Teresa Medeiros (24 page)

His hand shook as he lifted it to her cheek, bathing his fingers in the silky wetness. A shudder passed through her at his touch. Her lips trembled; the tip of her nose pinkened. Morgan had never seen anything more lovely. A single teardrop caught on his fingertip and he brought it to his lips, savoring its salty warmth. He took a step backward, staggered by the taste of her courage. Even his most fierce enemy would never have dared to lay such a weapon in his hands.

Horror washed over Sabrina as the echo of her impassioned confession reached her brain. Her hand flew over her mouth as if she could somehow snatch back the words. But it was too late. A dazzling grin was spreading over Morgan’s face, a tantalizing blend of boyish triumph and wonder.

“I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “Can you imagine that?”

She scrubbed at her cheeks with both hands, bracing herself for his roar of laughter, his mocking taunts.

But his bemused smile remained, underscored by a rumbling chuckle. “Fancy that, won’t you? Who would have thought it?” Sabrina blinked, wondering if he wasn’t drunker than she’d realized. The brilliant glamour of his grin nearly blinded her.

She remained frozen in shock as he turned and marched away, still shaking his tawny head. Eve’s warning echoed through the empty corridor.

Don’t give yer heart to him, lass. He’ll only feed it back to ye, piece by piece, until ye damn near choke on it
.

Sabrina collapsed against the mirror. “Oh, dear God,” she whispered. “What have I done?”

“Enid, wake up! Enid, please!”

The hissed whisper barely penetrated Enid’s fuzzy brain. She was dreaming, floating naked and weightless in a lake of sweet cream. Ranald waited for her on the opposite shore, plump, juicy strawberries dripping from his outstretched hands.

“Mmmm,” she moaned, anchoring her arm around Ranald’s lean waist. He burped in his sleep.

“For heaven’s sake, Enid, would you wake up?”

It wasn’t so much the desperation of the plea as the frantic hand clawing at her shoulder that finally roused her. Freeing Ranald, she rolled over and pried open one bleary eye.

“S’brina?” she mumbled to find her cousin crouched on the floor beside the bed, all but hidden by a voluminous pelisse and hood.

Sabrina laid a warning finger to her lips. “You mustn’t wake Ranald. I need your help. Something terrible has happened.”

Enid scrambled in her pocket for her bottle of hartshorn, forgetting she was nude. “What is it? Are we being attacked by the Chisholms? Is the castle on fire?”

“It’s worse than that. Far worse.” Sabrina paused dramatically. “I told Morgan that I loved him.”

Enid smiled dreamily and rooted back into the pillow. “How very nice. I was wondering when you were going to get around to it.”

Sabrina shook her violently. Enid’s eyes flew back open. “It’s not nice,” Sabrina hissed. “It’s horrible. Morgan knows I’m vulnerable to him now.”

Sabrina’s panic finally began to seep into Enid’s consciousness. Even in the scant firelight, Sabrina’s face was stark white, her eyes shadowed. Enid propped herself up on one elbow, suddenly wide awake. “Have the two of you never—”

“No! Never!”

They both held their breath as Ranald shifted to his back, mumbled something about roast mutton, then lapsed back into soothing snores.

“It’s really not as bad as people lead you to believe, you know,” Enid whispered. “At least not after the first time. Of course, with a man of Morgan’s incredible … um … stature …”

“Enid!” Sabrina wailed. “You’re not listening.”

Enid gasped at the sudden insight. “Why, you’re not afraid he’ll hurt you! You’re afraid he won’t!”

Sabrina lowered her eyes, remembering the feel of Morgan’s warm hand cupping her, the melting pleasure that could drive even the proudest of women to her knees. She had no choice but to flee before he discovered her girlish infatuation had burgeoned into a woman’s love.

“I can’t stay,” she said softly. “I have to get back to Cameron before it’s too late, before I’m no better than one of Morgan’s besotted doxies hanging around the great hall, praying I’m the one he’ll choose to warm his bed that night.”

“You don’t honestly think he’ll let you go?”

“I’m going now. Tonight. But I can’t go alone.”

Enid’s despairing gaze traveled between Sabrina
and Ranald. Ranald’s beautifully sculpted mouth hung open, making him look no more than twelve.

Sabrina squeezed her cousin’s hand. “I know I’m asking too much of you, but I can’t make it down the mountain alone.”

