"My boots!" she laughed, tucking the scarf around her neck. "What a madwoman I am, all bundled up with no boots on." She giggled again, watching Danielle's blond head duck low to slip the stiff leather over her foot. "I feel mad, you know."
"All the more reason to stop and think what you're doing!"
"Collin . . . He . . . I cannot even tell you what he accused me of. Even being a virgin was not proof enough, not for such an honorable, decent man. I will not live with a man who despises the very lust he avails himself of every night. He shames me, Danielle. He shames me at every turn. Am I such a shameful person, then?"
Her friend's eyes filled with the tears that Alex's body had ceased to produce. "You must not think such things. He is a fool. Have I not told you they are all fools? Write to the duke. He will come for you himself."
"No, I am sorry to leave you here, but I cannot stay another moment in his house. Take the bag. Perhaps you should wrap it in a sheet? I'll retrieve it outside the gate, where that grass grows so wild. Go."
And then she was alone. She slipped her sheathed knife into her boot and cast a cold eye around the stone walls of the room, skipping willfully over the items that spoke of her bed-partner. Not her room and it never would be. Leather slid over her fingers as she pulled on her gloves and turned her back on Collin Blackburn's bed.
The mare swung her head around in a sharp arc and caught Collin's chin with a thunk.
"Damn it." He dropped her foot, no doubt rewarding bad behavior with exactly the thing she wanted, but he couldn't seem to bring himself to care. It likely wasn't the worst hit he'd get today. At least his tongue hadn't been between his teeth.
Unfolding his stiff body, he rose with a grunt of true exhaustion. Uncertainty had kept him up all night. Uncertainty and guilt and the dusty cold of an unused bed. Not so unused now. He wondered when the maid would discover the rumpled bed. A week or two? Then again he might be moving in permanently; Alex's eyes had been that cold.
Stepping out of the shadowed barn, Collin's hands clenched to fists at the memory of her curls teasing the man's cheek. They'd looked so. . . involved. Tense in a way that bespoke an intimate past. He'd thought he might throttle him . . . And apparently he should have.
"Stupid prick," he muttered, meaning Dixon, but feeling the sting of the curse himself. Who was more stupid than he?
He'd felt the censure of Alexandra's gaze on him all night, as he'd twisted and turned in the rough embrace of pilfered blankets. Her eyes gone blank and depthless, a shield against his hatefulness.
"Damn your black soul," he growled, definitely meaning himself this time and not the startled boy who leapt out of his path. Pausing at the door to swipe his boots against the bale of hay he kept there to catch stable muck, Collin dug his fingers into the stiff muscles of his neck.
He had wounded her. Again. Perhaps unforgivably. He'd struck out in childish anger when she had needed his protection. God only knew what that blackguard had been saying to her—that rapist disguised as a pale English milksop. And the startled dismay he'd surprised from her face . . . that hadn't been fear of discovery, it had been helplessness as she'd stood in a crowded ballroom and tolerated the presence of her attacker.
His throat thickened with regret, with disgust at what he'd accused her of. Worse than that, really, for what if he'd been right? What if she had serviced a dozen men before he came along? Hadn't he been with a dozen women in his life? Hadn't he suckled and licked and screwed them and never thought twice about it? Oh, he was cruel, and wretched with it now.
He loved her. He loved her and he had abused her as surely as if he'd beaten her to the floor.
The walls moved past him and he was walking through the great hall, between tables still littered with the mess of dinner. Bridey's small girl worked her way 'round, stacking metal plates and cups. The meal was done then. Had she eaten?
His boots slapped the stairs as he bounded up, abruptly urgent with the need to see her. He smelled of sweat and horseflesh and no doubt she'd spit and slap at him, but he wanted to see her, wanted to dare an apology.
Her door fell open, unbarred.
"Alex?" A sound stirred from the turret room. A woman slipped into view, her blond hair a disappoint-ment. "Danielle. Is your mistress about?"
Collin glanced stupidly around, as if she crouched behind the bed. The maid did not answer and when he looked back to her, she only returned his stare, though her lips twitched into a momentary snarl. Well.
"Ah, has she gone for a ride?"
"You could say that."
He felt a flicker of irritation and set it aside. "What does that mean?"
"You may figure that out on your own."
"Please don't growl at me. Just tell me where she is."
"Fool."
"What?"
"Salaud, she has left you." "Left me? But—"
Danielle swung about, skirt and hair flying out in a wave as she stepped back into the turret room and slammed the small door behind her.
"Left me?" His brain seemed to creak under the pressure of the words and his eyes wove circles around the room, finally landing on her wardrobe. With one great lunge, he yanked the doors open and shook his head at the crush of dresses inside. Left him. . . No, she couldn't have. Her things were still here, her trunk still lurked at the foot of the bed. Her maid was sitting not ten feet away. She couldn't have gone anywhere.
No, she hadn't left. She was probably hiding in the turret room even as he stood here reeling.
"Danielle!" The door burst open under his palm with a sharp crack. "Damn it, is she here?"
But his wife was not in the tiny round room, only her maid staring at him past her tears. Danielle, crying? What was this? A shaft of ice pierced his churning gut. "What the hell is going on?"
"I told you!" She sprang to her feet to face him, a tear dripping from her chin. "She has left you."
"But all her things are still here. You are still here. Where could she have gone?"
That narrow shaft of ice split and widened. She had left him, run away. Left in the dead of night for all he knew. And where could she go with just the clothes on her back? Back to Kirkland Hall?
A suspicion struck him, terrible in its familiarity, and comfortable despite that. Fergus. Fergus who liked her so well and defended her and who hadn't yet shown his face today. Fergus who lived not two miles from here and was missing from his post.
Collin's hand shot out to grip the maid's arm. "Has she gone to him? Has she?"
