Highlander Undone (11 page)

I
was just a trifle late for the dinner party,” Addie said, then, meeting Jack’s incredulous gaze, amended, “Well, for me it was a trifle late.”

Jack arched his brows. “What, pray tell, is very late for you?”

“After dessert,” Addie replied and Jack laughed. She tucked her arm companionably through his and felt him stiffen slightly before relaxing and allowing her to lead the way to the far end of the Merritts’ walled garden.

Inside the townhouse Lady Merritt’s distinctive whoop of victory could be heard.

“She and Gerald must have recouped some of the points they lost,” Addie said.

“She doesn’t like losing,” Jack replied.

“That’s why she insisted Gerald be her partner against Ted and Mrs. Morrison. Ted is, if possible, an even worse whist player than I.”

“Ah. I see. I was wondering why she all but shoved us out the door in the middle of the night.”

“Middle?” Addie asked. “Jack, it’s barely eight o’clock. Don’t try to tell me you’re now keeping monastic hours.”

“Oh, I assure you, I am quite worthy of a monk’s cowl,” he said, his voice deepening with odd emphasis. “And while it isn’t, perhaps, the middle of the night, it’s cold and dark.”

Addie looked up at the heavens, surprised by his querulous tone. Above, the sky had turned indigo, spangled over with a million stars. The moon, nearly full, spread a thin veil of milky illumination over the garden. She did not feel in the least bit cold, as the shawl she’d slipped about her shoulders kept her more than adequately warm.

“And that paltry excuse for sending us out here,” Jack sniffed,
“
‘November is when the garden is most interesting.’ Fustian. She simply wanted us gone. I see evidence of nothing here but her gardener’s lack of industry,” he said. “Those trees want pruning.”

As usual of late whenever they chanced to be alone together, Jack’s posing became at once more exaggerated and more obviously a mask. He kept peering around through a quizzing glass, his gaze here and there, everywhere but on her.

They reached the end of the garden, the brick wall covered with holly. A small marble bench stood close against it and without waiting for his invitation, Addie sat down.

He stood by, carefully inspecting the holly, the wall, the bare pear tree, everything but her.

“Jack,” she said. “Do sit down or I will suspect that you don’t have a proper appreciation of my company. It is lovely, isn’t it?”

“Lovely.”

“I agree with Lady Merritt, though we might not share the same reasons. Nothing is as fantastical as a winter garden in moonlight.”

“I would have supposed you’d preferred autumn with its riot of colors.”

She shook her head emphatically and seeing his quizzical glance,
continued, “Oh, autumn is very nice with its rich palette. But what the moonlight robs of color, it returns in subtlety and texture.” She touched the dark, glossy leaves of the overhanging holly. “There is something about a graphite landscape, the feathered silver on the lawn, the impenetrable blackness of deep shadow, that is mysterious and evocative. Color can too easily hide the essential nature of a thing, its basic structure, its form.”

She cocked her head, regarding him closely. “Like you, Jack,” she murmured. “What does all that color conceal about you?”

He speared her with a sharp glance, so rapidly come and gone that if she hadn’t been studying his face she would have missed it, before a lazy smile spread over his lips. “La, Addie. I am afraid that without my ‘color,’ as you so quaintly put it, I am merely a sketchbook scribble.”

“I doubt that.”

“And I appreciate your doubt. Really, I do.”

He’d done it again, diverted her questioning. “Please, don’t stand there towering over me, Jack,” she said, hearing the frustration in her voice. “Be seated.”

He lowered himself to balance on the edge of the marble slab.

“What can I do for you?”

His head snapped around. “Ma’am?”

“Please. I have asked you so many times to use my given name. It’s not that difficult to pronounce. I’m certain I’ve heard you say it once or twice. It’s a friendly sort of gesture and one you seem reluctant to adopt. Each time I think we are friends, you . . .”

“I what?”

“You draw away from me,” she said, embarrassed but determined to speak.

“I am sure you are mistaken.” He looked at her, a darkness far deeper than the night in his eyes. “I feel quite . . . friendly.”

His reassurance frustrated more than reassured her, but she did not see what more she could say so she returned instead to the subject at hand.

“Very well,” she said. “How can I help? Who would you like to meet? I have some rather exalted family connections, but no more lofty than your own.”

“My own?”

“Lord and Lady Merritt. They are received by the ‘best’ people. I’m afraid my usefulness to you would be better served in a different capacity.”

“How so?”

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, while the Merritts are received by the best, I am received by the worst.”

