Jennifer Roberson (16 page)

He saw the blossoming of relief in every Campbell face, followed almost instantly by humiliation that they’d failed to keep her safe.

Cat ignored him utterly and looked from one to the other. “They are cattle thieves,” she said plainly. “What do you expect of them but to come in the night
like
thieves, aye?—and set the dirks against your throats!”

He looked sharply at the Campbells. As one they stared at her, startled as he by her vehemence. Then the one she had called Angus began to smile, though he had the grace—or
the wisdom, aye?—
to attempt to hide it from his captors.

“They canna keep us,” she went on, with a scathing glance at the MacDonald clansmen, “and we’ll no’ be killed for the silence. I am Glenlyon’s daughter; they know about MacGregors and what happens to proscribed clans.”

The color was back in their faces and the brightness in their eyes. Now they were angry men hungry for redress. Dair sensed the renewed alertness of the captured Campbells and the accompanying tension in his own men. He grabbed an arm and yanked her back out of the shieling before she could say anything else that might stir them to revolt.

“Christ, MacDonald—will ye stop pulling me this way and that like a muckle-headed stirk—?”

He ignored the latter protest. “Fierce words, aye?—and likely to get them killed.” He took her around the side. “We’ve no’ harmed them save for a lump or two; d’ye want worse on your head?”

Cat stumbled over a stone, recovered stiffly, and turned to face him, ignoring the arm still clasped in his grip. “I willna let them be ashamed for being trapped by Glencoe men,” she declared. “There’s no honor in your clan. Why should they expect it?”

The virulence of her tone took him aback. Then the words settled themselves to pierce his pride. “Then perhaps I should let Robbie have his kiss and see what you say then, aye?”

Her expression was briefly anguished, then hardened into a commingling of frustration and bitter anger. “In God’s name, MacDonald, what d’ye
expect
me to say?”

He opened his mouth to respond, but lost the train of his thought. He knew what he had
intended
to say, but it now lay tantalizingly out of reach, blown away on the rising breeze that lifted a lock of loose red hair and carried it forward to drape in unintentional coyness across one pronounced, oblique cheekbone.

“Well?” she prodded, and he recalled she had posed him a question.

He looked away from the strand of hair and the face from which she impatiently pulled it. “I would expect you to say—to
suggest
to them they make no attempt to fight.”

“Why? Would you? Is that what you would say and do, in my place?”

It was irrefutable logic, especially from a Campbell, and he found it intensely annoying. Dair lost interest altogether in the hair and the cheek and scowled at her.

“Dinna show me that black look, MacDonald,” she snapped. “ ’Tis Glen Lyon we’re in, not Glencoe.”

“But we have the weapons.”

“And we our tongues, aye?—” She was clearly unabashed by his perceived victory. “—which you well ken, being a Highlander, is as much a weapon as a dirk if wielded properly. D’ye expect us not to use them?”

He supposed not. He
knew
not; he himself would use whatever lay at hand. Dair’s scowl deepened.

“Will you let us go?” she asked.

“I willna. Would you, in my place?” He arched ironic brows.

Her brows were level but equally eloquent; she wrenched them upward even as he had his own, matching his irony, but with a devastatingly effective grasp of condescension far superior to his. He had seen it in Jean as well.
—is it a woman’s gift?—

“As
we
havena gone lifting cattle in Glencoe for some time, I canna say,” Cat declared. “For myself, I havena been in your place, and ’tis likely I’ll never be.”

He conceded that readily; he did not know a woman who went with men to steal cattle.
—though I dinna doubt this one would try!

“Let go of my arm,” she said coolly. “—And stop staring at me that way.”

Until that moment Dair did not realize he
had
been staring at her. Now that she had told him he could not look away from the face that had once been plain but now, as plainly, was not. Were it not for the color of her hair and her eyes—
—and her Campbell tongue!—
—he’d swear it was another lass entirely.

Her arm was still grasped in his hand. He did not release it yet, wanting something of her. “If you’ll swear not to march back into that shieling and give them more words meant to rile them, I’ll consider releasing you.”

