Bride of the Beast (32 page)

"Rousing is what I believe it would be.
Incredibly
so." Languid heat and a tight, pulsing anticipation spooled through Caterine just thinking about such carnality.

She dropped back onto the cushioned seat. "I believe it could be done very well in this window embrasure."

Rhona cast a furtive glance toward the door, then leaned forward. "Do you think he would do such a thing?"

"If such acts are all we can share, he might." Caterine speculated, and hoped. "Mayhap if I tell him doing so would help accustom me to ... such intimacies."

"Do you fear for him this night, my lady?" Rhona blurted then, finally voicing the unspoken reason they were both awake at this late hour. "Are you as worried for him as I am
for James?"

Caterine blinked back her own trepidation. It sat too close to the backs of her eyes, hot and burning, its dark shadow the reason she'd clung to other, pleasurable and stirring, images the long night through.

Steeling herself against a dread she didn't want to ponder, she turned toward the sea. Still blanketed with fog, nothing but its ceaseless crash against the rocks hinted at itc proximity.

That, and the chill, brine-laced air.

"We needn't worry," she said then, the words coming more from the swirling mist drifting past the windows than from her. "They will soon return, and unscathed."

A strange but welcome conviction she simply knew to be true.

As if an angel had whispered it into her heart.

late
the next
afternoon, strong winds drove sleety rain across Dunlaidir's bailey, the gloaming dark just beginning to set in, as Sir Marmaduke and his bone-weary companions finally clattered into the stronghold's deserted inner courtyard.

No trumpets sounded, no cheering acclaim rose to greet them. Not a single gasp of wonderment for the fat bullock and equally plump milk cow they led behind them.

Nary a soul stirred, and a deep quiet—almost a death pall—hung heavy in the chill air. An eerie place and moment, shrouded in silence, with no wish to be disturbed.

As if the whole castle slept.

Or mourned.

From the corner of his good eye, Marmaduke caught Sir Alec crossing himself. Sir Gowan, the most rough-hewn amongst his men, appeared ill at ease as well, his wary gaze flitting about the empty bailey.

"They will not know we are back," Marmaduke spoke at last, swinging down onto the rain-dark cobbles. Shoving back his mailed coif, he ran a tired hand through his damp hair.

A queer foreboding rode his back, too, but he quelled his own disquiet long enough to rake his friends with a stern look, daring them with his calm to reach inside themselves and recover their own.

"I thought they'd come flying down the stairs the moment we rode in," James said, his frowning gaze on the empty outer stairs.

Cold and wet, the stone steps rose to an equally unwelcoming landing where the hall's main door remained un-moving, its iron-studded solidness firmly closed against them.

"I would've sworn they would have waited by that door," James declared, dismounting.

Marmaduke clapped a hand on the young man's shoulder. "Think you I would not have relished a warmer welcome, too, my friend?" He forced a jovial tone. "Come, let us see to these beasts, wash the muck from our limbs, and then we shall see what keeps our ladies."

He broke off at the sound of pounding footsteps.

Black Dugie's.

The great bear of a man ran toward them, his eyes wild and staring, his massive chest heaving when at last he reached them.

"Great Caesar's ghost!" he panted, looking for all the world as if he'd just seen one.

Or, even now, stared at a whole host of departed souls.

"We thought you were dead! Every last one o' you," he cried, clearly dumbfounded.

"Dead?" Gowan snorted. "Dead weary and ready to drown ourselves in ale rather than this slashing rain, but not dead as you mean," he said, swiping the dripping wetness off his forehead with the back of a burly arm.

"It'd take more than a handful of sword-swinging Sassunachs to put MacKenzies to earth." Sir Alec strode up to them, his own bedraggled and blood-stained appearance making him look every inch a dead man.

"But..." Black Dugie gaped at them, his broad face still wreathed in doubt.

"We may look dead, but I assure you we are very much alive," James said, speaking to the smithy, but still staring at the hall's closed door. "Where are our ladies? Why aren't they here to greet us?"

"Because they will be preparing a fine reception for us in the hall." Marmaduke slung an arm about James's shoulders ... and hoped he spoke the truth. "Be glad they—"

"Oh, nay, that isn't what they're about," Black Dugie said, something in his words drawing the rapt attention of all. "They're a-huddled at the high table trying to come up with a way to pay for perpetual prayers for the lot of you."

"Perpetual prayers?'
Marmaduke's astonishment couldn't have been greater. "Did they have so little faith in our return?"

Black Dugie shuffled his feet. "My pardon, milord, but how could they think otherwise when Sir
John
told us you'd all been killed?"

"Sir
John
”
Marmaduke stared at the smithy, sheerest incredulity whirling through him.

It couldn't be.

They'd seen the older Scotsman slain.

'There must be some mistake." Ross put voice to Marmaduke's amazement. "Sir
John
cannot have told you aught. The man is dead."

He glanced at Marmaduke, then back at the smithy. "We saw him cut down."

"Then his wraith rode in here all a-fire to lie to us." Black Dugie pointed to the hall door. "He's up there now. Trying to console your womenfolk."

"By the Rood!" one of the Highlanders swore, the oath accompanied by the
zing
of metal as his sword left its scabbard.

"But..." Gowan puzzled, rubbing his rain-flecked beard. "We saw him killed."

"Nay, my friend," Marmaduke said, comprehending at last, "
_W
e saw him fall from his horse and roll down the hill."

"To ride back here and announce our demise," Ross embellished, and Marmaduke agreed.

