Heather and Velvet (37 page)

Sebastian’s grin faded. His eyes met Prudence’s, and a slow flush crept into her cheeks.

Jordy pulled a thick sheaf of parchment from his shirt. “The other one sent this.”

Sebastian unfolded the envelope, his hands none too steady.

Prudence adjusted her spectacles, fighting to keep her voice cool as an unexpected desolation swept her. “Have you got what you want? Will you send me back now?”

They all looked at her blankly.

Sebastian scanned the elegant scrawl, frowning. “I just wed you, lass,” he said absently. “Why should I send you back?”

“That MacKay was an odd one.” Jordy tapped his temple. “A bit teched in the head I believe.”

Sebastian’s eyes went cool and wary. “Why do you say that?”

“He laughed when he read yer note. Sputtered so hard I thought he was havin’ a fit.”

Prudence rocked back on her heels. “Perhaps he found your spelling amusing.”

Glowering at her, Sebastian snapped the envelope shut. “A pity he wasn’t having a fit. A happy MacKay gives me the jitters.” He spilled gold into his sporran, then slammed the lid of the coffer. “I’d best pay Big Gus for his hospitality. Then we’re going home. To Dunkirk.”

“Sebastian?” Prudence said softly.

He swung on his heel, his good cheer dissolving to reveal he was as tense as a cat.

Prudence mustered the tatters of her logic. “Why don’t you free me? You have what you want now. You’re married to a duchess. You have a fortune in gold and your precious castle. You have no further use for me.”

His crooked grin was a haunting echo of his once loving smile. He tilted her chin up with one forefinger. His thumb grazed her lower lip with a delicacy that sent shivers through her. “You’d be amazed at the uses I have for you.”

He turned away, striding down the muddy road like he owned it. The others trailed behind. Prudence sank down on the stoop, propping her chin in her hand.

The little girl from the next cottage crept closer. Her adoring gaze followed Sebastian. “He’s a bonny one, ain’t he?”

Prudence’s eyes narrowed. Wind and sun ruffled Sebastian’s sandy hair to gilt. “He’s bonny all right. And if you’re smart, you’ll find the ugliest man you know and beg him to marry you.”

The child leaned against Prudence’s leg, undaunted by her cynicism. “Me mum says he’s like Robin Hood. Robbin’ from the rich and givin’ to them that needs it.”

Prudence winced to hear her own innocent words echoed with such childish faith. Men and money. She was beginning to hate the both of them with equal fervor. Even Laird MacKay found her predicament amusing. And Sebastian had always chosen wealth over her. She saw again the gold spilling through his strong, sure fingers. Had he ever touched her with such loving grace?

The child buried her pug nose in the fur of Prudence’s cape. Prudence glanced down, ashamed to be so caught up in her bitter musings that she hadn’t noticed the girl’s bare feet and painfully thin legs.

She hugged her close. She smelled like a child, even beneath the layer of dirt that weighted her hair and dulled her skin. Prudence looked around, really seeing the village perched on the barren shelf of the majestic Cairngorm mountains for the first time. Shutters hung crooked on sooty cottages. Chimneys crumbled into gaping holes where thatched roofs had been blown bare by the harsh winter
winds. Spring would come soon, but not soon enough for this village.

Her gaze finally came to rest on the leather-bound coffer sitting at her feet. It was filled with blood money—D’Artan’s blood money. Her lips twitched.

She gave the little girl a squeeze. “Tell me more about this Robin Hood of yours, my dear.”

When Sebastian returned, Prudence was sitting on the coffer surrounded by a giggling, tumbling mass of children. He stopped in his tracks, caught unaware by the charm of the sight. Prudence’s hair was disheveled, her face flushed with laughter. A wistful smile touched his lips.

How easy it was to imagine her with another child on her knee! A tawny-haired little girl with solemn violet eyes and a husky laugh. Or perhaps a boy with fine dark hair and a penchant for mathematics.

Jamie almost ran over him with the wagon, spurring him into movement, and Sebastian’s smile faded. He could ill afford to indulge the wild, selfish hope that the night they had lain together might have borne fruit. As he approached, a towheaded boy threw a staunch arm around Prudence’s neck and glared at him with jealous eyes.

