The Passionate One (23 page)

She raised her
eyes, speared the darkness that hid him with her gaze. “Those peasants were my
clan. McClairen was my laird.”

He stood as still
and motionless as the night.

He’d seduced her on
the eve of her wedding, killed her kinsmen, and stolen her from the home she’d
so carefully fashioned, from the life she’d so carefully cultivated.

Well, she thought,
she needn’t be careful anymore. There was no one here whom she wished to
please.

“You can’t stay
awake all the time,” she whispered. “But you’d best try, Ash Merrick. For as
soon as you’re asleep, I’ll be gone and you’ll be lucky if I don’t leave that
silver blade of yours sheathed between your ribs.”

“Trading threats,
are we?” he mused softly. “Well, it’s my turn now. Listen carefully. You’re right.
I can’t stay awake until we reach Wanton’s Blush. But if I catch you trying to
run away, or trying to induce some poor fool into interfering with us, I’ll not
hesitate to punish you. Severely.” Not a chord of warmth was revealed in his
voice.

She huddled back on
the mattress, glaring at him. She heard him take a deep breath.

“And as for your
‘killing me’ if I touch you—” His head shifted in the gloom and she caught the
glint of his dark eyes. “Any time I want, anywhere I want.”

* * *

For three days a tempestuous
sky dogged their travel. It hounded them along faint, ancient drovers’ paths up
to high pastures and secret paddocks, the traditional hideouts of the raiders
and thieves.

Ash did not try to
break Rhiannon’s silence. With her savage denunciation, she’d finally made him
confront his own motives. His notion that Watt would want to kill her because
he preferred the company of men was feeble and ridiculous. Her best interest
hadn’t been at the heart of his decision, his loins had been. He’d deluded himself,
and that tortured him most of all. He’d always been honest with himself if with
no one else.

With no reason to
enjoin Rhiannon’s good opinion, having repudiated it, he punished himself by
seeking its opposite, her contempt—something she was more than obliged to give.
It was a painful scourge. It was damn near killing him.

As for Rhiannon,
she watched the rod-straight back before her with sullen hostility. She had
little doubt Ash meant his threat to hurt her if she tried to flee. But it
wasn’t that or the bruising pace he set—or even the fact that in spite of his
claim she’d yet to see him asleep—that kept her from trying to escape. She had
no place to go.

Each night she met
his mocking smile with a tilt of her chin but held her breath until he’d wound
a blanket about his shoulders and settled with his back against the door of the
inns where they’d overnighted. He ignored her then, his gaze fixed on the
floorboards, leaving her to wonder what drove him now to complete whatever plot
he’d devised.

She little cared.
And if the haunted expression she sometimes glimpsed upon his fierce, exhausted
countenance might have once confounded her, bitterness left no room for such
speculation. She simply welcomed whatever pain he felt. He’d destroyed her
life.

During their travel
her gaze slew cautiously about. It was all so intimately recognizable: the feel
of the wet, cool air; the dark, drenched colors; the scent of flinty rock and
gin-spiced conifers. It had been waiting for her return for a decade, like a
witch’s unwanted familiar.

The winnowing wind
whispered a spurious greeting and the chill mist stretched milky fingers up to
brush her legs in mock obeisance. Here the McClairens and all those sworn to
support them—including the Russells—had returned from Culloden’s bloody
battlefield seeking sanctuary. Here Lord Cumberland’s dragoons had found them.
Here they’d been hunted down. Here massacred.

Even in moonlight
the mountains seemed stained with blood, the ground, salted with her clansmen’s
deaths, forever inhospitable and barren. A thousand high, craggy acres of
graveyard.

She shuddered and
closed her eyes against it. They’d made her home a potter’s field.

In such a manner
they traveled for four more days and nights. On the fifth night they crested a
high, tree-bereaved hill overlooking the sea. Below them and some miles off, a
thin bridge of land connected the headland to a big, crescent-shaped island. It
surged out of the sea, blocky and jagged with rock. At its inner curve it rose
to a high shelf of land overlooking the sheer, dramatic cliffs facing east. On
this apex perched a mansion, or castle, or fortress.

