Chapter Twenty-Two
“How many of your men are dead?” Isobel asked her husband, trying to sound calmer than she felt.
Dougal and Lachlan had come in just at dark and she had gleaned the details of their situation in pieces: MacNab haunting their borders, lurking not quite beyond sight, attacking when he could and withdrawing again when Dougal himself rode out.
The guard Dougal had assigned to patrol the perimeter had been slaughtered, the message clear.
She had never seen anyone wear the look now on her husband’s face, grim, stark, and blank with anger, enough to justify his name.
He had not expected an attack so swift or stealthy.
Unable to sit still, he paced before the fire in the great hall while Lachlan sat silent with his head in his hands, and Isobel, with Meg at her side, stood by.
“Four,” he answered in a voice rough with emotion. “Every man I sent out on this last patrol—their horses, as well.”
Meg swore bitterly, and her brother glanced at her. “Aye,” Dougal said, “he needs to pay. He will pay.”
Lachlan raised his head. “Aye,” he agreed in turn. “But MacNab has made his position evident, has he no’? Not a man comes or goes until your wife’s father arrives and this matter is settled. You do not ride out, I do not go home. You cannot even send a message to the King.”
“As if I would appeal to that trumped-up bastard!” Dougal fairly shouted the words, his rage overflowing. “I take care of my own troubles and fight my own battles.”
“And how are you doing at that, Brother?” Meg asked nastily. “MacNab has you in a slip knot. If you ride out with a band of men to meet him fairly, at arms, he will melt away and you will find no enemy.”
“At least that may keep the villain clear of my borders.” Dougal looked at Lachlan. “We will ride out at dawn—until then, let him freeze his balls off in the cold. I have fallen men to honor, and clansfolk to comfort.”
Isobel whispered, “What comfort can you give them?”
Dougal’s profile grew hard as iron. “All a laird has to offer—his vow to provide for them so long as I am able.”
A chill of apprehension snaked its way up Isobel’s spine. “Might you lose your lands over this? Could you lose everything?”
All three of them stared at her. Dougal pivoted on his heel to face her. “No one takes my lands!” he declared. “I may lose my honor, my standing, my head, but MacRae lands, where MacRae blood has been spilled, will remain. ’Tis a sacred trust.”
Isobel nodded. She had thought her father obsessed with the lands he oversaw in Yorkshire, lands that had come to him as her Scottish mother’s dowry, no doubt a throw-away entitlement on her maternal grandfather’s part.
For, as she had come to see upon acquaintance with her husband, Scotsmen did not part with Scottish lands.
The Yorkshire holding, profitable as it might be, had never belonged to her grandfather’s ancestors and was not tied to him by blood.
Looking at her husband now, Isobel saw MacNab might as well steal his limbs as deprive him of his lands—or emasculate him. Isobel needed to understand his feelings, and how deep they ran.
She lifted her chin and looked him in the eyes. “There is another solution.”
Impatient and enraged, Dougal barely acknowledged her. “Aye? How is that?”
“I could give MacNab what he wants, what he says he wants, that is, and stop this horror where it stands, before any more blood is shed.”
“You?” Dougal’s smoke-grey eyes narrowed in an unfriendly way. “Again, how?”
“By handing myself over to him.” The words sounded bolder and far braver than Isobel felt. In truth, the very idea sickened her and made her heart beat high up in her throat. Yet she found she would be willing to do even this, for his sake.
Meg gasped, and Lachlan’s head swiveled toward Isobel violently. But Isobel barely spared a glance for them. She continued to gaze into her husband’s eyes, looking for something she failed to see. Acknowledgement? Gratitude? Affection? Isobel’s heart clenched in disappointment.
What she did see was a flare of rage so bright it seared her. “You wish to leave me?” he roared. “Despite all you said? Now that he looks to prove victorious, would you rather throw in your lot with my fiercest enemy?”
“No!”
He reached out with one arm and cleared the table beside which they stood, sweeping it of cups, bottles, papers, and a candle that flared before going out.
“You decide your chances look better with MacNab, is that it? You look to abandon the ship I sail? You believe I shall be bested—again?”
“No, I—” Isobel’s heart fluttered, and she struggled for words in the face of what she now saw flare in his eyes.
He lowered his voice to an edge of danger, cutting as a blade. “Or is it you would simply prefer his bed to mine?”
Isobel reacted without thought and lashed out, intending to strike him. He caught her wrist before she could land the blow, and held her tight.
“So it is to be that way, is it? By how many means will you punish me?”
“You misunderstand me,” Isobel cried, not even attempting to struggle against his bruising grasp. “But you will not listen, stubborn savage that you are.”
He sneered into her face, “I am not in the mood to listen.”
