Teresa Medeiros (32 page)

She scooped up the book and hurled it at the far wall. It slid down to land in the floor, its pages rifled. Let Morgan figure out how it got there if he dared.

Her eyes burned hot and dry. Her legs throbbed dully. She welcomed the physical manifestation of her pain, all the while knowing it wasn’t keen enough to distract her from the turmoil in her heart.

She’d had ample time to think in the past two days. Too much time. Time enough to know that from this moment on she would be nothing but a millstone around her husband’s neck. He deserved a woman with two strong legs who could work for his clan. A woman who could give him the son he desired. Her hand fluttered over her stomach, refusing to give name to the one hope she still clung to.

Just by honoring their vows, Morgan risked losing the respect of his clan. She had borne the MacDonnells’ enmity as her birthright, but their pity would kill her soul. Far worse would be the pity she would see in Morgan’s eyes each time he looked at her, each time he touched her. The pity he might show a sparrow with a broken wing or a child who had fallen and skinned its knee. Her hands clenched the quilt. The MacDonnells weren’t the only ones with pride.

She pressed her eyes shut, assailed by a memory of their last night together in the bed that had since become her prison. She could still see Morgan’s magnificent body sprawled beneath her, burnished by the
extravagant spilling of light from the tapers he insisted upon whenever they made love. She saw his beautiful face strained with pleasure as she surrendered her inhibitions, giving herself over with fierce abandon and knowing a surge of triumph in that instant when Morgan roared his own exultation, losing the very control he so prided himself on.

She opened her eyes, knowing what she must do.

When Dougal and the doctor returned, she was propped against the pillows, her hands folded in her lap.

“Princess, you’re awake!” Her father rushed to her side, kneeling to clasp her hands. His hands felt almost feverish against the chill passivity of her own.

A joyous smile wreathed Dr. Montjoy’s face. “Praise the good Lord! I knew he’d see us through. Stay with her, Dougal, and I’ll go fetch the lad.” A giddy laugh escaped him. “ ’Twill be welcome indeed to have some good news to share with him.” He trotted toward the door, rubbing his pudgy hands in anticipation.

Sabrina stopped him with a single word. “Don’t.” Dougal frowned. Even hoarse with disuse, Sabrina’s voice dripped ice. “I do not wish to see my husband at present.”

The doctor’s smile faded. “But, girl, if you could only have seen him in the past fortnight. He’s had near supernatural powers. I’ve never seen any man go so long without food or sleep.”

“I do not wish to see him,” she repeated. “If he protests, remind him that he owes me that much.”

“But, lass—” Dougal started, aghast at her callous words.

“Tell him.”

The doctor turned away, his jowls drooping like a disconsolate hound’s. Sabrina gazed down at her father’s hands. They still rested lightly over her frozen fingers. Eyes that knew her too well searched her stony face.

“Shall we talk about it, lass?” he asked softly, lifting his hand to cup her cheek.

Unable to bear his solace, she turned her face to the pillow. “No, Papa. I’m weary. I wish only to sleep.”

As his hand withdrew in wounded silence, the throb of Sabrina’s shattered legs was nothing compared to the agony in her heart.

Gulping the brisk air, Morgan clenched his hands on the crude stone of the battlement. He could not shake the terrible niggling suspicion that Sabrina was awake. He would have sworn she’d been watching him as he’d napped beside her bed the previous night. But when he had jerked his head around, her curly lashes had rested flush on her cheeks as innocent as a lamb’s.

But what of the petulant quirk of her lips? he wondered. It hadn’t been there before, had it? He had wrestled with the most absurd desire to cup her face in his hands and kiss it away. Perhaps guilt and lack of sleep were making him mad.

The wind stung his eyes and tossed his hair, bracing him with its icy purity. Surely nothing could be more healing than this breath of heaven blown down from the mountainside. As soon as she was well enough, he would wrap Sabrina in his plaid and carry her to this tower for a taste of it. He would carry her many places from now on. For the rest of his life, she would be the one burden he would gladly bear.

He had managed to sit calmly, Dr. Montjoy hovering in the background, while Dougal explained that Sabrina would never walk again. Would never dance down the stairs in those ridiculous little slippers of hers. Would never stomp out a Highland fling at Fergus’s urging. Would never chase him across a meadow ripe with summer until he allowed himself to be caught and tumbled into a fragrant patch of heather and bluebells.

