Teresa Medeiros (30 page)

She flinched as a pair of iron-shod hooves struck sparks off the back wall, demanding her attention.

Pookah tossed his mane in spirited defiance, eyes rolling in challenge. Slabs of sinew and muscle roiled beneath his shiny coat. Steam puffed from his flared nostrils, making him resemble a dragon more than he did the other horses.

Sabrina narrowed her eyes in determination. Refusing to give her fears time to root, she lifted her skirts and raced across the stable to throw herself, barefoot and saddleless, across Pookah’s sleek back. Hooking her legs around him, she gave a wild cry of command and stabbed at his quivering flanks with her heels.

His body went completely lax. He stood like a statue, not prancing, not quivering, as far as Sabrina could tell, not even breathing. He was as docile as one of the fat, even-tempered ponies her mother had insisted she ride as a child. Sabrina couldn’t believe she had come this far only to be defeated by another stubborn MacDonnell.

“Damn you, horse!”

Her heels flailed at him again, but he remained as unmoved by her blows as he was by her broken oaths.
As she saw her future slipping away, she was haunted by visions of a past that seemed determined to repeat itself.

She and Morgan, separated by iron bars. Morgan slamming her to the floor of her father’s hall, cheered on by the jeers of his clansmen. Angus pitching forward, a jeweled dirk buried in his back. A golden-haired boy pushing her to the leaves, anger and pain flaring in his stormy green eyes.

Her curses died. Her legs went limp with exhaustion. She buried her face in Pookah’s coarse mane, tears of despair spilling from her eyes as she whispered, “Please, God. Oh, please, not again …”

Pookah was no less moved by her tears than his master had been. Whickering softly, he tossed his dappled head. Hardly daring to hope, Sabrina clutched his slippery neck with both arms as he shot toward the open door. Snow exploded beneath his pounding hooves. Morgan’s clansmen came pouring from the castle, their shocked faces nothing but a blur as Sabrina and Pookah thundered past.

The flying snow blinded Sabrina as she went careening down the icy road in search of the one man who held all their destinies in his hands.

Morgan stood waist-deep in the glacial waters of the loch, his numb arms wrapped around the belly of a terrified sheep. He’d arrived to find neither Ranald nor the rope he’d promised in evidence. Cursing his cousin’s laziness, he had spent several minutes cracking the thick crust of ice that glazed the loch before plunging into its icy waters.

Holding the sheep’s head above the water, he waded for the shore. Her pitiful bleating deafened him. One of her flailing hooves scraped his upper thigh.

“Easy, lass,” he muttered, twisting his hips to a safer angle. “One more blow like that and my father-in-law’ll be dinin’ on mutton chops tonight.”

His plaid tangled around his thighs in a sodden weight as he hefted the sheep from the water. He collapsed
to his knees in the snow, holding the trembling creature against his chest to warm them both.

“There now,” he soothed it. “You’re safe and you’ll soon be dry which is more than I can say for me.” He freed her and she went trotting off without even a backward glance of gratitude.

“Just like a woman,” Morgan said, shaking his head in bemusement. He climbed to his feet, flexing his raw hands. His only pair of boots were filled with water, and his feet were numb. Narrowing his eyes, he gazed down the distant road that ran adjacent to the meadow to see a party of riders approaching from the south.

His shoulders slumped. Here he stood to meet his illustrious father-in-law, soaked to the skin, his hair in a tangle, his plaid encrusted with muddy slush. He chuckled as his chagrin turned to amusement. The Cameron would simply have to understand that he was a workingman now. Dougal’s beautiful, industrious daughter had seen to that.

Emboldened by the thought of her, Morgan strode toward the road to welcome their guests. The thunder of hoofbeats cracked like a whip across the brittle air. Morgan paused, frowning to realize they were coming from the wrong direction.

Shading his eyes against the glare of the snow, he gazed back toward the castle. Not even in his worst nightmare could he have envisioned the sight that greeted him.

Paralyzed with horror, he watched a gray streak barrel down the narrow road. A scantily clad figure clung low on the horse’s neck, her own dark mane streaming behind her.

Sabrina
. His wife’s name was a soundless prayer on his lips.

