Teresa Medeiros (37 page)

Morgan stood stiffly at attention as Elizabeth’s pensive gaze swept him from the polished buckles on his shoes to the velvet queue taming his unruly hair at the nape. Her pout melted to an approving smile.
“Quite
impressive,” she echoed.

“Very well, then,” Dougal said crisply. “You’re all dismissed. There will be no further need of your services.”

As the servants obeyed, Morgan sank into a chair, relieved to no longer be the center of their avid attentions.

Dougal paced the solar. “All the arrangements have been completed. As you insisted, Ranald will act as your footman. You’re to have lodgings, a secretary, and an allowance at your disposal.”

“I’ve no need of charity,” Morgan said.

Dougal peered into his face. “Have you ever tried living in London with no money in your purse? No, I can see you haven’t.” Stroking his beard, he resumed his pacing. “Beth and I have taken temporary lodgings
in Bloomsbury. Sabrina is not to know we’re in London. All you’re lacking now is an entree into society.”

“Perhaps a title,” Elizabeth suggested, sitting on the edge of the settee. “No one in London can resist a title. MacDonnell is an ancient name. Surely your family was entitled before they took up thievery and depravity as a way of life.”

Morgan shot her a dark look. “I never paid any mind to such nonsense. What good is a fancy scrap of paper from the king when you’ve no gold to go along with it?”

“Think, lad,” Dougal commanded. “Search your mind. There must have been some mention of it somewhere.”

Morgan frowned. “Halbert,” he muttered half to himself. “Lord Halbert, Baron of …” Dougal and Elizabeth exchanged a hopeful glance. “No, no, that’s not it at all. Sir Halbert—”

A cheerful singsong voice drifted out from the window:

Dougal marched to the window and snatched back the drapes. Ranald smirked up at him and sang softly, “ ‘… Horrid Halbert, the dread Earl o’ Montgarry.’ ”

Elizabeth cupped a hand over her mouth, muffling a giggle of mingled horror and delight at Morgan’s stunned expression.

A jubilant smile broke over Dougal’s face. He whirled to face Morgan. “Hell, man. You’re a bloody earl. You outrank me. I’m but a lowly viscount.”

Elizabeth rose and spread her skirts in a playful curtsy. “Well my lord, are you ready to claim your countess?”

Morgan’s eyes glinted with raw determination,
making him look more pirate than nobleman. “Aye, my lady. And she’d best make ready to be claimed.”

Sabrina smothered a bored yawn behind her fan.

The orchestra was tuning up, the discordant notes flaying her taut nerves. Simply another interminable Belmont ball to be endured, she reminded herself, no different from the private theatricals, the afternoon poetry readings, or her aunt Honora’s beloved card parties, where Sabrina was displayed upon her upholstered divan for the sympathy and diversion of London society.

She snapped the fan shut, afraid to admit even to herself that she was beginning to take a perverse pleasure in their pity.

Uncle Willie and Aunt Honora appeared on the stairs. A light smattering of applause greeted their arrival. Her aunt’s tiny ringlets danced like sausages popping in a fire. The entire Belmont family looked soft and unfinished around the edges, like unbaked bread dough. As her uncle approached, Sabrina marveled anew that her willowy mother had emerged from such bovine stock.

Uncle Willie chucked her under the chin. “How’s my favorite niece tonight? Enjoying yourself, my dear?”

“I’m your only niece, and I might be enjoying myself more if it weren’t for this tiresome headache. I’ve had simply the most horrid—”

“There, there, that’s all very nice, pudding, but the Duke of Devonshire just arrived. I really must pay my respects.” Giving her a fatherly wink, he hastened away.

Sabrina sighed at his desertion. Enid was standing by the tall casement windows, basking in the attentions of her dogged ex-fiancé. Her skin glowed peach against the dove-gray of her mourning gown. An enthusiastic footman began bawling the names of the new arrivals.

Enid’s brother, Stefan, less portly and infinitely more graceful than his father, danced down the stairs. Sabrina’s spirits brightened. “Hullo, coz.” He leaned
down to press a dutiful kiss to her cheek. “Holding the beaus at bay, are you?”

“Doing my best,” she chimed, clasping his hand before he could escape. “I do believe I’m taking an ague though. It’s dreadfully drafty in here. Would you mind trotting back upstairs to fetch my shawl?”

