Seducing a Scottish Bride (26 page)

Of the bold horned raven of the vision his lady had shown him there was nary a trace.

Indeed, the stone’s engravings had so deteriorated that it was no longer recognizable as a heraldic shield.

But before he could wonder o’er the matter, Sorley, Tam, and the Dragon pushed through the tumult, eager to see to his wishes
and help him and his lady dismount.

The Dragon lavished his usual care on Buckie, lifting the now-tail-wagging dog from his onion creel.

“See he is bathed properly and combed,” Ronan said, turning aside even as the pock-faced, gap-toothed guardsmen strode away
with the dog. “Then have Hugh MacHugh give him as many meat-bones as he desires.”

A wind-muffled
as you wish
drifted back to him, but he scarce heard.

Nor did he do more than nod his thanks when Sorley handed him the Nordic armlet Gelis had gifted him with just before the
bull appeared.

At the moment he had greater matters on his mind than bejeweled armpieces.

His lady had somehow slipped through the ring of guardsmen and was tripping up the outer keep stairs, already nearing the
landing.

But it wasn’t her light step or her remarkable speed that sent him bolting up the steps after her.

Not even the tempting bounce of her shining, loose- swinging hair.

Nor the promise of her seductive siren’s bauble, bouncing just-so betwixt her thighs, its glittering green gemstone an allure
powerful enough to turn the most resolute abstainer’s best piece into granite.

Nor was it the way she seemed to glow from within.

An irresistible beacon to a man so long without a woman’s warmth and loving.

Och, nae, it was nary a one of such disasters.

It was the horrible red stain soiling one side of her uphitched skirts.

Ronan stared, at first not comprehending.

Then something inside him ripped.

The world turned as red as the spreading stain and his pain vanished.

At his elbow, young Tam was just lifting his travel cloak from Buckie’s onion creel, and a laundress stood by, her hands outstretched
to take it.

Ronan almost plowed them down in his haste to reach the keep stairs.

“Suffering saints!” He pounded up the steep stone steps, catching Gelis just as she set her hand on the door’s great iron
latch. “Hold, lass! Dinna you move!”

Gelis started at the loud words.

She swung around to face him, about to ask what was amiss, but he was on her in a wink. Eyes blazing and hair whipping in
the wind, he swept her into his arms and kicked open the hall door.

“Someone fetch the hen wife!” he yelled, racing through the crowded, smoke-hazed hall. “My lady is injured!”

He crashed into a trestle table, near overturning it before sprinting on, knocking aside startled, wide- eyed kinsmen.

“Bring bandaging and have MacHugh send up his selfheal unguent!” he roared, bursting into the dimness of the stair tower.

“Put me down!” Gelis wriggled in his arms as he bounded up the curving steps, taking them two, sometimes three at a time.
“You’ll kill us both!”

“Hush, lass.” He clapped a hand over her mouth, pressing her head against his shoulder. “You’ll weary yourself if you speak.”

“ Pah-phooey!” She squirmed, her protest muffled. “You are the one who was hurt, not me.”

“Say you?” He gained the top landing, streaked down the darkened passage. “ ’Tis you who are bleeding, no’ I,” he flashed,
slamming open his bedchamber door.

He ran across the room, barely avoiding a collision with the steaming bathing tub some fool had placed in the middle of the
room instead of before the hearth fire.

Then, chest heaving, he lowered her to the bed with a gentleness that belied his wild flight across the great hall and up
the turnpike stair.

“Your skirts are bloodied,” he panted, stepping back now, a glossy spill of raven hair falling across his brow. Shoving it
aside, he looked at her, the dread in his eyes squelching her denial.

She blinked. “My skirts?”

“Aye, yours.” He swiped at his hair again. “To be sure, and they’re no’ mine!”

His dark brows lowering, he leaned close and snatched up a fistful of her damp, red-stained gown. He shook the reddened folds
at her.

Gelis pushed up on her elbows, eyeing her ruined skirts. “I am not hurt — not badly,” she insisted, only now feeling the slight
sting on her thigh.

The faint but steady throbbing and the telltale trickle of warmth.