Morgan lurched into a run, knowing his only hope was to somehow throw himself into Pookah’s path. The horse took a torturous curve at a dead gallop, hooves skidding on the icy stones. Why didn’t she fall off? Morgan thought wildly. Why the bloody hell didn’t she just fall off? But even as she leaned back and
tried to steer the horse away from the cliff’s edge, her tenacious hold on Pookah’s mane never wavered.

Morgan pounded across the meadow, arms and legs pumping, heart swelling in his chest until he thought it would surely burst. But the harder he ran, the farther away she seemed. He was twelve years old again, hurtling across a cloud-shadowed meadow, a little girl’s hopeful cries of “Boy! Boy!” punishing him for ever being callous enough to flee her.

Morgan was halfway between Sabrina and the approaching riders when the Cameron party reached a cluster of tall rocks at the bottom of a steep hill. Shouts of warning and confusion rang out, followed by the shrill whinnies of terrified horses. Morgan’s gaze never strayed from Sabrina. As she plunged down a straight stretch, he forced himself to run faster, knowing he had to bisect her path before she reached the next deadly curve.

There the road lay in a deceptively gentle ribbon, snaking only inches from the cliff’s edge. At Pookah’s speed the horse would never be able to make it. And neither would he, Morgan realized. There was only one way to give Sabrina a chance.

He dropped to one knee, drawing his pistol from his plaid in one fluid motion, praying its powder hadn’t been dampened by his plunge into the loch. Stray gunshots rang out. The Camerons were thundering toward him. Hoofbeats bore down on him from all directions. His locked arm never wavered.

“I’m sorry lad,” he whispered. Clenching his teeth against a frisson of anguish, he cocked the pistol, fixed Pookah’s graceful head in his sights, and fired.

Before the horse could stumble, Morgan had dropped the pistol and was up and running. Pookah reeled in a macabre dance at the cliff’s edge. Roaring Sabrina’s name, Morgan launched himself from a towering drift.

For an impossible moment the horse teetered on the brink of the cliff. Morgan would have almost sworn he smelled the maddening scent of roses, felt the taunting whisper of Sabrina’s hair brush through his fingertips
before he slammed into the road with bone-jarring impact, his hands empty of all but air.

Pookah rolled, his legs flailing at nothing, before disappearing over the cliff’s edge. Then there was nothing to break the winter silence but the shrill screams of horse and woman and the nightmarish sound of snapping bones.

Morgan hurled himself toward the cliff with every intention of plunging after her. A dead weight thudded into his chest, bringing him to the ground only inches from its edge. Arms and legs swarmed over him. Blinded with agony, he fought them like a madman for what seemed like an eternity. They straddled him, holding him down. Then a fist crashed into his jaw, slamming him into stillness.

Bewildered, he struggled to understand why a sweat-drenched Brian Cameron was lying across his legs while Alex Cameron, his freckles stark against his deathly pallor, held his shoulders. He blinked up at the man who had struck him. A bearded man whose lip was swelling and eye blackening from Morgan’s frantic blows even as he watched. A man with Sabrina’s dark-lashed eyes filled with a fierce anguish to match his own.

Dougal caught Morgan’s plaid in his fists. “She’s alive, lad! A ledge broke her fall. My men saw her chest move.” Dougal gave him a harsh shake. “Do you hear me? I don’t know for how long, but, by God,
she’s alive
!”

Then Morgan did something he had resisted doing for twelve long years. He buried his face in Dougal Cameron’s heaving shoulder and cried like a baby.

Fergus MacDonnell had laughed in the face of death countless times, but if he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the sight of his chieftain bearing his bride’s broken body into the courtyard. A pall of silence hung over the clan, disturbed only by a muffled cry of anguish and a child’s steady sniffling.

Their young mistress’s neck hung limp, her dark hair streaming in a lank curtain over Morgan’s arm. The ashen pallor of her face led many of them to believe she was already dead. Keening softly beneath her breath, Alwyn turned her face into Fergus’s shoulder. He pressed her close, wanting to shield her from the even more terrible specter of Morgan’s face.

His rugged features might have been hewn from rock. Their total absence of emotion was chilling. Nothing but the grimy tear tracks staining his cheeks even marked him as human.

Held in thrall by the grim spectacle, the MacDonnells hardly noticed the Cameron men who filed in after
Morgan, some leading their horses, others limping, the fine wool of their garments torn and stained. Fergus gaped as their ranks parted to reveal Ranald stumbling between them, his hands bound by a frayed length of rope, fresh blood soaking the shoulder of his plaid. A questioning murmur rose.