“Anything for you, princess,” he murmured, poorly concealing the weary roll of his eyes.

“Not the wool, Stefan,” she called after him. “The cashmere. Wool makes me sneeze.” The very thought of sneezing made her sneeze, and she dabbed her nose with a lace handkerchief.

By the time Stefan returned with the shawl, the cavernous ballroom had half filled and Sabrina was surrounded by fawning well-wishers. She sent one attentive young gentleman to fetch her a glass of champagne while another was ordered to search out the source of the pesky draft. Wielding her wistful smiles and fluttering lashes like weapons, she exerted the only power left to her.

Two rather plain young women dwarfed by their upswept ringlets hovered by the wall, conversing behind their fans. Their thinly plucked brows drew together in obvious displeasure as they eyed the besotted men swarming around Sabrina. Beneath the clink of champagne glasses and murmur of conversation, their low, malevolent voices carried clearly to her ears.

“Pathetic little flirt, isn’t she? Flaunting her infirmity is the only way she can get a man’s attention.”

Sabrina kept her smile pasted on, thankful for the heavy ceruse that hid her flush of anger.

“Given to tantrums, they say. One of the Belmont underfootmen told our cook that only last week she …” The woman dropped her voice to a whisper.

Her companion giggled. “She behaves like a child because she’s only half a woman. Any man who would pay court to her would have to be less than half a man.”

Their surreptitious glances raked her useless legs. Rage flooded Sabrina. She wished she could jerk back the lap rug and show them some hideous deformity
that would send them all shrieking from the ballroom in horror.

An eager male smile drifted into focus. “Miss Cameron, your champagne?”

A glass was pressed into her trembling hand. Before she could thank her benefactor, the first strains of music soared out from the orchestra. One by one her admirers made their painfully polite apologies and drifted away to join the dance. One of the women who had discussed her with such malice could not resist tossing a triumphant sneer over her shoulder as she took the proffered arm of a pock-marked young gentleman in a poorly fitted frock coat.

Sabrina tapped her fingers on the divan. The rich notes of the music throbbed through her veins, echoing the pulse of her furious heartbeat. Even Enid was dancing, her hands stiffly locked with Philip Markham’s.

Sabrina wanted to despise them all, even her loyal cousin, for their unappreciated ability to whirl and bow and sway to the graceful cadences of the music. Oddly enough, she had never before felt such compassion for Eve, such a strange sense of kinship. Morgan’s clanswoman had spent her life drifting on the fringes, invited to the banquet, but never allowed to dine. Sabrina took a sip of the champagne. Its bitterness burned her raw throat.

Had the world turned differently and the MacDonnells never come to Cameron, she might be twirling among them now. She searched the painted faces of the men, wondering if she might have found them handsome, might have fallen in love with one of them. They seemed silly and callow to her now, vacuous creatures content to flit from ball to card party to theater. Their soft hands had never known a callus. Their perfumed skin had never smelled of sunshine and sweat earned from an honest day’s labor.

Had any of them ever hunted to put food on their family’s table? Had they ever risked everything, even their lives, for those of their own blood? Had they ever waded through calf-high snow to rescue a drowning sheep?

Had they ever made a woman cry out their name in a moment of cresting ecstasy? Surely their wigged and powdered hair had never curtained a face strained with passion. Had never tickled a woman’s skin as they slid down on her in the seductive darkness of night.

Sabrina pressed her eyes shut, unable to bear the wild, yearning flutter of her heart.

The music drifted to a pause. She opened her eyes to find a bevy of gentlemen already abandoning their partners to stampede to her side as if beset with guilt for daring to enjoy themselves while she languished on the divan. A weary sigh escaped her. For once she wished they would all just go away.

On the stairs, the footman cleared his throat. His voice vibrating with a note of pure majesty, he threw back his head and announced, “The Earl of Montgarry!”

Just what the party needed, Sabrina thought, tossing back a cynical swallow of the champagne. Another simpering nobleman.

An odd beat of silence followed. The guests were all blinking raptly at the steps like a herd of vapid sheep. Curious as to what might be fascinating enough to capture even their jaded attentions, Sabrina craned her neck.

As she met the glacial green eyes of the man on the stairs, the champagne glass slipped through her numb fingers to shatter on the marble floor.

