Only For A Knight (23 page)

 

So thoroughly had he laid siege to her, staked his
claim
on her.

 

A claim she knew with her heart and her soul that he meant to redeem to the fullest.

 

And soon . . . if the smoldering heat banking in his eyes and his confident stance were any indication.

 

A possibility she could not allow.

 

Especially since even just standing so close to him, them both fully clothed, proved so overwhelmingly titillating, she could scarce draw breath for wanting more—a deeper, utterly lascivious closeness the sinuous likes of which she suspected only flared so hotly between paramours and their lemans.

 

Leman.

 

The word and all its illicit meaning gave her the strength she needed to put an end to whate’er crackled and sizzled between them before the blaze raged out of control.

 

Drawing herself up as straight as she could, she dragged in a tight breath and surrendered to the inevitable.

 

“Aye, ’tis well and I am knowing the plaid comes from this house, Sir
Robert
,” she said, emphasizing the name she knew he did not wish her to use, secretly amazed she could get any words at all past the knots in her tongue. “And if you sought me out to inquire why I have suchlike in my possession, you will be sorely disappointed because I cannot tell you.”

 

“Cannot or will not, my lady?”

 

Juliana bristled at the title, but she said nothing. After all, he had repeatedly told her to call him Robbie—and she’d just deliberately used
Robert
for the sheer pleasure of annoying him.

 

“Well?” He leaned against the worktable, his feet crossed at the ankles, and simply . . . eyed her.

 

Eyed her and, Juliana suspected, seeing much more than the agitated flush she knew stained her cheeks and the furrowed brow that could ne’er seem to stay smooth in his presence.

 

“Must I ask you again?” He picked up one of the little earthen medicinal jars, a fat, globular one, and began circling its rim with his middle finger.

 

A decidedly slow-moving middle finger whose leisurely explorations of the round jar lid annoyed her beyond all bounds of reason.

 

“Cannot or will not? Answer me and I shall set down the jar,” he said, a triumphant gleam in his eye.

 

Sheer indignation kept her from spluttering.

 

“Ne’er
will not,
good sir, for I do not lie,” she said so soon as she was sure her voice would not quiver. “I will ne’er hide the truth from you or any man.
Cannot
is your answer.”

 

She flicked a hand at the ancient plaid. “I cannot tell you the origin of the
breacan an fheilidh
because I do not know.”

 

He set down the jar, followed her gaze. “Lady, forgive me—I would not see you distressed.”

 

Juliana shrugged. “In truth, sir, I am glad-hearted I can tell you aught at all. In especial, a good deal about the woman who owned the
breacan
—and I do wish to speak of her. Indeed, I must.”

 

“The woman who owned it?”

 

He stared at her, the stiffness of his son-of-the-laird-leaning-against-the-table posture falling away as quickly as he’d struck the pose.

 

“So you have been remembering?”

 

“I have been regaining my memory, aye. Though not as much as I’d prefer—bits and pieces only.”

 

“Praise the saints,” he said, and turned all his smiling-eyed good humor on her. “Here is news to lift my spirit!”

 

Juliana’s heart began to thump.

 

He would think otherwise once he’d heard what she had to say. She turned back to the worktable, rested a hand on the plaid’s brittle folds.

 

His gaze, too, slanted back to the aged lump of fray-edged wool. “If the memories pain you, you needn’t tell me. I should have left the thing where I found it . . . ’tis hoary old, anyway. I ought not have been looking in—”

 

“Nay, you should not have, but I am well pleased that you brought it here.”

 

He lifted a brow at that, looked doubtful.

 

Juliana rubbed her fingers over the plaid’s moth-eaten wool, an entirely different kind of heat now constricting her chest.

 

“The plaid was my mother’s,” she said after a moment. “By bringing it here, you have given me good reason to tell you about her—about things I should have told you when the memories first started coming back to me.”

 

“You are crying, Juliana.” He took a small length of linen bandaging from the table, used it to dab at her cheeks.

 

“I never cry.” She reached up to ease his hand from her face, stunning herself when her fingers brushed against the wetness there. “My mother prized the plaid, although I cannot say why it meant so much to her. She is dead, see you? I— . . . she . . .”

