Page 58 of Highland Fire
Half-crouched over, they circled warily.
“Now what’s brought this on—as if I didn’t know?” taunted Peter, and quickly sidestepped Rand’s furious lunge. “This time you are not going to have everything your own way, big brother. At last we are evenly matched.”
Rand snorted. “What? You think you are ready to take me? Halfling, you are still wet behind the ears.”
Peter’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Is that so? I don’t think Caitlin would agree with you. Why don’t you ask her?”
Caitlin’s eyes moved between them. There was a recklessness here that made her tremble. The indolence which she had taken to be a characteristic of all the English Randals was no longer evident. “Please,” she said. “Please.”
Both men charged at the same moment. Locked together, they crashed into a small table, overturning it, and Caitlin let out a shriek.
Eyes staring, fist to her mouth, she watched them in horror.
Peter had his knee in Rand’s back and was pounding his brother’s head against the floor.
Frantically looking around for some way to stop the fight she ran to the hearth and fetched a poker.
“Please,” she begged them, “this has got to stop!” And she waved the poker helplessly in front of her face.
With a heave and a shove, Rand reached for his brother’s leg. The edge of his hand caught it such a blow that Peter let out a howl and rolled over onto his side, clutching his kneecap.
“You hurt him!” Caitlin wailed.
“God, I hope so!” grunted Rand, and sprawled on top of him. Breath coming through clenched teeth, he locked Peter in position, face down, one arm twisted behind him, his head pulled back by the force of Rand’s free arm.
“Don’t hurt him! My God, if you don’t stop, you’ll break his neck!” She was sobbing with fright, hopping from one foot to the other.
Her words only aggravated the situation. Rand’s hold tightened. Through his clenched teeth, he grated, “This is what you may expect, halfling, when you make up to my wife.”
Peter’s only answer was a choked-off gurgle.
Caitlin raised the poker high above her head. “Rand,” she pleaded, “don’t force me to hurt you! Please!”
“Don’t be so dramatic…” He broke off as Peter’s open palm hammered the floor, the signal that he was conceding defeat. Rand let him go at once.
Breathing hard, both gentlemen pushed themselves up to sit cross-legged. Peter’s hands were at his throat and his jaw worked. Caitlin was clutching the poker in a death grip as she waited in terror to see what they would do next.
It was Rand who extended his right hand first. “You are getting quite adept,” he allowed generously.
Peter grimaced as he clasped Rand’s outstretched hand. “Tell that to my sore throat.”
Aware of a sudden stillness, they both looked up at Caitlin. Stomping her foot, she emptied the ink pot over both blond heads, then went stomping out of the room.
The ball was long over, and Rand and Caitlin faced each other across the width of their bedchamber. Only moments before, Rand had dismissed Caitlin’s maid. His eyes were wary. Hers were simmering.
“I believe I owe you an apology,” he said.
He sounded faintly uneasy. Good. She was going to make him cringe before this was over. “I suppose you think it amusing, terrifying the life out of me like that? I thought you meant to kill each other.”
“No, did you? We always settle arguments with a wrestling bout.”
“Someone might have told me.” Her voice was frigid.
His was placating. “Couldn’t you tell that it was only playacting—more or less?”
“You came within a hairbreadth of having your brains bashed in by a poker.”
His eyebrows lifted. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s what you deserved!”
Smiling, he touched his fingers to his swollen eye and the bump on his forehead.
“I think I got more than I deserved, certainly more than I bargained for. Peter is getting to be quite skillful. And you had your revenge with the ink pot.” He combed his fingers through his wet hair.
“I’m going to have your mark on me for many a long day.
The stuff is almost impossible to wash out. ”
“What I can’t understand is what set you off. You didn’t ask any questions. You didn’t wait for explanations. You charged in there like a bull on the rampage. Why?”
He shrugged carelessly. “Peter is at a bad age. You know how it is.”
She looked at him blankly, but he did not explain himself. “It was all very innocent,” she assured him.
“Yes, I know. You were discussing…manure.”
His smile won no answering smile from her, but rather ignited her temper. “We were discussing Scotland,” she snapped.
At the mention of Scotland, the laughter in his eyes went cold, and suddenly Caitlin did not care about taking a petty revenge for the fright he had given her. Other things of far more significance must be settled between them.
Breathing deeply, choosing her words with care, she said, “When you brought me here, Rand, it was on the understanding that we should divide our time between England and Scotland. It seems to me you have had a change of heart?”
“No. Let us just say you assumed too much.”
Her eyes went wide, and she curled and uncurled her fingers. “I assumed too much?” she said faintly, then rallying, “But, Rand, you must see that I have responsibilities in Scotland. I can’t turn my back on them.”
“What responsibilities?”
“Fiona for one. She’s just at an age when—”
“Fine! We’ll have her come to Cranley, give her a season in London, if you think you are up to it.”
Nothing in her expression betrayed that his barb had found its mark. “My grandfather is not getting any younger. Is he to come to Cranley too?”
“Your grandfather is as strong as an ox. If his health were to break down that would be a different matter entirely.”
Her brows were knit, and she was studying him as though he were a stranger whose face she could not quite place. “In the past, you used to visit Deeside every year for the hunting season.”