"So it would seem," he said aloud, reaching for his own steel. "Come, men," he said, already striding for the keep "Now we have certainty."

It was time to corner a swine.

**

The instant the hall's great oaken door crashed open, Caterine whirled around and choked back a sob. Her heart near bursting with relief, she stared in amazement at the men coming through the open door.

Icy wind swept in with them, its gusty draughts setting the nearest torch flames to dancing, the wildly flickering light casting weird shadows over their granite-hewn faces.

Reaching across the high table, Rhona closed her hand over Caterine's wrist. "Lady, they live," she breathed, her voice a tremulous whisper, the joy and wonder in her words matching Caterine's own.

Her throat too tight for words, Caterine wrapped an arm around the little dog on her lap, clasping him hard against her as she sent silent prayers of t
hank
sgiving heavenward.

He
towered over them all, contained anger pouring off him, its intensity palpable from clear across the hall. Every glorious inch of him very much alive ... as were they all.

Their brows dark in the smoky torchlight, they came forward, advancing on the high table without a word of greeting. Jaws set and hard-faced, their outerwear caked with mud, the mail beneath, smeared with blood.

Black Dugie came with them, by no means as sore-battered-looking but equally wet and grim-faced. And with a long-bladed dirk clutched tight in his hand.

"God be praised!" Caterine found her voice at last, relief spiraling through her, the heat pricking her eyes, blinding her to the menace on their faces.

And the oddity of drawn steel in her hall.

"A miracle," Sir
John
said beside her. "By Lucifer, who
wo
uld have—"

"Do not compound your treachery with still more lies," her husband cut him off, speaking loud enough for all to hear, his voice as cold and deadly as the gleam of his blade.

He fixed Sir
John
with a long, hard stare. "Come," he said, beckoning to him, "you mention Lucifer, let us hasten your journey to his side."

"Dear God, you are witless," Sir
John
scoffed, the words
dripping scorn.

Ignoring the slur, Sir Marmaduke trained his gaze on her. "My regrets, lady, that I must blacken the name of a family friend, but this man is a traitor," he said, and Caterine believed him for the truth was writ on his face ... and in her
heart.

"He is Sir Hugh's man," her husband accused, his expression growing colder by the minute, darkening with the first scowl she'd seen him wear.

"Is that not so?" He turned to the men standing close beside him, and without hesitation, they nodded agreement.

Even James.

Black Dugie, too.

"Lies!" Sir
John
shot to his feet, his face scarlet. Glaring at Marmaduke, he lifted his hands. "A liar, and no true knight for you challenge an unarmed man."

Angry murmurs rose at that, growing louder as they sprang from one table to the next. "Unarmed?" one of the garrison men called out. "Sore straits easily remedied!" Coining forward, he slapped his own blade full-length on
foe high table.

Without so much as glancing at the weapon, Sir
John
snatched up his cloak. "I will not be party to rabid posturings," he said, swirling the mantle around his shoulders, “Mayhap once this foul night has passed, the good folk these walls will have regained their senses."

His head high, he started forward, not looking right until he strode past Marmaduke. Then, with astonishing speed for a man of his years, he threw back his cloak and spun around to lunge at Marmaduke's back, a wicked-looking dagger flashing in his upraised hand.

Someone's scream—her own or Rhona's—filled Caterine's ears as, with even greater agility, her husband whirled to face Sir
John
, his fingers closing in a fierce-looking grip around the older man's wrist.

The dirk dropped to the rushes, but the forward momentum of Sir
John
's own spinning whirl plunged him against the well-honed edge of Marmaduke's sword. He cried out as a bold slash of crimson appeared across his middle—a true wound this time, and a fatal one.

His shriek of pain muting into a horrible gurgling sound, he stared at his own red-flowing death, utter astonishment in his bulging eyes, and sank to the floor.

Chaos and uproar filled the hall as men noisily thrust back from their places at the long tables, rising almost as one, to press forward and crowd around Marmaduke and the soon-to-be-dead Sir
John
.

Caterine and Rhona clung to each other, looking on in horror as Sir Marmaduke cast aside his sullied blade, then knelt beside Sir
John
's prone figure.

"A well deserved end," someone called out above the din. "A black heart done in by his own false move," another agreed, the angrily spoken words, sharp, loud, and echoing off the weapon-hung walls.

In stark contrast, pathetic moans, scarcely audible, issued from Sir
John
's gray lips, his eyelids flickering as he tried to focus on the men peering down at him.

Biting back his own anger, Marmaduke cradled the man s head. "Unburden your soul before you breathe your last," he
said, lifting his voice to cut through the whir of confusion, the growing swell of heated murmurs and darker slurs, the shrill yapping of his lady's little dog.

Glancing up at the men thronging near, he raised a hand
still their grumbles, then reached for Sir
John
's blood-drenched tunic and carefully lifted its hem.

The wound, an angry red slit just beneath Sir
John
's ribs, was his only one. Not even a bruise or scratch marred the whiteness of his flesh.

"But he was smeared with his own blood," Gowan's voice came close to Marmaduke's ear. "We saw—"

"Not his own blood." Ross spat onto the rushes. "The bastard sullied hisself a-purpose. To make us think he'd
been cut down."

Glancing at the battle-hardened Highlander, Marmaduke signed for him to hold his tongue.

"My lord of Kinraven," Sir Marmaduke said, lowering the shirt, then leaning down to speak into the dying man's ear, "your treachery has cost you all. We would have helped you win back your home had you but asked."