 

He reached for her when her voice broke, tried to put his hands on her shoulders, but she sidestepped him.

 

“I am sorry, lass,” he said, soft-voiced. “Losing a mother is one of life’s deepest sorrows.” He paused, looking at her as if expecting her to say something more. “You say she cherished the plaid?” he asked finally, his tone and expression soothing.

 

Too soothing.

 

Blinking, Juliana dashed the moisture from her cheek. Scalding heat squeezed her chest and thickened her throat, making it difficult to wrap her tongue around the words she wished to say.

 

“Aye, she cherished the plaid. And highly, that I know,” she admitted at last, glancing around the herbarium.

 

She needed to get away from him—even a handbreadth would suffice.

 

Her gaze lit on the snake stones in the still-opened aumbry and she went there, taking up position in front of the little wall cupboard, and hoping he would not follow her.

 

But he did—looming over her in an even more intimate way than he’d dared at the worktable.

 

“You were telling me your mother was fond of the plaid?”

 

She nodded. “I cannot recall a day I did not catch her taking the plaid from its place of honor on her special shelf and holding it close to her heart, or simply smoothing her hands over it. But unless her attachment had aught to do with the treasure she kept wrapped within its folds, I do not understand why she felt as she did.”

 

“Nay?”

 

“Nay, indeed. To me, the reverence she showed the
breacan
wasn’t . . . seemly,” she said, regretting the coldness of her words, but the gentle caring in his own thick-voiced
“nay”
had struck uncomfortably close.

 

“It is a MacKenzie plaid,” she said, smoothing her skirts.

 

“There could be worse colors to sling round your shoulders in these parts.”

 

He gave her an all-too-endearing smile. A slightly lopsided one the likes of which she’d not yet seen on him—and didn’t want to again.

 

The boyish charm of it . . . bothered her.

 

So she pulled another weapon from her dwindling supply, a bright-shining new one she was only just beginning to form and mold back into the cherished place she now knew he’d e’er held in her heart: her brother, Kenneth.

 

“The MacKenzies may rule Kintail, but they are by no means seen with grace by everyone.” She lifted her chin at him. “My own brother could ne’er abide them.”

 

“And would your brother be this . . .
Kenneth,
you’ve mentioned?”

 

Juliana nodded, thoughts of her well-loved brother making her eyes threaten to well again.

 

Her knight smiled again, even possessed the bold-heartedness to gentle his knuckles down her cheek.

 

“Then I should give much to meet your brother,” he said, his dimples coming out to further annoy her. “I’d like the opportunity to set his mind aright.”

 

“I doubt you could.” The surety of that was writ in stone. “Kenneth is man of his own mind and heart. A man unbending in his beliefs . . . his principles.”

 

“All the more reason I should value the honor of his friendship—if e’er I have the chance to win it,” he said, a barely noticeable shadow crossing his face. “See you, I, too, am a man of strong principles, my lady. For all my behavior may look otherwise to those who do not know me.”

 

Juliana stiffened, pretended to focus her attention on the assortment of small wooden storage boxes arranged so neatly within the deep recess of the aumbry.

 

“Do you mean, perchance, pursuing me whilst your own bride-to-be sleeps beneath your roof . . . mayhap awaiting you even now, in these very moments?”

 

She glanced at him, saw his set-faced expression, the displeasure in his dark blue eyes. Eyes so deep a blue, at times, she’d swear they were black as fresh-cut peat.

 

“You do not know of what you speak,” he said, tight-voiced. “I have taken measures, made arrang—”

 

“She has agreed to become your lady wife.” Juliana took one of the tiny wooden boxes from the aumbry, began dusting it with a fold of her
arisaid
. “Mind you well—I have not and ne’er will assent to being your . . . leman.”

 

“My leman?”

 

“Your concubine,” she said, returning the wooden box to the aumbry. “Since you have the
breacan an fheilidh
, you surely saw the coiled braid that was wrapped within its folds?”

 

“Aye, but I do not see what that has to do with such a fool notion. I would ne’er—”

 

Juliana raised a hand, silencing him. “The braid was plaited of my mother’s hair—hers, and her paramour’s,” she explained. “He was her heart’s treasure, the only man she e’er loved. But he shunned her, leaving her alone to eke out an existence from the harshest soil when another, more pleasing attraction caught his roving eye.”

