Page 27 of The Passionate One (McClairen’s Isle #1)

Ash couldn’t make it up the servants’ stairs and he refused to ask the snickering footmen to carry him. By gritting his teeth and concentrating very hard, he managed to stumble into one of the small antechambers behind the great hall—a mean, dark room, presently unused and therefore as devoid of furnishings as it was of light.

Gratefully, Ash sank to the floor, his back against the wall. His ribs throbbed dully. He forced himself to twist and was pleased when it hurt no great deal worse than before, indicating that just perhaps his ribs weren’t broken. Scant comfort but all he was likely to get. His hand felt as though it were being crushed in a vise. His skin stung where the sweat and grease ground into innumerable abrasions.

He would have lain on the floor and allowed sweet oblivion to overcome his senses but each time he closed his eyes he saw her face and read again her horror. The pain in his body faded, becoming faint compared to the pain of that recollection.

From his earliest years he’d understood what he was. He’d never wasted a moment regretting it. A wise father may well know his child, but it was more important that the child recognize not only his sire but those parts of himself his sire had bequeathed.

Somehow he’d forgotten that. Indeed, it seemed lately that he’d lost the part of himself he knew best. Well, he’d bloody well remember, because this pain—this pain was unendurable. It had to end. It would end.

He’d finally accrued enough money to ransom Raine. He’d even written to the French demanding particulars of how and where the trade would occur.

The door opened and a bar of light fell across his injured eye. He winced, flinging up one hand against the intrusion and placing the other palm flat against the floor. He heaved himself to a crouching position, facing whoever entered.

He squinted against the bright rectangle of the door frame. “Another challenger?” he asked with a bitter laugh. “Why not? It might not be a very interesting confrontation but it might prove satisfying—for you. Hell, for both of us. Though being a gentleman I should ask you to take your place at the end of the queue.”

“Ash.”

It was her voice. Ragged and low and it nearly undid him.

He swallowed hard. Had his father sent her as a special reminder of the many ways in which he could bring his eldest son to heel or had she sought him for her own purposes?

“What, Rhiannon?” A small pleasure to speak her Christian name, but one he wouldn’t cede. “Have you come to condemn me for my chosen path, my ill-gotten gains, the depth to which I have sunk? Don’t waste your breath or my time. I don’t give a damn what you think.”

Liar.

“No.” She turned and spoke to someone in the hall. He climbed to his feet, weaving slightly. His little speech had cost him dearly.

“I’ll need more water than this and hot,” she was saying to whomever waited without. “Very hot. And bandages and he’ll need a shirt.”

“You’re not going to clean me up,” he ground out, sickened by the thought of her hands sloughing the filth from his limbs.

She ignored him, hefting a pail from the floor outside and setting it inside the room. She closed the door behind her, sinking the room into twilight.

“Where are you hurt worst?”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“You already know that. I’ve come to patch up your wounds.”

“The hell you say.” He made himself stand away from the wall. Sweating with concentration, he moved toward her. She did not back away and as he drew near and his eyes adjusted to the murky lighting he saw that she wore one of those new gowns Carr had insisted she don, a shimmering bronze striped through with rich green.

She looked elegant and regal, no longer the modest little beauty. No, quite evolved now. Quite different from that pretty wench.

This gown dipped low, far lower than anything she’d ever worn in Fair Badden. Her bound breasts, pushed up by the constricting bodice, trembled in an agitation delicious to behold. He’d never had the time nor inclination to lechery, owning a full complement of sins that already commanded his attention. But even battered and broken, just the sight of Rhiannon made him grow hard.

Yet it was not his hand that reached out and hovered inches above naked flesh. It was hers. Incredulously, Ash realized she meant to touch his naked chest. Like a wild thing unused to human contact, his stared at her in startled wariness.

Rhiannon shivered before the threat she read in his hot, smoke-dark eyes. He looked cornered, dangerous, and unpredictable. If she had sense she would leave. Whatever he was to his brother, he was her enemy, a scoundrel who’d used her, lied to her, and stolen her from her home for money. She began to move back toward the door and safety but her gaze, released from his, fell on the purpled skin sheathing his ribs.

He hadn’t wanted to fight the Scotsman. Carr had forced him to it.

