Page 19 of The Passionate One (McClairen’s Isle #1)

What little light came through the window did not reach Ash’s face. He didn’t say a word. He just stood over her, like a child’s golem, a construct of darkness and earth, holding her like a child’s cloth doll. Only the violence of his grip bespoke the deep well of anger his silence could not quite contain.

Well, Rhiannon, too, was angry. Years of obeisance fell from her like rusty shackles. Fair Badden had been an opiate, a sweet illusion of kindness and gentleness. But she’d only needed to pass beyond its borders to be wakened to the world she’d left behind, one of treachery, desperation, and deceit.

She pitched herself against his hold and he released her. She fell back on the bed on stiff arms.

“Is that what you think?” he whispered.

“What else?” she spat up at him. She was not half dead with fatigue now, not lost in a labyrinth of hellish, living memories. She knew where she was, what she was doing … what was being done to her. She’d fought once and survived. She would fight again.

“I’m taking you to my father’s to keep you from being killed.”

“You are too good.” Even as she jeered, some misbegotten part of her wanted him to convince her that he believed what he said. Even if it was madness, madness she could forgive. But he was not mad, nor misguided. He was simply a devil.

He didn’t expend the paltry effort of a reply.

“I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by telling me this,” she said, in spite of herself. “Why would someone want to hurt me or kill me? Why would Phillip want to kill me?”

His gaze slipped away from hers and she noted the involuntary act with bitter conviction. He would lie now. “Watt did not want this marriage. He may not even know why himself. Perhaps his father was forcing him to it and he saw no other way to escape.”

She laughed. “Not want this marriage? I went to him yesterday, to tell him what I had done. He wouldn’t let me, even though it was clear from what he said in the forest that he suspected. Is that the act of a man looking for a way out of a marriage?”

“You were going to tell Watt? Why?” He sounded shocked. “You asked me not to tell him.”

“Of course.” She bit off the words. “Because I feared you would say it in such a way that he had no recourse but to call you out—just as you did. You told him in the crudest manner possible. I could not have gone to my marriage bed with that lie waiting to be discovered and I would not have deceived him. But you would have no understanding of that, would you, Lord Janus?”

A flinch? More likely contained laughter.

“None at all,” he said. “I was going to advise you to prick your thumb as he slept and smear your thighs.”

She felt the blood flee from her face, her skin grow cold, but she was stronger now. She ignored his crudeness.

“What I would like to know is why you have even bothered weaving this pitiful story,” she said. “I would think a man of your talents would have at least come up with some better tale.” Her lip curled back in as much contempt for herself as for him. “In fact, why fabricate this Banbury tale about assassins at all? I mean, you have the bloody letter naming you my surrogate guardian, don’t you?”

She peered through the darkness, trying to find some sign she’d struck a human chord in that inhumanely still countenance. All she could see was moonlight shimmering over his black hair.

“You didn’t really need an excuse to take me, did you?” she insisted.

“No,” he finally answered in that cool, dead voice.

She could hear his breathing, the slight draw and exhalation, light, measured, as if he were consciously regulating it.

“So if you don’t mean to rape me—and make no mistake, that is the only way you will ever again take your pleasure between my legs—what do you want?” With bitter satisfaction she heard the small, sharp inhalation of his breath. Pain or anger, it made no difference to her, as long as it discomforted him.

She waited for his answer, head up. A long moment passed.

“Don’t you know?” he finally ground out.

“Money,” she said flatly. It made sense. In hindsight his entire stay in Fair Badden had been one, long, well-orchestrated bit of dodgery: the charming, unsuccessful fumbler slowly transformed into a peerlessly lucky gamester.

“There’ll be no money from Mrs. Fraiser,” she promised. “The lands and everything on it are entailed to her son and he’s far beyond the reach of your stratagems.”

No reply.

She bent forward into the light from the window so that he could see her contempt, read her disdain.

“You’ve no chance of blackmailing anyone into paying for my return.” A small satisfaction, but she would take what she could. “Whatever Phillip might want, Squire Watt will never accept me as his daughter-in-law now.”

“So sure? I’m not.”

She shook her head, and the long, tangled skeins of her hair settled around her cheeks and throat like a widow’s webbed veil. “He might overlook the lack of a dowry but not the lack of a maidenhead.”

“Oh, Rhiannon, I assure you, you’ve more to recommend to that particular marriage than a simple intact piece of skin.”

“I loathe you.”

“I know.”

He would not be baited, nor pricked with the contempt she was wielding like a blade. His heart and soul were immutable if, indeed, he owned them at all. How could she have been so deceived?

“How lucrative was your stay in Fair Badden?”

The shadow shape shrugged, drifting back a pace, dissolving further into the gloom. “Four hundred pounds. More or less.”

“You admit it?” she asked.

“Why not?” he countered. “You’ve already discovered me. I see no advantage in promoting your na?veté. If you could not stand to—how did you phrase it?—‘go to your marriage bed with that lie waiting to be discovered,’ how can I be any less noble? Only honesty between us now, eh, Rhiannon? Unless,” his voice dropped, became low and mocking, “you’d rather we dispensed with even that inconvenience … ?”

She shrank back from its ugliness.

“No? Ah, well.”

He was every bit as terrible as she conjectured. How much worse could he be? She had to know the extent of her gullibility.

“The song?” she asked. “Is that true, too?”

“Which song?” he asked.

