Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] (12 page)

To his amazement, he would have sworn he caught a wee quirking at the left corner of MacFie’s lips, but the twitching—or whate’er it’d been—vanished in a flash.
Gavin folded his arms, rolled back on his heels. “So what will you do to make amends to them?” he wanted to know, his tone calm as the sea on a windless day, his freckled face once more the pinnacle of blandness.
Blandness, and something most disconcerting that Iain couldn’t quite put his finger on . . . and didn’t really want to.
“Amends?” he stammered, the single word sounding more like the wheeze of a strangled man’s last breath.
Gavin nodded. “We cannot leave them here, nor can we send them on their way.” He cast a sidelong glance at the yew-enclosed graveyard. “Not with good conscience.”
“Nay, we cannot,” Iain ground out, massaging the back of his neck. Saints, but his skin felt hot . . . feverish.
He
felt feverish.
Wholly besieged . . . condemned and damned to meet his fate face on, even when everything he’d lived and learned hitherto screamed in warning protest at the very idea of keeping the beauty at his side, letting her into his life.
His maligned, worthless life.
But the only one he had, and if he meant to salvage what honor remained him, he’d deny it no longer.
Indeed, the prospect of reclaiming his life held surprising appeal. More, in fact, than aught else he’d considered in a good long while.
Feeling as if he no longer teetered quite so close to the edge of a dark abyss, Iain drew a deep, rejuvenating breath, doubly pleased to note the air held a wee hint of heather.
He almost smiled.
“So-o-o, MacFie, we’ve come to a crossroad, it would seem,” he said in a steely-smooth voice that would accept no rebuttal. “The lasses remain at our sides—for propriety’s sake, as our wives—and we shall escort them to the nunnery of their choice.”
Gavin arched a brow. “And then?”
Iain shrugged, surprising himself when he didn’t bark at MacFie for posing the question.
Perhaps his temper
was
lessening.
If so, he’d credit any such improvement to the distraction of the flame-haired beauty rather than any oblations he’d spent the countless shrines they’d visited on their journey across the land.
Still, he didn’t want to consider “and then” just yet.
Instead, he strode hotfoot to his horse and began hastily undoing the fastenings securing his fool pilgrim’s staff to the back of his saddle.
“I agree we must keep them with us, but have you forgotten we meant to sleep at the MacNab’s this night?” Gavin reminded, coming up beside him. “He is a close enough friend of Donall’s to ken you have not taken another wife.”
Wife
again.
The word chilled Iain anew and brought Lileas in all her fragile and tender beauty to the forefront of his mind . . . but not for long. Another image, a vibrant, bolder one, vanquished her with ease. The vision of a green-eyed minx with a tousled mane of fiery red curls and creamy, coral-crested breasts lush enough to harden a eunuch’s tarse.
“Nay, I have not forgotten MacNab, nor that we sent on Beardie and Douglas to await us there,” he snapped, blinking away the image.
Not quite able to shake the guilt that had come with it.
Guilt, too, for thinking of the stash of MacLean treasure hidden in the saddlebags Donall’s two burly seamen guarded with their brawn and steel.
Iain frowned, his fool fingers freezing on the saddle ties.
His forehead began to throb again.
Woman of his MacLean heart or nay, he
had
seen her steal the votive . . . rob a holy shrine.
At once, the dread iron bands snaked round his rib cage again, and he struggled to banish the thought, to thrust what he’d seen from his memory as a dog shakes off water. Then, much to his amazement some deep seated knowing rose from the darkest fastnesses of his
soul and met his suspicions with scorn.
Scattered them before they could take root.
Determined to ignore his doubts and trust his instincts, he wheeled to face MacFie full on, pinned him with his best brother-of-the-laird look. “
You
shall ride on to the MacNab’s with the older lass and make my excuses—I care not what,” he said, waving away Gavin’s protest. “The younger one stays with me, and we’ll join you by eventide on the morrow along the road, north some ways beyond the MacNab’s holding. The old Fortingall yew would be a good meeting place. Do you know it?”
“Aye.” Gavin nodded. He stepped closer, and clamped a firm hand on Iain’s shoulder. “But as your brother’s man, I am loyal-bound to mind you of the treasures we carry,” he said, his troubled gaze mirroring how little enthusiasm he held for raising the concern.
Iain went still. He narrowed his eyes at MacFie, half-believing the bastard had seen the selfsame thought emblazoned across his own forehead just moments before.
