Only For A Knight (9 page)

 

He stared hard at the island stronghold, let his gaze caress the massive walls seeming to rise from the loch’s glinting surface. He swallowed again, indecision beating through him with the same erratic pumping of his heart. Little nigglings of ill ease to temper the elation of his homecoming and send chills of foreboding sliding down his spine.

 

If only he’d taken a different route, hadn’t happened upon this beauty.

 

If only he could peel back the hours and ride home with his heart as unsullied as his valor, rid himself of the enchantment she’d wrapped around him.

 

He cursed softly. As if he would change a single moment of the day even if he could. Nay, he’d keep her—even if he paid the highest price!

 

With an inward grimace at the trials awaiting him, he glanced up at the broad night sky. The clouds had thinned to wisps and a swath of twinkling stars glittered across the heavens, nary a one winking him mercy. Far from showing sympathy, their cold brilliance, so distant and aloof, only underscored his plight.

 

A dilemma he could easily solve by wheeling round his garron and riding away with his beauty. Absconding with her across hill and moor until they’d reached the edge of the world—a place where no living soul would care if she bore a name or no, and where he could do as he was wont without calling down certain ruination upon his clan.

 

A folly of a notion he considered no longer than the space of a breath and an exhale.

 

“Would that it could have been otherwise,” he swore again, the softly muttered words snatched away by the wind before they could fall upon impressionable ears.

 

Then, without further thought, he tightened his arm around his treasure, dug in his spurs, and set his mount thundering down the rugged slope, into the night—and in the only direction his honor allowed him.

 

Honor.

 

The word slipped through the darkness, teasing the edges of Juliana’s sleep but not quite waking her.

 

She tossed uncomfortably, snuggled deeper into her unusually soft plaid, and wondered when the Highland wind had started gusting so ferociously that it shook not only the rough-planked door of her mother’s cot-house but also the hard-packed earthen floor beneath her bed-pallet.

 

Faith, even the heavy iron cooking pot swung on its chain—she could hear the commotion, an incessant jangle. And, surprisingly, the unmistakable creaking of leather.

 

But before she could puzzle over
that
oddity, or the unaccustomed solidity and warmth of her most-times cold and lumpy pallet, the voice she’d heard earlier spoke again, penetrating her dream.

 

Her brother Kenneth’s voice, it was, and he was at home once again—however briefly. A journey he made whene’er he could, generously delivering the siller he’d earned at sea and supplying them with provender and goods he’d gathered in the months he’d been away.

 

His usual type of visit in which he’d stay only long enough to address whate’er tasks required a man’s strong arm. But also taking precious time to reassure them of his love, see to their well-being, and, he would always insist, to steel Juliana’s backbone.

 

To fire her mettle and make her strong . . . lest any smooth-tongued fool dare attempt to hurt her.

 

Use her as their mother had been used, however willingly.

 

“See you, lass, honor belongs to all whose heart is pure. Never you forget it, for I tell you true. Such glory is not the sole privilege of knights and lairds,” his well-loved voice minded her, the comfort of his words making her forget the annoying rolling motion of the floor.

 

He’d caught her muttering dark oaths as she’d stitched yet another patch onto her best kirtle’s thread-worn skirts. And, as he was e’er wont to do, he’d fixed her with a calm and steady gaze, then assured her she possessed sound wits and a stout, goodly heart—a generous heart.

 

Qualities that cloaked her in honor as shining and true as any nobly-born maid gowned in finest raiments.

 

And as always on hearing such words from him, her cheeks would flame and she’d glare at her patched skirts or her work-reddened hands before lifting a doubting brow.

 

But then she’d smile and promise to make him proud—to be as honorable as she could.

 

Yet now, she’d been given a task of monumental import and could not rouse herself from her pallet and its inexplicable jostlings—something harder than a band of steel held her in place. And even more unsettling, she couldn’t escape the sure knowledge that following the path of honor would lead her straight into the devil’s own lair.

 

A conviction that seized her with shocking clarity when, at last, she broke free of her dreams and awoke.

