Claimed by the Highlander (36 page)

It was the first time she had seen her husband smile in such a way, let alone laugh. She had
never
seen him laugh. Not once.

Gwendolwn frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”

He nodded, as tears spilled from the outer corners of his clear blue eyes. “Aye, lassie! I just realized that you’re madder than the witch I lived with in the Hebrides for the better part of a year. You’re fookin’ insane!”

Gwendolen began to laugh, too, and wondered how it was possible that she could forgive him so easily for all the pain he had caused her.

“It’s not funny,” she said, deeply offended, irritated, and amused—all at the same time. “I held true to my pledge, so you never had any right to be angry with me. I did nothing wrong.”

He slowly rose to his feet, and his smile faded. “You’re right about that, lass. I was the one who was wrong, and it had nothing to do with you. It was me.” He paused. “It’s just that … I’ve never loved anyone before, so I’m a bit … I’m a bit raw.”

Her heart softened immediately at the sound of the word “love,” spoken so openly from his very own lips. How she had dreamed of hearing him say it, just once. How she had wanted to feel his affections. “Aye, that you are.”

“It’s not that I didn’t believe you about the wine,” he continued. “I did. I knew you were telling the truth, and that your brother tricked you. I think I knew it all along, but I was afraid to believe it, afraid of being disappointed somehow—because I’ve had a hard life, lass. I lost the only two women in the world I ever cared about.”

“Your mother and sister…” she finished for him.

“Aye. All my life, I’ve lived for vengeance and nothing else. Even when I first met you and claimed you as my bride, there was a part of me that wanted to hurt you, to be cruel to you, because I saw you as the enemy. I saw
everyone
as the enemy—even those I cared about. But since being with you, lass, my desire to fight and take my revenge out on the world has waned. It’s a part of me that has gone very…”

Gwendolen stepped forward, curious. “Very what, Angus?”

He squinted toward the horizon. “Very quiet.”

Reaching out with a shaky hand, she touched his cheek. “I’m glad.”

He turned his lips into her palm, held it tight, and kissed it. Then he pulled her into his arms and embraced her for a long, shuddering moment. At last, he pressed his mouth to hers. His lips were like sweet, warm honey, his tongue like an intoxicating wine that made her melt with delight. Backing her up against the stone battlements, he kissed down the side of her neck and cupped her head in his hands.

“Oh, Angus,” she sighed, “I want to stay mad at you, but I cannot. You make my knees go weak when you talk like this, because it’s such a revelation. The first day I saw you, I was terrified. I still am, in so many ways.”

“There is no need to fear me now, lass. I’ll never do you harm. I’d die to protect you from it.”

She pulled him down for another kiss. It was tender and deep, and she felt as if she were drowning in endless rapture. Her hands moved slowly up the hard muscles of his arms and came to rest on the tops of his broad shoulders. She ran her palm down the length of his tartan, draped across his chest.

“I dreamed of the lion last night,” she told him, recalling her fantasy encounter with the beast in the meadow. “And I don’t think I am an oracle after all.”

He drew his head back. “Why is that?”

“Because I dreamed that I told him he had no right to be angry with me, and he roared at me and made my insides tremble. But you are not roaring at me, Angus. You are kissing me and loving me.”

He gazed down at her in the dazzling morning sunshine. “Aye, but there are many ways I can make you tremble, my darling Scottish lassie.” He lifted her skirts and slowly slid his hand up her leg. “Like this, for instance.”

Her whole being flooded with desire. “Ah, I believe you may be right…”

He gently massaged her behind. “And what about this?”

She closed her eyes and nodded, then her wild lion nuzzled her ear and kissed her neck until she was overcome by waves of sweet agony.

“Do you know what comes next?” he asked.

“I think I do.”

“Then it appears you’re still having premonitions.”

Gwendolen smiled. “I’ll believe it when you make me cry out in ecstasy from all the roaring passion that is yet to come.”

He slid a finger inside her heated depths and stroked her with great finesse. “I’d better get busy then, because clearly I have something to prove.”

And indeed, Gwendolen MacDonald, wife of the great Scottish warrior, Angus the Lion, trembled amorously from head to foot on the roof that day, and the trembling continued later in the laird’s private chamber—on the bed, on the floor, and on top of his desk—until well into the night.

Read on for an excerpt from

JULIANNE MACLEAN’S

next book

Seduced by

the Highlander

Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

Drumloch Manor

Scottish Borders

October, 1721

From the private journal of Lady Catherine Montgomery:

I have decided that today, since the weather is fine, I shall write my first entry at the stone circle. I cannot explain it, but something about this place comforts me, and I am in dire need of comfort. It has been four months now since my return. Though “return” is not at all the proper word for my status here.

I still remember nothing of my life before, despite the doctor’s many efforts and tireless attempts to experiment with my head. He is both perplexed and shamelessly enthused, and I am beginning to think he will be disappointed if he ever cures me of my malady. He frowns at me when I say this, but I feel as if my spirit is in the wrong place—as if I have taken possession of another woman’s body and claimed all that she once had as my own. I feel like a charlatan, and sometimes I wonder if that is what I am—a wicked, scheming impostor—even though Grandmother and Cousin John assure me on a daily basis that I am she.