He feigned shock, drawing away, his hand to his chest. “In what manner ‘worst’?”

She shrugged, enjoying herself. “Oh, artists and their ilk are invariably ‘worst.’ It is part of their mystique. Even if they don’t engage in reprehensible and degenerate behavior—which I hesitate to confide, most of them do not—they would still claim to. They have their reputations to consider.”

He laughed and she rocked back on the bench, catching her knee in her interlaced fingers, enjoying herself immensely. “So, whom among them would you like to know?”

The smile stayed on his lips, but the pleasure died from it, leaving it a hollow approximation of enjoyment. She struggled to understand what had happened.

“Oh, I don’t think you need bother introducing me to any particular persons,” he said. “I am content to fraternize with the artists in your brother’s studio.”

“Artists don’t frequent my brother’s studio. And certainly not members of Mr. Morris’s lot. They are far too political for my brother. He’s an artist, not a revolutionary.” She narrowed her eyes on Jack. “In fact, as one of his
acolytes
, why aren’t you more political?”

Jack lifted his head. “My father was a soldier, Addie. He might not approve of what I am doing now”—he spoke this with a strained sort of guilt—“in fact, I know he woul
d not, but I heartily approved of what he was and who he was, and that was a soldier who served his country. I would not dishonor his memory by preaching anarchy.”

“A soldier.” She’d almost forgotten.

“Yes.”

Poor Jack. Pity welled up inside of her. No doubt Jack had failed his father’s expectations. “It must have been a difficult relationship,” she said sympathetically, “he being a soldier and you being of an artistic nature.”

“Not at all.”

She glanced at him in surprise.

“He was a fine parent. An exceptional and loving father.”

A tingle of apprehension pricked the edges of Addie’s
consciousness
. She shook it off. “Well,
be that as it may
, you’ll find no other artists in Ted’s atelier. Except Gerry.”

Jack plucked a dried, brown leaf from the ground and began methodically shredding the papery tissue between the tougher veins. “Perhaps,” he said, his attention focused on his hands, “this Season, I should be content to watch your brother’s work and meet what society comes through his doors—and Lady Merritt’s.”

Addie frowned. “Society, as far as my brother’s Season is concerned, will apparently be limited to Miss Zephrina Drouhin and her”—she bit off the word she had been about to use—“officers.”

“Officers can have excellent connections. Only witness my father,” he said, grinning.

She smiled at his foolishness. There, he’d done it again. He’d
teased her out of her dark musings, made her look beyond herself. He
clearly cared for her in some manner, even if it was no more than a
fraternal affection. The problem was, she didn’t want
another
brother.

She shifted irritably on the bench. Her shawl caught on the holly vines and was dragged from her shoulder. She shivered in the sudden cold.

At once, Jack shrugged out of his coat and carefully set it about her shoulders. “See? I told you it was cold.”

She closed her eyes. She could smell him on the cloth, the tang of his sandalwood soap mixed with the heady male scent that was so uniquely his own. She pulled the jacket closed, relishing the feeling of his captured heat enveloping her body.

He lifted the soft velvet collar up around her neck. The backs of his fingers grazed her throat. Electricity danced beneath his touch.

Drowsily, her lids drifted open. His face was inches from hers, the blue of his eyes cobalt in the moonlit garden, his fair hair gleaming like platinum. His hands stilled then as, slowly, his fingertips skated with exquisite delicacy along the line of her throat, tracing her jawline and tilting her unresisting chin.

She could see the quiver of his nostrils as he took in her own scent, see his black pupils dilate, his lips open a feather’s thickness, feel the warm exhalation of his breath on her own suddenly swollen-feeling lips.

She leaned toward him and their lips met. It was sweet. So sweet. A glissade of firm warmth as his lips touched and clung to hers. His hands slipped beneath her heavy coil of hair to cup the back of her head. His thumbs bracketed her jaw, levering her head gently up to his.

Soft. Tender. She kissed him back, pressing her mouth more firmly to his. Her hands slid between them and crept up his chest. Beneath his shirt, his body was hot and tense and hard, his heart beating thickly beneath her palm. His kiss deepened and sighed with pleasure.

At once, his hands dropped and he backed away from her. “Jesus!” The word, though whispered, exploded from him.

“Jack? Jack, what is it? What have I done?”

“You?” He threw his head back. His teeth ground together. “Rather ask me what I have done. No. I beg you, don’t. You have done nothing.”