 

“You!” she spluttered, realizing at once the source of her dream pallet’s odd rolling motions, the reason her humble bed of heather and bracken had seemed so . . . solid.

 

So hard and unyielding.

 

“Ha—the valiant knight-rescuer! I see you abducted me in my sleep,” she accused, using snapping fury to disguise her surging confusion.

 

“Havers, lass, if that is what you think,” came her only answer. That, and a decidedly masculine snort.

 

Irritation brewing, she struggled against him, curled her fingers around the arm he’d clamped around her waist as she tried in vain to loosen his iron-firm hold on her. “A base-hearted paladin who’d carry off a poor lass unable to defend herself!”

 

“Not so. You err. That was not the way of it,” he disagreed, splaying his hand across her midsection in an obvious—and brazen—attempt to keep her from squirming. “I—”

 

“Your fingers are jabbing into my breasts,” she seethed, keenly aware that they weren’t poking her at all. Rather, they rested perfectly still, there, in the softness beneath the rounded lower swells of her bosom. “You are hurting me.”

 

“Say you?”
His deep voice held a trace of amusement. “Some would say I am only trying to keep you from falling headlong from this horse. I vow suchlike would cause you far greater pain than the tips of my fingers brushing against your . . . tender parts, my lady.”

 

Juliana stiffened at his logic.

 

She could not gainsay him.

 

Not without appearing mushy-brained or ungrateful.

 

She
had
slid sideways in her silly efforts to claw free of his viselike grip. And he’d righted her with lightning-quick speed, only then sending his fingers spreading into . . . intimate places.

 

Not wanting to admit she recognized he’d saved her from what could have been a disastrous fall, she bit down on her lower lip and let silence convey her annoyance.

 

Truth be told, he wasn’t moving his hand at all. Not now that she’d ceased tearing at his arm. But, more distressing still, the warm press of his oh-so-motionless fingertips seemed to be sending countless little threads of tingles twisting through her abdomen, and lower.

 

Especially lower.

 

Pleasant tingles, they were, and the likes of which she’d never experienced. A sensation both wildly exhilarating and vastly . . . disturbing.

 

She drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders. Anything to keep him from noticing the effect his flattened hand was having on the deepest region of her belly.

 

The
tingles
she feared might be glowing all over her abdomen as well as firing her within.

 

“I would ask you to remove your hand.” She made the clipped words a statement. “It bothers me.”

 

“I imagine it does, for it bothers me in the same way,” he said, his voice a shade huskier than usual.
Softer.
“Nevertheless, I shall continue to hold you. Simply so you do not—harm yourself.”

 

Juliana frowned. Faith and mercy, his richly-smooth voice slid through her in ways almost as unnerving as the heated tingles he ignited in her soft parts!

 

Hot indignation streaking up the back of her neck, she twisted round to glower at him. “You took advantage of a sleeping woman! You are still taking—”

 

“Mind it well, lass—I have ne’er had need to take advantage of any woman,” he shot right back, matching her glare with a dark look of his own. “You were full awake and spitting worse fire than you are now when I plunked you onto this saddle. You only fell asleep after we’d ridden many leagues. And it was a much needed slumber, I am thinking. A rest only made possible because I held you so securely before me.”

 

The truth of his words fueling her ire, she lifted her chin, tried her best not to blink. “And how do I know you were not doing more than holding me?”

 

“I vow you cannot know—so you’d best believe me. My knightly word ought be enough to quell your doubts. If you are wise, you will recall that I have already seen you mother-naked—bare-skinned in all your fine-glowing magnificence. Were I a less noble man, I would have partaken then, had I wished to do so. Do not think I wasn’t tempted.”

 

Juliana blinked after all.

 

But she said nothing.

 

Her mouth had gone too dry to speak and it cost her too much effort to convince herself that the shivers sliding through her just now were summoned by the freshening wind and not his bold words.

 

Or that some shockingly brazen part of her found it exciting that he’d called her naked body her
fine-glowing magnificence
.

 

He tilted his dark head to the side. “Shall we say it a truce?”

 

Recognizing defeat, Juliana nodded.