Her hand rose, closed the distance, and gently, carefully, traced a deep gash across his breast. His eyelids fluttered shut. She sidled closer, her touch feather light, warily watching his face for signs of—

He grabbed her wrist, spinning her round and catching her by the throat with his free hand, shoving her violently against the wall, hissing as his swollen hand, cushioning her wrist, slammed into the wall. His eyes opened on a blaze.

“You’ve changed, little Rhiannon,” he muttered thickly. He angled his head sideways. Around her throat his fingers tightened. “You’ve grown bold and headstrong. What happened to the sweet, obedient young woman I met? Don’t you remember, Rhiannon alainn? Or is that it? You want a reminder of her fate?”

There was nothing of kindness in him. She’d been wrong. Wrong to stay. Wrong to be moved by his pride and his plight—

“Remember now?” he whispered, the soft rough music of his voice mocking his violent actions. He pushed his body flat against hers, dominating her slighter frame. Even through the layers of thin silk petticoats and draped satin skirts she could feel the swollen part of him brand the outside of her thigh.

“Or now?” He thrust his hips graphically against hers. Her courage wavered. Eyes wide with stricken, mute appeal she stared at him. A muffled word—a curse? an endearment?—escaped him and then his mouth closed on hers, punishing and brutal.

His tongue dove between her lips, thrust deeply within her mouth, and stroked her tongue, seeking the warm sleek side of interior cheeks. Passion exploded within him.

Rhiannon.

He felt the weight of her breasts flattened against his chest. Her throat was a silky column in his palm. Her wrist was as delicate as a bird wing.

He could have her. Here. Now. Pain speared his side and throbbed in his hand. Pain sat like a vise in his chest and burned like acid in his thoughts. He knew only one way to make it stop—

He fumbled low at her knees, bunching the heavy satin up, savoring the long, smooth slide of his knuckles up her thighs. He dragged the skirt higher, and cupped the softly rounded swell of her buttocks, lifting her, pressing her even more tightly to the wall, vaguely aware that she was clutching his shoulders.

His gaze devoured the sight of all the ivory skin he uncovered, remarked the dark stain left by his dirty hands as they traveled up the long lines of her lovely milk white thighs. She’d been clean.

He laughed softly and laughed again when he saw her face go still with apprehension.

Cleanliness. He’d never been clean. He’d no experience with anything unpolluted. Until her. She was fresh and sweet and innocent. In spite of her nightmares. In spite of being stained by the blood of battle. In spite of him.

The scent of her filled his nostrils. The cool polished feel of her hair slipped in silky waves over his forearm. Why should he not have her when she’d wrung from him the one thing he’d always had—the knowledge of who he was.

He dipped, bending at the knees. She could not resist. Her body was imprisoned between his and the wall. He rocked forward against the hidden delta he’d exposed. Erotic pleasure surged through his limbs, pooling in his groin. He couldn’t stop, would not stop, he would take her, use her, pitch and flux and drown in the sin of ravishing her. He wanted to overpower her, force her to pliancy, punish her for making him—

Through the thundering of his heartbeat he felt a faint vibration, a shiver no stronger than the pulse racing in her throat. She was sobbing.

Not the sweet sob of abandonment he’d heard on that warm, cursed Beltaine Eve. Not the sound of newly discovered passion, of pure desire. It was not a pleasured sob like the one she’d offered to the night sky when she’d so artlessly, so ravishingly given herself to him. It was a pitiful gasp for a breath he would not allow.

Dear God, let me rape her, he prayed. Let me be done with her. With a thick sound, he wrenched his mouth from hers.

Rhiannon breathed.

She opened her eyes and found Ash’s thick-lashed eyes inches away, fierce and alien. Had she once thought them cold? Impossible. Molten lead and green wood smoke, heat and ash, nothing cold here. Nothing recognizable.

His hand about her throat tightened fractionally as if he read in her pleading expression something he would not endure. Anchored only by her hands braced on his shoulders, her hips jammed to the wall by his, she stared at him. For a long second their gazes locked. Fury roiled just beyond expression in Ash’s battered face. She took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Let me go,” she commanded him.

The edges of his nails dug deeper into her throat.

“Why should I?” he sneered.

She wanted to whimper, to claw at the hand on her throat. It would be futile. She’d seen Ash’s expression on the faces of the soldiers who’d bayoneted her cousins. The redcoats had been ordered to commit acts that none of them would have willingly done in the normal course of their lives. But because it was war, because Cumberland said to, they’d obeyed, burned crofts, shot men like wild dogs, bayoneted boys.

