The Adventurer (17 page)

The music played on, and the dancing kept up. They whirled and they turned, pranced and circled. One partner replaced another. All the while Calum stood and watched and wondered.

Just who the devil was this lass?

She called herself a mermaid, yet she spoke with the Sassenach’s tongue. She dressed and conducted herself politely, nobly even, yet she deigned to pass her night dancing with a bunch of drunken Scotsmen. And she had the stone of his ancestors hanging around her neck, but she refused to reveal where she’d gotten it.

And then he remembered something she’d said when she had arrived in the hall earlier that evening and he had remarked upon the fineness of her dress:

’Tis all I have. Your men took my trunks when they ransacked the ship ...

Her trunks.

The trunks that Fergus had told him were awaiting him even now in his study. Perhaps there would be something there that would reveal her identity, finally telling him whether she was related in some way to Lord Belcourt as he suspected, a mermaid like she claimed, or someone else entirely.

Setting down his ale tankard, Calum stole a final glance at the lass. Then quietly, he slipped away.

It was some time later that Isabella held up her hands in a gesture of outright surrender when yet another of the men stepped forward to claim a dance. Her sides were stitching beneath her stays and her hair, plainly arranged as it had been, had tumbled from its pins after the first few turns about the floor. It now fell down her back in a tangle of black. But she didn’t care. It was a night for adventures and she had enjoyed herself immensely.

“Miss Maris, you look as if you might like a wee drink ...”

“Oh, yes, thank you ... Hamish, is it?”

The lad dimpled that she had remembered his name. “Aye. I hope this will do.”

He handed her what appeared to be a tankard full of ale. Isabella had never had ale in her life. It wasn’t something customarily served to the daughters of a duke. She was so parched, she drank it anyway.

In fact, she drained the entire tankard.

As she set the vessel down with a clank on the table, she wondered what her mother, the duchess, would say if she could see her now?

Dancing with rough Scottish men ... swigging ale ... sharing her first kiss with a notorious pirate? And what a kiss it had been ...

It had been everything she had ever dreamed a kiss should be, unbelievably, undeniably breathtaking. For the rest of her life Isabella would remember that kiss, would remember, too, the way it had felt as if her legs and arms had turned to pudding, and how her senses had been sent soaring to the stars. Were all kisses that way? Or was it simply the adventure of the night, the fact that the one kissing her had been a handsome, exciting honorable pirate?

When she was older she would tell her daughters, and her daughters’ daughters, about that kiss. They would sigh dreamily and giggle about it over tea and wonder if they, too, might one day be given such a first kiss.

She didn’t know what had come over her to agree to kiss him as she had. The Bella she had always been would never have dared such a thing. But somehow, there was just something about him, something about the way she felt when she was with him. She felt like a new and different person. She was not the same
boring
Bella Drayton. She was someone else. She was Maris, a pretend mermaid, and for the first time in her life, she was
reckless.

Elizabeth would be so very proud of her.

Dunakin Castle, the Isle of Skye

Lady Elizabeth MacKinnon was not known for her patience.

She was, however, rather renowned for her impatience, and it was that trait alone that had her muttering, “Bloody blooming hell...” as she stared out the rain-dotted windowpane looking out onto the misty Kyle of Akin.

Where could Bella be?

Had her husband been there, he would have looked at her with a reproving lift of his brow. Douglas didn’t like it when Elizabeth swore. And truth be told, at that moment, she would have welcomed that scolding glance over having another day pass with no word from Douglas.

He had promised he would write when he found Bella.

Which only meant he hadn’t yet found her.

Damnation!

Any number of horrors could be happening to her at that very moment as Elizabeth stood there, miles away, helpless to do anything to save her.

It was the very worst sort of feeling Elizabeth had ever known.

She closed her eyes, leaned her head against the cold windowpane, and tried to summon up a mental image of her dear sister.