“ ‘The Ride of the Demon Earl’s Brood.’ ”

“St. John must have tripped in his haste to tell you that little tale.”

“Is it true? Did you?”

“Why?” he countered. “Are you wondering just what sort of evil seed you received?”

She gasped at his crudity, at the calm passionless manner in which he delivered it.

“All right. Here it is. I slashed through a line of men armed with pikes and staves. I made my sword bright with their blood. I trampled them under my horse’s hooves.”

She wrapped her arms around herself.

“I aided redcoated Brits in killing Scottish peasants.” And then, so quietly she barely heard him. “I saved my brother from being killed.”

She raised her eyes, speared the darkness that hid him with her gaze. “Those peasants were my clan. McClairen was my laird.”

He stood as still and motionless as the night.

He’d seduced her on the eve of her wedding, killed her kinsmen, and stolen her from the home she’d so carefully fashioned, from the life she’d so carefully cultivated.

Well, she thought, she needn’t be careful anymore. There was no one here whom she wished to please.

“You can’t stay awake all the time,” she whispered. “But you’d best try, Ash Merrick. For as soon as you’re asleep, I’ll be gone and you’ll be lucky if I don’t leave that silver blade of yours sheathed between your ribs.”

“Trading threats, are we?” he mused softly. “Well, it’s my turn now. Listen carefully. You’re right. I can’t stay awake until we reach Wanton’s Blush. But if I catch you trying to run away, or trying to induce some poor fool into interfering with us, I’ll not hesitate to punish you. Severely.” Not a chord of warmth was revealed in his voice.

She huddled back on the mattress, glaring at him. She heard him take a deep breath.

“And as for your ‘killing me’ if I touch you—” His head shifted in the gloom and she caught the glint of his dark eyes. “Any time I want, anywhere I want.”

* * *

For three days a tempestuous sky dogged their travel. It hounded them along faint, ancient drovers’ paths up to high pastures and secret paddocks, the traditional hideouts of the raiders and thieves.

Ash did not try to break Rhiannon’s silence. With her savage denunciation, she’d finally made him confront his own motives. His notion that Watt would want to kill her because he preferred the company of men was feeble and ridiculous. Her best interest hadn’t been at the heart of his decision, his loins had been. He’d deluded himself, and that tortured him most of all. He’d always been honest with himself if with no one else.

With no reason to enjoin Rhiannon’s good opinion, having repudiated it, he punished himself by seeking its opposite, her contempt—something she was more than obliged to give. It was a painful scourge. It was damn near killing him.

As for Rhiannon, she watched the rod-straight back before her with sullen hostility. She had little doubt Ash meant his threat to hurt her if she tried to flee. But it wasn’t that or the bruising pace he set—or even the fact that in spite of his claim she’d yet to see him asleep—that kept her from trying to escape. She had no place to go.

Each night she met his mocking smile with a tilt of her chin but held her breath until he’d wound a blanket about his shoulders and settled with his back against the door of the inns where they’d overnighted. He ignored her then, his gaze fixed on the floorboards, leaving her to wonder what drove him now to complete whatever plot he’d devised.

She little cared. And if the haunted expression she sometimes glimpsed upon his fierce, exhausted countenance might have once confounded her, bitterness left no room for such speculation. She simply welcomed whatever pain he felt. He’d destroyed her life.

During their travel her gaze slew cautiously about. It was all so intimately recognizable: the feel of the wet, cool air; the dark, drenched colors; the scent of flinty rock and gin-spiced conifers. It had been waiting for her return for a decade, like a witch’s unwanted familiar.

The winnowing wind whispered a spurious greeting and the chill mist stretched milky fingers up to brush her legs in mock obeisance. Here the McClairens and all those sworn to support them—including the Russells—had returned from Culloden’s bloody battlefield seeking sanctuary. Here Lord Cumberland’s dragoons had found them. Here they’d been hunted down. Here massacred.

Even in moonlight the mountains seemed stained with blood, the ground, salted with her clansmen’s deaths, forever inhospitable and barren. A thousand high, craggy acres of graveyard.

She shuddered and closed her eyes against it. They’d made her home a potter’s field.

In such a manner they traveled for four more days and nights. On the fifth night they crested a high, tree-bereaved hill overlooking the sea. Below them and some miles off, a thin bridge of land connected the headland to a big, crescent-shaped island. It surged out of the sea, blocky and jagged with rock. At its inner curve it rose to a high shelf of land overlooking the sheer, dramatic cliffs facing east. On this apex perched a mansion, or castle, or fortress.

* * *

It was impossible to tell what exactly the place was, or had started out as, or looked to become, it was so rife with turrets and buttresses, cupolas and columns, friezes and pediments. A mad architect’s maddest creation.

Lines of windows cast beacons across terraced lawns and pockmarked sweeping staircases. All about, pinpricks of light—lanterns?—swung and swayed about the massive fortress’s base, like fairies dancing maniacally about the skirts of some mammoth, beleaguered matron.

Flitting in and out of the open doorways, through beams of light and patches of shadow, darting and settling in clusters and singly amidst the blackening lawn, were people, ladies and gentlemen, dozens and dozens of them.

Bemused and disconcerted by the spectacle, Rhiannon looked to Ash. His gaze was already on her, thoughtful and remote, his face stained with fatigue. He smiled tightly, and flung out his hand in a cavalier’s overmannered gesture.

“Welcome to McClairen’s Isle,” he said, “and Wanton’s Blush.”