“I may do so again, if the fancy takes me.”
A sudden involuntary movement of her hand sent the chair toppling to its side.
Ignoring it, she advanced upon him. The words burst from her passionately.
“I thought you were coming round to my way of thinking. Rand, you are chief of a great clan. You bear a proud and honorable name. You can’t just turn your back on Scotland.
There is so much to do there. Peter said so himself.
Everything here is perfect. Your life lacks challenge.
Don’t you see, in Deeside you would find that challenge? ”
“Ah. At last we come to the crux of the matter.”
His arms were folded across his chest; his smile was not quite a sneer. Shaking his head, he said softly, “Tell me, my sweet, do you really suppose that I am such a slave to your beauty, your wit, and your delectable body that I will allow you free rein to order my life to suit yourself?”
Herein lay his chagrin. When his mother had questioned him, oh so casually, on the nature of his feelings for Caitlin, the truth had hit him with all the velocity of a runaway carriage.
He had loved her almost from the moment he had set eyes on her.
Not that he had known it. Like most of his sex, he had never been in the habit of searching his emotions, trying to identify what he was feeling.
He wanted her. He delighted in her. She stirred something in him, an odd mixture of tenderness and possessiveness that no woman had ever touched.
He had not looked beyond that until his mother had prodded him.
The knowledge that he loved Caitlin did not make him happy. He burned to know what she felt for him. She had never said the words to him, words he had heard from the lips of a score of women in his time, words he was very adept at turning aside. No woman had ever heard them from him.
This was not the only cause for his chagrin.
The suspicion was growing in him that the only thing Caitlin loved, was capable of loving, was a tract of rocky land in the Highlands of Scotland—Deeside.
Peter had confirmed Lady Margaret’s poisonous remarks, and if that were not enough to convince him, David’s avowal that he meant to return to Scotland if he survived Waterloo confirmed it.
Caitlin’s devotion to the Highlands of Scotland was almost fanatical.
There was nothing she would not do to draw others to her cause.
How differently now he viewed his former indulgence of her—the free hand he had allowed her in setting Strathcairn to rights.
With Caitlin, that had been only the first step in her campaign to make his Scottish estates into a showplace.
If she had given him the only words he wanted to hear, he would have laid the world at her feet.
Without them, every word, every look, every inflection must be minutely examined. Scotland had become the testing ground.
“A slave of my what?” She gave a small gasping laugh. “Rand, you must be confusing me with another lady, or you have taken leave of your senses.”
“Do you deny that you are using me for you own ends?”
Guilty color stole up her throat, into her pale cheeks. “Why, whatever do you mean?”
“That innocent stare may work very well with Peter, but I am alert to all your wiles. There is nothing you will not do, no trick to which you will not stoop, in order to get your own way.”
“Are we talking about Scotland?”
“You know very well that we are. Well, let me tell you, you overreached yourself this time, my pet. Throwing down the gauntlet to my brothers with that barefaced wager! Filling Peter’s head full of ideas about the challenge that awaits him in Deeside!
What next will you try? Is my mother to become your next target, or perhaps one of my sisters?
One thing is certain: you won’t find me as easily duped as I once was.
The Highlands of Scotland, and Deeside in particular, will no longer be at issue between us.
As far as I am concerned, they are not worth the price. ”
She stared at him for the space of several heartbeats while the blood in her veins turned to ice. “What are you saying?” she asked hoarsely.
His eyes raked her. “A mistress barters her beauty and sexual favors for money. My dear, you missed your calling. Need I say more?”
She wasn’t hurt. She was furious. After everything that had passed between them!
The torrid nights! The long, intimate conversations!
The shared laughter! After everything she had done for him!
Giving up her home in Scotland! Trying to fill the role of mistress of Cranley!
Accepting his crazy family as if they did not belong in Bedlam!
And this was how he saw her! He thought she had prostituted herself for a few acres of land.
“You won’t try to pretend, I hope, that you love me?” His voice was strained and there was a stillness about him that mystified her.
“Love,” she said scornfully. “That is a word that does not exist in my vocabulary any more than it exists in yours. Do you know what your trouble is, Rand? You don’t know how to be friends with a woman. Friendship…affection…Oh, what’s the use—we’ve had this conversation before.”
A muscle in his cheek clenched, but he spoke without heat. “Are you, by any chance, holding David up to me again?”
“I’m not saying David was a paragon, but he knew how to be friends with a woman.”
“A soul mate, in fact.” His lip curled.
She glared up at him. “He was wrong about you. He thought that once your days with Wellington were over, once you had done your duty to your country, you would remember the duty you owed to your clan. But you don’t really care a straw about the Clan Randal, do you?”
“In a word, no.”
Swiftly moving to the bed, she pounded her pillows the way she wanted to pound his head. “You won’t be sleeping with me tonight, so don’t even think it,” she told him.
He smiled nastily. “How like a woman! A headache, my sweet? Don’t despair, I have just the remedy to cure it.”
She allowed him to get one knee on the bed before, smiling sweetly, she said, “It’s the wrong time of month, and if you can cure that , I and women the world over will be forever in your debt.”
With a stream of muffled profanities, he slammed into his own chamber.