Heather and Velvet (40 page)

She lifted her goblet. “Jamie told me there were two Frenchmen in the village today inquiring about you. Do you know why?”

Her question didn’t surprise Sebastian. He was only surprised she had taken so long to ask. Perhaps she was as afraid of the answer as he was.

“They’re probably D’Artan’s bulldogs. The old man has given me two weeks to send him the formula. If MacKay makes good on his promise, we’ll need no longer.”

“What did Killian promise you?”

Sebastian winced at her use of MacKay’s Christian name. There was both tenderness and respect in her voice.

“A pardon,” he said gruffly. “MacKay’s gone to London to request an audience with the King. He believes His Majesty will be grateful to know what sort of snake he has lurking in his House of Commons.”

Prudence’s lips twitched. She and Laird MacKay couldn’t have thought of a better way to help Sebastian if they had spent months pondering the issue.

She lifted her fork to her lips to hide her smile. “And what did you promise him in return?”

Sebastian drained the rest of the ale. “You.”

Her fork stilled.

Sebastian rushed on to fill the silence, studying the burnt crust of his bun with acute interest. “Since we hadn’t the written consent of your guardian to wed, an English court should grant you a dissolution of the marriage posthaste. Of course, to avoid a scandal, it would be best
for you to convince a judge our union was never consummated.”

“What shall I tell him is the reason for that?” Her voice was strangely flat.

Why did she have to be so damn calm about it? he wondered. He felt like breaking something himself. He stuffed half of the bun in his mouth with deliberate crudity. “I don’t care. Tell him whatever you like. Tell him I snore too loud. Don’t bathe often enough. Fancy men over women.”

She slipped on her spectacles.

Oh, hell, he thought. Here it comes. The bun hung like a rock in his throat.

She peered at him over the rim of her spectacles. “Do you?”

He frowned. “Do I what? Snore? Smell?”

“Fancy men over women?”

He gave her a long look from beneath his lashes. He was suddenly spoiling for a fight, desperate for any release from the turmoil that battered him. He had known this feeling before, but in smoky taverns and boisterous alehouses where he could pick a fight without hurting anyone but himself.

He tangled the butt of his knife in the tablecloth, glanced down, and found the fight he was looking for.

He snatched up the edge of the cloth, overturning his empty goblet with a thump. “This was your gown, wasn’t it? The pink gown you wore at the Campbells’ the night I robbed you.”

She gazed at him, every maddening inch the “Duchess of Winter.”

“Cranberry.”

“Cranberry?” he roared.

“The gown was cranberry. Not pink.”

He stood and jerked the cloth off the table, revealing the ugly, scarred wood beneath. The plates shattered as they struck the stone floor. “I don’t give a damn if it was fuchsia. I don’t expect you to cut up all your fine clothes to serve me. Don’t think I haven’t seen you! Dusting with your petticoat. Straining cream through your stockings. I never asked that of you.”

“I don’t need those clothes here. They’re impractical. My old gowns are sufficient.”

He shot around the table and jerked her hands out of her lap, turning them to the candlelight. Calluses toughened the tender pads. Her palms were chapped and reddened.

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Your old hands were sufficient too. Look at them now! I remember when they were as soft and white as doves.”

She stared at the table. A single tear spilled from her brimming eyes and slipped down her cheek.

A wave of self-contempt swept Sebastian, making him even angrier. His fingers dug into her wrists. “Dammit, woman! I didn’t bring you here to be my slave!”

She stood, wrenching free of his grip. “Then what in God’s holy name did you bring me here for? It certainly wasn’t to be your wife!” She slammed her palms on the table and faced him nose to nose. “What’s wrong with these hands? Are they too stained for you? Too hard? Not as soft and lily-white as Tricia’s or Devony’s?” She held up her hands between them. “I’m proud of these. They’ve done more than serve tea and open books. They’ve never been more beautiful. I’ve earned every blister, every callus, and every splinter working to make this castle some sort of home for you.”

