Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] Read online

  A soothing pleasure aided by Janet’s delicate hand.

  At the thought, green-tinged chills stabbed up and down Amicia’s back. Sweet Mary Mother, of his sincere-sounding speech she’d heard scarce little beyond those two damning words.

  A hot-glowing flush sprang onto her cheeks. “If you would not hurt me, then do not send me away,” she stressed, disregarding her pride even if he wielded his own like an impenetrable shield. “I pray you, do not suffer me the shame or anguish of returning me to Baldoon.”

  He raised a brow at that, but glanced aside, his face set as if carved of the same cold granite as his castle home. A long, awkward silence stretched between them, broken only by the soft patter of rain on the stone flags of the wall-walk and the hollow whistle of the wind.

  “The only shame is mine to bear, my lady, for it will take me overlong to repay your brother the dowry moneys already spent.” He kept his gaze fixed on the distant horizon. “As for suffering, Doon is a well-favored isle, Baldoon one of the finest strongholds—”

  “I bid you to honor my own perception of shame and suffering,” she countered, deflecting his objections as ably as a well-practiced knight parries an opponent’s sword thrusts. “Would you but know me better, you’d see the folly of your words.”

  Magnus swallowed, moistened lips gone suddenly dry. “But I am thinking of you, lass,” he said, and hoped the words didn’t sound as insipid to her ears as they did to his own. “I would not keep you here, bound to a man without enough coin to feed you properly much less—”

  “I will not go back.” She folded her arms, her dark eyes flashing rebellion.

  Drawn by that fire, and the underlying note of desperation she couldn’t quite disguise, Magnus cursed himself for a fool, enchanted, when he should have been mightily vexed.

  Ne’er had any female spoken thus to him, but the slight quaver in her voice and the rapid-beating pulse at the base of her throat belied her mettle, and saints help him, but he wanted to cradle her against his chest and comfort her.

  Her scent—warm, womanly, and laced with a faint touch of heather—made him long for succor.

  The dark, languorous kind he hadn’t enjoyed in more years than he cared to admit.

  Mayhap never, were he honest.

  He frowned, tried not to inhale too deeply. Or note the agitated rise and fall of her breasts. Notably lush breasts. Even the heavy lie of her cloak couldn’t hide their bounty. Magnus stifled a groan. Keeping her would prove a greater trial than any he’d ever faced on the tourney field.

  Her indisputable charms would not be so easily ignored as the dubious offerings of the less than savory light skirts e’er so eager to spread their legs for jousting champions or, truth be told, any knight or lairdling with a siller or two to spare.

  As if aware of his quandary and the power she held over him, she moved closer, her imploring gaze searing his soul. Sakes, he couldn’t budge a muscle if his life depended on it—she befuddled him beyond all good reason.

  “I appeal to your knightly honor, sir,” she said, not batting an eye. “Please reconsider your desire to nullify our marriage.”

  Magnus near choked. She had no idea of the kind of desire she unleashed in him.

  “It is because of my honor that I would see you returned,” he said, lighting his fingers to the glossy black braid coiled over her ear. A grave error in judgment, for the cool silkiness of her hair launched an immediate assault on his fortitude. “I may be sore weary from what transpired at Dupplin Moor, but I am ever yet a man. Think you I could know you beneath my roof—as my own lady wife—and not touch you?”

  She stepped closer. A ploy that worked, for those scant few inches of nearness and the dangerously seductive sensuality flowing out from her set his body on fire and had him beyond all coherent thought.

  “You are much mistaken if you believe I am asking you not to touch me,” she was saying, her clean, heathery scent stealing his breath. “I only plead you not to shame me by sending me back.”

  “I—” Magnus broke off at once and frowned. Now he could not even get words past his fool tongue!

  “Or would you risk rekindling our clans’ old enmity by shunning me?”

  The softly spoken words split through the sensual haze that had been fogging his wits. “’Twas a stolen bride that began the feud between our families, not a returned one.”

  “A shunned bride is the greater insult, is it not?”