They couldn’t stop. Their brutalized minds wouldn’t let them. They wouldn’t stop for even an instant and consider that the Highlanders were people. And nothing must remind them elsewise. When her youngest cousin had shed a tear, a soldier shot him, furious that the boy had reminded the redcoat that he was murdering a child.

She saw in Ash’s embattled countenance that same frantic need to kill an overburdened conscience with one heinous, unforgivable act. To finally take that last step over the line and free-fall into an abyss of moral blackness, a place where choices and options no longer tortured him.

And yet, in spite of all she knew of him, she did not think he had been brought to that place. She locked her hand about his strong supple wrist, praying she was right.

“Because,” she said very clearly, very firmly, “you are hurting me. You are frightening me.”

He stared at her a second as if he could not comprehend her words. Slowly the fingers around her throat loosened. He released the skirts he held crumpled at her hip. He did not say a word, only stepped back, a single step, just enough for her to move away.

Swallowing, keeping her gaze fixed on his, she slipped sideways, skirting the room’s edge. He watched her stonily, mutely, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes bleak and exhausted and terrifying. Fumbling behind her she found the door latch and twisted it, pushing the door open. Only then did she dare turn her back and leave.

Fia found Gunna lugging a heavy-looking pail down a corridor. The old woman puffed as she staggered under the weight. With a quick glance around, Fia hastened forward. The startled old woman dropped the bucket the few inches she held it above the floor and snatched her veil before her face. Seeing it was Fia, she relaxed.

“What are you doing?” Fia hissed. “If Carr sees you downstairs, you know he’ll dismiss you.”

“Ach! He’d naught do so,” Gunna snickered. “He couldna replace me and well he knows it. Dinna worry, darlin’, I’m just heading in there.” She jerked her head toward a half-ajar door. “I must bandage up the lad is all.”

Fia glanced at the door. “Ash is in there?”

“Aye, most likely unconscious. But, hold lassie. If he ain’t, I’d no be entering that particular lion’s den just now. He’s like in as black a mood as Lucifer in sunlight.”

“Why?”

Gunna shrugged as Fia latched her fingers around the bucket’s handle and lifted it. “I dunno. Perhaps he’s in no mood to have his lover become his stepmother.”

Fia stopped. The water in the bucket sloshed, soaking the bottom of her skirts. She barely noticed. “His lover?”

“Aye,” Gunna said, tching gently and bending down to dab at Fia’s jonquil-colored skirts.

Fia watched her in surprise. Gunna seldom gossiped and did not encourage it in Fia.

She shouldn’t ask Gunna more. But Carr had taught her the import of knowing about everything that affected one’s life.

“What?” Gunna said, reading Fia’s wide eyes. “Did you think that all Mr. Ash’s drinking and carousing was for the hilarity of it? I had it from the lassie herself that Mr. Ash and she were lovers. Only once, ’tis true, but I’m thinkin’ Mr. Ash would like to make it twice. Mayhaps even more.” She winked at Fia.

“But,” Gunna went on, “Carr must have other ideas. Why else would he send Mr. Ash to bring the lassie here if not to marry her himself? No matter what the lassie herself believes.” Gunna chortled and picked up the bucket. “It’s no wonder Mr. Ash is in so foul a temper, is it?”

“But Carr didn’t bring her here to marry her,” Fia murmured, following Gunna’s bent form down the hall. “He can’t.”

Rhiannon and Ash were lovers? Yet Carr had commanded Ash to bring her here and Ash had done so. Why? And if Carr had wanted Rhiannon here badly enough to send Ash for her, why was he now pacing the floor and muttering about finding someone to take Rhiannon Russell away?

“Why can’t he marry Miss Rhiannon?” Gunna asked casually, stopping outside the door.

“Because,” Fia answered distractedly, still trying to sort through what she’d learned, “the Prime Minister gave an edict to Carr years ago, after the death of Lady Beatrice. He said that if one more of Carr’s wives died, no matter what the cause, Carr would answer to the king and he would answer with his life. Upon hearing this, Carr swore he would never marry again—no matter what the inducement.”

The old woman frowned and pushed the door to the darkened room open farther. A hiss of pain from the darkness just inside greeted them.

Gunna turned to Fia. “Best you be gone now, dear. Afore yore father comes seeking you and finds you here, with him.”

Before she could reply Gunna slipped into the room leaving Fia to hasten back the way she’d come, her thoughts in a whirl.