The Passionate One (38 page)

“Maybe not,” he
ground out, “but I won’t let you throw yourself away on him. I couldn’t live
with myself if I allowed you to become his creature.”

“Oh, Phillip—”

“He won’t marry
you, Rhiannon.” Phillip shook her again, trying to reason with her, well
acquainted with the strength of the spell she was under. “He’ll just play with
you for as long as you amuse him and then he’ll betray you.”

Her eyes lifted to
his, no longer a girl’s unlearned gaze, but one filled with compassionate
understanding. He could not look at them. He drew a deep breath through his
nostrils.

“I won’t let him
have you.”

He dipped and caught
her under her hips, tossing her over his shoulder.

“Phillip! No!”

Jaw bulging with
determination, he strode back to the others, ignoring her pleas and her
vindictives, her flaying arms and thrashing legs. He was a decent man, a good
man, and he’d offered her his name. She’d been promised to him. He’d only to
get her away from that devil’s influence and everything would return to the way
it had been before Merrick. The way it should be.

In front of him,
his companions broke from their awed observation and scurried for their mounts,
trading roguish smiles and excited murmurs.

And if Phillip felt
more ill than victorious, they needn’t know and would never suspect. They’d
only know that Rhiannon was his and he would not let her go.

It was late
afternoon when Thomas Donne found Ash Merrick and his father outside Carr’s
office. Ash’s voice was low, Carr’s expression flat with animosity. No other
guests were present. They were readying themselves for the nightly bacchanal.

Donne’s smile
thinned with satisfaction. He could not have asked better. He wanted to see
Carr’s face when the bastard realized that whatever plan he’d had for Rhiannon
had been thwarted. And, Donne admitted, he would not be averse to witnessing
some small pain on Ash’s proud, dark countenance when he discovered she’d
rejected him in favor of another.

It was little
enough revenge against the family that had decimated his own, but small
satisfactions were all he would allow himself until he found the means to bring
this house down in its entirety. Watt had been a gift, a bit of unanticipated
pleasure. How piquant that the situation allowed Donne to maintain his role of
pretended friendship even as he delivered the blow.

“Merrick! Lord
Carr!” he hailed.

Ash looked up.
Carr’s brows rose questioningly.

Donne hastened to
their sides, taking care to compose his features into lines of concern. He
pulled Watt’s note from his hand pocket. “I just returned from Miss Russell’s
suite. I had gone there to ask her if she would care to walk in the
conservatory. Her door was ajar. I entered and found this on the floor. I know
it does not speak well of me, but I read it. I think you had best read it, too,
sir, seeing as how you’re her guardian.

He held the missive
out. With a frown, Carr took it. As he read it, his frown disappeared and was
replaced by an expression of surprise. Donne waited, his heartbeat thickening
with anticipation, careful to reveal none of it. And then—and then—Carr’s face
bloomed with pure, unfettered exultation.

Carr looked up, his
eyes shimmering with satisfaction. And relief. Stupefied, Donne stared at him,
aware that Ash, too, was regarding his father with consternation. Ash snagged
the letter from his father’s hands.

“Bloody well good
for her.” Carr had managed to rid his expression of pleasure, but he could not
erase the gloating quality in his voice. “This is what comes of offering
foundling brats a home. Ungrateful baggage.” His gaze settled on Donne. “You
saw, didn’t you, Donne? I offered her a home, dressed her like a princess,
introduced her to my friends, and she turned her back on it. There was nothing
more I could do, was there?”

Donne was so
completely offset by Carr’s reaction, he could not think of a reply.

“I couldn’t stop
her, could I?” Carr insisted.

“No,” Donne
answered.

Carr’s head bobbed
up and down. “Well, that’s that then. She’s gone and I still have guests who
require my attention.” Carr clapped his hands together, only just refraining
from rubbing them together. He strode away on a buoyant step.

Donne watched him
go, trying to account for Carr’s reaction. He would have staked his life on the
fact that Carr had plotted some ill use for Rhiannon Russell.

He glanced at Ash.
His glance stayed and became a stare, riveted by what he saw.

Some small
pain.
That’s what he had told himself when he’d
devised this scene. If Carr’s reaction had lacked evidence of his being
injured, Donne’s wishes in regard to Ash had been answered tenfold, a hundred,
no, a thousand.

Donne had never
before witnessed such raw anguish on a man’s face, a pain so extreme that no
mask, no experience with torture, no instruction in endurance,
nothing
could hide its eviscerating power. It turned Merrick’s eyes to arctic ice and
then ashes and then emptiness. Merrick’s hands hung loose at his sides as
though he had no power to lift them, as if just the act of standing tested him
beyond his measure.

“She’s gone, you
say?” Ash’s voice was quiet, empty.

“Yes. Gunna says
she walked out early this morning. Hours ago. I found the boy who delivered
this message to her.”

“Boy?”

“Andy. Yes.”

He glanced up as
though he was having trouble forming cohesive thought. “But you just came from
her room,” Ash murmured. “You didn’t mention questioning the boy.”

Donne cursed
himself for a fool. “I did not think it advisable to let your father know any
more than necessary about her whereabouts. And that’s not the point. Listen,
Ash. The lad says Watt was with a great number of men. That they’d camped on
the far side of the island. There’s no good going after her. And no point.”

“Yes. I know.”

God help him, he
had no stomach for this sport. Ash had been gutted, sure and proper, and Donne
saw no sense in playing with the entrails. “She’s out of Carr’s grasp, Ash.
That was all you
really
wanted, wasn’t it?”

Ash turned his head
slowly, seeking Donne’s gaze and pithing him with such sudden searing
understanding that Donne knew he’d given himself away and revealed himself as
an enemy. And he also knew it made no difference to Ash, that nothing made any
difference anymore.