“I can see that.” From the corner of her eye, Isobel saw Meg grab Lachlan’s sleeve, pull him to his feet and tow him from the room. Save for the guard who doubtless waited outside the door, she and her husband were alone.
“Can we not speak reasonably?” she appealed. “Can we not try?”
He swore and released her, turning away to the fire, giving her his back. “If you wish to leave me, do it,” he growled.
“I do not wish to leave you.” How could she tell him she wanted anything before that, and given the choice would sooner die than go to MacNab?
“If you wish to leave me go,” he repeated, “but I will never see you released to MacNab. Go to your father if you must—or to hell—but I will fight to the death before I see you in that animal’s hands.”
“Why will you not listen?” She walked round him and stared up into his face.
“Much as you would deny MacNab the victory of gaining possession of me, I deny the possibility of you losing your lands and all you hold dear, just to keep me. These lands are your life’s blood, while you have not known me a month.
Rather would I act to put an end to this conflict. ”
“You cannot. The devil himself could not resolve what lies between MacNab and me. Is that what you truly think, that I would steal victory from MacNab by keeping you?”
“Yes.”
He searched her face. “Nay, Wife, but I would spare you the agony, torture, and abuse that befalls any female who comes to his—or his cur of a son’s—hands.”
“Aisla,” she said.
Pain flickered in his eyes. “Aye, Aisla.”
“What did he do to her? She was Bertram’s wi—”
“I do not wish to speak of it.”
“No.” The echoes of his pain gripped Isobel’s heart. “Yet the love you once felt for her finds its reflection in the hate you feel now for MacNab. Judging by the depth of your hatred, your love must have been deep indeed.”
Dougal fairly howled, “I have said I do not wish to speak of it!”
“And I say we must, since what you felt then affects us now. I am caught in this. Do you not think I have a right to know exactly what MacNab did to Aisla—and thence to you—that killed your ability to love?”
Dougal became very still, like the surface of the ocean before a storm. Like the ocean, Isobel could feel currents stirring, violent and terrifying. When he glared at her, she saw vicious rejection in his eyes.
“Love is a lie,” he told her, “a fool’s cruel delusion. It is weakness rather than strength, a myth that begets vulnerability. A claim of love changes nothing. It saves nothing! And I do not want to hear the word spoken between these walls again.”
“Then perhaps I should leave you. Maybe when my father arrives I should pack up the nothing with which I came and just leave with him. Because I will not live with a man who supposes he can tell me how to speak, think, and feel.”
Dougal’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “Surely you did not expect me to love you.”
Isobel took the blow without flinching, at least outwardly.
“Of course not. It is a ridiculous premise. What, after all, is there about me to love? And why should my life take such a turn, in a direction it never before headed? Obviously I am not worthy of any such fine emotion. I might as well slink home behind my father and live out my days in disgraced obscurity.”
He took a step nearer her, lifted one hand toward her face but stopped short of touching her.
“You deserve better than a lie, Isobel. I value you—the devil knows, I desire you! I admire your courage and would be glad to see you bear my sons. But I cannot offer you more than that. Should there not at least be honesty between us?”
Isobel’s heart, struggling beneath her breast, admitted she did not want him to lie. She wished the words to tumble from his lips, soft declarations and promises. Yet this man would never give her that, and she began to see his harsh demeanor revealed a stark honor.
If she told him how she felt, confessed the wild, tumultuous feeling possessing her, he would scoff, call her deluded, declare her feelings unfounded. And she could not bear the pain of that—not now, and possibly not ever.
For the first time, her eyes dropped from his. “Honesty.” She repeated the word as if she fathomed not its meaning.
“Aye.” His hand at last touched her cheek, cupped it almost tenderly, sending through her a shiver of involuntary response. Traitorous flesh, that wanted him so! “’Tis all I can offer you, Isobel—that and my promise, as your husband, to hold to you and no other.”
“So, you offer your disbelief in love to me, alone. It is a grand compliment!” She drew a ragged breath. “You speak over and over again of honesty, yet you refuse to say, honestly, what happened between you and MacNab.”
“Do not ask that of me. Anything else.”
“Yet it is what I need to know.”
“It is not.” His thumb brushed across her lips, causing her to part them and draw a breath—causing desire to flare low down in her belly. What would she not do for this man? Yet what he demanded of her—to live with him without love—must prove hardest.
“All you need to know, Wife, is I will fight with the last of my strength to keep you.” He laughed harshly. “Poor reassurance as that may be.”
Somehow, Isobel found the strength to pull free of his grasp. “And if I ask Meg for the truth?”
“Do not do that,” he said. “I warn you—do not, if you wish to retain any semblance of harmony between us.”