The Legend Mackinnon (11 page)

She’d expected an oath and a quick dismissal, but he shocked her further by caressing her cheek with a blunt fingertip. “Aye, and that’s the truly mad thing, Maggie. For a moment there, I was.”

Before she could respond he turned and walked back to his fire.

She opened her mouth twice to say something, but closed it both times without uttering a word. Perhaps getting out of here for a while was a good idea. She picked her things back up and walked to the door.

“Will you be here when I get back?” She hadn’t meant to ask, but now that she had, she wanted an answer.

He was silent for a moment, then said, “Where else am I to go?”

She did smile then. “Well, I think there are still a few trees left on the mountain that have somehow escaped your axe.”

He seemed to relax slightly then. When he spoke, the edge was gone from his tone. “I’ll be here.”

It was more than she’d expected. And it filled her with a warmth she knew was foolish. She nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at her, and smiled at his broad back.

“It’s been a long time since someone worried about me. It shouldn’t feel so nice. But … well, thanks.”

“If you mean that, then listen tae wha’ I say tae ye. Leave that one in town. Come back tae the cabin alone.”

“Duncan.” But he stood there, such a magnificent picture, with the roaring fire at his back, white shirt framing his shoulders so proudly, kilt wound around his waist and hips so perfectly, and legs so sturdy and fine, all topped off with concern for her clear in his fierce eyes. She couldn’t find it in her to deny him anything at that moment. “I’ll work something out with Cailean.”

He seemed to relax a little then. And the fierce light that shone from his eyes had somehow managed to capture a bit of the heat of the fire he so carefully tended. She felt warm all the way to her bones. And tended to in a way she’d never been made to feel. Judd had wanted to possess her and to that extent he’d paid her a great deal of attention, but he’d never tended to her. Not to the parts of her that mattered. No one ever had. Because she hadn’t let them. To her, needing was a weakness and she wielded her independence like a sword and her self-sufficiency like a battle shield.

Perhaps that had been her mistake. Perhaps needing wasn’t the weakness. Maybe pretending you didn’t have needs, or needed someone other than yourself to fulfill them was the real weakness. It was a tantalizing thought.

The idea that Duncan was the one to teach her that was the epitome of irony. What was the point in finally discovering the meaning of life if the man she wanted to explore this great insight with was dead?

Boy, can you pick em or what?

“I’ll have questions for you,” she warned.

“I’ll do what I can tae gi’ ye the answers.”

“Fair enough. I’ll come back alone.”

Cailean was out of the Jeep and halfway to the porch when Maggie finally came out of the cabin. “All set,” she said a bit too brightly and hoped that Cailean’s gift didn’t extend to mind reading. She knew her cousin had as many questions as she did and the task of explaining Duncan wasn’t going to be easy. Explaining her feelings about Duncan would be downright impossible. She wasn’t sure herself what the complicated mass of emotions he stirred up inside her would all boil down to, but she was certain that she wanted the chance to figure it out in private before sharing them with anyone.

Cailean looked her over, spending a few lengthy moments on her face, but in the end she nodded. “Let’s go.”

They climbed in the Jeep. On the long drive down the mountainside, Cailean fell deep into thought and Maggie didn’t push it. They would eventually talk. For now, her thoughts strayed back to Duncan. She touched her cheek where he’d stroked her and remembered their almost kiss. A light shiver raced over her skin and her pulse notched up a level or two. Yes, maybe finding Cailean a room in town was a very good idea after all.

D
uncan walked toward the small clearing with something close to dread filling his stomach. He had never come back here, not once, in all the months he’d spent on this mountain. It surprised him how little of an impact centuries of time had had on the small meadow. It looked much the same as it had that November afternoon he and Mairi had started across it. They had never made it to the other side.

Early on in purgatory, when he’d made it clear he had no interest in returning to this place, They had made it, known to him that small markers had been erected by the family Mairi had traveled across the ocean with. The same family had helped her find the small hunting cabin after their arrival and had taken turns tending to her when she was so very ill. For the first time he wondered what it must have been like for her. To him, her decision to leave her clan had been the mindless act of a coward.

During his trip over and the subsequent hunt for her in America, he’d thought only of her betrayal and the cost it would levy on both their clans. Never once had he considered that she could not have been either mindless or a
coward to have made such a journey with no fellow clansmen to see to her safety.

He’d seen her illness as a manifestation of her foolish act and her just due for her betrayal. He had not listened to one word of her attempts to explain her actions to him. She was his betrothed and, as such, his property. To his mind, her rights began and ended at that point. He had refused her even the basest courtesy, not even demanding she return, but simply arriving and exercising his rights by taking possession of her. His only goal had been to return them both to Scottish soil where they would be married and thus end the long feuding between their clans.

Duncan hadn’t expected to find the small stones still standing. And, in fact, he found only one. It was small and rounded, blackened with time until the name etched in the stone was almost unreadable. Almost. But to him the letters and numbers shone as if lit from an inner fire. Mairi Claren. Born 1680. Died 1698.