* * *

It was impossible
to tell what exactly the place was, or had started out as, or looked to become,
it was so rife with turrets and buttresses, cupolas and columns, friezes and
pediments. A mad architect’s maddest creation.

Lines of windows
cast beacons across terraced lawns and pockmarked sweeping staircases. All
about, pinpricks of light—lanterns?—swung and swayed about the massive
fortress’s base, like fairies dancing maniacally about the skirts of some
mammoth, beleaguered matron.

Flitting in and out
of the open doorways, through beams of light and patches of shadow, darting and
settling in clusters and singly amidst the blackening lawn, were people, ladies
and gentlemen, dozens and dozens of them.

Bemused and
disconcerted by the spectacle, Rhiannon looked to Ash. His gaze was already on
her, thoughtful and remote, his face stained with fatigue. He smiled tightly,
and flung out his hand in a cavalier’s overmannered gesture.

“Welcome to
McClairen’s Isle,” he said, “and Wanton’s Blush.”

Chapter Nineteen

They left the
horses with a liveried servant and climbed the front stairs through the carved
panels into a great hall ablaze with light and mirrors and gilt.

Beneath the
beatific gaze of the plaster angels high overhead mingled dozens of people.
They nibbled cakes and licked gloved fingers, spilt iced punch on Persian
carpets, and laughed and posed and sweated in their rich gowns and piled wigs.

Ash led Rhiannon
through the little queues of revelers and knots of gamers. Few noted their
progress. Most had gone days without sleep, sun, or fresh food. They were
swollen on wine and excitement, dull and fog-witted, groping through the mire
of senseless spectacles and animal pleasures his father designed to keep them
entertained... to keep them careless with their money. For, when all was said
and done, Wanton’s Blush was simply the most dissolute, the most licentious,
the most sumptuous gaming hell in all the British Isles.

In a few minutes
they had broken free of the crush in the main hall and stood in a narrow
corridor behind the curved staircase. A laughing woman burst out of a nearby
door, her gown slipping from one shoulder, a trio of flushed and hound-eyed men
tumbling in pursuit. Ash snatched Rhiannon up and out of their way.

His arms tightened
convulsively. The salty, musty scent of travel filled his nostrils. The feel of
her body stoked the appetite he’d held in check into a veritable blaze. He
looked down. She’d averted her face.

Temper surged
through him. What did he care? He thought fiercely. He did not need her scorn
to tell him who he was.

“Fa! Carr never
said we were to have a masque tonight!”

Ash looked up. A
pink-ribboned, satin-clad creature in a lavender wig leaned against the door
frame.

“But ’struth, must
be so for here’s Little Red Ridy Hood herself!” The man’s plucked and pencilled
brows rose in twin semicircles above shallow, lashless eyes.

Smoothly, Ash lowered
Rhiannon to the ground. She did not step back. Of course not. She’d never give
him the satisfaction of showing fear. Neither did she say a word or rebuke him
in any way. She did not need to. Her silence was eloquent enough. She expected
he’d stolen her from Watt to satisfy his carnal appetite.

The lavender-headed
fop’s gaze drifted from his interested inspection of Rhiannon to Ash, sizing up
the filth of travel, the five-day growth of beard, and the tangled tail of
black hair.

“And this is either
the woodsman or the wolf. I say, fellow, which are you supposed to be?”

“Pray commence
trembling, Hurley, that’s Merrick you’re twitting.” A gorgeous young girl
appeared beside the plump, pink Hurley. Her young, pure face was absolutely
smooth and her poise was unassailable. The gray of her elaborately powdered wig
contrasted jarringly with her obvious youth, somehow making a mockery of both.

“Merrick?” the
perplexed Hurley asked.

“My brother,” the
girl replied.