 

“This man was your father?”

 

“He was, aye,” Juliana admitted. There seemed nothing more to be said.

 

He was watching her carefully, the only outward sign of emotion, the whitening of his knuckles as he clenched his hands round his sword belt.

 

“Tell me who he is, and I shall sort him for you.”

 

Juliana looked aside. “His name, as my mother’s, refuses to surface long enough for me to grasp—I only know they are both dead. Him, many years ago . . . I do not even recall his face, and my mother, more recently—as I told you.”

 

“I am sore grieved to hear this, lass . . .” He raked a hand through his hair. “You have borne much, I see. Would that I . . . that your life’s path could have been . . . otherwise.”

 

Biting back the hot fury rising inside him, he struggled to school his features lest she misread his outrage, and become even more distressed.

 

“I truly am sorry,” he said, aiming a pointed glance at the folded plaid, furious at himself for having succumbed to the temptation of rummaging through her belongings.

 

He lifted a hand, let it fall as quickly. “Hear me, lass, ne’er would I have willfully deepened your sorrow. I regret—” he broke off, his gaze narrowing on the faded colors of the plaid.

 

“If your family held such a poor opinion of MacKenzies—our clans were surely at feud with each other at some time,” he said, voicing the only explanation.

 

All knew such conditions ran rampant between most clans at some point down the long centuries of Highland existence.

 

He moved to the table, placed his own hand on the frayed cloth. “Considering the age of this great plaid, clearly a man’s—can it not be that some male kin of yours snatched the
breacan
as a war trophy? Mayhap during some skirmish or raid o’er the years?”

 

“That well could be,” she said, not sounding entirely convinced. “To be sure, I have seen enough such relics adorning the walls of your great hall—I ken such
badges of honor
are often taken. Still, my mother cherished the plaid—more so than she would have a mere battle trophy.”

 

She looked at him. “But since I cannot know for surety, your explanation seems as sound an answer as any.”

 

Her motions slow and deliberate, she turned away from him, selected a peat brick from a small creel in the corner, and placed it on the brazier’s grate.

 

“Of more importance to me than the
breacan
’s origin are the hazy snatches I recall of my mother’s last hours,” she said, using a small pine bough to brush aside a scatter of peat ash from the dirt floor in front of the red-glowing brazier.

 

“See you,” she said, putting away the pine bough, “I now know why I had the pouch of siller with me when you rescued me from the lochan—the coin belonged to my mother and her last wish was that I deliver it somewhere in recompense for aid given her o’er the years.”

 

Robbie’s brow furrowed. “Aid?”

 

She nodded. “I am certain of it—such was my mother’s way, her heart. Ne’er would she accept the merest help, freely given or nay, without making due repayment.”

 

“So someone helped her in the years after your father abandoned her?”

 

“I believe so.” She turned away from him again, her gaze seeming to settle on the snake stones in the aumbry. “To be sure, we ne’er had much—but someone regularly sent enough coin to supply us with the most basic provender, and, as need arose, a creel of cut peats, or a few good laying chickens.”

 

Looking back at him, she smoothed a curling wisp of hair from her face. “Once, at Christmastide, we awoke to find a side of venison, several rounds of fine green cheese, and two creels of salt herring on our door stoop.”

 

Robbie studied her. “’Twould seem this someone cared about your mother?”

 

Juliana shrugged, long-forgotten memories rising in her mind like a freshening wind.

 

“Whoe’er he was, he once sent us the sweetest milch cow,” she went on, some hard place deep inside her softening upon remembering. “Nigh loving as a dog she was, e’er putting down her head to be stroked whene’er anyone approached her. And her milk . . .”

 

She glanced toward the window, for a very brief moment seeing not the misting rain but the dear little brown cow she’d so loved as a girl.

 

“Her milk,” she said, looking back at him, ignoring the lump in her throat, “was the finest I have e’er known. A cup of it had but a wee measure of milk at the bottom . . . all the rest was thick, sweet cream and tasted of peat smoke.”