“I willna! Would you? Would any man? Why d’ye think
I
should?”

Dair felt a bubble of laughter break in his chest, suppressed from escaping his mouth only by an application of immense self-control. He had expected no other answer; she had not in girlhood been willing to do so, and now that she was a woman she proved even less inclined. “Then I’ll keep your arm as surety.”

The line of her mouth was mutinous. The mouth itself was a wide, proud slash beneath a nose lifted imperiously into the air, the vertical line of it dividing precisely in half the remarkable vitality of her features.

No languid lass, Cat Campbell—
Dair scowled. He did not recall ever marking her mouth before, or her nose, or features singly or mutually beheld, but here they were before him and unavoidable. As was the rest of her.

“Cat Campbell,” he murmured. “Good Christ,
Cat Campbell
—” Self-control vanished. The bubble broke free of its constraints and Dair began to laugh.

“You bluidy bastard,” she said furiously, and swung her other arm to fetch him a clout on his ear.

He ducked enough to take the blow on the side of the jaw. “Christ, Cat—
wait
you—” It hurt, but not as much as his ear would have. He caught her arm so she dared not try again, with better result. “What I mean—”

She twisted in his grasp, jerking one arm free at last to scrape from her face the windblown lock of hair curling just beneath one furious, brilliant blue eye. “D’ye think I’ll stand here and let you insult me? D’ye think I dinna ken what you’re laughing at? Holy Mother, MacDonald, was it in your minds to come hunt up Glenlyon’s daughter to see what has become of her now that she’s grown?”

He met anger with quietude, knowing how self-control infuriated someone who lacked it; it was a subtle weapon he had learned early in life. “We came for cows.” Which he knew
she
knew; why else would MacDonalds ride to Glen Lyon?

When her anguished scowl deepened he dismissed irony and replaced it with truth. “It wasna meant as an insult. Christ, Cat, how could it be?”

She swallowed visibly. Her voice was none too steady. “You came for cows—and everything else!—last time, aye?—”

“Cat—”

“—but still found the time to tell me what I am.” Sudden tears stood in her eyes, prompting fresh anger and a twisted dignity that, despite its battered state, was rebuilt stone by stone out of its wreckage. “I ken what I am, MacDonald. I ken what that Stewart’s told me, and what
you’ve
undoubtedly said: ‘Glenlyon’s boy-faced daughter’!”

He was not a man much given to having the speech knocked from his mouth by another’s words. But at this moment, at this accusation, he found himself utterly bereft.

The tears spilled over. “Oh good
Christ,
here it is again—d’ye see?” She was disgusted, and clearly embarrassed; as furious with herself as with him. “There. ’Tis done, aye?—my weakness is uncovered. Put me in the shieling with the others, now, and tell yon swankie of Appin that you’ve reduced Glenlyon’s daughter.
Again.
”

Dair knew then what had been done to her, knew the words that had been said over the long years of a harsh childhood with nothing of softness about it save what she made for herself, and that itself was difficult with so many to gibe at her for it. He could hear the words in her silence, in the anguish of her eyes, the words meant merely to goad, to poke a stick at her pride, but which she had taken seriously because there was little cause and less justification to break a lass’s pride in the name of a lad’s pranks.

He
knew;
he was a man who had once been a lad. A quiet, undersized boy often called a changeling by others, and whispered about behind MacIain’s back when gossip ranged too far.

Dair looked into her eyes and saw the self-loathing there, the bitter recrimination that she should be made helpless before her direst enemies so that they, too, could hurt her.

He opened his mouth to tell her she was a fool, but shut it again. She would believe he lied no matter what he said.

And yet he could not let her believe it. “There is a pile of granite behind you. I’d have you sit on it.” He guided her to it, waited as she sat down rigidly, then stood before her. He slid his hand down her arm until he clasped her wrist, then used his other hand to grasp and extend her fingers, easing the stiffened knuckles into suppleness. He had gentled garrons and puppies; he believed she would be no different. “You’ve long fingers,” he said. “I remember a time there were scabs upon them; I saw so that day when we came wi’ MacIain.”

