The Passionate One (15 page)

“Lord, but you are
exquisite.” The words seemed torn from his lips, a spoken thought not flattery.

She tipped her head
back and drank deeply from the bottle. False courage, she knew, but any courage
was welcome when a woman was faced with Ash Merrick’s dark and passionate eyes.

“What do you want
of me? Whatever I own is at your disposal.” One side of his mouth lifted in a
crooked grin. His gaze held hers. “Whatever skills I possess are yours to
command.”

“Not enough,” she
breathed, stepping closer, vaguely conscious that she skirted too near the
fire, both figuratively and literally.

“Really?” His tone
was mead infused, intoxicating and low and sweet, pitched for her ears alone.
“What queen could ask more of her subject? And what would that be?”

She hesitated,
craven and coward that she was, afraid to tell him the truth.

“Only say it and I
will give it to you.”

She tore her gaze
away from his, raised the bottle to her lips, and took another draught of
bravado, an increment away from declaring what she did indeed want of this man.
But then she would lose all that she’d spent years in attaining. She took
another drink. It burned going down.

“Yes?” he prompted,
a tense note hidden in his gentle cajolery.

“Your regard,” she
burst out and then, “your note. Your attention.”

Fearful of how
revealing her words were, she straightened, forced a laugh between her stiff
lips. She lifted her goblet to those watching. “A Queen’s due from her
vassals.”

“Here! Here!” the
crowd responded.

“But I’m not your
subject, madame,” Merrick reminded her gently. “I’m a foreigner, a sojourner,
an alien. I’m not one of them.” His eyes flickered over the crowd. “But then,
neither are you, are you... Your Majesty?”

She froze. With so
few words he named her an outsider, an imposter, an orphan. Abruptly the focus
of her concern shifted. A trembling of fear began in her heart and lungs,
filling her chest.

She fought the
sensation. She
did
belong here. She’d done everything, become
everything anyone could want. She’d lost her accent, even her memories. All of
it done so that she could stay. She had purchased her right to be here and she
had paid for it with the coin of her heritage.

Beneath her feet
the earth seemed to rise like the arching back of a cat. Ash was watching her.

“Sir.” Her voice
sounded faint, distant. “You are in my kingdom. You will demonstrate your
fealty.”

“I’ve had enough
games, Rhiannon.”

His voice was
pitched so only she could hear him, and yet she lost the meaning of his words,
it so unnerved her to hear her Christian name for the first time from his lips.

She tried to focus
but the earth was dipping dangerously and the fire was stretching toward her.
He was too close. He was always too close—or too far. Out of the corner of her
eye she saw Phillip stirring.

“Rhiannon? Why’s Merrick got his hands tied up?” Phillip lumbered to his feet. Oh, God. She’d forgotten him
again. She closed her eyes and immediately felt the effects of Edith’s clover
wine. “Rhiannon? Merrick?”

Her husband. Her
lover. Safety. Danger. Home. Refuge. Outsider. Her eyelids fluttered. She
swayed.

“What are you doing
to Merrick?” Phillip shouted in a bewildered voice.

She heard a crash
behind her, from Phillip’s direction. The crowd erupted in a cacophony of
alarm. She started to wheel around but the movement sent her spinning madly,
the world darkening.

“Catch her, you
fools!” she heard Ash shout and then the ground rose up like a blow.

Chapter Thirteen

Watt had either
sprained his ankle or broken it.

He’d launched
himself through the boughs waiting to be fed into the fire and caught a foot.
He landed in a heap of wide-eyed disbelief. With the simple conciseness of the
very drunk he’d then announced that he was hurt and proceeded to apologize to
Rhiannon explaining that he would not be able to jump over the bonfire and seal
their betrothal. Since Rhiannon was sagging unconscious in John Fortnum’s arms,
she did not respond.

Phillip’s friends
turned their attention to consoling their King. With a huzzah, they hefted
Phillip above their heads and took him back to the pavilion where he was duly
splinted, saturated with drink, and finally propped on a chair.