He reached for her, dazed by the magnificence of her furious passion, but his hands closed on empty air. She was already backing out of his reach.

“I’ll be glad when MacKay comes, you ungrateful wretch,” she said. “I wish he’d come tonight. I should have no trouble convincing a judge of your duplicity, since you obviously find your wife so distasteful that you’d prefer to sleep with your alleged coachman. As far as I’m concerned, you and your precious Dunkirk can go straight to the deepest pits of hell!”

With those words, she burst into tears, threw her hands over her face, and ran up the stairs.

Sebastian sank down heavily in her chair. He rested his chin on his steepled hands.

“You stupid bastard,” he whispered.

A rumble of thunder rolled through the castle like the taunting echo of his father’s voice.

Prudence pummeled her pillow with her fists. Who had ever heard of stuffing a pillow with dried heather? she wondered. If she wanted to sleep on bracken and gorse, she’d go lie on the wet, bleak moor below. She was surprised Sebastian hadn’t stuffed it with thorns. The bloody Scots were as uncivilized as everyone said they were, and Sebastian Kerr was the worst of the lot! Everything nasty she’d ever heard about Scots poured through her head in an invective stream.

Lightning flooded the tower. Thunder cracked like the heart of a massive stone. She dove under the pillow, where the lingering fragrance of heather haunted her.

Who had ever heard of a thunderstorm this early in the year? Even the laws of God went awry in this primitive land. Was there nothing she could depend on? Nothing, it seemed, but the petty treachery of Dunkirk’s master. She and MacKay had been daft to believe they could help such a selfish wretch.

The stifling air beneath the pillow smothered her. She flung herself onto her back, kicking at the wool blanket tangled around her legs. How could she expect a beastly Scot to appreciate the civilized charms of candlelight and satin tablecloths? She should have wrapped herself in an animal skin. They could have squatted in front of the fire and eaten raw kidney meat with their fingers. Lightning ripped a jagged streak across the sky. Her fingernails dug tiny crescents into her palms.

A blast of thunder shook the tower. Wind roared at the window, rattling the ancient panes with fists of wrath. The shadows on the wall danced with a life of their own. Prudence pulled the blanket over her head. Storms usually exhilarated her, but tonight she was afraid. It was as if the storm raged around the tower itself, drawn like a magnet to her own anger and misery.

Without wanting to, she felt the presence of that other girl, Sebastian’s mother. She imagined her cowering under the same blankets, smoky gray eyes squeezed tightly shut.
Prudence felt as if she
were
that girl, and every beat of thunder was the stomp of Brendan Kerr’s heavy boots on the stairs. He was coming for her. She shoved her fists against her ears, mumbling in vain the Pythagorean theorem of numbers to drown it out. Thunder boomed again and she sat bolt upright, trembling everywhere, her night rail plastered to her body by a sheen of terrified sweat.

A burst of white light threw substance into shadow and shadow into substance. That dark shape over there by the window. It hadn’t been there before, had it? Wasn’t that a plaid draped over its hulking shoulders and the flash of silver a claymore lifted in meaty fists?

With a splintering crash, the wind caught the window and flung it open.

Prudence screamed. A deafening crack of thunder drowned out the shrill sound. Rain poured into the tower, pelting the stone floor. She jumped out of bed and ran for the door. In the heartbeat of darkness between one flash of lightning and the next, she lost sight of it. She reeled around, beating at the walls like a trapped bird. When another streak of lightning lit the room, her trembling fingers closed around the iron latch. She fled down the winding stairs, her white night rail billowing behind her. She didn’t care if she ran into the devil himself as long as she escaped the echoing nightmare of the tower.

At the bottom of the last step, her foot thudded against something soft and substantial. She tripped and went sprawling.

A pained grunt was followed by a hoarse oath. A metallic click echoed in the sudden silence. Prudence flung her hair out of her eyes to find herself staring straight down the barrel of Sebastian’s pistol.