Would never run to greet him at the end of the day, a child on each hand and another clinging to her skirts.

It was the hardest blow Morgan had ever taken. But he hadn’t allowed himself so much as a flinch. He hadn’t sworn or roared or destroyed anything. He
hadn’t fixed his fingers around the hapless doctor’s throat as he had longed to do. He’d simply thanked Dougal for his candor and excused himself, climbing the crumbling stairs to this tower, where he could endlessly relive the moment of Sabrina’s destruction.

If only he had run faster, flung himself from the drift a second sooner, thought to sacrifice Pookah a dozen hoofbeats before he reached the cliff. If only he had failed to heed Ranald and let the damn sheep drown. If only he had seen the bitterness and twisted ambition in Eve’s crystalline eyes.

Because of him, Sabrina was broken and couldn’t be fixed. He couldn’t splint her wing as he had the golden eagle that had once blundered through the tower window. He couldn’t drip milk down her throat as he had the baby bird that had tumbled out of its nest at his feet. He couldn’t tuck her beneath his plaid and warm her with his body heat as he had the half-frozen shrew he had found buried in the ice.

His despairing eyes searched the unforgiving vista of snow and rock. He should never have brought her to this place. Better to have left her in Dougal’s plush demesne and adored her from afar.

A footstep sounded behind him. Morgan turned, wondering who would have braved the crumbling steps. Dr. Montjoy stood there, still huffing from the steep climb, an expression of abject misery on his face.

Morgan’s mind spiraled crazily. Had Sabrina taken an unexpected turn for the worse? Died?

He took a step toward the man without realizing it.

Blowing out a nervous puff of steam, Montjoy held up his hand. “I’ve good news, lad. Sabrina has regained full consciousness. She’s awake.”

Morgan started for the stairs, unable to curb the joy pulsing through him. It recklessly shoved aside both guilt and grief.

With more courage than Morgan would have suspected, the doctor stepped into his path. He blinked up at him through his fogging spectacles. “I’m sorry, but your wife doesn’t want to see you right now.” He
averted his eyes. “She said to remind you that you owe her that much.”

Dougal’s blunt honesty about his daughter’s future had been no more than a reproving slap compared to the wallop Sabrina packed. Her dainty fist staggered him. It took all of Morgan’s control to keep from reeling beneath its force.

He swung around to the parapet. The aged mortar crumbled beneath the strength of his grip. “Thank you, Doctor,” he heard himself say, even adding on a rare note of grace. “For all you’ve done. I’ll not forget it.”

As the physician’s despondent steps retreated, Morgan stared blindly over the merciless peaks.

You owe me that much
.

He owed her everything. A lifetime of penance for a crime he could never atone for.

Somewhere in the forest below, a branch succumbed to the weight of the ice. Morgan flinched at the brittle crack, bracing himself against the inevitable sound of anguish that would follow in his mind. Sabrina’s scream. His mother’s scream as she surrendered her life for his own. It echoed a sound that would haunt him all the grim days and lonely nights to come—Sabrina’s delicate bones snapping just like the stem of the Belmont Rose in his clumsy hands.

On the third day after she regained consciousness, Sabrina deigned to grant her husband an audience.

Keeping his hope in ruthless rein, Morgan slipped silently into the chamber. Pugsley napped by the fire. Enid sat in a chair by the bed, reading aloud to Sabrina. Her pale face was drawn and her fat ringlets hung lank around her cheeks. She gave a guilty start at the sight of him and hastily excused herself, refusing to meet his eyes. Morgan knew that she, like himself, was shouldering part of the blame for Ranald’s duplicity.

He remained by the door, clutching a wilted bouquet of gorse in one fist and drinking in the sight of Sabrina with a raw thirst that surprised even him.

She had never looked more like a princess—so regal, so unapproachable.

She sat propped among the pillows, a lavender ribbon binding her curls from her face. Her hands were folded in her lap. Hectic color brightened her cheeks. Morgan moved forward, feeling like a barefoot peasant
approaching her throne. Anger surged through him, unexpected and unwelcome, an anger he had no right to feel.

