Chapter 23 #2
Mrs. Simpson smoothed the hair from Rose’s damp cheeks. She sat on the floor, her pink-petal skirts spread around her, her head in Mrs. Simpson’s lap as the elder gently spoke.
Rose sat amidst her mother’s finery, porcelain figurines, etchings, portraitures, silver ewers, gowns, and laces. She clutched a gown with silk blond lacing that resembled spun gold.
Her mother’s hair had been the color of gold.
“I remember so many of these things.” With eyes closed, she breathed in the faded lilac and knew now why she so loved springtime. “I thought I had forgotten. Everything.”
Mrs. Simpson held a small portraiture of her mother cradled in her palm. “You have her face, my dear. She loved you so.”
Rose lifted her tear-stained face. “How can you know?”
“How can any mother not love her child, lass?”
The door opened and Ruark entered. Even at this later hour, he still wore the thick leather jack and boots she had seen him wearing in the dining hall, though he had removed the fencing gloves. His hand on the doorknob came to a sudden halt.
Rose came to her feet, as did Mrs. Simpson. “I will see you in the morning,” the elder said.
After Mrs. Simpson left, Ruark walked over to her, his deep blue eyes filled with gentle concern. “You are crying. Why?”
She shook her head. “I am happy.”
The back of his finger caught a tear. “Is this happiness, love?”
“We must get the rest of what he has,” she said. “We must. If it entails him visiting here, what can be the harm if he will bring the rest to me?”
“This is the harm, Rose. To see what this is doing to you. He is not here for your happiness.”
Unable to bear the intensity of his gaze that came with the tender brush of his fingertips against her cheek, she laid her hand over his and looked down at all her mother’s beautiful things. “I know. I know.”
She did know. More than anyone, she knew her father never did anything without a reason, without intent. But what could be the harm in allowing him to see her just one more time if it meant . . .
She looked up into Ruark’s face, beseeching. “He did not have to do any of this. Yet he did. Why? Why would he do this? Why now? I don’t understand. I don’t deserve this from him, Ruark. How can he . . . ? This has something to do with your visit to him.”
He wrapped her protectively in his arms. “Rose . . .”
She ignored the hard, flat tone of his voice.
Stepped out of his arms and faced him with her palms on his face as she forced him to look at her.
Her courage wavered. He had done something.
Once again, he had brought this fight to his doorstep because of his actions.
But whatever it was he had done, he must have passionately believed it was the right thing to do. She knew that much about her husband.
She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him equally as passionately.
“What happened in Mawbray?” she asked.
He stared at her. A finite second. A heartbeat no longer. “The Black Dragon is sitting in the shallows of the Solway Firth burned to her waterline,” he said. “I sank her rather than hand her over to Hereford.”
Rose’s jaw dropped open. She couldn’t begin to form words around her thoughts and looked away.
Sadness engulfed her. She looked around her, then back up at him.
She leaned her cheek into his palm. She felt the ring on Ruark’s finger and felt more than the warmth of his flesh, and then she remembered what Mrs. Simpson had said about the ring that long-ago day in her cottage.
“What you think you want may not be what your heart wants, and nothing great is ever accomplished without sacrifice.”
She kissed him. Wrapping herself to him.
He spanned her chin with his long, hard fingers.
“Hereford thought that by trying to take the Black Dragon, he was taking what meant the most to me,” Ruark said into her open mouth, walking her backward into the wall.
“He was wrong. I needed him to know that.”
He bracketed her with his hands. “I needed him to know what he threw away. I needed him to know that he had no more power over you and that you were mine.”
He laid his palm against her chest. “I feel your heartbeat, Rose. Here. As if it were my own, as if something has been returned to me that I lost many years ago. I have struggled to understand. I only know I live in fear of losing it.”
Rose wound her arms around his neck. “Have I not convinced you that my heart is freely given?”
’Tis only a ring, she told herself as his mouth slanted across hers with an urgency that equaled her own, and he gave her his own brand of magic that shimmered around her and made her float.
Picking her up in his arms, he carried her into his bedchambers.
“You have been in the fencing room,” she said, attempting to unfasten the jack so she could touch the warm flesh beneath.
He lowered her feet to the ground. “Aye, Colum needs the practice.”
His hands moved along her spine. He undressed her as quickly as he undressed himself. He bared her breasts and fell with her to the bed. Both of them seemed to disappear into the soft silken folds of eiderdown and fur.
She clung to him, knotting her fingers in his hair, then cradling his head against her breast, feeling his tongue against her hardening nipples, and she gave herself to his touch.
She was very wet. Then the hardness of him was against her flesh and he was pushing inside her.
He pressed up on his hands to look down at her, watching then catching her cries with his kisses and filling her with sensual fire.
“Ah, Rose,” he pressed his mouth into her hair. “I do love ye so, lass.”
Rose awakened late, which was not her usual custom.
It had still been dark outside when she had awakened earlier to find Ruark sitting on the edge of the bed fully dressed.
“I have to go out, love,” he told her, pressing his lips to hers.
“I shall be back soon. Do not fret. Go back to sleep and dream of me.”
She had walked to the window, wrapping her arms around herself for warmth as she watched him and a dozen other men ride out. “That is the problem,” she said. “I am always dreaming of you.”
Then she crawled back beneath the covers, yet worried as she somehow managed to sleep away the rest of the morning, when she and McBain had their rounds to attend.
Rose splashed cold water over her face, brushed out her hair and plaited the length before Anaya arrived and helped her dress. The first big chill of September had arrived, and as Rose looked out her window, she saw a layer of frost on the ground. Grabbing her plaid wrap, she opened the door.
