Midnight Honor (18 page)

What he wanted to do was throttle her, but he clasped his hands behind his back instead and avoided her gaze the way she had avoided his earlier. He looked out the window in time to see a falcon glide past, floating effortlessly on the wind currents, its wings outstretched and motionless. Only the head moved, the eyes searching relentlessly for prey, the wickedly hooked beak open in anticipation. It required no vast stretch of the imagination to compare the falcon to Major Roger Worsham, for the officer's eyes held the same carnivorous gleam, his expression the same calculating stillness as he studied his quarry.

If Worsham suspected Angus of lying about MacGillivray or Anne, the question that should concern them more became: What would
he
do about it?

Angus knew Anne was watching him, waiting for his answer, and he took a further moment to settle his emotions before he faced her. “What am I going to do? I am going to go home and make the necessary preparations to depart for Edinburgh.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Because I do not see where I have a choice, madam. I am an officer in His Majesty's Royal Scots Infantry, and if I refused to obey a direct order, I would likely find myself a fugitive skulking about in the hills alongside your grandfather and cousins.”

“Or you could say the word, and a thousand good men would join you in marching to meet the prince. If you did, and if you asked me to go with you, I would proudly ride at your side every step of the way.”

“Would you?” He moved forward, his body cutting through the shaft of sunlight as he reached up and took her face between his hands. “What if I asked you to leave with
me now? What if I asked you to come away from here and sail with me to France?”

Her eyes grew even more impossibly wider, bluer. “France?”

“I have friends in Paris; we could stay there until things settled down again. This will all be over in a month, two at the utmost.”

The brief shimmer of hope that had flared in her eyes faded again. Her sense of disbelief and confusion was as easy to read as nearly every other volatile emotion that crossed her face, and for once Angus wished she could be more like the Adrienne de Boules of the world, a blank page on which nothing was written that one did not want to see.

“This is my home,” she said, reaching up to gently but firmly extricate herself from his grasp. “It is where I belong. Running away will not change anything, nor will it do anything to breach this wall you have thrown up between us.”

Her rejection, her condemnation cut him to the bone, and he doubted she would listen now even if he did attempt to explain that the wall had been put there deliberately to try to save her from the very pain she was feeling now.

He stared at her mouth, remembering how willing and eager it had been to answer his whispered pleas only two brief nights ago. How in God's name was he supposed to just turn around and walk out that door knowing that if he did so, she would hate him? How would he be able to close his eyes again and not see her, not hear her, not be haunted by the image of her body moving urgently beneath his?

His arms dropped down by his sides. “I'm sorry. I should have known better than to … well, I just should have known better. Please forgive me, and forgive this intrusion. I will not disturb you again.”

“Angus—?”

“All things considered,” he added curtly, “perhaps it is for the best that you stay here. There are no battlements or cannon mounted on the walls of Drummuir House, but I warrant you will be safer here with my mother blocking the doors than you would be anywhere else. And … if you can … I suggest you get a message to MacGillivray; convince him to remove himself from Dunmaglass for a while. He might not
be too open to taking advice from me at the moment, but Worsham is as bloody-minded as they come, and it would be wise if John put himself out of reach.”

“I will send a warning to him,” she said, bowing her head, refusing to let him see how close she was to tears. “Thank you.”

“Do not thank me, Anne. If he was standing before me right now I would be more inclined to give him to Worsham myself than expose you to any further risk.”

Startled, she looked up into his face, but there was nothing there to ease the tightness in her chest. The mask was firmly in place, his eyes so cool and distant she could scarcely believe he had just asked her to run away with him to France.

The constricting pressure became too much to bear and she turned her face away, missing the action of his hand as it rose toward her shoulder. It stopped the width of a prayer away from touching her before the long, tapered fingers curled into a tight fist and withdrew.

“If you need anything while I'm gone, you know where I keep the strongbox.”

“I will be fine. I bid you have a safe journey to Edinburgh. An unsuccessful one, to be sure, but safe.”

He studied her profile, saw the bright jewel of a tear trembling at the corner of her eye, and he knew if he did not leave at once, that very moment, he would not be able to leave at all.

“If there is nothing more—?”

“No,” she whispered. “There is nothing more we need to say to each other.”

Angus nodded. Moving woodenly, he retrieved his hat and gloves from the chair, then glanced back at the window. Anne had not moved. She stood fully in the path of the sunbeam, the light turning her skin luminous, gilding the flown wisps of her hair fiery red and gold.

“Shall I write from Edinburgh?”

“If it pleases you to do so.”

He expelled a breath and put his hand on the doorknob. “I'll write, then.”

The door opened easily enough but his feet could not seem to make it fully across the threshold without stopping again.

“Anne … I know I have been somewhat of a disappointment to you lately, that I have likely not proven to be the husband of your dreams. But regardless of what happens or does not happen in the coming weeks, I do not want to leave without telling you that I have considered myself a very lucky man these past four years. Extraordinarily lucky, in fact, and I … I want to thank you for that. Perhaps some day, when this is over, you might even be able to find it in your heart to forgive me.”

Anne said nothing—she could not; she was crying too hard—and a moment later, the door clicked softly shut behind him.