He paused at the edge of the bed, unsure where to sit, where to look. The quilts humped over Sabrina’s splinted legs filled his vision. She stared into her lap without acknowledging him. The haughty cast of her expression warned him he had not been invited to sit on her bed. He was no longer welcome there. He felt another flush of anger, dangerous and electric.

He thrust out his hand, offering her the flowers. He had scrabbled beneath a crust of ice for them, rooting them out with the desperation of a beggar. As Sabrina eyed them from beneath her lashes, they seemed to wither to what they were—a pathetic clump of weeds. A woman like Sabrina wasn’t deserving of weeds, but of fat armfuls of fragrant roses.

Morgan wanted to jerk them back, to cast them in the fire, where they belonged. But it was too late. Her delicate fist closed around the crushed stems, taking care that their hands never touched.

“Thank you. They’re lovely,” she lied, laying them on the quilt.

Morgan jerked a chair around and straddled it. The awkward silence stretched.

Sabrina’s soft voice broke it. “I’m sorry about Pookah.”

Morgan sensed her words were sincere. A fresh flare of grief stabbed him. “He never suffered.”

A small, bitter laugh escaped her. “That’s what Eve said about your father. It must be a MacDonnell creed for a death well met.”

She fixed her gaze on him; Morgan almost wished she hadn’t. Her blue eyes held an arctic glitter that chilled him. Why the bloody hell didn’t she cry? A troubled Dougal had confided that she had accepted the news that she would never walk again with imperturbable calm. It was as if all her tears had frozen on that icy ledge. A memory came unbidden to him in an agony of desire and regret—the salty warmth of her
tears on his tongue mingled with the intoxicating taste of their passion.

His voice came out harsher than he intended. “Ranald told me all about Eve. About both plots to kill your da, one of which my own fa—” Morgan hesitated, unable to bring himself to say the word. The old man’s crafty machinations had been the undoing of them all—“one of which Angus himself condoned. He also told me about Eve’s poor aim in the hall at Cameron. After your father disarmed us all, Ranald went in search of her to try and stop her. But it was too late. She’d already found the dirk and hidden behind the tapestry. It seems I owe your clan and your father an apology.”

“So it does, doesn’t it,” she said mildly.

Morgan stared. It was like conversing with a stranger who was vaguely bored but willing to tolerate one’s company for the sake of politeness. His desperation flourished.

“There was one thing Ranald could not explain, lass. Your presence on the road that day. On Pookah.”

She was calm now, almost heartlessly matter-of-fact. “Eve informed me that you were part of the plot to kill my papa. That you had failed the first time and had gone to finish the job. That when you were done massacring my unsuspecting family, you were coming back to the castle to strangle the life out of me.”

Morgan was stunned. Her cool words confirmed his worst fears. “And you believed her?”

Sabrina lowered her lashes in a gesture that might have been coquettish in a less desperate moment. Morgan leaned forward, pretending that both his heart and his future didn’t teeter on the brink of her reply. She was silent for a long time. Her hands were no longer still, but twisting, one against the other, in her lap.

“Answer me,” he said, the quietness of the command belying its importance.

She threw back her head, dark passion erupting in her eyes. “Of course I believed her, you fool! Why shouldn’t I? You’ve spent half your life teaching me of your contempt for my clan, your greed and jealousy because we have the common decency to live like human
beings instead of animals. Have you ever given me cause to believe you’d choose honor when murder was at your disposal?”

Morgan gazed at her in stunned disbelief, unwilling to accept that his touch, his tenderness, his erotic possession, had taught her nothing about the kind of man he was. It was beyond him to conceive that the hatred between their clans was too strong to be mastered by what they had shared. He reached for her.

She recoiled violently, her repulsion too visible to be anything but genuine. A shrill, pathetic note caught in her voice. “Don’t touch me! I can’t abide it! It makes me ill! You’re nothing but a crude barbarian and I never want your filthy hands on me again!”

Morgan’s world went scarlet. His fingers splayed to cup her delicate jaw, bearing her back against the pillows. Her pulse fluttered madly beneath his thumbs. He exerted no pressure, but simply held her there while he searched her face for a truth he could tolerate. As he stared dead into the face of her callous betrayal, his hands flexed in a moment of near madness. Genuine fear flared in Sabrina’s eyes.