Teresa Medeiros (47 page)

At the top of the stairs, a single door remained undisturbed. Morgan’s breathing slowed as he approached it, measuring each silent step as if it would be his last.

The polished oak of the solar door felt cool beneath his palm. It swung open without a sound.

He should have known she’d wait for him there, bathed in moonlight as she’d been that autumn night a lifetime ago. She reclined upon the settee by the widow, her white nightdress glowing beneath the kiss of the moon. Gazing at the luminous orb as if held rapt by its spell, she dragged a hairbrush through her unbound hair, the motion dreamy, her profile pensive.

Morgan hesitated in the doorway. He felt as if he were profaning holy ground. Disturbing a shrine to the
life she had chosen over the one he could give her. A life of empty peace instead of bittersweet joy and travail. No risks. No pain. No loss because there was nothing to lose. He knew what he must do now. His own sense of loss threatened to overwhelm him.

The finches chirped a welcome from their cage, but Sabrina didn’t even turn her head.

She stroked the brush through a dusky curl. “It wasn’t very sporting of you to lock my family in the kirk. You gave the servants a terrible fright.”

“You know damn well I don’t fight fair. If they want out badly enough, they can break the bloody windows.”

She cast him a chiding glance over her shoulder. “Mama would never permit it. Those windows are over a hundred years old. They were shipped all the way from Heidelberg.”

Morgan moved to stand behind her, his own gaze not on the candlelit kirk across the ancient bailey, but on the shimmering waves of silk spread over Sabrina’s shoulders. She eased the window open an inch, as if polite curiosity were all that motivated her.

She tilted her head, utterly aloof and farther out of his reach than the distant moon. “They’re very quiet, aren’t they? Perhaps they’re praying for your soul.”

“They ought to be prayin’ for yours. If you still have one, that is.”

She pushed the window shut, cutting off the night breeze and smothering them in a peace Morgan now found to be more oppressive than his clan’s querulous demands had ever been.

“If you’ve come to rob us,” she said, laying the brush aside, “Mama’s jewels are in the coffer beneath the loose floorboard in the corner. You’ll find the snuffbox on the table inlaid with genuine gold. Oh, the Cameron claymore is right over there above the hearth. It belongs to you rightfully anyway.”

“Just as you do?”

A delicate bloom stained her cheeks. It was gone
as quickly as it had come, leaving her face both bloodless and expressionless.

Morgan destroyed the serenity with vicious satisfaction, his voice ringing harshly in the perfumed air. “I didn’t come to take anythin’, lass. I came to return somethin’ that belongs to you.” He reached into his plaid and drew out the spray of dried gorse, tossing it carelessly into her lap.

Her hands betrayed her, scrambling to gather the scattered blooms. Then as if realizing what they’d done, they collapsed like broken wings into her lap. Her lower lip began to tremble.

Morgan moved to block her line of vision. “What did you tell yourself, lass? That you were bein’ noble? Makin’ a grand gesture of sacrifice by settin’ me free?”

“You deserved more,” she whispered, a tear clinging to her lashes before falling to water one of the shriveled blooms.

He dropped to one knee beside the settee. “You’re damned right I did,” he choked out between clenched teeth. His vehemence shocked her into meeting his gaze. “You lied, lass! You lied to me and you lied to yourself. You’re not noble or brave. You’re nothin’ but a petty coward, Sabrina Cameron, and even if your legs were sound, I doubt your spine would support you!”

Tears were running freely down her pale cheeks, but Morgan ignored them as well as the betraying sting behind his own eyes. “You were right about one thing though. You’re not worthy of me. I want a woman of courage who’ll stand beside me through good times and bad, whether it be on her feet or on her knees. I’ve no use for some feckless lass who runs away at the first sign of trouble. Aye, Sabrina, I deserve far more than the likes of you for a wife.”

He climbed to his feet, forcing a note of dispassion into his voice even as agony flayed him. “So god-speed to you, lass. I wish you no ill. I wish—”

But Morgan couldn’t finish. A lifetime of lost wishes and broken dreams clogged his throat. Reaching
down, he gently wiped beneath her eye, catching a trembling teardrop, more precious than any gem, on the callused pad of his fingertip.