She tried to curl the captive hand into a knot; glared when he did not permit it. Her face briefly convulsed, as if his touch sickened her; but there was anguish there as well, and a bittersweet regret.

“But no more,” he told her. “Oh, aye, ’twill happen now and again—just like it does to me—but what of it? The flesh beneath is pale and smooth, but for the work a woman does, and that isna something to greet about.” He closed one hand more firmly around her wrist. “You’ve fine bones,
good
bones, well knit and well grown; they’ll not break under the labor you must do, the bairns you must bear.” Her elbow was stiff; he gentled it as well, then slowly set one knee against the turf to take his weight, while the other just touched the tented cloth of her tartan skirt. “And as for your face—”

Abruptly he stopped. He had intended a simple recitation of features meant to convince her she need not fear ridicule. But now suddenly he was close, too close, and the features that of themselves were nothing more than features merged to form a whole—

Dair released her at once and retreated on stiff legs, striding four long paces away before he could stop himself. There he halted on the lip of crumbling granite and stared fixedly into the distance.

Wind snatched at the loose folds of his kilt and teased bonnetless hair. He welcomed its cool breath, welcomed the promised summer, welcomed the chance to recover himself as he stood on heather-clad hills with an eagle in the sky and the glen below the wind-ruffled wings so lushly verdant and beautiful as to burst the heart in his chest.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “To humiliate me? There is no mud or spilled whisky or horse-piss, so you do it instead with words?”

He turned sharply. She had not yet retreated from her own outcrop, as if she understood he was no longer a physical threat.

“Have you used them up?” she persisted. “Are you thinking of new ones?”

It was difficult to speak. She was fierce and proud and bonnie, like the glint of steel in sunlight; like the blade of a deadly claymore, elegant in its simplicity. “I’ve never been a man for that.”

“Oh, aye?” She was patently unimpressed by his avowal. “And will you say you didna laugh when the Appin Stewart called me a boy-faced lass?”

Wind buffeted him again, lifting the swoop of plaid draped from shoulder to hip. The weight of the brooch tamed it, tugging against his shoulder. “You’ve seen me but three times, and never once have I treated you with anything but honor. And aye, I’ll say I didna laugh; he never said it to me.”

“And now? What is this, MacDonald?”

“This?” He wanted to laugh, but she would misconstrue it. Even though the laughter was for his own undoing, with none of it hers.
“This
is a man reconciling himself to a woman’s beauty.”

She recoiled as if he had slapped her.

In another woman it would have been blatant prevarication and as unamusing; it smacked of Jean Stewart, who was beautiful and knew it, yet teased him for flattery. But this was not Jean . . . “Dinna tell me you’ve not looked in the glass.”

“ ’Tis broken,” she retorted. “The day you came two years ago, I broke it then.”

“Then I’ll give you another.” It was small compensation for the other things she had lost, but he had no more to offer.

She sat very straight upon the granite. The wind came from behind her now, working more hair from her loosened, slept-upon braid. It blew around her face, underscoring the clean line of jaw, the belligerence of her chin.

She wasn’t truly beautiful . . . not as Jean was, or other women who had, briefly, attracted him; in fact, he knew of no
civilized
man who would, feature by feature, praise her in poetry, but the bards of Scotland would: she was Gaeldom come alive again upon the heathered braes where great-thewed heroes once strode; a human equivalent of the wild, barbaric Highlands, less a woman than a legacy of those who had gone before them all bearing shields and swords and axes.

He had a Highlander’s expert nose; with the wind from behind, Dair could smell the scent of her. Nothing so elaborate as French perfume, which Jean favored and he provided, but peat and smoke and wood, soap and wool and damp turf, and inevitably of woman; of the things he loved most in a Highlander’s harsh world.

She scowled. “What are you doing, MacDonald?”

His admission was more than he had intended to offer, but none he did not regret; it was the unadorned truth and therefore honorable. “Trying verra hard not to kiss a Campbell.”