“I must’ve cut myself when I withdrew my
sgian dubh
.” There could be no other explanation. “ ’Tis nothing, I say you. I’ve done so before and —”

“You are bleeding worse than a Martinmas goose!”

“But unlike that unfortunate creature, I shall live to see the morrow.”

The Raven’s expression said he doubted it.

He dropped her skirts and strode to the table. Grabbing a ewer, he half-poured, half-sloshed water into a basin. His hands
were shaking.

Even in the room’s dimness, she could tell.

Especially when he snatched a small drying cloth off a chair back and his hand passed in front of the light cast by a candelabrum.

A thought — horrible and damning — popped into her mind.

Her brows shot upward and she stared at him, her fingers digging into her bloodied skirts.

“You do not think
you
caused me to cut myself?”

“It would not be the first time.”

“
Dia!
” She slashed the air with her free hand. “I have never heard aught more foolhardy!”

With an oath that would have done her father proud, she yanked up her gown, flipping it back to expose her legs. “See you,
Raven — look here,” she cried, thrusting her right leg at him. “ ’Tis a wee scratch, naught more, and was done by my own clumsy
hand!”

“How it happened scarce matters.” He set the basin on the night table, plunged the linen into its depths. “Only that it doesn’t
again.”

“It won’t.” She fumbled to unlatch the buckle of her dagger’s thigh-belt, tossing the thing to the floor. “I’m not often so
clumsy —” she broke off, her mouth twitching. “With my
sgian dubh
, anyway.”

He humphed.

“ ’Tis true.” Sheer stubbornness made her emphasize the point.

He turned a skeptical face her way.

Keeping her own expression confident, she looked on as he wrung out the cloth. His hands still shook. She swallowed, striving
to find a way to reassure him.

But he’d clenched his jaw and when he stepped up to the bed, his gaze fixed on the tiny scrape on her thigh, she would’ve
sworn his eyes darkened.

Indeed, they almost smoldered.

“S-surely” — she jerked when he touched the dripping, icy cloth to her leg and began wiping at the dried streaks of blood
— “surely, you do not believe you have the Droch Shùil?”

“The evil eye?” He dabbed carefully at her inner thigh. “With surety, nae, though I’ve heard enough tales of those who have
but to glance at something they admire and blight it — much to their distress!”

“Then why —”

“Because what plagues me is far worse,” he spoke over her objection.

His eyes still on her leg, he reached to dampen the cloth again.

“I believe your
nick
was a warning.” He missed the basin rim by a good hand’s breadth. “I can’t risk daring Providence much farther.”

Gelis watched as he corrected his mistake, this time finding the bowl.

And still his gaze hadn’t left her thigh.

Not even as he wrung out the cloth.

“Providence brought us together, as I’ve tried to tell you,” she argued, not objecting when he lifted her knee, bending her
leg a bit to better dab at the thin runnels of blood striping her calf.

“And” — she leaned forward — “if you’ve any doubt, I can assure you it was my own haste in drawing my dagger that caused me
to nick myself. It had to do with the bull, not you.”

“The bull?” He looked up.

She nodded. “Did you not see his red eyes and ears?”

His fingers stilled on her calf. So she
had
known. “I saw his fiery eyes” — he kept his answer neutral — “but his ears looked grayish-white to me.”

“Ah well . . . ” She leaned back against the pillows and stared up at the bed’s dark, heavily carved canopy. “Then I guessed
rightly. He was indeed a creature of the
saoghal thall
.”

“The Yonder World?”

“So I would say, aye.” She plucked at a loose thread on one of the pillows. “Why else would I have seen his telltale red ears?”

Before he could answer, she rushed, “My
taibhsearachd
let me see him more clearly than you did. Everyone knows enchanted creatures from the Nether Regions have red eyes and ears.
Surely even you will not deny it?”

The Raven snorted and turned away to rinse the cloth again.

He did slide a glance at her. “And you know much of bespelled beasts?”

“I know enough.” She broke the thread she’d been fretting at, twirled the length of it around her finger. “That is why my
hand slipped when I pulled out my dagger.”

“The charge of a bull is enough to unsteady anyone’s hand.” The words spoken, he reached for her knee, this time dabbing gently
behind it.

Gelis bit her lip.