Enid smoothed the quilt over Ranald’s chest before throwing back her side. “Sometimes I think this husband of yours is more trouble than he’s worth.”

Sabrina managed to smile through a warm sheen of tears. All of her brave words to Morgan had been a lie. She was the one too cowardly to risk bloodying her hands by reaching for the wild rose growing just out of her reach. “He’s trouble, all right. But I suspect he’s worth it. I’m just too afraid to find out.”

She quickly bundled the grumbling Enid into a heavy gown and cloak and herded her out the door.

Ranald’s eyes popped open.

Sighing heavily, he propped the back of his head on his folded hands and glared at the ceiling. “Damn ye anyway, Morgan. If ye’d keep the wee chit in yer bed, where she belongs, a man might get a decent night’s rest and a mornin’ cuddle to boot.”

After long and thoughtful deliberation, he crawled out from beneath the warm quilts and slid into his trews, shivering and swearing under his breath with a flare that belied his lack of schooling.

Tossing Pugsley through the narrow aperture of a broken window proved to be far easier than shoving Enid after him. When her cousin’s hips hung and her grunts escalated to muffled squeals of alarm, Sabrina knew a brief flush of horror at the prospect of once again becoming the object of MacDonnell ridicule. No wonder Morgan hated to be laughed at.

She gave Enid’s rump a desperate shove that sent them both tumbling out the window into a fresh mound of snow. Pugsley danced around them, yapping and trying to bite their ankles through their thick stockings.

Enid rolled to a sitting position wearing a frothy
white beard. “You didn’t have to push me. You might have broken my neck.”

Sabrina scooped up the squirming dog. “If Morgan catches us running away, he’ll spare me the trouble.”

That dire reminder brought Enid lurching to her feet. They trundled toward the stables, their steps slowed by the weight of their cumbersome cloaks. The wind had slowed, giving the sky time to lace the icy crystals into plump feathers. The drifting snow muffled their steps, but made the aching thud of Sabrina’s heart seem obscenely loud.

The rickety stables crouched beneath the snow-laden branches of a pine thicket. Sabrina and Enid exchanged a nervous glance before each one tugged one of the handles that would swing wide the rough-hewn doors. A warm, musty blast of air hit them, punctuated by the drowsy whickers of the horses. Pugsley’s deep-throated growl was their only warning before a satanic gleam split the shadows.

The stables exploded in a flurry of rolling eyes and flailing hooves.

Of one accord, they slammed the doors and threw their backs against them. The entire structure shuddered.

“Pookah,” Sabrina whispered, smothering Pugsley’s alarmed yips beneath her hand.

Robbed of their plan to
borrow
one of the MacDonnell mounts, they trudged back around the castle only to find themselves shivering on the edge of the cliffs. A billowing sea of white had swallowed the heath below. The wind roared across its vast emptiness, whipping Sabrina’s hood from her head and biting tears from her eyes. The road to Cameron twined along the cliff’s edge like a narrow ribbon of glass.

“It can’t be the only way, can it?” Enid asked doubtfully.

“Of course not,” Sabrina said with more conviction than she felt. “We’re on a mountain, aren’t we? All we have to do is head downhill and we’ll be safe and warm in front of the fire at Cameron by the morrow.”

Cheered by her words, they wheeled around and marched toward the welcome shelter of the forest. Against her better judgement, Sabrina allowed herself one last hungry look at Castle MacDonnell.

With loving hands the sky had laid its blanket of snow over the crumbling edifice, shrouding its flaws and hiding the heartrending neglect that had stripped the mighty structure to a husk of its former glory. Firelight flickered in scattered windows, winking like knowing eyes against the dark. In the hazy half-light, it looked romantic, ethereal, a kingdom suited to a rough-edged prince of Morgan’s intense pride.

Enid tugged her arm. “If you don’t come on, you’re going to turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife.”

“ ’Twould be no more than I deserve.”

It would be no more than she deserved if Morgan found her in the morning, her feet rooted in ice, her face frozen in pathetic yearning. She tore her gaze away from the castle. Hugging Pugsley to her breast, she plunged into the forest, resolving to look only forward from then on, no matter how lonely and bleak the path before her.

“I once saw two beggar children frozen in an alley,” Enid said, ducking beneath the spiny arm of an ice-glazed branch. “It was quite ghastly, really. Their faces were all black and their lips curled back. I’d read that freezing to death was quite a pleasant way to die, not as nice as drowning can be after you cease to struggle, but peaceful nonetheless.”

