Teresa Medeiros (22 page)

She stole a look at him. Her voice faltered, stumbling over a puir lassie’s pledge of undying love to her faithless suitor. Longing closed her throat. Morgan’s eyes were closed, his gilt lashes resting flush on his cheeks. His muscled legs were stretched out before him and his plaid had ridden up to reveal bronze thighs dusted with sandy hair. Sabrina drank him in like a tall, cool swallow of water on a hot summer day.

She stroked the strings of the delicate instrument, weaving an old English melody, one her mother used to sing to them on cold winter nights when icy bits of snow tapped against the windows of the solar. She loved watching Morgan relax his fierce guard. She could almost see the tension seeping out of his muscles, the wary lines of his brow melting in contentment. She longed to fan her fingers along his rugged jaw, to touch him as she was touching the clarsach, with tenderness and reverence and joyous hunger.

He stirred in the chair, sighing drowsily, and murmured, “ ’Tis a lovely melody, Beth.”

Sabrina’s fingers froze. Morgan’s eyes drifted open, but she could read nothing but bewilderment in their depths. She held her breath. Perhaps she had only imagined his lapse.

He rubbed his brow. “I must have dozed off. I’d best get to bed before you have to call Fergus to carry me off.”

He lumbered to the door, then stopped. Sabrina felt his continued presence like a vise squeezing her heart. She was desperate for him to leave, desperate to be alone so she could give herself over to the doubts lodged like a stone in her throat.

Finally, when she could bear it no more, she swung around to face him. “For God’s sake, man,
what
are you waiting for?”

He stood like a Greek statue, his arms folded over the pagan span of his chest. “My good-night kiss, of course.”

Sabrina was flabbergasted by his nerve. She rested her hands on her hips. “It seems I’ve neglected to educate you fully on civilized custom. If a husband has behaved badly and wounded his wife’s tender feelings, they do not share a good-night kiss.”

He took another moment to digest that bit of lore. Then he strode over and lifted her by the shoulders until her feet dangled a full foot off the floor. His mouth claimed hers in a slow, gentle mating of tongues until all the nether pulses of her body began to beat to his dark, erotic rhythm. The resilient satin of his lips almost made her forget Eve’s warning, almost drove everything from her mind but the lazy promise of passion in his eyes. Almost.

“Stupid custom,” he pronounced, lowering her to her feet. “Good night, brat.” He shut the door behind him with a gentleness that mocked the thundering of her heart.

“Good night, Morgan,” she whispered to the silence. “No wonder he always calls me brat. He probably can’t remember my name.”

Pugsley emerged from beneath the bed at her words.

Sabrina threw the edge of the tablecloth over the chipped teapot, sickened somehow by the sight of it. Had Eve been right? Was Morgan no different from his father? Had he truly nursed a vain infatuation for her mother all these years? She searched her memories, finding Morgan’s face, its lean planes drawn with boyish longing as he listened to Elizabeth sing.

Sabrina pressed a hand to her stomach as if she could stop the dull ache spreading through it. The irony did not escape her. While she had propped her own little chin on her pudgy fist to gaze adoringly at Morgan, he had been watching her mother in that same worshipful stance.

She had thought nothing of it at the time. They had all looked to Elizabeth. Hers was the gentle pulse that beat at the heart of Cameron Manor. Sabrina had struggled her entire life to emulate her.

When Sabrina would have had every excuse to be the spoiled, vain brat Morgan believed her to be, she had striven instead to be graceful, generous, and well-mannered.

She had dutifully squelched the raw passions trembling in her heart. She had sat in the window, her embroidery in her lap, and watched wistfully as Morgan and her brothers went cantering over the heather-strewn hills on their shaggy ponies. To please her mother, she had even been willing to travel to London and marry some staid Englishman, secretly knowing that her heart would always belong to the Highlands and to the wild, stubborn boy who had stolen it.

Sabrina had been Mama’s dainty rose.

Papa’s perfect little princess.

And now she was Morgan’s charming pet, hopping to attention each time he jerked her leash.

But she’d never been a woman. And never a wife.

While Enid had found the courage to break the chains of the past, Sabrina had fallen into the same old trap, seeking to charm Morgan’s clansmen, hoping that if she won their hearts, she might win their chieftain’s as well.