S
ebastian stood over her, shirtless, his legs braced apart and one eye narrowed down the long black barrel of the pistol.

Prudence threw up her hands. “Don’t shoot me. I’ll never cook again. I swear it.”

Sebastian’s smoldering gaze raked her from head to toe. She rested on her elbows, her night rail dipped between splayed knees. Her unbound hair tumbled down her back in soft disarray. He slowly lowered the weapon, although his ragged breathing did not steady as he had hoped.

Sheepishly, he offered her a hand.

She accepted it, her hand as cool and trembling as a captive bird in his palm. He laced his fingers through hers and drew her up. She glanced at the worn blanket laid over the hard stones at the foot of the stairs.

“This
is where you sleep?” she asked.

“Aye. What of it?” he said brusquely. A light flush burned his cheekbones as he laid the pistol next to a wicked-looking dirk and a blunt-ended cudgel.

Prudence swallowed hard. “What were you going to do? Bludgeon me if I tried to escape?”

He frowned at her. “Just where
were
you going in such haste? You looked as if a banshee was wailing at your heels.”

It was Prudence’s turn to look sheepish. Away from the heart of the storm, the thunder faded to an angry rumble, and the rain tapered to a peaceful beat against the wooden door. Surrounded by the soft flicker of firelight, with Sebastian’s muscular presence so near, she saw her terror as only a childish fright. How could she tell him she had been fleeing a fanciful apparition of his own father?

“I wanted a drink of water,” she said defiantly.

“Indeed.” He lifted an eyebrow. “You could have opened your window and caught a bucket of it if you so desired.”

She looked away to escape his mocking gaze. The remnants of her ruined feast were gone. The floor had been swept clean of broken shards; the cranberry satin was draped neatly over the back of a chair.

“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable sleeping by the fire?” she asked.

Sebastian opened his mouth to tell her where he’d be most comfortable sleeping, but closed it again.

He sank down on the third step and ran a hand through his hair. “And if D’Artan’s men should come while I’m ‘comfortable’? We Scots learned long ago that comfortable men get their throats slit while they sleep.”

Prudence’s brow puckered. So Sebastian had lain here each night, wrapped in a coarse blanket on the cold stone floor, a one-man arsenal stretched across the bottom of the stairs, while she’d nestled on her heather pillow like a princess. The realization gave her a queer feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She sank down beside him in the shadow of the stairs, close enough for their thighs to brush. As they listened to the patter of the rain, the storm wrapped them in a cozy web of intimacy. Prudence realized this was the first time they had been utterly alone. There was no Old Fish sneering down his nose at them, no bandits snoring in the courtyard,
no Jamie to pop out of the wainscoting. She felt like a child left alone at home to bounce on the feather mattresses.

“Do you think D’Artan’s men will come?” she asked.

“They might. If our portrait of domestic bliss isn’t convincing enough.”

“They wouldn’t have found it very convincing tonight.” There was no reproach in her voice, only a musical humor that made Sebastian ache to reach out to her.

He took her hand in his. The shock of his warm fingers against her skin sent a tremor through Prudence.

He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. “Have you come to tell me I behaved like a barbarous Highlander?”

She laughed lightly, trying to hide the shattering effect his touch had on her. “I preferred the barbarous Highlander to the brooding Scot. At least you looked
at
me instead of through me.”

He was looking at her now, though shadows veiled his expression. “Oh, I look at you.” He unfolded her hand and brought it to his lips. With each breath, he pressed a tender kiss to her tingling palm. “I look at you every night while you sleep. With your long legs tangled in the blankets, your lips parted, your face flushed like a babe’s.” He rubbed his nose against the very calluses he had denounced earlier that night.

Prudence pressed her eyes shut, stirred again by the power of words not printed on a page, but whispered in a husky burr as soft as morning mist against her skin. They sang like a hymn through her lonely soul.