Sebastian locked his hands at the small of his back. “Quite a brood you have here, lass. Are they all yours?”

Prudence bounced a plump baby on her knee. “Only the best behaved.”

The baby lost his own thumb and tucked Prudence’s finger in his mouth.

Jamie climbed down from the wagon, scratching his stomach. “If that don’t beat all. Am I to load them up as well?”

Sebastian lifted an eyebrow, as if the decision were Prudence’s.

“Of course not,” she said, untangling the children from her skirts and handing the baby to an older boy with solemn eyes. “Run along home now, all of you.”

They raced away, their laughter echoing on the wind. The last to go was a thin blonde girl. She pressed her lips to
Prudence’s cheek and whispered passionately, “I’ll never ferget ye, Maid Marian. Never. Not even if I live to be twenty.”

The girl’s awestruck gaze devoured Sebastian from his boots to the crown of his hair. She bobbed a nervous curtsy before scampering away.

Sebastian watched her go, his brow furrowed in a curious frown. “Maid Marian?”

Prudence smoothed her skirts. “Simply a game we were playing.”

Jamie was looking at her expectantly. She tucked loose strands of hair back in her queue, dusted off her shoes, and tugged at her redingote.

Jamie rolled his eyes. “If ye’ll excuse me, Princess Prudence, I need to load the gold.”

“Oh.” She stood, stretching like a lazy cat before stepping away from the coffer.

Jamie caught one of the leather handles and tugged. Nothing happened. Prudence quenched a flare of panic.

He fixed Sebastian with a baleful glare. “It’s just like Tiny to run off to his own cottage when there’s work to be done.”

Before Sebastian could reach to help him, Jamie hefted the coffer with both hands. Wiry muscles corded in his arms.

“Damn thing feels like it’s full of rocks,” he wheezed.

Prudence was seized by a sudden fit of coughing.

Jamie lashed the coffer to the wagon, muttering loudly to himself. “Hadn’t even the common decency to ask for pound notes. Had to have a chest of gold like some godforsaken pirate.” His voice rose. “Tight as a Scot, ye are, Sebastian Kerr, and always have been!”

Jamie sank down on the coffer, breathing hard. He met Prudence’s gaze. “Don’t ever forget it, lass. Jamie Graham said it first. Tight as a Scot, that man is.”

Prudence dangled her feet off the ledge and watched snow billow out of the mountains in the north. The weather in the Highlands seemed to be as fickle as Sebastian’s mood. Who
would believe that it was nearly March? As they had traveled through the mountains toward Sebastian’s boyhood home, the icy daggers of sleet had shifted to snow, softening the wind with its fluffy white flakes.

Leather boots crunched the frozen earth beside her. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Sebastian propped his foot on a marbled rock.

She sniffed disdainfully. “Tolerable, I suppose.”

The sun chose that moment to break through the sky in the west, shattering the dark clouds and tipping the misty peaks with gold. Sunlight and snow spilled across the glen. Snowflakes caught on Prudence’s lashes. She blinked them away, fighting the strange exultation that swept her. How easy it would be to fall in love with such a land! As easy as it had been to fall in love with the man who stood surveying the mighty peaks as if he were their master, as well as her own.

Clouds sped across the glen, drowning the sunlight and lengthening the cold shadow of the mountain. Prudence tightened her shoulder-cape around her, suppressing a shiver.

Sebastian sat down cross-legged and unfolded an oilcloth package. A strip of mutton was halfway to his lips when he paused.

His eyes twinkled at Prudence. “You did help Mrs. Graham prepare this. Knowing your fondness for lacing things with laudanum, perhaps you should have the first taste.” He held the meat to her lips.

Her eyes crossed as she glared at it. “And if I’ve given up laudanum for arsenic?”

He shrugged. “Then I shall have to find another duchess to marry. There’s always the Duke of Gleicester’s widow. She’s a bit plump and slovenly, but pliable.”

Prudence snapped the meat from his hand with her teeth, nearly taking off two of his fingertips. The mutton stuck in her throat like a rock.

When she didn’t fall into foaming convulsions, Sebastian tore into the meager fare with abandon.

Prudence found she had lost her appetite. “I should have let Arlo hang you.”