Ash turned without
a word and walked away, leaving Donne standing alone. He decided then to leave
this place and to stay away until his resolve returned, because the long-lost
hereditary laird of the McClairen’s did not feel any of his anticipated
pleasure in revenge.

Dressed in
sumptuous, scandalous scarlet and gold, face painted in a mask of unrivaled
beauty, Fia threw herself into that night’s festivities. Abandoned and
scintillating, she danced with countless nameless men and flirted with as many
more. Throughout Wanton’s Blush, at gaming tables and in back corridors,
masculine and feminine voices alike remarked her extreme behavior. She shone
with a fascinating sharpness, a diamond newly cut.

When the meat of
the night was being served, when strong heads and weak had been plied with
their nightly opiate of wine and titillation, Fia heard dimly, like a cricket’s
song beneath the squall of a storm, the great clock in the center hall chime
the eleventh hour. Calmly, disinterestedly, she removed Lord Hurley’s hand from
her naked shoulder and without bothering to explain herself, left him panting
and red-faced in a shadowed corner of the conservatory. She walked to her
father’s office.

Once there, she
looked around to make sure she was alone and then unlocked the door with the key
she had stolen earlier that day. She entered. It was dark but she knew this
room well. She struck the tinderbox beside the door and lit a lamp on a nearby
table.

She did not waste
time going over the items lying on Carr’s desk. Instead she moved to the ornate
marble mantel and pried her nails into a seam on its top. A thin square of
marble came up in her hands, revealing the deep niche where Carr kept his most
valued papers.

She did not know
what she looked for. Proof, she supposed. One way or another an answer to
Donne’s accusation.

Carr had once told
Fia that her mother, Janet McClairen, for all her insane loyalties, had been
the one woman he’d loved. Fia had believed him for the simple tact that he
obviously hadn’t
liked
loving the woman.

Love, he’d said,
clouded the judgment, absconded with reason, and diminished a man’s
effectiveness. This was so in keeping with everything she knew about Carr that
she’d believed him. But perhaps he’d been a better play-actor than she’d
imagined.

She’d always adored
her father, even as she feared him, because cold and analytical as he’d been,
he’d always been direct with her. Honest. He’d made it their especial bond.
Others could be lied to, manipulated, occasionally—and necessarily—hurt through
deceit, but he would
never
use her in such a way. Certainly he would
never barter her to the highest bidder like...
like a whore.

But perhaps Carr
had
lied. Perhaps everything he’d told her had been deceits, equivocations, and
sophistry told to keep her malleable, to distance her from her brothers because
they knew the truth, to keep her shut away from the world while he groomed her
for her future... sale.

Perhaps Carr had
killed Janet McClairen.

Her mother.

Carefully Fia
removed a thick packet of letters and papers and returned to the desk. Carr
would be occupied for hours with “subjects.”

She had time to
discover the truth. God help her... and perhaps Carr.

Chapter Thirty-One

Rhiannon sat
huddled against one of the boulders ringing the small clearing. She drew her
knees up, folded her arms, and waited. The men from Fair Badden were sleeping.

As she watched, a
curl of smoke floated up from the smoldering campfire like a phantom fleur de
lis and dissolved into the black night. No moon or stars shown in the ebony
sky. It was a good night for prey animals to be afoot. A good night to walk
away.

Phillip had not
bothered to set a guard. He’d assumed that a woman alone would never dare flee
into this desolate wilderness. He’d been mistaken. She was a daughter of these
unforgiving mountains. Whatever they threatened her with could be no more
painful than that which Phillip had already done to her: taken her from Ash.

Rhiannon waited
another fifteen minutes before gathering her damp skirts and creeping forward.
Nearby—too near to chance saddling—the tethered horses nickered softly.
Silently, she rifled through the belongings scattered about and found a skein
of water. She slipped its leather thong across her shoulders, anger thrumming
through her.

Her entire life had
been a series of fear-inspired flights: the escape from the Highlands, her
abduction from Fair Badden, and now Phillip’s “rescue.” She’d been taken from
her home and then from her adopted home and now from Ash, always for the same
reason: so she would be
safe.
And in the process she’d left behind
those people and things she loved.

No more.

She would stay in
the Highlands and if by staying she was destroyed, then she would be destroyed
fighting for what she wanted, not fleeing what she feared. True, Ash Merrick
was dangerous and passionate and complicated. Perhaps he would even be the
death of her. But she loved him, with all her heart she loved him, and she
would fight to stay at his side.

At the edge of the
campsite, she lifted her hem and sprinted into the woods, her eyes riveted on
the east. And Ash.

There was not much
to pack, but then there never had been. A shirt, an extra pair of breeches,
woolen socks. Ash thrust them into a leather satchel atop the belt stuffed with
the money for Raine’s ransom.

He still had his
promise. He must hold on to that. It was all he had now. All he’d ever had,
really, except for those brief incandescent hours before she’d left.

He understood. He
did not fault her choice. Whatever magic they’d wrought as lovers had dissolved
with Watt’s note and sanity’s return. She’d weighed Ash’s poverty—not merely a
paucity of coin—against all Watt had and represented. Watt had won. How could
it be different? What could Ash offer her that could compare with friends,
family, security, and home?

He’d thought of
going after her—but it was a brief madness, the desperate last measures of an
injured heart. He wanted her happiness too much to delude himself any longer.
He couldn’t pretend Phillip wanted her dead. That wretched giant would never
harm Rhiannon.

Ash’s gaze strayed
to the adjoining room and the bed that still held their fragrance, the unique
perfume of their lovemaking.