Sabrina stumbled over the sodden train of her pelisse, mercifully distracting herself from her cousin’s gruesome anecdote. Between huffing and puffing for breath, Enid launched into another tale of a Belmont great-uncle who had lost two toes after being caught in a blizzard on the Prussian slopes. He had kept the shriveled digits in a jar on his mantel, whipping them out to rattle at his terrified grandchildren.

Sabrina began to stamp her feet with each step. Was she only imagining the numbness creeping toward
her shins? She gave her arm a sharp pinch, nearly panicking at the absence of sensation until Pugsley’s offended yelp told her she had pinched the dog instead of herself. He had long ago become a dead weight in her arms.

Enid shambled along behind her like a rotund snowman, nothing visible above her muffler but a pinkened nose and a pair of watery, accusing eyes. Her glum demeanor increased with each step that carried her deeper into the forest and away from Ranald.

The jagged snap of a branch sent her stumbling into Sabrina’s back. Sabrina’s feet shot out from under her. She couldn’t break her fall without dropping Pugsley, so her rump was forced to absorb its impact. She sat there, feeling the miserable wetness of the snow sink through her pelisse and swallowing the urge to burst into childlike tears. She wished desperately for the sturdy warmth of Morgan’s plaid, the sturdy warmth of Morgan himself. But she knew if she started thinking like that, she might never get up.

Compelled to fight Enid’s gloominess with an optimism she did not feel, she struggled to her feet, brushing the snow from Pugsley’s muzzle. “Nothing to be alarmed about. Simply a branch breaking under the weight of the snow.”

“I hope so,” Enid whispered, peering high above them, where the ebony branches clicked and swayed like the fuzzy legs of a giant spider.

“If we keep putting one foot in front of the other, we’ll eventually reach Cameron.” Sabrina tramped on, restating her plan as if to assure herself she had not just made the most terrible mistake of her life. “I shall explain to Papa that although Morgan was quite kind to me, we simply did not suit. Then I shall apply for an annulment.” She glanced over her shoulder at Enid, hoping to discover a lifting of the girl’s fear. “As long as the union wasn’t consummated, an annulment should present no problem.”

Sabrina slammed into something warm and solid. For a dazed moment she thought she had walked into a tree trunk. Her eyes crossed as they traced the intricate
pattern of the tartan before them, following it upward like a checkered map to find a jaw hewn in stone, lips tilted in arrogant amusement, and lush green eyes lit by a mocking sparkle.

A tree would have been more pliant, more relenting, and infinitely less smug than the brawny arms her husband folded over his chest.

“Now, lass,” he rumbled, “it seems you’ve got yourself a wee problem.”

Sabrina did not consider six feet and three inches of smirking Highlander a wee problem. A momentous obstacle seemed a more apt description. Since she had just outlined for his obvious amusement her entire cowardly plan of retreat and abandonment, she chose to attack rather than wait for his own sally.

“You followed us,” she accused him.

“Aye, and a wee bit dizzy we were gettin’.”

“Dizzy?”

Morgan stepped aside and swept out an arm toward the ground. Enid managed to look both miserably guilty and shamelessly happy to discover Ranald standing behind him, holding Pookah’s reins. Sabrina would have sworn she saw a maniacal gleam of satisfaction in the horse’s eyes.

Puzzled, she studied the path they would have bisected if Morgan hadn’t stopped them. The sugary snow had been flattened, baring the twigs and bracken beneath as if someone had taken a broom and swept
them clean. Sabrina glanced over her shoulder at the sodden, unwieldy train of her pelisse.

Morgan nodded, confirming her sinking suspicion that they’d done nothing but amble in a wide circle since leaving the castle, drawing him a map so unmistakable, he could have followed them all the way to Cameron had he chose.

“Proud of yourself?” she asked.

“You might have made it more of a challenge.” He plucked Pugsley out of her arms. The dog arched his back, wiggling madly to lick Morgan’s face.

“Traitor,” she muttered.

He handed the dog to Ranald. “Take the dog and the woman back to the castle.”

Pretending he was talking about her, Sabrina headed for the relative sanctuary of her husband’s cousin. Morgan caught her by the hood. “The
other
woman.”

Sabrina twisted around to glare at him. “She has a name, you know.”

Morgan sighed. “Mr. MacDonnell, would you please escort Lord Pugsley and Lady Belmont back to the castle?”