Ash witnessed it
all with a mixture of anger and helplessness. He had no right to hold,
administer to, or even touch Rhiannon. He hovered until Margaret Atherton took
charge of Rhiannon, then he found his way back to the tavern where he spent the
next several hours. But the thought of Rhiannon being untended and vulnerable
during the rest of this night of free-for-all carousing prevented him from
drinking and preyed on his imagination until it became an obsession. Someone
had
shot at her. A knife
had
nearly pierced her chest. A night like this
would present the perfect cover for an attempted murder...

The blasted witch
had coiled herself into the tangled mess of his life, and like a knot, she
would not come free. Not unless she was cut out, which marriage to that
golden-haired oaf would certainly accomplish.

But for tonight...
Ash slammed the half-full tankard down on the counter. Damn it to bleeding
hell! She was likely sitting on Watt’s good leg, purring in his arms, as he
stood here poleaxed by misguided fear.

But what if she
wasn’t?

He pushed the
tankard away and stepped over several bodies sprawled senseless on the floor,
heading through the door. Outside, a few knots of women and men still clustered
about the grounds. Few young people were present, however, and Ash remarked it
uncomfortably. Where had Fair Badden’s youth gone? He scanned the area for
Rhiannon and spied Edith Fraiser sitting with her eyes closed, the hound Stella
resting her heavy head on Edith’s lap. The marketplace was much quieter than it
had been a few hours earlier and it wasn’t even midnight.

At the end of the
square Ash found an old man gazing at the moon and smiling, a look of fond
remembrance on his seamed, leathery face. Ash asked him where everyone had gone
and why they’d abandoned their revelries so early.

The old man snorted
and after shaking his head in a profoundly pitying fashion, explained to Ash
that the revelries hadn’t ended, they’d simply been transferred to a more
private setting.

Over the course of
the last few hours, it would seem, the younger girls had gone into the woods to
gather hawthorn blooms to ensure good luck for the coming year. But the shawls
they carried on their arms and the back-long glances they’d sent the young men
who watched them go were invitation to another sort of hunt, the old man
explained with a chuckle and a wink.

The young men
hadn’t needed any prodding to follow after, stepping into the forest’s dark
embrace to seek another embrace entirely. Not that all the young women were so
inclined, the old man hastened to point out, but if a lad were lucky...

Ash left him, his
thoughts haunted by images he could barely tolerate.

Were Watt and
Rhiannon among their numbers? Ash wondered. Was she straining beneath him right
now?

His hands flexed at
his sides and his eyes glittered like flawed diamonds, a black carbon core
corrupting their brilliance. A peel of raucous male laughter coming from the
pavilion drew his attention and he turned in its direction.

Inside, Watt sat on
his throne, his lower leg padded thick and stiffly bound to a board.
Immediately the tension drained from Ash. Of course Watt wouldn’t be with
Rhiannon. He couldn’t even follow her on that leg. Watt’s ever-present coterie
of friends was with him. They were arguing over something. When the company saw
Ash, several flushed guiltily, except for St. John who grinned like an evil
gargoyle, winked at his fellows, and clapped Ash on the back.

Ash was in no mood
to play St. John’s cat’s-paw. Or to entertain and charm. He looked around for
Rhiannon. She was not there. She must have gone home, though it was odd she’d
left without Edith.

“Gads, I’m glad
you’re here, Merrick!
You
of all people must know the song.” St. John laid his arm over Ash’s shoulders. “Popular a few years back. I heard it in the Highlands, matter of fact.”

Phillip looked
away, his face turning dusky red.

“We know the front
part but can’t figure out quite how the bloody thing ends,” St. John went on.
“Here. Tell us.”

Ash narrowed his
eyes on the group. One of them tittered and hid his lips behind his palm.
Another’s eyes went wide as he struggled to contain his amusement, and suddenly
Ash knew the song they’d been singing. It had been popular some years back,
soon after the incident that had inspired it. Ash’s mouth went dry.