  A surge of ill ease crashed through Magnus. He blew out a frustrated breath. Where he’d only hoped to soothe, he now stood on thinnest ice. There had been strife off and on between their clans for centuries—even if no one could say which clan originally stole whose bride.

  The tradition had been born and every hundred years or so, a MacKinnon—or a MacLean—bride or betrothed found herself snatched away in the dark of night, ne’er to be seen again until her belly swelled with her captor’s get.

  And so the feuding would begin anew.

  “You are neither stolen nor shunned,” Magnus said, a great weariness settling on his shoulders. “Your brothers know that. They will not be looking to violate our truce when I but seek to uphold your honor.”

  “My honor or your pride?”

  Magnus could not answer her.

  “There are other reasons I would ask you not to send me away,” she said after a few moments of silence. “I would appeal to you to spare me a future as a smiled-upon-but-pitied clanswoman at another woman’s table. I would have . . . I only wish a husband and family of my own.”

  When he still did not answer, she peered at him, earnest challenge all over her beautiful face. “In return for keeping me, you may touch or have me any way it pleases you.”

  This time, Magnus did choke. “This is madness . . . allowing you to stay,” he spluttered, seeing his doom in the quick flash of triumph in her eyes. “Purest folly.”

  “Then you will not send me away?”

  Wordless, Magnus shook his head.

  “I thank you, sir.” She beamed at him, and even old Boiny, the mangy turncoat, looked pleased. “You shall not regret your decision, I promise you.”

  His decision?

  Magnus almost snorted. Instead, he merely inclined his head, and hoped it appeared as a tired nod rather than a defeated one.

  “Dagda tells me she’s been planning a celebratory feast,” he said, hoping to regain some semblance of control in a world spinning fast out of his grasp. “Once it is held, I will join you in old Reginald’s chambers of a night, and you shall serve as Coldstone’s chatelaine. As befits my wife. If any question your position, I shall have words with them. But between us, my lady, in the sanctity of our bedchamber, I pray you not to expect much of me.”

  “You are a true knight,” his newly accepted wife said, not needing many words.

  A blind man could see that she reveled in her victory.

  And that she wholly expected to tear down whatever safeguards and boundaries he’d just attempted to erect.

  “Then I shall bid you a good night, fair lady.” He took her hand and brushed a light kiss across her knuckles before he strode for the tower door.

  It took all his strength not to run.

  But once he’d stepped into the enveloping shadows of the stairwell, and knew himself shielded from her dark, all-seeing eyes, he gave in to his frustration and descended the downward winding stairs at a most unknightly pace.

  Chapter Four

  HE’D STEPPED INTO THE WRONG GREAT HALL.

  Or he hadn’t, and the transformation leaping out at him from every nook and cranny was the reason his da had dragged his feet and muttered imprecations beneath his breath every step of their way down the winding turnpike stair.

  Frozen by disbelief and no little irritation, Magnus stood in the shadows near the stair-foot and surveyed the early morning scene. As in every hall at such an hour, men sat huddled in plaids around the crackling log fire, its reddish glow illuminating their sleep-bleary faces.

&nb
sp; Others yet sprawled upon their pallets while not a few still lolled at the trestle tables, their heads resting on folded arms. Or, in some cases, in pools of spilled and soured ale. Someone somewhere plucked at the strings of a lute.

  His brother Hugh, no doubt, though he could not be sure as too much darkness yet filled the smoky hall for him to pick out his youngest sibling amongst the gathered kinsmen.

  Nevertheless, enough pitch-pine torches sputtered and hissed in their iron-bracketed holders along the walls for him to well assess the damage.

  Even if some would call the differences . . . improvements.

  Sensing movement, Magnus shot out a hand and curled firm fingers around his father’s elbow, deftly staying the old laird’s feet before he could slink back up the stairs.

  “What folly is this?” Magnus cut the air with his free hand, indicated the vastness of a hall he scarce recognized as being theirs. “Saints of glory, but I have now seen it all. This is too much . . . !”

  Donald MacKinnon gave an uncomfortable shrug. “The years have not been kind to us, son. Can you not see the changes as long-needed enhancements?”