Colum sat on a chair, his arms and ankles crossed, his chin against his chest as if he were asleep—as if he had been there since Ruark left just before dawn.
She gritted her teeth. She had promised her husband she would not contact the emissaries staying in the village.
And he still put a guard on her. His lack of trust in her gnawed.
Rose saw that Colum was awake, pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders and walked past him. He caught up with her at the stairs. “Madam,” he complained. “ ’Tis too early for jaunty exercise.”
“Does he think I would seek out my father? Is he mad?”
“Ruark trusts you fine, my lady. ’Tis your father he does not trust. Ruark has gone to send away the emissaries.”
Rose turned to face Colum. “He told me he sank the Black Dragon.”
Colum scraped a palm across his cheek. “Went up like a Viking funeral pyre. A person could see the glow for miles.”
“I know he didn’t want my father to have the ship. But why . . . ?”
“He was retiring from the sea anyway,” Colum said philosophically and she glared at him in disbelief, unable to believe the man could joke.
She turned on her heel. Colum stepped in front of her. “I am to keep you company today, madam.”
“Is Stonehaven under threat?”
“Your father is encamped twenty miles away. Nowhere near Stonehaven. However, I am still to keep you company.”
Some of the tension left her shoulders. “Still, if he is concerned enough to sic you on me, then I am concerned enough to make sure the boys stay in today.”
Ever since Ruark had taught Jack to ride a horse, he and Jamie were off every morning to the falls.
Clouds had formed by the time she reached the stable yard fifteen minutes later. “We were beginning to think you had forgotten us, dear,” Mrs. Simpson said. “What is it?”
“Have the boys been down this morning?”
Rose walked past Mrs. Simpson into the stable and saw that both of their horses were gone. She clutched her shawl and walked back outside. “How long have you been down here?
“Thirty minutes. You did say we would be leaving at eight.”
Rose looked over her shoulder at McBain knobbing it down the hill like a pirate with a wooden shank. “Tell McBain that we need to postpone today,” she said, and looked up at Colum. “We need to fetch the two scoundrels back.”
Before she knew what she was about, she was riding out of the stable on a feisty dun-colored mare.
She knew the location of the falls, as she had gone there many times to collect plants for the herbal.
But Ruark had warned the boys on more than one occasion not to go up there alone as ’twas dangerous to swim in the waters beneath the falls.
The two had become good friends but together they caused naught but mischief.
Colum rode beside her. Rose was not wearing a riding habit and the wind pulled the hair from its braid.
She sat with her cloak and blue muslin skirts tucked beneath her legs and stout leather half-boots in the stirrups and kicked the mare to a run, leaping a low stone wall and scattering a flock of tits foraging around a stream. Water sprayed around her.
They galloped for three miles before reining the horses back to an easy lope.
The sun emerged from behind the clouds. She spied the two horses walking free some distance from the wooded path leading up to the falls.
Her heart suddenly pounding with heightened physical tension, she pulled up short.
A puff of fog rose from the mare’s nostrils.
“ ’Tis a goodly climb to the top, and cannot be done safely with a horse,” she said to Colum, as she tried to make sense of the apprehension that struck her like a heavy rock to her chest. “The horses probably got loose from their reins.” One horse she recognized as the dragoon captain’s horse Ruark had stolen the night he had pulled her from the river. The horse was Jack’s favorite.
She started to ride forward, but Colum grabbed her arm. “Those two lads know enough to hobble the horses, my lady.”
Her mare danced sideways. Rose had to reach down to calm the horse. Her glance went to the pine trees that disappeared into the low-hanging misty sky. And she knew something was wrong.
Colum eased his sword from the scabbard, then they heard a slow ominous hiss. An arrow flew past. “Go back now,” she heard him say. “Go!”
The first arrow missed them both, hissing past Rose’s head.
The second and third hit Colum directly in the ribs, another somewhere else, she could not see.
Her horse reared up, saving her life as a fifth arrow struck the mare in the throat.
The horse screamed and faltered and went down in a flurry of hooves.
Rose hit the ground hard; searing pain exploded in her head, driving her momentarily into unconsciousness.
When she stirred and tried to push up on her elbow, she saw Colum unmoving a few yards away, blood pooling around his head. She called his name. She struggled to pull her leg from beneath the fallen mare. “Colum!”
A pair of heavy black boots appeared where she leaned her hand against the ground. She looked up.
Geddes Graham!
She had not seen him or thought about him since she had held a blade to his bollocks and demanded Jack’s coin returned. He could not be here.
“Milady Countess,” he mocked as he squatted beside her, “ye ain’t so big now without my knife in yer hand, are ye?”
She glared up at him through a tangle of hair. “What have you done?!”
Had Geddes killed the boys, too? Rage filled her and gave her strength.
From behind her, brutal hands dragged her to her feet. She cried out with the pain, then faced Geddes, that traitorous carnivore, with hissing fury, and kicked out at him, nearly striking him in the bollocks. Her foot hit his stomach instead.
“Bitch!” He backhanded her and split her lip. Only the rough hands gripping her kept her from falling.
Geddes gripped her hair, forcing her face back. “Your dear da is payin’ us to see ye delivered to him. He did no’ tell us in what condition you had to be.”
Rose tried to hang on to consciousness. Her swollen mouth stumbled to form her next words. “Why would my father do this?”
Geddes laughed. “ ’Tain’t you Hereford wants, my thorny Rose.”