Chapter Twenty #2
“Nay.” Cyrus stood rooted as a battle between hope and anger raged inside him.
His gaze skimmed along the dark dock across the water.
’Twas late, and the villagers had all sought their beds.
One of Iain’s guards stood watch by the remaining rowboats, and another rowed out toward the ship.
By the light of the hull lantern, Cyrus could tell it wasn’t a woman.
He turned away, wishing he had the note.
Fool. He’d tossed the paper into the coals in his bedchamber hearth, but the words had etched themselves inside him.
The loops and slant of her hand. He’d traced the lines of her name then, and his mind moved to the note.
I cannot marry you. There was nothing between us except lust. Laria.
Was that all there was between them? Lust had brought empires tumbling.
He remembered his father’s advice when he and Patrick were old enough to wed. I married your mother because she was plain and meek and lacking cleverness. I would never lust for her, and therefore she could never control me.
I lust for Laria. But the simple words told only a fraction of the story that had bloomed between them. If it were simple lust, he could find others to occupy his mind, yet Laria remained there, taking up nearly all the space.
His mind turned over the words to her signature. “Her name,” Cyrus said and turned to Kenan. “Her name looked different.”
“Laria’s?”
“Aye, on the landscapes she’d painted and hung in her room.
The L was looped on both ends, and the…” He thought hard and looked upward, picturing her signature cutting across the dark sky.
“The n looked different, too.” He met Kenan’s gaze.
“Someone else may have written that note. Signed her name.” Heart thumping, Cyrus spun around when one of Iain’s men called.
“Chief!”
Cyrus’s heart lurched as he watched the man point toward the water, dark and frigid beneath them. He ran toward the rail where they stood, searching for a woman in the water, but all he saw was the guard in the rowboat.
“Was she wearing that tonight?” Iain asked. “I cannot remember.” The man in the boat held out a sopping bundle of clothing. “Shake it out, idiot,” Iain called down. “We can’t see it. Is it blue?”
The man shook out a petticoat of dark wool.
It looked like something Laria had worn, something hanging in the armoire in her room.
He’d studied her clothing as well as the pictures she’d painted after he realized what they were, parts of the mystery woman who’d left him twice.
Once tied to a bed, his body stripped, and now caught in a trap of emotions, his soul stripped.
“’Tis one of Laria’s,” Iain said, his gaze scanning the dark surface. “But she wore something else at dinner.”
It must be some other woman’s gown. Cyrus’s stomach ached with the thought of her somewhere below his ship, floating without breath. Any twitch or break in the water, and he’d leap overboard. But it remained still, and his stomach remained clenched.
Another man came up to Iain, out of breath. “We’ve searched down to the bilgewater. No woman is on board.”
Iain ran a hand through his hair. “Very well.”
“Why would ye think she was here when she left me that letter?” Cyrus asked. Daingead, her signature was different, he was sure.
Iain cleared his throat. “Like I said, she could have written it as a ruse and planned to still sail with ye.” Iain’s lips thinned. The man wasn’t used to being questioned. He’d better get used to it now that he was married to Grace. The thought prickled along Cyrus’s limbs.
Iain pivoted on his bootheel. “I return to Tuath Tower.”
Cyrus watched Iain and his men row back across the water.
But his mind rolled over the signature and words in Laria’s note.
He’d been so focused on the first part, the part that said that whatever bond had formed between them was weak, merely made of lust, that he’d ignored the second part of the note.
I am returning to the forest. I must keep my grandmother safe. Don’t try to find me.
Fok. Sophie Macqueen was on her way to Scorrybreac with Rory and Sara, where she’d be safe. Laria knew that, but Iain didn’t. Laria didn’t write the note. Either she’d left a different note, and Iain had replaced it with his, or…
Iain disembarked at the dock, which remained empty except for his men. “Timothy,” Cyrus called, and his second-in-command strode over. “Tell the helmsman that we may leave tonight if the tide is high enough.”
“He says a storm is blowing in,” Timothy said.
“We might sail to get ahead of it,” Cyrus said, and Timothy ran off to talk to the man at the whipstaff below.
“We’re preparing to leave now?” Kenan asked. “Maybe Laria is trying to reach us.”