Flushing bright pink, Gavin lowered his voice. “If she is a thief, she could be tempted if she learned of such goods, could pose a threat—”
“She poses no threat.” Iain winced at the glaring untruth the instant the words left his tongue.
The well-curved lass posed a tremendous threat.
But one that had naught to do with bejeweled reliquaries and golden chalices.
She imperiled his ability to control his baser urges.
Imperiled it greatly.
“I will only ask once, and thereafter consider my duty done,” Gavin began anew, flushing a deeper red but undoubtedly taking his role as Donall’s most trusted too seriously to desist. “Do you trust the lass?”
“Aye, I do.” Iain blinked, stunned by the speed of his answer, rocked even more by the absoluteness of his certainty. “With my life, and with the entire stores of the MacLean treasury.”
“I am glad to hear it,” MacFie said, clearly relieved. He lifted his hand from Iain’s shoulder. “I trust her, too, and think you’d be much mistaken to doubt whate’er reason she gives you for taking the ex-voto . . . if she deigns to tell you.”
“She will tell me,” Iain said for his ears alone, the need to know suddenly burning as fiercely as his physical lust for her.
Consumed, he glanced at the yew trees, staring hard at them for a long moment in a vain attempt to peer through the leafy green barrier and catch a sweet glimpse of her creamy skin or mayhap a quick flash of her red-gleaming tresses.
What he did catch—imagined or nay—was another faint whiff of her heathery scent. It wafted past him, a silken caress on the late-afternoon breeze.
Just a wee hint of her fragrance, barely there and already fading away, but potent enough to fire the fiercely carnal side of him that—he now knew—had ne’er truly wakened until he laid eyes on her.
And oh how he burned to address those newly discovered needs.
To slake them every one.
His, and hers.
Especially hers.
His loins setting like granite, his pulse thundering in his ears, he turned back to his garron and set his annoyingly clumsy fingers to unfastening the remaining saddle ties.
A twig snapped behind him then, and the wind sent another scent to tickle his nose . . . but a decidedly masculine one this time. Unpleasantly familiar, and a dubious blend.
“Must you e’er lurk so close at my shoulder?” he ground out without turning around.
“We must speak of your penance, too,” came Gavin’s response.
Iain gritted his teeth and counted to ten.
Snapping at the bastard that he was beginning to remind Iain of his long-dead mother would only give him more fodder to relay to Donall.
Not that Iain really cared.
Not now when the shores of Doon seemed less inviting than the welcoming arms of a certain bonnie lass.
Squaring his shoulders, he drew a long breath and expelled it very slowly. “Take heart in knowing that, too, has not slipped my mind,” he said at last, yanking free the hated pilgrim’s staff. To his relief, the wide-brimmed hat and beggar’s bowl gave him less resistance.
He gave Gavin a tight smile. “I shall continue to pray for easement of my worst vices at whate’er holy site we happen upon,” he conceded, kneeling to place the items on the stony ground at the base of the chapel wall. “But I shall no longer disguise myself as a pilgrim, nor shall I deny my name.”
Straightening, he shot MacFie a defiant look. “In especial before the lass.”
Gavin cocked a doubtful brow. “And if she questions why you are no longer a pilgrim? Why you continue to kneel before shrines?”
“I shall tell her truth of the whole sordid tale before she can ask,” Iain declared, the assertion knocking a few more clumps of rust off his corroded pride. “At least the most of it,” he added beneath his breath.
And regrettably, loud enough for MacFie to hear.
Gavin leaned toward him, looking as if he wasn’t about to relinquish his good office of gaoler and Clan MacLean’s highest-ranking lairdly tattler. “And just what part of it will you keep from the lass?”
The most damning part,
Iain’s shame answered.
“Exactly why I was so distraught I knocked over the candlestand,”
he
amended, taking his plaid from its place of concealment within his leather travel pouch and flinging it boldly over his shoulder.
He’d tell her, too, that were she wise, she’d have done washing the grime from her limbs and use the shelter of the yew trees to scramble over the kirkyard wall and hasten away.
Seize the moment and run for her sweet life.
Run a thousand miles before her Master of the Highlands forgets his blighted touch and claims her for his own.
Claim her for his own.
The words shot through Madeline, a tingling hot streak of sizzling, molten gold, freezing her in her tracks before she’d taken more than a few steps into the open kirkyard, then spinning away before she could even catch her breath.