Enid burst from the crowd only to find her frantic path blocked by Alexander Cameron. “Ranald!” she cried, jumping up and down to see over Alex’s shoulder. “What happened? What in God’s name have you done?”

Ranald stared straight ahead as if he hadn’t heard her, his lips set in a grim line. Only after the doors closed on the grim procession and the massive bolt dropped, barring the clan from their own castle, did the whispers and rumors begin to fly.

Morgan refused to let anyone touch her. While the other men who loved Sabrina kept their own tortured vigil, he cut away her tattered gown, gently arranged her flaccid limbs, and bathed the numerous scrapes and gashes marring her smooth flesh. He wrapped her in clean sheets and brushed her tangled hair from her face. She lay as still as death beneath his tender ministrations.

Brian, the best rider among them, had been sent to fetch Dougal’s physician from Cameron. Unwilling to risk his wife’s life on the same road that had almost taken his daughter’s, Dougal had given his son strict instructions to tell Elizabeth only that the physician was needed to tend a sick child. Dougal stared over Morgan’s shoulder at his daughter’s face, fighting sick despair. Their child.

His burning eyes raked the chamber. What sort of life had she shared with Morgan? Had it been one of love and laughter or bitterness and blame? Should he have come sooner, he wondered, or would his arrival only have hastened this tragedy? None of the clues fit. They’d arrived to find the chamber a charming portrait of welcome, marred only by a splintered chair. A merry
fire had crackled on the grate. So why in God’s name had Sabrina been charging barefoot down that icy road in little more than a nightdress?

Dougal’s hands clenched into fists. He wanted to shake Morgan, to demand answers to the questions that tormented him. But as he watched Morgan draw a damp cloth across Sabrina’s brow, something stopped him. He would have never believed hands so big and powerful could be so gentle, so fraught with the unspoken desire to cause no pain.

Alex appeared in the doorway, his bleak gaze avoiding the bed. Relieved by the distraction, Dougal listened to what his son had to say, then laid a hand on Morgan’s shoulder. Morgan’s eyes never left Sabrina’s face; his hands continued their soothing motions.

Dougal withdrew his hand. “Two of the men who ambushed us are dead. Three others have scattered. Your cousin was wounded during the fracas. They’ve put him in the dungeon for now. He’ll need attention.”

Morgan’s tone was low and vicious. “Let the bastard rot.”

Tempted to agree with Morgan, Dougal shook his head at Alex, knowing Morgan might relent when the stench of betrayal wasn’t so fresh in his nostrils.

The afternoon shadows deepened to twilight, then to full dark. The endless hours of the winter night ticked by, measured by the shallow rise and fall of Sabrina’s chest. Morgan stroked his fingertips across the silk of her lashes, praying that she would open her eyes, longing to search their depths for some sign that she would not sleep forever.

But when she began to stir and thrash, Morgan had reason to regret his wish. Her eyes shot open, fixed sightlessly on horrors he could only imagine. A scream of agony tore from her throat, followed by another and another until Dougal buried his face in his hands and Alex rocked back and forth on the hearth, his palms clamped over his ears. Outside the chamber, Pugsley set up a mournful howling.

Sabrina’s teeth tore at her lips until they beaded with blood. When Morgan tried to dribble whisky
down her raw throat, she choked, and he was forced to abandon his efforts for fear his mercy might kill her.

As he threw his weight across her to keep her from harming herself in her violent struggles against the pain, he wondered savagely if he might have done her a greater kindness by planting the pistol ball in her brain instead of Pookah’s.

Only when the pale light of dawn crept across the chamber did Sabrina collapse in a sweat-drenched heap against the tangled sheets. It was not relief but exhaustion that finally muffled her cries to whimpers.

A cheery footstep sounded outside the door. Dougal and Alex started to their feet.

A jovial British voice boomed out. “Don’t you fret, Brian. I’ll have her back on her feet in no time. Hearty as a heifer, the chit always was. Do you remember the time she got her fat little hand stuck in that beehive? And the morning she took that nasty tumble off the—”

Before the door could swing open, Morgan was there. He slammed Dr. Samuel Montjoy against the wall, pinning him by the lapels of his frock coat. The physician’s steel-framed spectacles slid askew. His bewhiskered jowls quivered.