Black Falcon's Lady (Celtic Rogues Book 1) (7 page)

She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. Were the soldiers even now discovering the ladder to the loft? Piercing mattresses, piles of cloth with their sharp-honed swords? Tade—lightsome, rakehell Tade—would never let them take Devin without a fight. A hopeless fight. A fatal one. The image of his life-blood drenching the body that had pressed so warm against her own made Maryssa want to scream.

There was a swishing of steel and the sound of boots. She whispered half-forgotten childhood prayers, pleading with a God who had always seemed icy and vengeful.

"Miss Wylder.” Rath's stiff tone bristled with irritation as he strode up beside her. “We can hardly allow Bainbridge Wylder's daughter to go dashing off into the hills. If your comfort is more important to you than the escape of a desperate criminal—"

"At this point, Colonel Rath, I could cheerfully commit murder myself to get beneath the coverlet of my own bed," Maryssa said with heartfelt sincerity as Rath's command poured out of the cottage.

Yet even when the colonel settled her before him in the saddle, the soft, pudgy folds of his stomach flattening against her back, Maryssa could feel the cottage call to her. The cottage, and the green-eyed rogue inside it. She glanced back at the flower-draped whitewashed walls, trying to imprint them in her memory to be taken out and savored on listless, lonely days. But all she saw were the broad shoulders silhouetted in the shattered doorway, and the solemn, seeking face of Tade Kilcannon staring after her into the night.

T
ade dug
his fingers into the unyielding wood of the door jamb, fighting the urge to bolt into the yard and rip Maryssa from Rath's defiling arms. The taunts the English troops flung back as they mounted their horses found no chink in Tade's self-control, their voices only grating on his ear like those of whining children deprived of their game. In the room behind him he could feel his father’s rage as though it were a tangible thing, Kane Kilcannon’s hatred of all things English nurtured and tended all these years. He could hear Rachel's whispered prayers of thanks, sense the children's still-raw terror.

Yet it was the sight of Maryssa that knotted in Tade's belly, chasing the pale, frozen faces of his family into the shadows of his consciousness. Maryssa, her slight body bound in arms he knew had perpetrated a dozen separate horrors, her wraithlike face just visible over Rath's beefy shoulder. She peered back in such haunting sorrow, her changeable eyes clinging to the cottage with resigned pain, her moon-kissed features shaded with a fragile beauty that made him want to pull her into the shelter of his body, destroying all who would do her harm.

Tade stiffened as Rath bellowed an order and the English soldiers reined their mounts into position behind the colonel's gray gelding. Rath inclined his head toward Maryssa, an ingratiating smile curling his lips. Tade's fingers clenched, a fragment of the splintered door piercing deep into his palm. Cursing, he yanked his hand back and kneaded the injured place with his other thumb. Do her harm? Hah! Hadn't the girl made it perfectly clear that she was no "Irish trollop" for Rath's troops to abuse at will? Nay, she was an English lady who needed only to stamp her silk-shod foot to have an entire troop of Sassenach soldiers run trailing after her like a fat old dowager's lapdogs.

She was Bainbridge Wylder's only child—daughter of the richest landholder in Donegal, in half of Ireland. Didn't she belong with Rath, with these Sassenach soldiers who shattered Irish lives with no more thought than they had given the oaken door that lay splintered at Tade's feet?

Tade grimaced, suddenly shamed by his own cynical musings. God's teeth, he was sounding like his father, so bitter that he regarded even an act of compassion with doubt. For all her theatrics, this girl was no English belle whose nose was poked so far into the air she trampled over peasant babes in her path. She had lied to protect a man she had only just met, a man she knew had broken English law.

Did she, in her highborn naivete, have any inkling of what the gallant colonel would have done to her if his men had discovered Devin in the loft? Or had she risked all, knowing what punishment might await her? Tade shuddered inwardly at the thought of her delicate wrists cased in iron shackles. The little fool! The winsome, beautiful little fool! He wanted to hold her, wanted to shake her. And yet if she hadn't lied . . .

Tade's muscles tensed as he watched Rath knee the gray into a canter, the jarring movement nearly spilling Maryssa from the saddle. Though the space of the yard and three dozen horses lay between them, Tade could sense the fear in her slight frame, felt, too, an almost desperate urge to tear back the veils of darkness as they fluttered closed behind her.