  Magnus said nothing. God helping him, the only enhancement he could endorse was the layer of pleasantly scented meadowsweet someone had sprinkled atop the newly spread floor rushes.

  Everything else he could do without.

  Even the pleasing aroma of wood smoke.

  His temples beginning to throb again, he drew a deep breath and released it slowly. He liked the choking sting of smoldering peat. Relished it, in fact. He’d cut his teeth on its smoky-sweet bite and ne’er resented that, save on rare celebratory occasions, log fires proved too dear for Clan Fingon’s thin-sided purses.

  But the log fire wasn’t all that vexed him.

  New tapestries hung everywhere, jewel-toned colors screaming their worth, while scattered groupings of heavy silver candelabrums, each one topped with real wax tapers, crowded the long tables.

  Of such luxurious fripperies, he wanted naught.

  Not when the plentitude had been paid for with merks taken from the Lady Amicia’s overflowing coffers.

  And without doubt they had been.

  The guilty flush stealing across his father’s face confirmed it.

  “I cannot condone this.” Magnus frowned, each colorful thread in the new tapestries, each eye-catching gleam of silver glinting off the candlesticks, a dirk thrust in his pride. “We can ne’er repay such splendor.”

  “You needn’t glare holes in me,” Donald MacKinnon defended the opulence. With a show of strength that would have delighted Magnus at any other time, he shook himself free of his son’s grasp.

  Belligerence sparking in his eyes, the aged laird thrust out his chin. “Nary a coin from your lady wife’s dowry went toward any of this,” he declared. “’Tis wedding gifts you’re a-looking at—all of it. From the MacLeans, and from their sundry friends and allies throughout the Isles. Even the high table—”

  “The high table?” Magnus started at once for the raised dais at the upper end of the hall.

  “Aye, so I said—the MacLeans gifted us with a new one, complete with a finely carved laird’s chair.” His father hurried to catch up with him. “They even sent along a matching chair for your lady.”

  Magnus could only grunt in response. The neck opening of his tunic suddenly proved too tight for him to press a more coherent reply past his throat.

  Mmmmmph would have to suffice.

  That, and a good dark scowl.

  Furtive glances slid his way from those men already awake and breaking their fast, but each time he glanced in anyone’s direction, the offender made a great show of buttering a bannock or leaning down to offer a tidbit to one of the many hounds begging about the hall.

  Other eyes observed him, too.

  Eyes well-hidden in shadow so none would notice the simmering malice a certain someone couldn’t quite tamp down since the MacKinnon heir and his dastard father had emerged from the stair tower—for their appearance gave irrefutable confirmation that the morning’s attempt to have done with the ever-greedy lairdie had met failure.

  “I kept my own chair,” Donald MacKinnon prattled, giving his son a sidelong look. “It is no so fine as the new, but will serve for the now.”

  “The whole of the old table would have served,” Magnus snapped, stepping around a sleeping clansman. “A mercy, Da, that table has stood on the dais since before your grandsire’s day. Christ’s wounds—what happened to your sense of family tradition?”

  “The only tradition this clan has hanging ’bout its neck is that damnable curse,” the old laird muttered as they made their way past row upon row of bench-lined trestle tables.

  New trestles and benches, Magnus noted, the discovery causing the throbbing at his temples to increase to a most disagreeable hammering across the whole of his forehead.

  “The old table had to go, and none too soon,” his father insisted, puffing out his cheeks. “Its wood had grown wormier than a lochan’s bank in spring.”

  “I dinna care . . .” Magnus froze, his heart slamming hard against his chest. “Saints alive—they are grown men!”

  His jaw dropping, he stared toward the magnificent new high table but saw only the two strapping young men slouched fast asleep across its black-gleaming surface.

  His younger brother, Hugh, snored, his head resting mere inches from a platter of untouched oatcakes. Hugh’s burnished auburn hair, so like Magnus’s own if a wee shade lighter, glinted gold in the candlelight.

  Dugan, his middle brother, and dark as Colin Grant or any MacLean, slept too soundly to snore. He’d cushioned his strikingly handsome face on arms that looked every bit as well-muscled as Magnus’s own.