Sabrina’s eyes were beseeching, and he knew that if she had uttered one plea, one word in her defense, he would have stayed. But she held her silence, the very silence that had been their undoing. Morgan’s fist clenched, destroying the tear in the same motion that sought to preserve it.

He turned on his heel and left her without another word.

Sabrina sat in numb misery, listening to Morgan’s footsteps recede. The terrible truth of his words excoriated her. All of her noble intentions had been a sham, a pathetic travesty of self-sacrifice. Rather than risk his rejection or the mockery of his clan, she had struck the first blow, rejecting them first. She hadn’t been able to walk, but that hadn’t stopped her from running away.

She reached for one of the precious gorse blooms only to have it crumble to dust at her touch. It wasn’t Morgan’s pride that had finished them, but her own. The same pride that had kept her from falling to her knees at his feet one last time, the same pride that now clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from calling him back.

The serenity of the moon seemed to mock her. A haunting wisp, white against the darkened sky, floated past the window. Sabrina blinked away her tears as another ghostly plume drifted upward to disappear against the ivory backdrop of the moon.

She tugged the window open. The acrid stench of smoldering wood stung her eyes. She traced the wisps of smoke downward to discover a single stained-glass window at the back of the kirk writhing with flame. In a moment of sheer madness she thought Morgan had set the blaze to punish her for her cowardice. Her heart rejected the notion in the same beat.

“Morgan!” His beloved name tore from her
lips, the longing of a lifetime written in the single word.

But Sabrina was deafened to her own scream by an unearthly keening that swelled and rolled, cresting on a wave of pure unbroken majesty.

The sound was both beautiful and terrible. It was a sound never meant to be confined to manor walls, and Sabrina’s first instinct was to clamp her hands over her ears.

She could not bear it. Her fingertips flew to her temples, but still it swirled around her, penetrating every pore, flowing with unerring instinct into the gaping wound in her heart. It wailed of love and loss and a lifetime of missed opportunities. It wept bitterly of betrayal and regret, dropping shimmering notes like tears into a bottomless well of grief.

It was the voice of every woman, Cameron or MacDonnell, who had lost a father, brother, husband, or son to the senseless hatred that festered between their clans. It was the broken lament of all women throughout time who were forced to sacrifice love for pride.

It was Penelope weeping by the sea for Odysseus’s return. Dinah crying over the broken body of Shechem,
the man who had both raped and adored her. Eve cast out of the garden, bewailing the serpent’s treachery.

Eve
.

Sabrina sat straight up, fighting to shake off the spell of the dark lament. Its melodious tendrils wove a web of destruction, a web her family was already caught in, a web Morgan was walking straight into. She struggled against it, knowing she had to find something strong and enduring enough to cut through its cloying fibers.

Her frantic gaze searched the shadowy solar, finding nothing but her mother’s treasures, fragile luxuries costing an embarrassment of riches, but utterly worthless at that moment.

The back of the kirk coughed out smoke in thickening billows. If the fire spread to the front, where her family was held captive, they would no longer be silent, but screaming. Each wailing note of the pipes pounded at Sabrina’s brain, drowning out their imagined cries. At least she was to be spared that much, she thought despairingly, her head falling against the back of the settee.

Moonlight rippled along the massive blade of the claymore hanging above the hearth. Sabrina’s breath caught at the sight. The ancient weapon, scarred and nicked from countless battles, had no place in this elegant solar, yet there it hung, sparkling in the ethereal light like fresh hope.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The blade would have been no more unattainable had it dangled from the moon by a gossamer thread. But winning Morgan’s affections had once seemed equally impossible, she reminded herself. And if her papa’s tenacity had taught her anything, it was that nothing was impossible if you wanted it badly enough.

She hadn’t the time or the patience to wrestle with her feeble legs. Supporting her weight with her palms, she dragged herself to the edge of the settee and heaved herself over. She thumped hard to the floor, biting her tongue.

Using her arms and hips to maneuver, she
crawled toward the hearth. The skirts of her nightdress hindered her, twining around the dead weight of her calves. The ceaseless wail of the bagpipes muffled her struggle.