“Fia,” Ash said,
inclining his head. She was fifteen—or was it sixteen?—and having known so
little of her mother, was utterly her father’s creature. Ash trusted her less
than anyone else, perhaps because in spite of himself he felt the bonds of
blood between them, urging something different.

“Merrick? Carr’s
son?” Hurley stuttered.

“One of them,” Ash
allowed coolly.

“The ruthless one,”
Fia said with a small, practiced smile. She moved her salved lips close to one
of Hurley’s pink ears. Ash could practically see it quiver. “The dangerous
one,” she whispered loudly. “The passionate one.”

Hurley’s expression
of perplexity gave way to a licentiousness. He reached out to tickle Fia
beneath her chin. Calmly Fia slashed her fan across his knuckles. He snatched
back his hand, staring at her in wounded wonder.

“Be gone, Lord
Hurley. Before Merrick decides to misinterpret your attentions to his little
sister.” Her face was as smooth as a porcelain doll’s and yet a little sneer
curled around her words.

The white powder
covering Hurley’s face could not hide his flush, and with a mumbled adieu, he
escaped. Fia ignored his departure.

Beside Ash Rhiannon
stirred.

“What is this
you’ve brought, brother?” Fia murmured. “Something for Carr? A new toy?”

“His ward,” Ash
returned shortly. Rhiannon’s head remained bowed, her eyes downcast, her
shoulders slumped. She looked as if she’d been beaten which, Ash decided, was
probably just what she wanted to look like.

Fia, a little smile
chasing cross her features, dipped her head and peeked up.

“He has a ward now,
does he?” she said in a voice as gentle and dangerous as the sound of a snake
slithering over a dry lawn. Calmly Ash stepped between them. Fia glanced at him
in surprise. “Who’d have thought?”

“I would,” a deep
masculine voice with a distinct Scottish burr announced.

At the sound, Ash
turned. Approaching him was a tall, broad-shouldered man. The chandelier light
polished his dark mahogany head to a metallic sheen.

“Donne,” Ash
greeted him. He was surprised to see him here, at Wanton’s Blush. Carr usually
picked his guests carefully and while Donne was certainly rich enough to be
admitted, he did not display the proper susceptibility to drinking, gambling,
or wenching.

A smile carved deep
dimples in each of Donne’s lean cheeks, mirroring the cleft in his chin. There
was a watchfulness about the long, narrow eyes currently fixed on Fia. She’d
straightened abruptly at his appearance but now stood regarding the Scot with
the calm imperturbability she’d owned since childhood.

Rhiannon, like some
damn silent statue, remained motionless at Ash’s side. He needed to get her
upstairs before Carr discovered them. He was tired and edgy, in no condition to
deal with his father. Still, if Donne was here, perhaps he’d come with some
interesting information.

“What the devil are
you doing here, Donne?”

Donne shrugged. “I
came along as part of a set. Hurley’s house party, you know. I simply could not
refuse the opportunity to game a bit and, of course, such charming company.”

At his last words
he bowed in Fia’s direction, and though the movement was easy and elegant, a
quality of practiced boredom robbed it of politeness and made it instead an
actor’s gesture, cruelly meaningless.

If possible, Fia’s
young, unnaturally beautiful face grew smoother; her large eyes went dark as
obsidian in a black rill’s bed.

Donne turned to
Rhiannon, bowing again, and this time the movement was respectful, the gesture
an acknowledgement rather than a caricature.

“Since Ash refuses
to be civil, pray allow me to satisfy the amenities myself. Thomas Donne at
your service, miss.”

She lifted her
face, her gaze latching on to Donne’s handsome, lean visage, drawing Ash’s cold
consideration. She was pitifully easy to read.

In Thomas Donne’s
braw Scottish face she looked for a champion.

A sliver of pity
touched Ash. Donne was the last man who would come to her aid. He knew little
about Donne; he’d never asked, but what he did know was simple. Donne had been
abroad and, in some mysterious place, had won, earned, or stolen a monstrously
big fortune which he kept monstrously big by the simple expedience of not
giving it away to any fool that came begging.