“But, why—”

He leapt to his feet and loomed above her, tall and ramrod straight. He took a deep breath and held out his hand. Uncertainly she took it and he pulled her roughly to her feet. “We should go back.”

“Jack, I don’t understand. Was I too—”

“No!” With an obvious effort he repeated more quietly. “No. Addie, nothing you did was anything but natural and honest and . . . lovely. It is not you, Addie. It is me.”

And with those words, he turned and left her alone in the garden.

F
or God’s sake, man, hold your position!” Jack screamed above the deafening roar of firearms and mortar. He could barely see through the swirling smoke and showers of dirt that coated his plaid and his face. Muddy sweat trickled down his forehead and cheeks. The pungent scent of powder mixed with the metallic tang of blood.

High above, a flat bright disc of sun blazed. It shimmered across the battle-woven shroud of sand and dust and acrid smoke, the small vortex of hell the soldiers had created on the hilltop.

A bullet struck a nearby boulder and splintered shards of rock, which hissed past his ear, scoring his cheek. Another bullet sliced through his kilt, filleting the fabric open across his thigh. Another struck his claymore.

A mortar erupted behind him, sending a soldier vaulting head over heels down the side of the hill. Like broken tin soldiers, men lay strewn and bleeding in the short, saw-bladed grass, even more vulnerable in death than they had been in life.

More men—his men—scrambled over the ground, looking desperately for some cover, some leadership, while valiantly trying to defend an indefensible expanse of bare earth.

They should have entrenched. They ought to have dug in. Four times he’d sent word to the commander; four times he’d been denied. Now the Boers had made the summit of Majuba Hill, Colley’s “inaccessible position.” Expert marksmen picked off his scuttling troops like rabbits on an open heath.

He fired his rifle. Futile. Waste of ammunition. The Boers had crept up the mountainside like lizards. Now they clung just below the rim, hidden and deadly.

Jack bit down on his anger, frustration balling his jaw as he swung his rifle about. What the bloody hell had happened to Colley’s men?

“Regroup!” he shouted again above the cacophony of yells and rifle blasts.

“They’ve hit the sergeant!” yelled Connor, the young piper ahead of him. And then, suddenly, “The colors are down! The colors!”

The lad jumped up from his half crouch. His eyes were fixed on the regimental flag lying beside the outstretched hand of the dead color sergeant. Jack could see the boy’s down-covered jaw set.

“Forget the bloody colors!” Jack yelled.

“The colors are down!” Connor called out, pride and determination warring for precedence on a face more appropriate to the schoolroom than a battlefield.

Then it began. Inevitable. Hideously constant.

The boy ran. There was nothing Jack could do to stop the young fool’s brave dash for the colors. He’d tried. God, he’d tried. A thousand times, in a thousand different dreams, he’d tried to change the outcome of the lad’s mad race.

The too-familiar scream tore from Jack’s throat, reverberating in the suddenly empty drum of time and dream.

For the thousandth time, the bullet grazed his forearm. For the thousandth time, the small bird alit on a thornbush and cocked its head before darting away.

“Connor!”

For the thousandth time, the boy sprinted forward.

“No!”

For the thousandth time, an odd, slanting shaft of light struck the gun barrel emerging with liquid slowness from a huddle of rocks thirty feet away. Salty sweat blinded Jack’s left eye and, for the thousandth time, he blinked. It would be another dream-elongated eternity before he realized it wasn’t sweat but blood.

“No-oo-oo!”
His voice echoed eerily.

The boy was almost to his goal. Exultantly, he bent forward, his hand stretched out to snatch the flag up on a dead run. You could see it. Read it. The lad was already tasting the glory of his feat. It was there in his eyes, in the dawning smile on his—

“NO!”

The single report of the blast preceded the inconsequential little puff of white blooming from the barrel. A look of startled incredulity bloomed across the piper’s face as the impact tripped him and he cartwheeled forward, crumbling, falling . . . dead.

“No.”

And now, for the thousandth time, Jack would crawl to the boy’s side and—

Abruptly, terrifyingly, the sharp green grass beneath his palm withered. The cerulean sky above him bleached to the palest blue and his knees burned against white-hot sand. With a gasp, he struggled to his feet.

He was in the desert, far away from the familiar, hated African landscape of moments before.

“Captain!”

Before him stood a row of Highland soldiers in full dress regalia, shimmering in the waves of heat rising off the pale, golden sands. He recognized each one of them. They were, all of them, dead.

“What orders, Captain?” It was the young piper from Majuba Hill.

“Orders?” Jack echoed numbly.