She arrived at her destination grunting with exertion. Before she could see the Cameron claymore, she had to tilt her head so far back that her hair brushed the floor. The sword wavered before her bleary eyes, swaying like a grim pendulum between doom and hope.

She dug her fingers into the hearth and inched herself up, stone by stone, until her polished fingernails were cracked and bleeding. After minutes that seemed like an eternity, she dragged herself to a standing position. Her legs quivered at the unaccustomed strain. She teetered on the uneven stones.

The solar started to shrink, and she knew she was falling. There was no time to neatly disengage the claymore’s hilt from its pegs. With a last desperate lunge she grabbed the blade itself, feeling it slice deeply into her fingers as she crashed backward to the floor.

For an agonized moment Sabrina’s only concern was where her next breath would come from. She finally managed to suck a tortured gasp into her lungs. The stench of smoke drifted through the open window. She could feel blood from her wounded fingers seeping into her nightdress. She lifted one hand and wiggled them, more pleased than she could say to find them all intact.

Dragging the sword behind her, she scrambled for the door on hands and knees. The blade gouged an ugly trail in the polished oak of her mother’s floor. Sabrina thought with a grim flare of humor that she’d have to sneak back in and throw a rug over it if any of them survived the night.

She crawled out the open door onto the gallery. The steep edge beckoned her.

The wail of the pipes ceased. In a silence more shrill than the music, Sabrina flattened herself against the floor much as she had done the night Morgan had wandered into her mother’s solar to steal her heart. She
would have to choose her moment with care, or she stood to lose both Morgan and her family.

From the hall below came slow, mocking applause and the ring of Morgan’s voice. Sabrina had never heard anything so welcome. Its deep, familiar cadences made Eve’s song seem shallow by comparison.

“Bravo, Eve,” he said. “A command performance for a captive audience. How very impressive.”

Sabrina peeped over the edge of the gallery. Eve and Morgan faced each other in the hall below, their profiles to Sabrina. Eve set aside the pipes.

“What the hell are you doin’ here anyway?” Morgan asked, folding his arms over his chest.

“Watchin’ ye make a bloody fool out o’ yerself just as ye did in London,” Eve replied, crossing her own arms over her chest in like manner.

Morgan’s composure slipped a notch.
“You
were in London?”

“Aye.” She pulled something out of her plaid and tossed it at him. As it thumped against his chest, Sabrina saw it was a fat purse similar to the one she had seen her father give Morgan. “But I canna be bought by Cameron gold as easily as ye.”

Morgan stared at the purse, his expression stunned. “The beggar?”

“I’d rather beg than sell me soul to Dougal Cameron.”

The purse slipped from his hands to clank on the stone floor. “Why did you come back here, Eve? I forgave you for teachin’ Ranald to play the pipes. I might have eventually forgiven you for mistakenly killin’ my da. But I’ll never forgive you for cripplin’ my wife.”

My wife
. Sabrina pressed her eyes shut against a rush of moisture. Those words again. Precious. Beloved. Not even a magistrate’s seal had the power to wipe them away. But Eve’s next words made her eyes fly open with shock.

“ ’Twas no mistake, lad. Me aim was true when I struck down yer da.”

If there had been a chair behind him, Sabrina
sensed Morgan would have sat. His brow clouded with confusion. “But why?”

Sabrina ducked as Eve swung around to pace the drawing room in lurching strides, her braid swishing over her shoulder at each turn. Passion trembled in her voice. “Because I couldna bear it anymore! When he lifted his goblet to his precious Beth, I just wanted to shut him up.
Beth
!” she spat out. “It was always Beth! He wanted her to be yer mother, ye know. He used to tell me her bloodline was fit for a king, worthy of a mighty chieftain o’ the MacDonnells such as
his son
would become.”

“I don’t understand. I thought you loved him.”

Eve swung around to face him, almost beautiful in her fury. Sabrina was so compelled by her transformation that she forgot to duck. But Eve had eyes only for Morgan.

“I loathed the wee miserable rooster! The only reason I didna kill him sooner was that I wanted to watch him die slowly, chokin’ on his own pickled blood!”

“But he kept them from stonin’ you,” Morgan whispered. “He saved your life.”

Eve’s words rang out, harsh and irrevocable. “He saved
your
life!”