Damn, she could never be anything to him. She was English. A fine lady with riches and a hundred servants at her disposal, a lady who would scarce deign notice a lowly Irishman, regardless of the fact that the blood in his veins was more noble than her own.

But Quentin Rath . . . he would be judged her equal, with his fine house and his commission, purchased with bloodstained coin from his admiral papa's purse. No doubt the despicable colonel would spend the whole ride to Nightwylde insinuating himself into her ladyship's good graces. He would be rapping at Nightwylde's door first thing next morning, his cockaded hat crushed beneath one sweaty armpit, an engraved calling card in his freshly manicured hand, and the wealth of Nightwylde tallied up in his greedy little brain.

And Maryssa? Would she simper about before Rath, striking her hand to her brow and wailing about her ordeal among the barbaric Irish, as though she had been tortured in the crudest of dungeons?

No. She had placed herself in danger to protect Devin, Deirdre. To protect him. She was no haughty witch, but rather a woebegone fairy who had strayed like a will-o'-the- wisp into his life, then fled back to the kingdom from whence she had come.

From the first she had stolen into his heart, her very name seeming to trail petal-soft over his lips, lodging inside him with an aching sadness akin to that he had felt the summer he turned eight and found an abandoned tinker's child huddled in the "castle" he and Devin had built in a tree. Even Rachel's expert nursing had not been able to save the girl. But when she closed her eyes in eternal sleep, somehow Tade had known even in his childhood innocence that she had not died from the buffeting of chill winds off the ocean or the emptiness in her belly, but rather from too little love, given too late.

Today, when Rachel and the little ones had poured out to greet Devin, Maryssa had stood in the shadows with the same look of haunting loneliness, so shy Tade had wanted to stroke soft roses into her cheeks, brush her lips with his own mouth, make her smile. But when Deirdre had flung open the bedchamber door and he had seen Maryssa framed against a backdrop of rumpled bedclothes, her body all but naked, golden with candle shine, he had wanted to tumble her back onto the pillows, take all of her, and give . . . give her things no other woman had touched inside him.

The sounds of the children behind him intruded on the dreamlike sweetness playing in his mind. He shut his eyes, wanting to hold as long as he could the vision of tumbled dark hair streaming over coral-tipped breasts, of wide, searching eyes. But the picture was shattered as a hand clamped on his shoulder, spinning him around to face the rage-contorted countenance of his father.

Tade gaped, stunned as his father’s hand arced toward him. Shock dulled Tade’s normally keen reflexes, making him too slow to escape the blow entirely. Pain shot through him as his father's hard palm glanced off his jaw. Pain that had nothing to do with the force of the buffet dealt him. He wheeled, fists raised, but Deirdre leaped in front of him, her eyes wide, tears of accusation flooding her cheeks as she glared at their father.

"Da! How could you!”

"No, Dee. I'll be fighting my own battles." Tade moved her out of his path, his eyes glinting as he fought the feeling of betrayal that cinched around his chest. An uncontrollable need to wound back flooded through him, his words as he turned to his father intended to cut as deeply as the lashes Tade had been dealt. "I'm a trifle too old to drag behind the cow byre, Da," he grated. "Or did it make you feel more a man? Ramming your fist into my face since you couldn't bloody Rath as you wanted?"

“If I had any sense I'd thrash you till you couldn't move! Because of your idiocy the whole family could have been cast into Rookescommon prison. That little English wench—"

"That 'little English wench' just saved our necks!" Tade snarled. "Rath must've suspected Devin was here before he rode in. If Maryssa hadn't distracted him, we'd all be trussed in chains right now, bound for a Sassenach gallows. And we'd be the lucky ones.”

"Aye, luckier than the girl would be, by far," Kane shot back. "Did you consider for a moment what harm could befall her? No. You just threw her into the middle of disaster, and now you blow up with pride as though you're a fallen hero. Do you think I want the blood of another Wylder woman on my han—"

Tade's head tilted in confusion, his eyes narrowing at the hint of bittersweet pain underlying his father's words.

The muscles in Kane's face jerked tight, throwing the stark planes into sharp relief. A shutter fell over his eyes, driving away the sadness until it seemed only shadings of Tade's imagination.

"Another? Who?”