Sabrina couldn’t breathe. The familiar tightness swelled like a rock in her chest. The candle flames of the chandeliers wavered and dimmed beneath the hypnotic flare of her husband’s eyes. Only when his gaze moved on with a dismissal so casual and blatant as to be insulting did she dare to suck in a wheezing breath.

Morgan
.

Morgan, utterly magnificent, his coat a wine-colored justaucorps that hugged his waist and flared over his narrow hips to reveal matching knee breeches, cut to perfection against the tapered muscles of his thighs. The lace-edged purity of a snowy cravat framed his bronze jaw. His unpowdered hair was caught at his nape in a black velvet queue. It gleamed like spun gold beneath the kiss of the chandeliers.

Sabrina had thought the Morgan she had known to be a dangerous man, but as this elegant stranger surveyed the thunderstruck crowd, a faint smirk of amusement
quirking his chiseled lips, she realized he was much more than that.

He was a killer, a thief and assassin of female hearts who would give no quarter and take no prisoners. His masculine beauty was irresistible. She dragged her eyes away before it could blind her.

The whispers were already beginning.

“Who on earth is he? The Earl of Montgarry? I’ve never heard of him. Might we have met his parents in Edinburgh, dear?”

A disapproving male murmur. “Damned barbarian, don’t you think?”

An excited female thrill. “Oh, barbarous indeed!”

Sabrina discovered she had twisted her handkerchief into a hopeless knot. Her mind staggered, still unable to believe that Morgan MacDonnell was standing in the ballroom of her uncle’s town house rather than ruling over his Highland castle and giving some strapping Scottish lass like Alwyn his golden-haired babes. Morgan the Earl of Montgarry? She must be going mad. Morgan wasn’t an earl. If he was, then she would be a countess. Her eyes widened in fresh astonishment.

The faces of her aunt Honora and uncle Willie floated by like puzzled balloons as they hastened to greet their guest. Across the ballroom Sabrina saw that Enid, too, was transfixed by the sight of Morgan. She clutched the collarette at her throat, her face grayer than her gown. Sabrina feared her cousin was going to swoon. This time there would be no Ranald to catch her. Her priggish Philip appeared far too stiff, his face set in lines of perpetual disapproval. Enid’s gaze flew to Sabrina, reading the helpless fear in her cousin’s eyes.

Loyal as always, Enid pushed her way toward the divan with Philip dogging her heels.

Enid was not the first to reach Sabrina. As if awakening from a trance cast by the enigmatic stranger, several of the men rushed to her side. One knelt to pick up the shards of glass while another peered into her face and dabbed at the champagne spilled on the lap rug.

“I do say, Miss Cameron, are you all right?”

“You didn’t cut yourself, did you?”

Another gentleman grabbed her fan from her lap and began to cool her wildly, blowing a cloud of his wig powder up her nose.

Finding their attentions a terrible distraction, she sneezed and snatched the fan back. “What are you trying to do? Kill me?” she snapped before remembering to soften her rebuke with a tremulous smile.

Enid reached her then, insinuating herself at Sabrina’s side like a mother lioness protecting her pride.

Morgan stepped off the stairs, the breadth of his shoulders beneath the classic tailoring of his coat dwarfing every other man in the ballroom. The crowd was mesmerized by his wolfish grace. Her aunt and uncle led him toward the divan, their doughy features blurred with confusion. Enid squeezed Sabrina’s hand so hard that her joints cracked in protest.

At Morgan’s inescapable approach, terror flooded Sabrina, making her breath come fast and her fingertips tingle. Since the accident, she had often awakened screaming from nightmares of being trapped by fire—of writhing, her useless legs tangled in the sheets while flames licked at the curtains of her bed. But this man was more deadly, more consuming than any fire. All the emotions she’d sought to bury were rushing toward the surface like a fountain about to burst. Gulping back her panic, she stared into her lap, paralyzed by more than just her shattered legs.

Morgan came to a halt on the other side of the divan without even glancing down at her.

“Enid, my dear,” Uncle Willie said, “the earl has requested an introduction.” The guests were staring and Sabrina could hear the sharp note of warning in her uncle’s voice. What sort of risky game was Morgan playing? “He says he was an acquaintance of your
poor deceased husband.
”