  The transformation clutched hard around Magnus’s rib cage and made breathing difficult. Saints, where had the time gone?

  “God have mercy,” he got out at last, his deep voice thick with emotion. “They are grown men,” he said again, and ran a none-too-steady hand through his hair.

  A few short years on the tourney circuit and his spindly-legged little brothers now looked to match him in size and brawn. Dugan even sported a lush and curly beard!

  Magnus scrunched his eyes, blinked a few times, half-expecting these two strangers to be miraculously restored to the smooth-faced, skinny-shouldered youths he remembered. When next he looked, though, no such change manifested.

  “Hech, laddie,” his father snorted, lowering himself into his chair. “Did you think to come home and find your brothers yet beardless?”

  “I thought . . .” Magnus shook his head, blew out a quick breath. “I canna say. I do not know what I thou—”

  “You ought think of the depredations this household has suffered and be glad-hearted to have a bride able and willing to help you out of these ill-plagued times.” Dagda plunked two wine flagons on the high table, then poured a brimming cup for Donald MacKinnon.

  Leveling a stern look at Magnus, she clucked her tongue. “Consider the good it will do your brothers to have a new fleet of galleys to command. They are men full seasoned now, both too old to waste their days lolling about this broken-down pile o’ stanes with naught to do but sing verses to moonbeams and swing their swords at dust motes.”

  Magnus smiled at her—one of the rare times he’d smiled at all in recent weeks, and of a certainty, his first since setting foot on MacKinnons’ Isle.

  He also noted the increased number of silver strands in the dark braids wound tightly around her head. And there was a new, ne’er-before-there puffiness beneath her eyes.

  Looking at her, something hot and jabbing caught at his throat. Far from young before he’d left, Coldstone’s e’er-capable seneschal had aged much in his absence.

  “Ah, but you speak from my heart, dear Dagda,” he vowed, purposely laying on a light tone. “I, too, would see my brothers well-occupied and know this holding in finest order . . . including its once-great fleet.” He accepted the wine cup she offered him, took a sip.
“I would but see to these ambitions with my own good coin. There alone we differ.”

  “I warned he would see this proxy marriage as an ill-advised adventure.” Janet stepped from the shadows, a large platter of green cheese and hot, crusty bread balanced against her hip.

  She slid a heated glance to the window embrasure across the hall where Lady Amicia sat listening to Colin Grant strum tunes on Hugh’s borrowed lute.

  Following her gaze, Magnus’s brows snapped together. His wife—wanted or nay—had removed her cloak, and torchlight spilling into the deep-set alcove caressed each one of her lush curves and cast a high shine onto her glossy, black-gleaming braids.

  Most annoying of all, she was beaming at Colin Grant!

  His jaw clamping, Magnus turned back to the high table. He’d have a word with his womanizing friend later.

  Battle-injured or nay.

  “. . . Magnus will soon be sending her away,” Janet was saying, her voice ringing with pettiness. “Their marriage is not legitimate without a proper bedding, and he does not want her. Not her riches or her . . . her body!”

  Magnus near spewed his wine.

  His wife’s delectable body had occupied him far longer than any present would guess.

  Truth was, were he made differently, he’d march across the hall this minute, flip up her skirts, and show the world just how much he wanted her! How very able he was to enjoy the bounteous charms his lute-strumming friend ogled so freely, damn his serenading hide.

  Janet set her platter of cheese and bread on the table. “Without a bedding—”

  “Bedding?” Dugan’s eyes snapped open. “What fair maid is in need of a tumble?” Sitting upright, he glanced round. “I shall tender my services to any lass in need thereof!” he announced, a roguish grin spreading across his face . . . until his gaze fell upon Magnus.

  “By the Rood—Magnus!” Leaping to his feet, he bounded around the table to throw his arms around Magnus in a bone-crushing hug.

  After a moment, he stepped back to give his older brother a thorough and sweeping scrutiny. “Sakes, but it is good to see you . . . even if I can scarce keep my eyes open to look upon you at this scourge of an ungodly hour.”