2 #4
Staring at Duncan’s eyes, Amber tried to see them as gray, but honestly could not. Green, perhaps. Or blue. Or brown. But not gray.
Amber let out a long sigh and prayed she wasn’t deluding herself.
“Where did you meet these unusual men?” she asked. “Or were they women?”
Duncan opened his mouth, but no words came. He grimaced at the fresh evidence of his lack of memory.
“I don’t know,” he said flatly. “But I know that I have met them.”
Amber went to Duncan and put her fingers over his restless sword hand.
“Their names?” Amber asked in a soft voice.
Silence answered her, followed by a curse.
She sensed Duncan’s raw frustration and growing anger, but no faces, no names, nothing to call forth memories.
“Were they friend or foe?” she asked quietly.
“Both,” he said hoarsely. “But not…not quite.”
Duncan’s hand clenched into a heavy fist. Gently Amber tried to soothe the fingers into relaxation. He jerked his hand away and pounded on his thigh.
“God’s blood!” he snarled. “What kind of dishonorable cur can’t remember friend or foe or sacred vows?”
Pain twisted through Amber, pain that was both Duncan’s and, eerily, her own.
“Have you made any such vows?” she asked in a low voice.
“I—don’t—know!”
The words were almost a shout.
“Gently, my warrior,” Amber said.
While she spoke, she stroked Duncan’s hair and face as she had through the long hours when he had been lost in an odd kind of sleep.
At the first touch, Duncan flinched. When he looked into Amber’s troubled golden eyes, he groaned and unclenched his hands, allowing her gentle caresses to soothe him.
“Sleep, Duncan. I can feel your exhaustion.”
“No,” he said grimly.
“You must let yourself heal.”
“I don’t want to go into that fell darkness again.”
“You won’t.”
“And if I do?”
“I’ll call you forth again.”
“Why?” he asked. “Who am I to you?”
Amber hesitated at the blunt question, then smiled an odd, bittersweet smile as Cassandra’s prophecy echoed like distant thunder.
He will come to you in shades of darkness.
And he had.
She had touched a man with no name and he had claimed her heart.
Amber didn’t know if she could bend events so that life as well as death flowed from her reckless action. She knew only one thing, and she knew it with a certainty greater than that of the sun’s burning progress across the sky.
“Come heaven, come hell,” Amber said in a low voice, “I will protect you with my life. We are…joined.”
Duncan’s eyes narrowed as he realized that Amber had just given him a vow that to her was every bit as binding as any that lords might make among themselves.
The fierceness with which she was prepared to defend him against the darkness that had claimed his memory both reassured Duncan and made him smile.
She was so fragile-looking, a handful of sunlight and softness, a fragrant breeze, a sweet warmth.
“Are you another ruthless Boadicea, to lead men into battle?” Duncan teased gently.
With a small smile, Amber shook her head. “I’ve never held a broadsword. They look like great, clumsy things to me.”
“Fairies weren’t meant to wield swords. They have other weapons.”
“But I am not a fairy.”
“So you say.”
Smiling, Duncan traced the long fall of Amber’s unbound hair.
“Odd to think that you are mine and I am yours…” he murmured.
Amber didn’t correct Duncan’s misunderstanding, for there was a curious difference in his touch now. It sent tendrils of sweet, secret fire through her.
“Only if you wish it,” she whispered.
“I can’t believe I would forget such a fey, beautiful creature as you.”
“That’s because I’m not beautiful,” she retorted.
“To me you are as beautiful as dawn after a long winter’s night.”
The genuine belief in Duncan’s voice and eyes was reinforced by his touch. He was not paying her courtly compliments. He had spoken what was to him the simple truth.
Amber shivered as Duncan’s thumb outlined the curve of her parted lips.
He felt her response and smiled despite the headache that had returned with the renewed beating of his blood.
The smile was nakedly male, frankly triumphant, as though he had been given an answer to a question he hadn’t wanted to put into words.
Duncan’s other hand slid deeply into Amber’s hair, both caressing and chaining her. Strange sensations coursed from his touch. Before she could put a name to them, she found herself stretched across his chest, her lips against his, and his tongue within her mouth.
Surprise overcame the other feelings racing wildly through Amber. Instinctively she struggled against Duncan’s heavy embrace.
At first his arms tightened. Then slowly, reluctantly, he loosened his grip on her just enough so that he could speak.
“You said you were mine.”
“I said we were joined.”
“Aye, lass. That’s what I had in mind. Joining.”
“I meant—that is—”
“Yes?”
Before Amber could answer, the excited yaps and howls of a pack of hunting dogs burst into the clearing that surrounded her cottage. She knew without looking that Erik had come to check on the stranger who had been left in her care.
Erik would be furious that Amber had disobeyed him and untied the man who had no name.