Almost reeling, she fought to regain her balance, but the heated passion crackling behind those few words
she’d caught still eddied through her, making her dizzy.
As did the man himself.
Even Nella gawked at him . . . or at least Madeline
thought
she did, for her friend stood equally still beside her.
Madeline stared, too, her heart tilting dangerously while some small corner of logic deep inside her nodded in satisfaction at having recognized the master beneath the dusty pilgrim’s garb.
Those rags—and the accompanying trappings—lay forgotten in the dirt, discarded and exchanged for the proud plaid now slung so casually across his wide-set shoulders. A pilgrim no more, he seemed to tower above his auburn-haired friend, though Madeline knew the other to be a hairbreadth taller.
His
hair glistened in the sunlight, no longer pulled back from his face, but spilling loose over his shoulders, full black and silky-looking, shimmering as a raven’s wing, and making her fingers itch to touch the gleaming strands.
Madeline swallowed, stared hard at his hair. Dear saints above, its sleekness fell near to his waist. Just
looking
at it set her to trembling, turned her knees liquid, and stirred her to such a degree she had to remind herself to breathe.
She swallowed again, wholly captivated by his dark beauty, enthralled by the aura of barely contained masculine power emanating from every inch of his tall, well-muscled body.
Were she less overwhelmed, less startled by the trans formation, she would have smiled, for nary a man could
walk the earth who better fit the style she’d given him.
But she could only stare, too awed to do aught else.
The man—whoe’er he truly was—was simply irresistible.
A vibrancy, a
living
intensity, such as she’d ne’er seen a man—or anyone—possess, rolled off him in dark waves burnished with gold, his sheer presence filling the little kirkyard, beguiling her senses, and surely branding any female within a hundred miles as his own.
If he cared to claim them.
For one laming instant, Madeline’s pounding heart thumped out of beat, her palms growing cold and clammy, as her damnable gift sent his words echoing faintly through her once more.
Claim her for his own,
he’d said or thought . . . and Madeline had caught the sentiment. She’d felt its blazing need to the roots of her soul . . . and wished so fervently he’d meant her and not the one woman whose heart he carried within his own.
Wished, too, she could shake off her disappointment, free herself of the thrall he’d seemed to cast o’er her, and stride forward to greet him fairly—her true Master of the Highlands—rather than hang back in the shadows and make moon eyes at a man she desperately wanted but could ne’er call her own.
Determined to ignore Gavin’s gog-eyed perusal, Iain blew out a gusty, frustrated breath and made a bit of a show of smoothing his plaid’s fine, woolen folds into place as best he could until he calmed enough to search his bags for his sadly misplaced brooch.
That, too, grated on his nerves, so he indulged himself by tossing aside the thin leather band Gavin was e’er pressing him to use to tie back his long hair, insisting a man with hair nigh to his arse would ne’er make a believable pilgrim.
Enjoying the feel of his hair spilling unhindered down his back once more, Iain tossed his head and bit back a near-irresistible urge to shout out loud with the sheer glory of this wee, but to him important, reclaiming of his freedom.
He
did
level a deliberately dark look on MacFie, half-expecting the gawking bastard to take advantage of the eye contact to admonish him to confess his sins to the lass in their damning entirety, but the Islesman merely cleared his throat.
More than once, and quite affectedly.
So exaggeratedly, in fact, Iain wasn’t at all surprised when the fine hairs on his nape prickled, and he spun around to find two limpid green eyes fastened on him.
She
stood but a few scant paces beyond the yews, her friend hovering protectively at her elbow, and he’d been too caught up in thoughts of ravishing her and defying MacFie to notice her approach!
And most mortifying of all, her green-gold gaze flew from him straight to the discarded accoutrements of his sham pilgrimhood, then back to him, drifting over his plaid and his unbound hair, the widening of her eyes and the paling of her creamy-smooth skin sure enough signs she’d guessed all.
Knew before he could tell her that he was anything but a common miracle seeker.
An unfortunate turn of events any way he twisted it, but one he knew he could have easily mended were it not for the grim set of her beautiful face, the hint of disappointment clouding her lovely eyes.
Rampant
disappointment lest along with his tarnished honor and rusted pride, his ability to read a woman had waned as well.
Hoping it wasn’t so, he straightened his spine and captured her gaze, holding fast to its startled loveliness until he could peer deep enough to be sure.