Flattening her palms on the table, Sabrina surveyed the chamber with smoldering eyes washed clean of childish illusion. There was nothing of Sabrina Cameron here, no hint of her character, no clue to her personality. Her mother’s elegant hand was everywhere. On the porcelain tea set shipped from London at her expense, on the graceful tapers dipped per her orders, on the virginal bedclothes hemmed by her precise stitches.

Everything in Sabrina’s chamber, including her dog, had belonged to Elizabeth first. And now she had reason to believe her husband’s heart had as well.

Sabrina loved her mother. Admired her. Respected her. But she could not
be
her. Not even for Morgan.

All those years ago, Morgan had taken such perverse delight in knocking her crown askew. Now the time had come for her to relinquish it willingly.

Pugsley growled his approval as she drew the pins from her hair, sending it tumbling around her shoulders in a dark, smoky mass.

It was nights like this that made Morgan wish he were a drinking man. Not even the iciest of spring waters could quench the fire roaring through his loins. His exhaustion had fled before the sweet acquiescence of Sabrina’s lips beneath his. The prospect of sleep was now as removed as earning a spasm of precious release for his lust-battered body.

In a moment of savage weakness, he wished he could be the man Sabrina believed him to be. He envied the moral poverty of his notorious ancestor, Horrid Halbert, who would have simply chained the beautiful Cameron girl in his dungeon to rape at his leisure.

Groaning, Morgan tossed back another draft of water. He had sought the hall, hoping to find both solace and anonymity among his boisterous clansmen. As their numbers had dwindled over the past few years and the sporadic raids of the Grants and Chisholms had grown bolder and more bloody, most of the MacDonnells had abandoned their decaying cottages and sought the refuge of the castle. They took their meals together in the hall and huddled on the benches wrapped in their plaids to sleep each night just as their ancestors had done five centuries before.

The skipping notes of the flutes and the rhythmic throb of the tambours kept time with Morgan’s restless heart.

“Heave ho, there he goes!” came the warning cry as one of his clansmen took a good-natured punch and went sailing down the table.

Morgan caught the lad by the scruff of his plaid and heaved him aside without blinking an eye. Fergus sat next to him on the bench, nuzzling a lass’s neck with far more tenderness than he might have shown a few hours earlier. Another afternoon tea with Sabrina and Morgan feared the grizzled rascal would start
spouting Shakespeare. Eve perched at the end of the table, surrounded by four MacDonnells too distant from Morgan in kinship to even have earned the dubious honor of being called cousins. Their whispers and sly glances nagged at him, and he found himself once again obsessing over the frustrating mystery of Angus’s death. It galled him to know that he might never learn who murdered his father.

He yearned for that taste of sweet oblivion when Sabrina had eased him into slumber with her song, slipping him back in time to the peace of the Cameron solar, where Elizabeth’s rich soprano had finally drowned out the shouting, cursing, and violence that had punctuated his young life. But when he had awakened, Beth’s daughter had been watching him, a quizzical pain darkening her eyes. His elusive peace had shattered beneath a flood of blinding need.

It was snowing harder now. Glittering flakes drifted through the arrow slits and into the hall like a sprinkling of banished stars, melting as they reached the heated air.

Morgan stiffened as a sinuous pair of arms circled him from behind. “I hate to see ye lookin’ so grim,” Alwyn purred in his ear. “Gi’ me a moment o’ yer time and I’ll put a smile back on those bonny lips o’ yers.”

As tight as his loins were wound, Morgan suspected a moment was all it would take. His hand clenched around his mug. For one bleak instant he was tempted. Sabrina would never have to know. But as he met Eve’s wise, amused gaze down the length of the table, something in him resisted, knowing instinctively that he would feel worse after the soulless coupling. Dirtier and even more unworthy of the girl he had married, a girl as fragile and pure as the fresh flakes of snow pouring into the hall.

He was forming his rebuff when the music died. The flutes shrieked into silence. The tambour player thudded to a halt. Fergus choked on his whisky, spewing it across the table in the face of a lad too dumbfounded to bother wiping it away.

Morgan followed their stunned gazes to the archway. When he saw what had captivated them, he reached over, blindly pried the mug out of Fergus’s hand, and killed its contents in a single convulsive swallow.