“Aye, Captain.” A redheaded corporal swept his hand toward the silent troop. “Lead us. We await only your command.”

“I . . . I haven’t any orders.”

“Excuse the presumption, Captain, but ye do, indeed.”

“What are they?” Jack asked. A thread of despair, as if he knew the answer, began uncoiling deep in his chest.

“Lead us home, Captain. Take us on the High Road. The path promised us, the ones who die in battle on foreign ground.”

The word was meaningless, an indecipherable phrase he parroted like an idiot. “What is home?”

“Here, with us, Captain,” the young piper answered kindly. “Dinna worry, sir. We dinna worry. We know you will do—”

“Jack?”

From somewhere behind him, her voice reached out and touched his heart like the tip of a white-hot blade. Somehow he’d pulled Addie into the dream and she was frightened.

He tried to turn around but the fierce need of these dead soldiers held him rooted, pinned facing forward, forcing him to take this last command. He fought their silent entreaty, fought until he shook, trembling and sweating.

“Jack?” More than fear in her voice now. She needed him.

Somehow he managed to pivot toward her voice even though the weight of the dead company’s petition bent his back like an overstrained bow. Their voices called his name as a single distant demand, a cry he could not heed.

Because he saw her.

She stood in clear, cool moonlight, her mahogany hair dancing in a crisp, clean wind. A gentle light refracted in her amber eyes.

“Jack.” She held out her hand. “Come home.”

And all at once that word had sense and meaning and significance. He only needed to take a few steps across shifting sand and touch her to be there. With her. Eagerly, he stretched out his hand.

Blood covered it.

He gasped, staring down at himself. He was naked. All his clothing was stripped from his body. Naked except for the pall of sticky blood that covered him from neck to foot. Whether it was from his own wounds or another’s, he couldn’t tell. He only knew he’d been baptized in the stuff.

At the same time, the voices calling him had risen in pitch and volume, becoming a howling wind, a hot blast of reproach scouring his naked flesh.

He heard her gasp and looked up. She was staring at him in horror, recoiling. The breeze that had tossed her hair had become a furnace’s roar, her dark tresses lashing her pale face. The hand once held out in welcome now fended off the very sight of him.

“No!”

He squinted into the wind, blinded by the pelting sand. She was being swallowed up by the storm, lost in the roar of the dead company’s fury and need.

“Addie!” He bolted upright in his bed.

It was pitch-black. And cold. The soft ticking of the mantel clock mocked the heavy pounding of his heart. His breathing was hoarse, the fine cotton bedsheets sweat-soaked and clinging. He sucked air deep into his lungs and dug his knuckles into his eye sockets.

Majuba Hill. El Teb. Afghan. For years he’d relived the ambushes, conversed with dead companions, led irreversible charges, and fought against unconquerable foes. The dreams were his nightly companions. Familiar demons.

But Addie had never been there before.

Unmindful of the December chill, he got up and paced to the window. There, he braced an arm above his head, leaning his heated forehead against the cold, frosted glass. He stared with unseeing eyes out into the tranquil, star-filled night.

He knew what had authored the change in his nightmare.

Paul Sherville had returned from Arabi a wealthy man. And he’d been a friend of Charles Hoodless.

It was exactly the sort of information he’d begun this deception to acquire.

He closed his eyes. He had no honor left. He’d taken advantage of his last living relatives to ferret out other people’s secrets—their little failures, addictions, and misfortunes. He used a grieving butler to pry into people’s private lives. He manipulated Gerald Norton, whose only crime was to offer him friendship. Yet, none of these was the worst of his sins.

He’d known from the beginning the damage Hoodless had done to Addie. But he’d not realized the extent of it. Now he knew better. It didn’t matter.

He’d considered time and again telling her the truth, but he was in too deep. It was too late. She would despise him for his deception. Even if she could somehow be convinced to let him continue his masquerade, her loathing would expose him. She hated soldiers and that was all he had ever been.

Yes, what he was doing was monstrous. God! So why was he doing it? He knew that, too. He owed it to the men who had died because of their commanding officer’s greed. It was a debt he could not ignore. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t quit.

But from here out he had to do so with the least possible harm to Addie. She felt more than casual affection for him. It was there in her beautiful eyes, the spontaneous smile of welcome when they met, the eagerness with which she had responded to his kiss. He had to stop that affection from growing. He had to kill it.

“Addie.” He wasn’t even aware he’d said her name until it dissolved in the air, leaving the room as silent as though it had never been uttered.