“It’s a thing
called ‘The Ride of the Demon Brood.’ ” St. John smiled.

Ash struggled for
composure. He’d disparaged these men for being naive and unaware. God, how the
fates must be laughing at him. He’d assumed that here, in this tiny outpost in
nowhere, here at least he would escape his notoriety. With empty eyes he gazed
at St. John’s puckish countenance. He wouldn’t give him the pleasure of seeing
how well he’d scored, how sharp the knife, how raw the wound. He was far better
at hiding pain than this man could imagine.

And as far as the
embarrassment St. John obviously hoped to provoke in Ash if St. John thought
some antique ballad could bring shame to a name that had no understanding of
the concept... the idea wrung a laugh from Ash’s throat, startling St. John.

“Why, certainly,”
he declared hoarsely. “What lines were you having trouble with?”

The other men had
sobered and were regarding Ash warily.

“No one recalls?”
Ash asked lightly. How to tell them. Part of him wanted to explain, to insist
they believe him if he claimed the ballad a lie, a piece of propaganda, a
hideous hyperbole of the truth. But what difference? His past had taught him
that people wanted to believe the worst. So be it.

“Then let us recap.
The story goes like this: In order to save her brothers’ lives, a Scottish
lassie must prevent the ragged remnants of her clan from hanging the worthless
youngest son of the Demon Earl.

“The lad is accused
of raping a novitiate and the clan’s call for his blood is well justified. But
the poor girl’s brothers languish in London awaiting trial for their part in
the uprising of forty-five.” Ash grinned savagely.

Raine hadn’t raped
that girl. Ash had never asked but he didn’t need to, he knew his brother. He
looked around at the rapacious faces. They hung on every word, unhappily
transfixed by the sad, sordid tale.

“I swear I have
told this story so often I have managed to encapsulate the entire tale in a
fifth the time it takes to sing the damned thing!”

His sweeping gaze
caught and held each man present. They squirmed uncomfortably.

“Let’s see, where
was I? Oh, yes. Our pitiful heroine. Eight? Ten years old? And all this drama
to contend with. The thing of it is, the thing that breaks the heart, is this:
That very night while her father is away pleading for his sons’ lives the
girl’s mother has died in childbirth.

“Now, if her
clansmen kill the English Demon Earl’s cub she can kiss adieu to any hope that
King George will be merciful and free her brothers. Is it any wonder she makes
such an effort to halt the boy’s lynching even though he is her enemy?”

In his mind’s eye
he could still see that raggedy girl-child, her thin white arms wrapped tightly
about Raine’s throat, her gold hair streaming down her nightgown, her bare feet
sunk in the ice- and mud-rutted road. He wanted to tell them that she’d been
the only spot of mercy in a night black with vengeance and retribution. That
he’d ached even then for that child. That he’d regretted what had happened.

But they wouldn’t
understand the choices he’d made, they’d all made, all the actors on that cold,
winter stage. They wouldn’t believe him and he wouldn’t allow anyone to dine on
his grief.

He continued.
“Well, the lass prevents the bloody deed by flinging her arms around the bound
boy, shielding him with her own wee body—and I say the tale would have been a
sight more interesting if the girl had been sixteen rather than ten but then
Highlanders are an odd breed. Anyway, while thus, the Demon Earl himself rides
up, a hundred redcoats with him. At his side are his devilish eldest son and,
behind, watching, the little black-haired witch who is his daughter.”

“Aye, that’s the
spot we’d gotten to,” a slurred voice called from the shadows.

“Is it?” Ash
queried, fighting the revulsion threatening to overwhelm him. He would not
succumb. Not in front of St. John and some of these others.

A few of them
shuffled, miserably wishing to be elsewhere but held captive by his recital of
the old tragedy.

“Go on,” St. John urged and then added, “if you’ve the guts.”