Chapter Nine

J
ohn MacGillivray woke to the sound of whispered voices. They were low and indistinct, clouded by the quantity of harsh spirits he had downed the night before. He had barely made it home to Dunmaglass from Culloden, and when he'd stripped off his blood-soaked waistcoat and shirt and seen the torn stitches, he had known there was only one way to seal the raw edges of flesh. As luck would have it, he had found Gillies MacBean curled up on the floor in front of the hearth fire, his plaid wrapped around his shoulders, the prodigious depth of his snores indicating he had not been sleeping long. Following the skirmish with the English soldiers, it had been his duty to escort Fearchar Farquharson deeper into the hills and to settle him with a strong guard of clansmen. Jamie Farquharson had returned to Dunmaglass with Gillies and was stretched out beside him on the hearth, his plaid likewise pulled over his head.

Before the whisky had taken hold of MacGillivray's senses, he had ordered Gillies to thrust the blade of a knife into the fire and heat it red hot. When the steel was glowing and the bottle of whisky was empty, John had gripped the side of the table and ordered Jamie to hold his arms. He had snarled at MacBean to do it right the first time, for he had his hand on his sword, a fine pistol on his hip, and he would not hesitate to use them on the two fools if they blundered.

The smell of burning skin and sizzling blood had set every iron-hard muscle to trembling, every nerve screaming, but the pain had been mercifully brief before he had slumped forward into a drunken stupor.

Now he was hearing the whispers. They overlapped and seemed to echo within themselves, the words becoming a muddle of shushes and wheeshts and soft feminine sighs. He remained very still, afraid to open his eyes lest he find himself suspended on white clouds with heaven above and the fires of hell below and a flock of serious-minded seraphs debating whither he be sent, up or down.

Something icy cool touched his forehead and he opened his eyes a slit, relieved to see no bright lights, no diaphanous wings hovering over him. The whispering had stopped as well, but he sensed he was not quite in the clear yet, for there was a lingering specter standing by the side of the bed. For half an eternity, he just stared. If it wasn't an angel then it was something sent by the devil: a wee spookie his mother used to call them, a vision of something you dreamed about so long or wanted so badly that the devil used it to torment your soul.

His own personal chimera was just standing there looking down at him. Her face was a pale oval in the lamplight, her hair spilled around her shoulders in a shimmer of flames. She wore a white shirt and men's trews, and he could see where her breasts pushed softly against the cambric, unhindered by any foolish whalebone garments.

If it was a vision, it was real enough to tempt his hand upward. And when his hand encountered solid flesh, he could no more control the desire to pull her down beside him than he could the need to draw her beneath him and sink his flesh into her until the vision faded and disappeared.

Anne gasped when she felt MacGillivray's hand close around her wrist. Having been assured by Gillies MacBean that he was still sleeping his way through a heavy fog of whisky, she had remained behind a moment, intending only to straighten the covers he had thrown off and perhaps take a cloth to the beads of moisture that gleamed on his brow. She had felt no signs of fever when she touched his skin, but standing this close to the bed she had
seen what the shadows and disheveled covers had shielded from the view she'd had inside the doorway.

His entire left side was exposed in a magnificent display of strength and sinewed power, from his shoulder down the extraordinary length of his body to his toes. His chest might have been chiseled out of solid granite, his arms and shoulders of oak. His legs were furred with hair as blond as that on his head, with tufts of copper sprouting at his armpits, thicker and darker at his groin. Nesting there was evidence that the rumors she'd heard about his prowess had more than a little foundation in fact. And there was where her gaze stalled and her breath stopped, for even as she watched, his flesh began to stir and grow.

When his fingers curled around her wrist, she was sufficiently off balance to offer no resistance as she was pulled forward and down onto the bed beside him. The startled cry that formed in her throat was smothered when his mouth crushed over hers, and no sooner did she part her lips to attempt another cry, than his tongue launched an instant, lusty invasion. She tried to twist free, but he was already rolling on top of her, trapping her legs beneath his, and trying to push against him was like trying to push a mountain out of the way—one with determined hands, hot lips, and a shockingly huge protrusion of flesh that was already jutting thick between her thighs.

His tongue swept her mouth and probed deep on each thrust, reducing her cries to strangled gasps. When he shifted, cursing the trews that proved a stronger deterrent than her frustrated cries, she renewed her struggles and this time, the heel of her hand caught him high on the wounded shoulder, causing him to jerk back with a roar of pain.

For the moment it took his senses to clear, he glared down at her, his lips drawn back in a primal snarl. The long golden locks of his hair had fallen forward, the ends tickling her cheek, the denser mass near the scalp throwing up more shadows to mask his face from the light, but there was enough to see his expression turn from rapine lust to blinking confusion.

“Annie? Ye're real, then?”

“Of course I'm real, you great oaf. Heave off me!”

“Christ,” he gasped, easing back. “Christ, Annie … I'm
sorry. I didna ken … I mean, I thought ye were … For the love o' God, what's that stench?”

“I am afraid the stench is of your own making,” she said, glancing pointedly at the blackened flesh over his wound. Glistening under the shiny layer of unguent Gillies had applied to ward off infection, the smell was similar to that of rotted fish.

He released her at once and, seeing how further disturbed the covers had become, snatched them hastily above his waist. Anne wriggled free. With her mouth still wet and pulsing with the taste of him, she scrambled clumsily off the bed and retreated to a safe distance. There she attempted to cover her embarrassment by tugging her clothes back into order.

John rolled onto his back and gazed around the room in further bewilderment. “This is ma bedroom, is it no'?”

Anne cast an acerbic eye around the piles of clothing thrown hither and yon, the half-f slop jar at the side of the bed, the globs of congealed wax on the table where oil and a good scrubbing stone had rarely ventured. “It would appear so.”

“What the devil are ye doin' here? What time is it?”

“It is past four in the afternoon, and I've come from Drummuir House to return a favor.”