 

She also swung back around and trained her gaze straight ahead, preferring to stare into the ever-thickening night mist rather than suffer another moment of his cheeky dimpled smile and the mischievous twinkle that could light his dark blue eyes so . . . annoyingly.

 

“’Tis well, then, that we are at peace. For your good and mine.” The words came low-voiced and just above her ear. “See you, we are almost there.”

 

“There?”
Juliana couldn’t help the response from tumbling off her tongue, unnecessary as the question was, for she saw indeed the island stronghold.

 

The most formidable holding she’d e’er imagined.

 

“Eilean Creag,” her rescuer-captor confirmed, the thick emotion warming his voice at odd contrast to the cold, unwelcoming look of his home.

 

A devil’s lair, to be sure, the whole of it seemed to glower at her from the depths of her most gloom-ridden nightmares. High curtain walls and heavy, battlemented towers rose up from the mist, every dark stone of its massive strength resonant with threat and droning menace.

 

Juliana’s breath caught in her throat. Eilean Creag looked to be a dismal place fit to be inhabited only by ghosts.

 

Or worse.

 

Finding Robbie MacKenzie less intimidating than his home, she leaned backward into his sheltering embrace, for once blessing his close grip on her, even welcoming the light kiss he dropped on the top of her head in response to a gesture he’d surely misunderstood.

 

As they rode on, she started to grow cold with a numbing chill that came from someplace deep inside her. A disconcerting notion that Eilean Creag awaited her arrival, even crouched ready to smote her. Trying to ignore the sensation, she glanced heavenward, pleaded the saints that the castle would prove as empty, barred, and deserted as it appeared.

 

Nary a flicker of light glimmered from its narrow, arrow-slit windows and not a single horn blast ululated their arrival on the lochside.

 

But someone—or something—watched them.

 

She could feel devil eyes boring into her, assessing her critically and willing her gone.

 

Quite certain of the malevolent stare, Juliana drew the borrowed plaid closer about her shoulders. Faith, even her stomach churned now and her palms were running slick with clamminess.

 

Her knight appeared oblivious.

 

Seeming to have forgotten her completely, he dug in his knees and sent his mount spurring ever faster down the shingled strand toward the stronghold’s massive portcullis-hung gatehouse.

 

A manned gatehouse, after all, for at their thundering approach, the iron-spiked barrier began to rattle upward with a night-splitting screech of pulleys and chains. Light shone at last, too. A double row of low-burning pitch-pine torches lined the entry’s narrow, tunnellike pend, the smoking flames casting weaving pools of light and shadow onto the dark cobbles.

 

More torches burned at intervals along the stone causeway looming beyond. And a second, equally forbidding gatehouse at the causeway’s end stood open, its portcullis already raised. Soft, yellow-flickering candlelight showed at each arrow-slit window in the twin-flanking towers.

 

But Juliana paid these details scant heed beyond fleetingly registering the general air of gloom and oppression. Nor did she note or care that her fingernails were digging so fiercely into Robbie MacKenzie’s arm that she’d drawn his blood.

 

Something else held her rapt attention.

 

A vision so disturbing she would have sworn the world was about to come to an end—could she find her tongue! At the very least, a great shudder ripped through her and her heart plummeted to her toes.

 

For the devil paced the parapet-walk of the keep’s highest tower.

 

A great, glowing-eyed demon of the night, he stopped his stalking the instant they clattered out of the arched pend beneath the first gatehouse. A nightmarish threat in the swirling mist, he leaned out over one of the merlons in the parapet’s crenellated walling and stared down at them, his dark wings flapping about him like oversized raven sails.

 

Colder-looking than the longest winter night, and taller than any true man she’d e’er seen, his feral stare unleashed all Juliana’s deepest fears, hurtling them at her one by one to skitter across her every nerve and lodge in the pit of her belly.

 

“Jesu God,” she cried, certain she’d caught a whiff of sulfur on the chill night wind. “’Tis the devil himself . . . there on the battlements!”

 

Behind her, Robbie MacKenzie hooted a lusty laugh, gave her a quick, exuberant squeeze. “Aye, by the saints, more than a few have called him just that—and worse, at times!”