His touch was doing more than cleaning the blood streaks from her legs. Every glide of his hands on her skin sent delicious
tingling warmth shivering and spilling through her, a cascade of delight that rippled clear down to her toes and — she drew
a shaky breath — spread
up
her legs as well.

Sweet titillating sensations, they spiraled across a certain very feminine part of her, each luscious new swirl of desire
making her pulse and tingle with an almost unbearably delicious thrumming.

Almost as if he were touching her there.

Wishing he would, she squirmed on the bed. She imagined, no, she willed, his fingers to circle higher. To caress and stroke
her, perhaps even to look at her
there
, peering as intently between her legs as he was now staring fixedly at her wee, meaningless cut.

After all, when Evelina of Doon had given her the golden bauble-chain, the one-time joy woman had sworn that if all else failed,
she need only ensure he catch such an intimate glimpse of her.

If so, the older woman had vowed, he’d be unable to resist her.

Such was the nature of men.

Embarrassed by such a scandalous notion, however rousing, she drew a deep breath when he dipped and rinsed the cloth once
more.

Then, summoning her boldest self, she deliberately eased her knee just a tiny bit farther to the side.

“My sister once saw such a creature,” she blurted, hoping to disguise her wickedness. “Deep in Glenelg, though it was an enchanted
stag, not a bull.”

“Say you?” He arched a brow, his attention still on her cut.

She nodded . . . and moved her leg just a teeny bit more.

A muscle jerked in his jaw and he straightened, tossing aside the bloodied cloth.

“And what did your sister do?” He was still looking down at her, his gaze now focused a little higher. “Was she — Arabella,
I believe? — injured?”

“O-o-oh, nae.” Gelis shook her head, excitement making her heart pound.

Soon she would have him.

She shivered, tossed her hair back over her shoulder. She was beginning to burn. Heat and tingles coiled through her, igniting
her passion and making it hard to concentrate on anything but her wish that he’d seize her.

Grab her swiftly, and kiss her senseless, finally making her his own.

Instead, he angled his head and — she was sure of it — his gaze went a bit predatory.

She moistened her lips.

“Your sister was fortunate then,” he said, his voice now as dark as his eyes. Heat and sensuality shimmered off him, warming
and exciting her. “Perhaps the Old Ones do look after MacKenzie women.”

“Arabella doesn’t need their help. Nothing ever happens to her.” She heard the huskiness in her voice and shivered. “She could
walk through a blizzard and emerge without a hair out of place.”

“And the bespelled stag?” The Raven cocked a brow again. “He left her be?”

“He just stood there, watching her.” She could scarce speak.

He
was
looking at her.

She could feel the flames of his stare licking at her.

“Then he could no’ have been all that formidable.” His gaze grew even hotter, so intense she was beginning to sizzle.

For sure,
that part
of her was melting.

She moistened her lips again.

“Ah, but he was a fearsome beast,” she chattered on, the heat between her legs making her wriggle. “Like our bull, he had
eyes of fire and blood-red ears. To be sure, he would have attacked her, but Arabella recognized him for what he was and threw
a silver coin at him.”

“A silver coin?”

“Just that.” She nodded. “We’d been to the market fair earlier that morning and she still had a small cache of coins with
her.”

“You weren’t with her?”

“I hid away when it was time to leave the fair.” She shifted on the bed, keenly aware of the dampness beginning to mist her
inner thighs. “Some of the local chieftains were looking for young warriors of particular fighting strength. I wanted to watch
their competitions.”

“And your sister did not?”

“She was tired and only wanted to return to Eilean Creag,” Gelis remembered, leaving out how Arabella had rolled her eyes
when she’d suggested they stay longer to watch the strength trials. “She’d spent hours searching for colored thread and bone
needles but couldn’t find any to please her. That’s why she still had coins later.”

The Raven stepped closer. Something in his gaze made her think he was scarce listening to her, only looking at her. He reached
to smooth the hair from her cheek. His touch, when it came, was slow and deliberate, claiming.

It made her breath catch.

“I have heard of throwing silver coins at such beasts,” he said, still holding one of her curls, rubbing the strands between
his thumb and his fingers. “But I have ne’er met anyone who had tried the like.”