram’s wi—”

“I do not wish to speak of it.”

“No.” The echoes of his pain gripped Isobel’s heart. “Yet the love you once felt for her finds its reflection in the hate you feel now for MacNab. Judging by the depth of your hatred, your love must have been deep indeed.”

Dougal fairly howled, “I have said I do not wish to speak of it!”

“And I say we must, since what you felt then affects us now. I am caught in this. Do you not think I have a right to know exactly what MacNab did to Aisla—and thence to you—that killed your ability to love?”

Dougal became very still, like the surface of the ocean before a storm. Like the ocean, Isobel could feel currents stirring, violent and terrifying. When he glared at her, she saw vicious rejection in his eyes.

“Love is a lie,” he told her, “a fool’s cruel delusion. It is weakness rather than strength, a myth that begets vulnerability. A claim of love changes nothing. It saves nothing! And I do not want to hear the word spoken between these walls again.”

“Then perhaps I
should
leave you. Maybe when my father arrives I should pack up the nothing with which I came and just leave with him. Because I will not live with a man who supposes he can tell me how to speak, think, and feel.”

Dougal’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “Surely you did not expect me to love you.”

Isobel took the blow without flinching, at least outwardly. “Of course not. It is a ridiculous premise. What, after all, is there about me to love? And why should my life take such a turn, in a direction it never before headed? Obviously I am not worthy of any such fine emotion. I might as well slink home behind my father and live out my days in disgraced obscurity.”

He took a step nearer her, lifted one hand toward her face but stopped short of touching her. “You deserve better than a lie, Isobel. I value you—the devil knows, I desire you! I admire your courage and would be glad to see you bear my sons. But I cannot offer you more than that. Should there not at least be honesty between us?”

Isobel’s heart, struggling beneath her breast, admitted she did not want him to lie. She wished the words to tumble from his lips, soft declarations and promises. Yet this man would never give her that, and she began to see his harsh demeanor revealed a stark honor.

If she told him how she felt, confessed the wild, tumultuous feeling possessing her, he would scoff, call her deluded, declare her feelings unfounded. And she could not bear the pain of that—not now, and possibly not ever.

For the first time, her eyes dropped from his. “Honesty.” She repeated the word as if she fathomed not its meaning.

“Aye.” His hand at last touched her cheek, cupped it almost tenderly, sending through her a shiver of involuntary response. Traitorous flesh, that wanted him so! “’Tis all I can offer you, Isobel—that and my promise, as your husband, to hold to you and no other.”

“So, you offer your disbelief in love to me, alone. It is a grand compliment!” She drew a ragged breath. “You speak over and over again of honesty, yet you refuse to say, honestly, what happened between you and MacNab.”

“Do not ask that of me. Anything else.”

“Yet it is what I need to know.”

“It is not.” His thumb brushed across her lips, causing her to part them and draw a breath—causing desire to flare low down in her belly. What would she not do for this man? Yet what he demanded of her—to live with him without love—must prove hardest.

“All you need to know, Wife, is I will fight with the last of my strength to keep you.” He laughed harshly. “Poor reassurance as that may be.”

Somehow, Isobel found the strength to pull free of his grasp. “And if I ask Meg for the truth?”

“Do not do that,” he said. “I warn you—do not, if you wish to retain any semblance of harmony between us.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“A party of riders approaches, Laird! A large party, and flying MacNab’s banners.”

The bellow from the battlements froze Dougal’s heart in his chest. A fortnight had passed, awaiting the arrival of his new wife’s father, and the situation in the keep had steadily deteriorated. His warriors were edgy, Meg irascible, Lachlan gloomy. And Dougal’s relationship with his wife veered between cautious hostility and passion so bright it seared him to the bone.

Now on this cold, bright, snow-dusted morning it seemed something would happen—at last.

Dougal had been up since dawn, unable to sleep and unwilling to disturb his wife’s slumber. In the chilly dining hall, he nursed a mug of ale for his breakfast and half listened to Lachlan whine about his continued ill-treatment at the hands of Meg. When the summons came, he and Lachlan stared at one another, and then Dougal swore viciously. His sword was in his hand even before he rushed to the outer door with Lachlan in his wake.

Aye, and there they were, Gerald Maitland no doubt among them. They made an impressive showing in the clear light, a group at least a score strong with their pennants snapping in the cold wind.

Dougal’s warriors, no doubt as eager for action as he, formed a group around him, and he knew the men on the walls would be ready to fight as well. If it happened here, on his doorstep, so be it. ’Twould not be the first time blood had stained this ground.

As the party approached, Dougal’s quick eyes dissected it. He saw no agents of the King, just a strong battalion of MacNab clansmen at Randal and Bertram’s backs. And there at Randal MacNab’s side a stranger, well-muffled against the cold, who must be Gerald Maitland.

Dougal sneered. He supposed he could not offer his wife’s father a naked blade in greeting, much as he longed to. The blood pounded in his veins, and he felt rabid for a fight. Yet talk must come first.

The party came to a neat halt perhaps thirty feet from Dougal’s doorstep, the horses blowing steam into the cold air. Dougal, with his entire birthright at his back, felt the weight of the moment. The choices he made in the next few minutes could cost everything. And he had never been a man to play it safe.

Yet he had a wife now to defend, as well as an inheritance—and, perhaps, a child on the way? He had wondered about that this morning before dawn, when he ran his hand over her naked belly. She showed no sign, yet, of increasing. But how could he pump so much seed into her without founding a bairn?

His narrowed eyes moved to the man at Randal MacNab’s side, searching for some resemblance to Isobel and finding none. The man’s high forehead and prominent nose made him look pained, his grey hair gave no hint as to its original color. But the expression he wore defined, quite well, his mood.

“MacRae!” Randal MacNab hollered. “Do you mean to give us battle? Or let us in?”

“A braw question,” Dougal returned. “Which does your arrival warrant? And what of the fact you ha’ been haunting my lands for weeks, trespassing and tempting my warriors’ swords?”

“Looking after my interests,” MacNab maintained.

“You have no interest in what is mine.” For a thousand pounds sterling, Dougal could not have kept the disparagement from his voice.

“But this man does.” Randal gestured to the rider beside him. “This is Gerald Maitland, father to the woman you abducted and raped.”

“Oh, aye?” Dougal snarled. “And can Gerald Maitland not speak for himself?”

“I can.” Maitland edged his mount forward. “Are you holding my daughter? Did you seize and force her against her will?”

Dougal struggled to remind himself this man knew only what MacNab had fed him—a poisoned fare. He considered giving Maitland the benefit of the doubt, and failed to persuade himself.

“And which daughter might that be?” he shouted, knowing his very tone was an insult.

Even at that distance he saw the angry flush rise to Maitland’s cheek. “Isobel, as you know right well.”

“Truly? Yet I perceive, sir, ’tis your daughter Catherine you sent north as a bride for Bertram MacNab.”

Maitland exchanged an incredulous look with Randal MacNab before saying, “I thought to send my daughter Catherine but was deceived in that. Isobel took her place.”

“And you did not miss the one for the other? Tut, tut, sir. What sort of father must you be?”

“Cur! Answer my question, else you will do so at the demand of my sword! Do you hold my daughter Isobel?”

“She abides here with me, aye.”