“She didn’t write the note that was left for me.”
“Whether she wrote it or not, she was gone,” Kenan said, his forehead furrowing in thought. “Could Iain have taken her, leaving the note?”
“He was with us until we retired for bed.” Cyrus’s gaze moved around the deck as if looking for a slender shadow. “But he was angry enough to row out to our ship to search. Rageful, even. Much more than when we first saw that Laria had escaped Tuath Tower.”
“So… He had her, and she escaped him?”
Cyrus rubbed his forehead, glancing up at the mast. Clothes had been found in the sea, and someone had seen a woman along the docks. “I think Laria is on this ship.”
A call came along the deck for men to climb the masts and unfurl the sails, sending the crew in an orderly fashion along from bow to stern, their movements practiced and efficient.
“Iain’s men looked everywhere,” Kenan said, turning in a tight circle.
“They didn’t look up.”
Both men tipped their faces toward the mast top.
The darkness made the small platforms nearly invisible, the lantern light not reaching that high.
They were standing under the main mast, but Cyrus strode toward the mizzenmast at the stern of the ship.
Water darkened the planks at the base of the mast. He touched his finger to a drip on the sturdy wooden pole, his heart thumping.
“Bloody hell. I need a blanket,” he called to one of the men, who changed direction without question.
“Ye think she’s up there?” Kenan tipped his head back.
The sailor ran back, handing Cyrus a woolen blanket, and he began to climb the ratlines up the mast. Blanket slung over his shoulder, he clutched each rope rung, wet from the mist or from Laria.
Hands and feet moving in a rhythm he knew well from working on his father’s ships all his life, Cyrus made his way up into the blackness of night.
Two of his men followed to unfurl the larger mizzen sail from the yard.
As he climbed, the mast swayed with his weight and the growing wind.
A storm might be blowing in, but he could still see stars overhead between patches of filmy clouds streaking by.
He didn’t call her name, not wanting to look foolish if she wasn’t there. But his steps quickened, along with his heart, to reach the underside of the circular mast top platform. The mast passed right through the center of Poseidon’s Fist.
He drew even with the bottom of the snug structure. “Laria, are ye in there, lass?”
Below him, the sail unfurled, and wind caught in it, jerking him nearly off the mast. Clutching the rope, he pulled himself up and peered into the tiny space. Pressed into the opposite side, as if wishing to blend in with the thin curved wall, was a form.
“Laria.” He pulled the blanket from his shoulder and rested it over the shivering body.
Her pale face stood out from the shadows, and her eyes were dark circles. “I didn’t leave the tower.” Her words came out jaggedly through chattering teeth.
He pulled her to him, even though half his body still stood outside the protective circle. She felt like a statue of ice, frozen and fragile in his arms. He willed his heat into her. “What happened?”
“Iain,” she whispered into his neck, and fury rose cold inside him.
“Iain took ye from yer room?”
“He sent Jasper Whitt.”
“I’ll kill the man.” Cyrus took a steadying breath. “The letter?”
“I never wrote a letter.”
He’d been right about the signature. It wasn’t hers. He stroked her wet hair, wishing he could take the chill from her body.
“Cy?” ’Twas Kenan below. “Do we sail?”
He must get her out of there, away from Macqueen shores. Unable to let go of her to climb down, he tucked her head into his chest, covering her ear.
“Aye!” he bellowed. “Raise the sails.”
Below, the men called out a series of commands, and the winches turned, raising the sails of the mighty ship. The mast swayed as the wind caught, the sails snapping, but Cyrus balanced, holding her against him, the blanket corralling their combined body heat.
“Jasper took ye from yer room.”
She tipped her head back to look into his face. “Iain ordered it. Jasper took me to the hidden staircase leading up to Iain’s bedchamber and tied and gagged me. Grace found me there.”
Cyrus tensed. “Grace?”
“She heard me at the bottom of the staircase.”
“She didn’t come with ye? Escape with ye?” Bloody hell.
Laria shook her head. “I tried, but she’s convinced Jasper is acting on his own. She wouldn’t leave with me.” She squeezed his arm. “Cyrus, I tried.”
Cyrus could have growled. The tearing inside him was painful. Either Laria was wrong about Iain, or he was abandoning his sister.