Morgan wheezed as the pure malt whisky seared a path down his untried throat. For an eternity he could neither breathe nor swallow, but he suspected both efforts would have been futile anyway as Sabrina came scampering into the hall, looking for all the world like a mischievous wood nymph.

The skirt of her rose-colored gown had been slashed into so many ribbons, it made even Alwyn’s attire seem modest. She wore no underskirt, petticoats, or paniers, and with each jaunty step she took, an alarming expanse of milky thigh was revealed.

Her feet were bare, her hair unbound. It tumbled down her back in a wild mass, crowned by a circlet of satin roses that looked suspiciously like the ones designed to bind her bodice at a decent level. She wore no powder. The flush tinting her cheekbones was natural. Only the bee-stung pout of her lips had been rouged in invitation.

Morgan wanted to do things to those lips. Tender
things. Unholy things. A pulse throbbed to life in his groin, beating a rhythm of warning.

His beady eyes twinkling with mirth, Fergus splashed more whisky into the mug. “Drink up, me man. I’ve a feelin’ ye’ll be needin’ it before this night is done.”

Morgan drained the mug, his gaze never leaving Sabrina. The whisky wove fiery tendrils all the way down to the pit of his belly, where he feared his heart was now residing.

Sabrina wound her way through the frozen dancers, pausing at intervals to bestow an impish grin on a gaping face. The silvery peals of her laughter rippled through the taut silence as she approached Morgan’s table, her hips swaying in an invitation older than time itself. From the corner of his eye Morgan saw Alwyn hop into Fergus’s lap.

Sabrina planted a hearty kiss on Fergus’s grizzléd cheek, then straddled the bench, facing Morgan. “Was your bed too cold for your liking, my lord?” Her gaze strayed to Alwyn, making it obvious she had witnessed the woman’s defection from Morgan to Fergus. “Perhaps you came to seek some warmth?”

Morgan’s hands clenched around the mug, gouging fresh scars in the crude earthenware. He kept his voice low, so low that even Fergus would have to strain to hear it. “Guard your tongue, lass. My clansmen believe we share a bed, and I’d prefer to keep it that way. So why aren’t you in yours?”

Her blue eyes widened to ingenuous saucers. “I wasn’t aware my chamber was to be a cell. Or a cage. Am I your prisoner now, Morgan? Or your pet?” She offered him her upturned wrists. “Perhaps you would care to bind me?”

Her words and posture conjured up pagan images made none the less erotic for their barbarism. Morgan shoved her hands back into her lap, struggling to ignore the tantalizing drape of her thighs over the rough wooden bench and the crushed volvet pooled at their enticing V.

He covered the shaken note in his voice with
sternness. “This is not the way a chieftain expects his wife to behave.”

“Ah, but I’ve behaved all my life, and where has it gotten me? There’s no point in letting the naughty girls have all the fun.” To his shock, she arched her graceful neck and caught his earlobe between her sharp little teeth before whispering, “Your clansmen aren’t nearly as stupid as you’d like to believe. If you were sharing my bed, you’d have better things to do than brood.”

Before he could recover, she was dancing out of his reach. He glowered, entranced against his will by the provocative sparkle of her eyes. Wary of his stillness, Morgan’s tablemates were already edging out of his reach.

Sabrina clapped her hands in a bid for an attention she already had. “I should like to propose a toast.” She swept a chipped goblet from the nearest table and hefted it high. “To my newfound family—the MacDonnells!”

A dubious cheer rose from the hall. Although the MacDonnells feared their chieftain’s stony countenance, they couldn’t resist drinking to anything. This time when Fergus offered him the whisky, Morgan took the bottle instead of the mug. He quaffed it, then dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.

Sabrina tipped the goblet to her lips. Morgan was transfixed by the convulsive arch and ripple of her throat around the potent liquor.

The shock of it lowered the fabric of her voice from creamy silk to husky velvet. Her eyes glittered with tears of reaction. “I promised Fergus I’d teach you a new song, and contrary to what your chieftain believes, we Camerons always keep our vows.” She began to clap her hands and tap her foot in rousing rhythm.

Her enthusiasm was infectious. After throwing an uneasy glance at Morgan, the boy manning the tambours began to pat out a beat on their warped skins. Other hands and feet picked up the rhythm, clapping and stomping until the hall resounded with it.