Sweet, innocent Bella, who more so than any of her sisters had been sheltered the most by their upbringing. While Elizabeth had been off riding her father’s stallions pell-mell across the Northumbrian hills, Bella had stayed behind at home, content just to write in her journal. When Katie and Mattie had staged mock dramas for the duchess in the garden and Caroline, bored with having been relegated to the lesser parts, had turned her attention to climbing the duke’s prized fruit trees, Bella had simply sat off to the side, sketching them all in her sketchbook. Bella was meek. She was timid. And now she had been thrust into the very midst of a most dangerous situation, alone, no doubt frightened out of her wits, and with no one knowing where to find her.

Bella, we will find you. If it takes looking across every brae and burn in Scotland, I promise we will find you.

Elizabeth had never known a fear like the icy empty chill that had seized her when that ship, the
Hester Mary,
had arrived at Leith harbor without Isabella on it. Aunt Idonia had been beside herself, hysterical as a madwoman as she stumbled down the ship’s gangplank, breaking into tears the moment she saw Elizabeth and Douglas and the others standing there.

She had scarcely been able to relate the events that had taken place, events that seemed somehow unbelievable despite the fact that the captain, crew, and the other passengers had all corroborated them.

Pirates had taken her sister.

Scottish
pirates.

They had no clue as to who they’d been or why they had taken Isabella, no clue that is until Douglas had asked Lord Belcourt to repeat his version of the story a second time, this time concentrating on the things the pirates had said and, more specifically, the banner they had flown from the flagstaff of their ghostly ship.

Bratach Bhan Clann Aoidh.

It had been their war cry, and the clan standard for the clan Mackay.

And once they had deciphered that part of it, Douglas had known just where to begin searching for her.

“In Sutherland,” he’d said, in an effort to reassure the duke, who had been on the very verge of calling out the king’s army.

Sutherland, in the very northern part of Scotland.

Even from where Elizabeth was on Skye, it was some one hundred fifty miles distant.

Douglas had prepared to leave immediately from Edinburgh, chartering a sloop to sail after them. It was when Elizabeth had announced her intention to go with him that she learned just how inflexible her husband could be.

“No.”

“But, Douglas, she is my sister!”

“She is my sister, too, Elizabeth.”

“But she was my sister long before she ever was yours!”

That comment hadn’t pleased him, although he had to know it was only the almost unbearable fear that had made her say it in the first place.

“Elizabeth, I love Isabella just as much as if she had been born a sister of my blood. Which means I will look for her just as diligently as you would, and with much greater means, I might add. I know the country. Being Scottish, I am much more likely to have success talking with them than you would.”

Elizabeth tried, but failed to find any argument against that. “But you have to find her!”

“And
I
will.
You,
however, will travel with my brother to Skye where you will see to the safety and well-being of our unborn bairn. Aye? On board a ship that might very well come up against another in combat on the high seas is no’ the place for an expectant mother.”

He was right, and Elizabeth knew it. She’d only another two months before the babe was due. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.

It was on that thought that Elizabeth repeated, “Bloody, blooming hell.”

“Now is tha’ any way for an expectant mother to be talking?”

Elizabeth spun around, half expecting to see Douglas standing there, somehow miraculously returned with Isabella beside him.

But it wasn’t Douglas, not at all, although the man who stood there was as near as one could possibly get.

His younger brother, Iain MacKinnon, strode into the room to stand beside her at the window.

“Dinna worry, Bess. Douglas will find her. I know some of the Mackays from marching with the prince’s army in the rebellion. They were all honorable, respectable men who would ne’er think to harm a woman.”

Elizabeth looked at him. “Then why did these honorable and respectable men take her in the first place?”

“I wish I knew.” Iain shook his head. “All I can think is that whoever took her must be some sort of rogue, an outcast of the clan. You dinna need t’ worry though because he will only live long enough to regret ever doing it. Douglas will make certain of that.”

And if he didn’t, Elizabeth vowed,
she
most definitely would.

Calum closed the door to his study behind him, shutting away the music and the revelry that were still well under way in the hall below.

He hadn’t wanted to leave, but he’d had to. He’d had to because he had been afraid, truly afraid, that if he stayed, he just might kiss her again.