Lady Catherine Montgomery. Daughter of a Scottish earl. A woman who went missing five years ago.

They tell me my father was a great war hero, and that he died fighting for the Scots in the recent rebellion (on the side of the Jacobites, which I allegedly supported, and quite passionately so). I remember none of that. All I know of myself is what I have been told, and what I experienced since the spring, when I was discovered in a farmer’s stable in Italy, huddled in an empty stall, hungry and shivering.

Nuns took me in, and I was, in a way, reborn in that convent abroad, nursed back to health, questioned relentlessly, and finally identified as the long-lost Drumloch heiress.

Am I truly she? I do not know. The portraits of Catherine Montgomery all show a rather plump and innocent-looking young girl. I am neither plump, nor am I quite so young any longer. I am six weeks shy of my twenty-fifth birthday, they tell me. And no longer innocent. The doctor at the convent confirmed it.

I am not quite sure how to feel about that. Sometimes it disturbs me, when I imagine what I do not remember. In my mind, I am still a virgin.

I am also very slim, which is why some of the servants did not recognize me. They all agreed that I had the same hair as Catherine—which is a rather unusual shade of red—but other than that, some of them believed I looked nothing like she did. They were promptly dismissed.

But what if they were right? Sometimes I feel as if Grandmother is hiding something from me. She says that is not so, but I am suspicious. Could it be that some part of her simply needs to believe that I am her grandchild, even when she knows I am not? She has already lost her son after all—the great war hero who was my father. I am all she has left of him.

If I am in fact the heiress.

Either way, heiress or not, I cannot keep from watching over my shoulder. I am always expecting the
real
Catherine Montgomery (or her ghost) to appear at any moment and expose me as a fraud …

Catherine closed the leather-bound journal and tipped her head back against the flat standing stone, wishing she did not have to write about all this, but Dr. Williams had encouraged her to record her thoughts and feelings, suggesting it might help unlock something in her mind.

Another experiment. Would he insist upon reading it?

Flipping the book open again, she glanced over what she had written about her virginity and considered scratching out the part about his shameless enthusiasm.

No. She would leave it. It was honest, and if the point of this exercise was to cure her strange illness and solve the mystery of her five lost years, she would need to open her mind completely and let everything spill out like a bag of marbles onto the floor.

Feeling tired all of a sudden, she set the journal aside and stretched out on the grass in the tall, cool shade of the standing stone. For some reason she felt great comfort whenever she came here.

She crossed her legs at the ankles and folded her hands over her belly, while staring up at the bright blue sky, dotted with fluffy clouds. They floated by at a leisurely pace, shifting and rolling. It helped to relax her mind. Perhaps today would be the day when the past would come out of its box.

Soon she was dreaming about autumn leaves blowing across an endless bed of lush green moss. She could hear the faint rustle of footsteps through the grass, a horse nickering on the breeze …

In the dream, she saw herself in a looking glass, and heard her own voice calling out from across the distance. She reached with a hand and tried to speak to the woman in the glass.
“Come and find me. I am here. I’ve been here all along.”

Suddenly, the woman vanished in a rush of fear—like a ghost that did not want to be seen.

Stirring uneasily, Catherine felt a presence all around the stone circle, but it was not the spirit from the dream. Her body tingled with awareness, and she moaned softly into the breeze.

Someone was watching her, circling around the outside of her private sphere. She could feel his eyes on her, waking her with a strange power of will that aroused all her senses. It compelled her to sit up, but she could not move. She was still asleep, and her body seemed made of lead.

At last, her heavy eyelids fluttered open, and she blinked up at the sky. She sat up and looked around.

There, just outside the ring of stones, a wild-looking Highlander was seated high upon a massive black warhorse. He observed her with an eerie silence that made her wonder if she was still dreaming—for he was a breathtaking, god-like image in a shimmering haze of sunlight.

His windswept black hair matched the shiny mane of his horse. It reached past his broad shoulders and wafted lightly on a whispering hush of a breeze. He wore a dark tartan kilt with a tarnished silver brooch at his shoulder, a round shield strapped to his back. Upon his hip, he carried a claymore in a leather scabbard.

Everything about him oozed sexuality, and the shock of such an improper awareness took Catherine beyond her depth.

She wanted to call out to him, to ask who he was—what did he want?—but she could not seem to find her voice. It was as if she were still floating in the dream.

Or perhaps this was not a dream, but a hallucination. She’d had a few of them lately, often seeing herself moving about, doing everyday things, and she never knew if they were memories of her life, or the lazy inventions of a woman who simply had no past.

But there was nothing lazy about
this
man, she realized with a dizzying swirl of fascination as she rose to her knees. He was a warrior, clearly, who looked as if he’d spent days, maybe weeks, in the saddle. The evidence was all there to behold—in his weapons, his brawny strength, and the dark shadow of stubble on his finely sculpted face, the grim hue of his exhausted, angry eyes, and the grimy appearance of his shirt.

The horse snorted fiercely and tossed his huge head, and Catherine gasped at the sound. It was exactly what she needed—something temporal, something vociferous, to finally pull her out of her reverie.

She knew now that this Highlander was no hallucination. He was true flesh and blood. But why was he staring at her like that, with such angry, bold intensity?