"Another person to suffer for your irresponsibility," his father blazed. "You're always right, no matter who you hurt! Run off at all hours to God knows where, playing catch-skirt with your rakehell friends, worry Rachel and your sister nearly to their graves, then whisk in as bold as you please, dragging an English chit behind you.”

"Tell me. What galls you the most, Da?" Tade asked, with menacing quiet. "That she's English? Or that you owe your life to a Wylder?"

"Damn you—"

"Damn me? You're the one who holds fast to hell."

"Aye, and you're the son who should be helping me battle out of it! But no, you're too busy cavorting around like a damned court fool to be bothered. You've shamed me since the day poor Patrick Dugan was dragged away, you and your reckless—"

Tade's hand knotted, fury searing him as he swung at Kane's bared teeth. He slammed his fist to a halt inches from his father's face, bile rising in his throat. Tade wrenched his fist to his side, his jaw rock-hard as his eyes flicked to Devin's solemn face at the foot of the loft ladder. The quick, hot anger that blazed through Tade's limbs turned to stomach-twisting nausea.

Had the love he and his father shared crumbled so far that they would charge each other like crazed beasts, tearing where they were most vulnerable? Since the day fourteen years ago when Patrick Dugan had been hauled away, Tade's father had never mentioned the incident. Never torn open that scar. His father had wanted only to heal his pain and the guilt that had threatened to drive Tade past bearing, to wipe from his memory that horrible day, which had been the only other time in Tade's life that Kane Kilcannon had struck him. Tade looked into his father's eyes, eclipsed now by bitterness, and remembered them filled with tears.

Tade's fist tightened, dropped. "I love you, Da. God knows I do," he said quietly. "But you'd be wise to leave Patrick out of this lest you want me to forget you sired me."

"Just be certain you do no siring of your own. I saw the way you were eyeing Wylder's wench. Get a bastard on her and he'll think no more of taking the gelding knife to you than to a stallion in his stables."

The crystal green hardness in Tade's eyes clouded, taking on dark mysteries of forests primeval. "Da, remember the night the Fianna mare came? You tried to guard her. Stone fences, barred gates, even an iron latch on the stall. My stallion, Curran . . . he broke every one of them."

"Aye. And he was half dead himself when we found the two of them. If his foreleg hadn't healed his pleasure-taking would most like have cost him his life. You have no idea what Bainbridge Wylder is capable of. Stay away from his daughter, Tade. Or by God, you'll be no son of mine." The tiniest quaver in his father's voice made Tade's gaze snap up to Kane's. Astonishment coursed through Tade, mixed with a prickling of foreboding. Fear. His father's eyes held the same fear he had shown when Devin's life had been threatened by the soldiers.

Tade's eyes widened, but the sight of Rachel's work-worn hands fluttering up to grasp his father's shoulder in a silent plea stilled the questions on Tade's tongue. The soft brown eyes peering past Kane were more vulnerable than he had ever seen them. Tade forced his shoulders to relax, a half-smile twisting his lips as his eyes swept to the proud features so like his own. "You could try to deny me, Da," he said. Turning his back on his father's bitterness and on the silent pain in Devin's face, Tade paced out into the yard.

The night closed soft about him, the sounds of Rachel drawing Kane to the hearth and the family moving about, fading again into dream.

A dream so beautiful and winsome that it banished all others Tade had known, leaving in their place visions of dark hair, eyes soft and ephemeral as the mists dancing in from the sea. Tade reached down to finger a pouch secreted beneath the waistband of his breeches. Idly he pulled the leather bag from its place and slipped the laces open. After countless women, bedded and forgotten, it was only now he understood the primal urge that had driven his stallion to batter himself against stone and steel. That craving of flesh too deep to be denied. She called to him, Maryssa, with sirens' songs that he alone could hear. Spells, woven with silken threads that bound but also freed. And he would go to her, he knew, even if Kane Kilcannon chained him in irons.

Tade touched the contents of the pouch, spilling Maryssa's necklet into his outstretched palm. Moonlight toyed with the tip of one gold wing, the tiny arched neck of a graceful gold swan.

She had raged at him when he had torn it from her neck at the Devil's Grin, the blue-green sparks flaring in her incredible eyes. Yet he was certain she had not linked the rakehell Tade Kilcannon to Donegal's Black Falcon this night. Tade's lips tipped into a ghosting of smile. Aye, if she had, she'd most like have dragged Rath to him and helped the cursed bastard knot him in ropes.