And if he kissed her again, he knew there was no way on earth, or in heaven or hell for that matter either, that he would stop.

So he turned the key, locking the door for good measure.

In the center of the room stood a half-dozen traveling trunks of varying sizes.

Among them, one would hold the secret to where Uilliam was imprisoned.

The other would solve the mystery of who the lass truly was.

The question was, which one did he want the answer to first?

After the kiss he’d just had, and the way it had hit him, hit him like a boulder hard in his belly, he wasn’t entirely certain. The enigma of the mysterious Lady Maris was only growing more complicated. He wanted, nae, he
needed
to know who she was, where she had come from.

He also needed to find Uilliam.

Throwing chance to the wind, Calum crossed to the nearest trunk, pulled a chair up beside it as he set about opening its lid.

It was hers.

He knew it the moment he lifted its latch, jimmied easily enough with the point of his dirk. The very scent of her, subtle herbs and sweet spices, overwhelmed him as soon as he lifted its lid, as if she were standing just behind him in the room.

Fate had apparently decided for him.

Calum pulled away the layer of scented tissue paper that covered the trunk’s contents and was greeted by swaths of fine silks and satins and laces arranged neatly before him. He took up a candle and set it atop the trunk beside it and started rummaging through, pulling out bodices and fichus and ribands embroidered with silver threads. These were not the trappings of any ordinary lass. They were costly fabrics and finely stitched furbelows. When he dug farther inside, beneath the clothing, he found a small box that contained her jewelry, fine pieces set with jewels and pearls that only served to feed his initial suspicion that she was in some way related to Lord Belcourt. If not his daughter, then a niece or cousin, perhaps. In any case, a genteel lady—and not any mysterious mermaid.

Calum noticed a single pair of white stockings, silk and very finely woven, tucked away inside the trunk. He reached for them, picking one up and letting it fall to its full length. It was made to the shape of her leg, clocked with a trailing ivy design that had been embroidered along the lower calf. He imagined that bit of silk caressing the curve of her leg, tying at her knee with a wisp of silk garter.
Red
silk garter. He breathed deeply, slowly, as he ran the sleek fabric between his fingers, and pictured her wearing them, pictured her wearing
only
them, just the stockings and the Mackay stone dangling between her breasts.

Nothing else.

His body jolted at the very thought.

She would be lovely, he knew, her pale skin radiant as she stood before the fire, her breasts lush and full. He imagined her waist, small as it was, flaring to the hips she had hidden beneath those panniered skirts. He imagined her standing before him, a seductive smile on her lips as she snaked one hand around his neck, and pulled his mouth to hers. He imagined taking her up against him, against the hardness of him, and carrying her to the fire to lay her down on the great rug before it.

He would kiss her from temple to toe, taste her scented skin, and run his hands along the silken length of her thigh.

He would bury his face in her hair, nuzzling her neck as he made love to her throughout the night.

He imagined her looking at him with those soft eyes of blue and whispering his name ...

Calum.

He imagined her taking that chain from around her neck and giving him the stone that would finally give him the answer for which he had waited a lifetime.

He imagined, because he knew ... it was a dream. Naught but a dream.

Calum set the stocking aside and continued searching through the trunk for his answers.

It was in the second, smaller trunk that he found something infinitely more intriguing.

A journal.

Her
journal.

Calum sat back with the candle burning beside him and turned to the first page, reading the words written there in a fine and elegant script:

Today I received the news that Bess is with child. Whilst I was immediately elated for her, and thrilled at the prospect of becoming an aunt, I must confess to a certain envy. All her life, Bess swore against the trappings of love and marriage, yet she has found her greatest happiness in just that. And now, she is to become a mother, whilst I, whose only dream has ever been of having love and marriage and children, am left empty and alone. I feel terrible. And then I feel terrible for feeling terrible. Am I a horrible sister? I love Bess with all my heart, and am thrilled at her new happiness, but at the same time I cannot help but weep inside at the unfairness ...