Chapter Eleven
THE WOODEN CHAIR was abominably hard.
Robert’s body ached in places he did not even recognize.
It had been a punishing two days. Lady Mairi MacLeod had woken him in his bed at the Durness Inn during the early hours of the previous morning with some panicked story of how her sister had been carried off.
He had not slept since, searching for Lucy along all the roads from Durness, following the trail of the abductors until he had finally caught up with them in this godforsaken place.
He had dispatched the hired thugs and sent Wilfred packing.
He had tended to Lucy while she was sick and all the thanks he got for his efforts was a repeated refusal of his offer of marriage and the threat that she would run off.
She was stubborn, Lady Lucy MacMorlan, and spoiled, and a great deal of trouble and yet he still wanted her.
And now she was tied to the bed, and that made the wanting all the more acute.
He might be exhausted but not so much that he could not make very thorough love to her.
Robert thought about the slippery silk ties and about Lucy restrained.
He thought about the delicate curves and hollows of her body beneath the thin night shift.
He thought about the scent of her skin and the sensation of it beneath his hands.
All the thinking and no doing was playing havoc with his senses, making him so hard he could burst, making him want to part her sweet thighs and plunge into her.
Madness. He ran a hand over his hair, rubbing his forehead to try and banish the images of lust. He cursed his vivid imagination as he grew an even more monstrous erection.
He shifted for the hundredth time on the chair.
“You are still awake.” She did not sound pleased.
“So are you.”
“I am uncomfortable.”
“So am I,” Robert said, with feeling. “Why don’t you invite me to join you on the bed?” he added. “It would be more pleasant for both of us.”
It could do no harm to make love to her now, now that she was to be his bride. He ached to have her. The desire pounded in his blood.
“I don’t think so.” She sounded prim, but underneath the formality ran a thread of anxiety. He was forcibly reminded that she was a virgin. She needed careful wooing, not ravishment. She certainly should not be seduced on a frowsty mattress in a mouse-infested inn.
Damnation.
“Then we are both destined to endure an uncomfortable few hours,” he said.
Nevertheless he did sleep, after what felt like several eternities.
He was troubled by visions of Lucy slipping wraithlike through his dreams—at one point he even imagined her hands on him—and he stirred but did not fully wake.
The exhaustion of the past two days, the relief that she was safe and the promise of the future all lulled him.
He awoke several hours past dawn. The room was cold and full of pale gray light.
The shutters were open, rattling in the breeze.
It took him no more than a split second to come completely awake, instinct warning him that something was wrong.
He leaped from the chair with an oath. All his muscles screamed a protest.
Two strides took him to the bed. It was empty, the bonds hanging limp on the wooden rail like a mocking taunt.
They had not been cut, which could only mean that Lucy had managed to wriggle out of them somehow.
He frowned. That must have hurt. As a sign of how determined she was to escape marriage to him, it was speaking loud and clear.
The window was wide. He ran across to it and leaned out.
There was a low roof beneath, sloping down to within six feet of the ground.
Spinning around, he took a swift inventory of the room.
The drawer in the dresser was half-open, spilling clothing onto the floor.
Lucy’s nightgown lay abandoned in a pile of tumbled white.
His sword belt had gone from the chest. His pistols had been taken, as well—along with his money.
This time he swore even harder. At least he still had his dirk.
Grabbing his coat, he unlocked the door and headed down the stairs, taking them three at a time.
There was a rusty old claymore adorning the lath-and-plaster wall of the hallway; he took that, as well.
His horse was missing. By now he was not in the least surprised.
He had underestimated Lady Lucy MacMorlan before.
This time his mistake had been spectacular.
He had thought that as long as the door was locked and he held the key, as long as she was physically restrained, he could let down his guard.
It was an amateur mistake. Lady Lucy might be the oh-so-proper daughter of a duke, but she was the descendant of Malcolm MacMorlan, the Red Fox of Forres.
She was from warrior stock through and through.
Scratch the surface and the trappings of nineteenth-century civilization were thin in all of them.