Her face flushed and twisted into an ugly snarl as she reared back, pulling herself from his tight fingers. She did not answer his question. Instead, she drew herself up and spit full into his face.
Rage clawed at him, tearing his gut into ribbons, urging him to slap her, to punish her for the pain that ground his mind into dust. Frightened by the violence that stretched into his muscles, he growled at her wide-eyed stare and swung about to hunt down his wife and her lover.
By God, he'd been right. Right all along and she had actually made him feel sorry for her. His wife and his best friend.
But, no! his small, stupid heart cried. No, there is a mistake. And perhaps there was. He'd never really thought she could do this. He'd only been so afraid of it.
His vision darkened and he blinked around, startled by the change in light. The stable. He was in the stable. A groom stared, eyes round with question.
"Has Mrs. Blackburn been here today?"
"Aye, sir. Off for a ride on that mare o' hers."
"When?"
"When? 'Round about ten. Maybe before."
"Ten this morning?"
"Ahh. . . Yes, sir." The man's eyes rolled to meet briefly with the boy mucking out the first stall.
"Saddle Thor. Quickly."
Collin's mind worked itself into knots while he waited, examining the possibilities. Fergus's house first, but they couldn't be stupid enough to stay there. Of course, Collin usually stayed busy all day between the horses and the new house, so perhaps they'd counted on a few more hours of secrecy. But surely this was all a misunderstanding. He'd go to Jeannie's. Likely Alex was there. And it would sting to have to retrieve his woman from a neighbor, but he would deserve that. He'd deserve it for expecting such terrible things from his own wife.
He blinked again and there was Thor, held by the worried groom and tossing his head in impatience. Ten minutes to ride to Fergus's home and then he would know.
The ground passed beneath his feet, tumbling nearly as fast as his flailing soul. Don't be there, he found himself praying. Don't be there. Please, Alex, don't be there.
Thor flew down the road, bursting up over a hill and back down the other side, neither horse nor rider sparing a thought for the danger of such speed. A gust of wind caught them at the next hill and slowed their pace for a moment, a cold hand that forbore snow and ice. The road wound down then, slipping them into a valley and out of the force of the breeze.
He could see the house from here, could see the curl of smoke from the chimney and the low bench where he'd passed many a summer evening over a glass of whisky. He could see the apple tree and the window below it that looked in on Fergus's small room and his bed.
Dread closed his throat.
Thor slowed, winded already from being run cold, and Collin guided him to the left, down the narrow path and closer to the place he did not want to be.
"Don't be here," he whispered into the smoke-spiced air and drew the horse to a stop.
Knees weak and body nearly too heavy to catch, Collin slipped to the ground. The door opened to him—the third door today that he'd suspected of hiding his wife. And there was the fourth, just to his left. A narrow square in the wood and daub wall. It was firmly closed, and why would that be? Why close a door against the home where you lived alone?
Pain spiraled tight, rising from his gut to his throat and squeezing everything in-between to ruin. The room was only two steps away and he had to do this.
The first thing he saw, the first thing that carved itself into his brain, was Fergus's long, tanned arm—a swipe of skin and hair that curled over the gentle hill of someone sheltered beneath the quilt. Collin's eyes followed the curve of the blanket, swept down the bed to see another of Fergus's limbs—his leg, naked and bent and thrown over one tiny female foot that snugged against his calf.
Something fractured in the quiet of his chest, a concussion of silence that nearly broke him.
"You are a God-damned traitor."
A sweet female gasp assaulted his ears as the bed shuddered.
"You can have this woman if you want her, but you will not have her on my land."
Fergus sprang naked from the bed. His fierce snarl fell to blank shock at the sight of Collin looming over his bed. "Jesus Christ, man, what the hell are ye doin' here?"
Collin's vision blurred, swirled, until the world was a jumble of Fergus's nude body, and his own rising fists, and the trembling shape of a woman hidden in her lover's bed. "Drills."
Fergus's face burned crimson, or Collin's vision turned red, he couldn't tell which. "She is not a whore, you bastard spawn of the devil, and I'll kill you if ye say it again."
Collin barked in disbelief, reaching for the quilt instead of his friend's throat. "You'd dare to defend my wife when she lays in this very bed, naked and filled with your seed?"
The blanket felt like paper beneath his hands, so light that it floated halfway across the room with the tiniest jerk. The roar in his head was his own blood or Fergus's growl or the sob of the woman he'd bared. His mind tripped, lurched, just as his body did, just as he saw the nude length of a woman who was not his wife, just as his chest caught Fergus's shoulder and his body fell back.
Breath burst from lungs caught too hard between the floor and the body that fell upon him.
"How dare you?" A hand fisted in his hair. "How dare you come into my home and . . . and—"
"Where is she?"
The hand wrenched. "Get out."
Fergus's weight left him and he felt himself pulled to his feet by his scalp, but the pain couldn't penetrate his shock. "Where is my wife?"
"God damn ye, man, are ye mad?"
A blink brought his friend's face back into focus, revealed the rage in his eyes and lips a line of white in his beard. Collin's eyes rolled and swung past him to catch on the sight of Jeannie Kirkland, crouched and hiding herself behind the paltry shield of a pillow clutched to her chest. She stared, horror-struck, breath panting out between her lips.
Collin's hands hung limp at his sides even as he saw the open hand fly out to crack against his cheek.
"There is a lady present, ye daft prick, and you'll leave this moment or I will dig your eyes from your head."
Collin turned, stumbling when Fergus yanked the quilt from beneath his feet and pulled it back to the bed. Murmurs, fierce whispers flew to his ears, but he couldn't begin to decipher the words. Nothing here made sense to him. He walked from the room and out into the platinum day and stood, waiting.