“You’re too civilized for that. Too English. Of course, we must never forget it was the civilized English who slit the Scots’ throats while they lay wounded on the field of Culloden.” He grinned at her. “By the old clan laws, I wouldn’t have claimed you as my bride, but as my slave.”

His frosty eyes warned her of the myriad of possibilities that word held.

She tucked her reddened nose into her cape. “Then it’s fortunate we are now under English law.”

“Look again, angel.”

He slipped an arm around her shoulders, guiding her gaze across snow-swept peaks broken by patches of Caledonian pine and the indigo splash of a loch.

His breath was warm against her. “You’re under my law now.”

A pale moon rose in the twilight sky, and the mountains melted into the velvety gray of impending night. The saddle rocked between Prudence’s thighs as she followed Sebastian’s horse up the steep path. They rounded a rocky ledge, bringing her her first glimpse of Dunkirk.

Anger swept her, followed by a numbing sense of desolation. How could Sebastian have traded her love for a shattered ruin?

To Prudence, who had lived her entire life among the rolling green hills of England and the misty coast of Northumberland, the stark rock looked as forbidding as a goblin’s lair. The moonlight cast a silver wash across its shadow. She shuddered to think how wildly the wind must blow through the castle on its peak.

Their shaggy mounts pawed their way up the rocky slope and into the courtyard. An air of emptiness hung over the small castle, as if it awaited the loving touch of a master who was never coming back. Dead lichen crept up the crumbling stone walls. Jamie’s wagon sat in a corner of the courtyard, but there was no sign of Jamie.

Without profaning the eerie silence, Sebastian dismounted and offered her a hand. Prudence flexed her legs while he touched a flint to the wick of a candle stub. The
wan light flickered over his handsome face, gone as closed and still as the deserted castle. For the first time, she wondered what he might be thinking, might be remembering. As they passed beneath an oaken door that creaked on broken hinges, she shrank into his side, thankful for his presence.

“Great hall” was too kind a description for this cavernous dwelling. Sickly moonlight crawled through the arrow slits, illuminating the magenta and white of bird droppings spattered across a sea of stone. Gnawed bones and moldy bits of things best left nameless huddled in piles. The twin hearths at each end of the hall were empty of all but heaps of gray ash. Cobwebs shrouded the tarnished bronze of the torch sconces.

A strange emotion seized Prudence. She had a sudden vision of Sebastian dining at Tricia’s table, garbed in casual yet elegant splendor. He had not so much as let a crumb fall on his frock coat without brushing it away. Was it any wonder he found civilization a seduction as well as a trap? Who was she to judge him for seeking to escape such squalor forever?

He gently disengaged her fingers, and she realized she had been clinging to his hand. He pressed the candle into her palm and gestured to a set of stone stairs that curved up one wall.

“Go. I’ll tend to the horses.”

She trailed after him, hesitant to surrender the comfort of his broad shoulders. “I can help.”

He shook his head and gently shoved her toward the stairs. “Don’t be afraid.”

His husky burr gave the words the effect of a charm, a magical incantation that straightened her spine and sharpened her resolve. She wasn’t afraid. She was terrified. But she wasn’t about to let him know it.

The door opened behind her, and a blast of cold wind deepened the chill of the hall. Then the door closed, and Prudence was left alone in the flickering candlelight. She wondered if another girl had once stood in her place, her hands trembling, her gray eyes brimming with frightened tears, alone in a strange country with a brutal stranger.
Prudence shook herself out of her reverie. Sebastian was not his father. And Prudence Walker was made of sterner stuff.

Prudence Kerr, she reminded herself.

The warmth of the candle melted against her palm. If she didn’t find a candlestick soon, her hand would be swimming in tallow. She started for the stairs, grimacing as her shoe crunched something small and delicate.

The frail light cast ghosts of shadows on each crumbling step. She stumbled and reached for the wall to steady herself, then jerked her hand back as her fingers sank into damp mold.

There was no corridor at the top of the stairs, only a narrow landing with a single door. The tower must serve as it had five centuries ago, as sleeping quarters for the entire castle.

A bead of hot tallow spattered on her wrist. Prudence drew in a deep breath and shoved at the splintered door.