He smiled grimly. Lady Lucy was magnificent. She was indeed everything he wanted in his wife and the mother of his children.
The only other horse in the stable was a mangy nag that looked as though it was going to keel over if ridden too hard.
It would have to do. Ignoring the angry shouts of the landlord, who had lost a blunt claymore and had been cheated of both the price of the room and the hire of the nag, Robert headed off down the road toward Thurso at the fastest trot the horse could raise.
* * *
LUCY HAD BEEN traveling for several hours.
She was not at all sure she had been going in the right direction.
Navigation was not one of her strong points.
Nor had she seen anyone to ask. The countryside of high crags and bare rock was golden with bracken and hazy purple-gray with heather.
The sun was already bright and hot. Nothing and no one moved in the landscape.
Only an eagle circled lazily above in the pale blue.
It felt unnaturally quiet and Lucy felt a prickle of unease. The horse felt it too. His ears were pricked and Lucy could feel tension in him.
She liked Robert Methven’s horse. He was a rich chestnut with bright, intelligent eyes.
He was fast, brave and clever. He reminded her of his master, but that she did not really want to think about, for she had treated Methven shamefully, stealing his horse, his pistols, his sword and his money.
It had been quite easy in the end. He had been sleeping deeply and barely stirred when she had lifted the sword belt from the chair and swung the saddlebags with the pistols in them over her shoulder.
Lucy had judged searching his pockets for the key to the door to be too risky, so she had clambered out of the window and taken the low drop to the stable yard instead.
She and Alice had spent years climbing in and out of windows at Forres Castle.
Or at least Alice had. Lucy had watched, so she knew how to do it.
The only thing she was not entirely happy about was her outfit.
She had not had long to rummage through the chest of drawers and so had emerged with a motley collection of clothes.
There was a low white blouse, which she wore with a bright scarf to conceal her décolletage, there was a pair of boy’s breeches that were a passable fit, a jacket that was too small and tight and some stockings with holes in them.
Footwear had been a problem until she had reached the stables and had been able to steal a pair of well-worn boots from one of the grooms. They were slightly too big and would give her blisters if she tried to walk far in them.
Her hair was loose and unbrushed. All in all she knew she looked ragged and unkempt.
The lane wound slowly downward toward a loch that gleamed in the sun, reflecting the soft blue of the sky.
There was a scattering of crofts by the side of the track, barely enough to be thought a village, with a few chickens scratching in the dust and some washing flapping on a line.
The walls were falling down, the earth so poor it could barely support the neat rows of cabbage and beans that had been sown.
Farther out, Lucy could see houses that had been abandoned, the roofs fallen, grass growing through the cracks in the walls.
Some had been burned and the charred and blackened remains of fallen spars gleamed malevolently in the sun.
There was a strange atmosphere about the place, part fear, part despair.
Lucy felt it with a trickle of apprehension down her back.
As she drew level with the first croft, a man came out of the gate, laying aside his hoe and dusting soil from the palms of his hands. He was young, no more than three or four and twenty, but his face was lined with tiredness and he moved slowly.
“Good morning...mistress.” He raised a hand to shade his eyes as he looked up at Lucy, clearly unsure what to make of her.
She could read his thoughts; the horse was highly bred, she was wearing a man’s sword on a belt that was far too big for her, the saddlebags bulged and her clothes were cheap.
She suspected he thought her a thief, though he spoke politely enough.
“Where do you travel?” he asked.
“To Durness,” Lucy said. “Am I on the right road?”
“You need to turn northwest,” the man said. His eyes had widened at her cut-glass accent and he stood up a little straighter. “The road forks past the knot of pines.” He pointed. “You can water your horse by the loch there.”
“My thanks,” Lucy said. She turned back on a thought. “Who is the laird here?” she said.
The man’s face darkened. “Cardross,” he said, and spat in the dust.
Cardross.
So these people were Wilfred’s tenants, so poor they could barely scrape a living from the neglected land. Lucy felt chilled although the sun was hot. It had not occurred to her that she might have wandered back onto Cardross land. She was going to have to be very careful.