Eighteen. Had she really been so young? She’d been considered well past the age suitable for marrying and he’d never given thought to the difference in their ages. Almost eleven years had separated his birth from hers.

He sank down in the cool dampness of the grass, heedless of the gray skies and chilling air. There was no sign of his stone or that he had ever walked this meadow. Why that made him feel hollow he could not have said. He frowned, irritated further by yet another sign of his sudden sensitivity.

He certainly was a man who was clear about his contributions to his family and his time on earth, deeds both good and bad that had shaped the man he was. That there was no mark of his time spent on this continent should not concern him in the least. Scotland was his country, his home, his heart. He would have given his life for it without pause. This land meant less than nothing to him. It had
taken and not given. He felt no true loyalty to it … or to the woman whose bones lay beneath it.

He wondered where Mairi’s spirit had ended up. He’d been certain upon learning of his destiny in purgatory that she was burning in hell for her sins to her countrymen and to him.

Now, for the first time, he was not so certain. Who had been sinner … and who had been sinned against? That uncertainty was what had driven him from the cabin. It had eaten at him, badgering his mind and soul with questions he did not wish to ponder.

He had first blamed Maggie. All her talk of her mistreatment at the hands of Judd had made him think and react in ways completely foreign to everything he’d previously believed of himself. Then to compound things, The Key had shown up. This was faery trickery he was certain. They had wearied of his stubbornness and contrived to force him into madness and complete his descent to hell by putting these Claren women in his path.

And yet it was a path from which he did not seem able to stray. When Maggie walked out of the cabin earlier that afternoon, he’d actually worried that he’d not see her face again, hear her laughter, taste her lips. He’d worried of this obsession for days now, taking care to steer clear of her presence all together until he had his thoughts once again under his control. And yet one glance, one word, and his heart and thoughts and desires were no longer his to master.

His first impulse had been to restrict her from leaving by using his greater strength. If she was too foolish to see to her own safety, then he would see to it for her! But he had listened to her words, taken her promises … and trusted her to act on them. Trust a Claren? What spell had she cast?

Was this how Alexander had been drawn to his death? Had his younger brother, John Roderick, fallen to a Claren
Key as well, or a Claren sword? After Duncan’s failure, it would have fallen to Rory, the last of Calum’s sons, to bind the clans in some way. What did it matter? They’d all ended up dead.

It was because it did indeed matter that he had finally ended up here in this spot, certain he would come back to what he knew and had always known as truth. He had done the right thing in trying to take her back. Never before had he questioned his actions and he would stop this insurgence now before it went any further.

“Aye, so ye’ve finally come.”

Duncan froze, then forcibly relaxed. Her voice was soft, the lilt musical where he’d only remembered shrillness. Mairi. Had his thoughts conjured her?

Mairi gathered her roughly woven skirts and sat down beside him in the grass. “From yer frown I’d say yer not here to grieve me.” She paused and he felt her silent censure. “Some things no amount of time will change.”

He should have been surprised by her sudden appearance, yet he was not. “A thousand years could pass. I’ll no’ grieve the death of a woman who killed my family, my clan.”

“ ’Twas no’ my act, but your stubbornness and that of every man in both our clans that killed them.”

Because he was terrified to look at her, he made himself do so immediately. She was taller, broader of shoulder, less fragile, than he remembered. Where he remembered it pinched and tight, her mouth was wide and generous, as if made to smile often, though he couldn’t remember a single one. It was not that he found her lovely where he’d only remembered ugliness, that shocked him. It was that, with few exceptions made for the decade or so difference in their ages, she looked like Maggie.

“Ye look like yer seein’ a ghost.” She smiled faintly. “Perhaps yer seein’ now what you didna let yoursel’ see before.” She reached out a hand and it took all his considerable
will not to shrink away. Her touch on his arm was not weak and grasping, but surprisingly warm and firm.

“Yer beauty or lack of it doesna change your actions,” he said coldly.

“Nor does yer sudden appearance here change yer brutality and arrogance,” she said evenly.

“You condemned us to death, Mairi. No’ just you and me, but our clans as well.” He looked her in the eye. “Is that the sin yer paying for in purgatory? Why are ye no’ rotting in hell where ye belong?”

She seemed shaken by his accusation. “Our union would no’ hae stopped the killin’ or the feudin’.” She spoke fervently. “Ye still havena seen that in all this time? Our clans were destined to decimate each other.”

“And yet rather than stay and fight alongside yer kinsmen, you fled, compounding the sin of death with tha’ o’ shame as well.”

There was a fierceness in her blue eyes he had never seen before. It reminded him of another set of blue eyes, ones that had moved him as Mairi’s never had. Had the fault of that been Mairi’s alone?

“Aye, I grieve for what happened to them,” she said heatedly. “But ’twas their own foolishness and misplaced pride that warred them to their deaths. I couldna make them listen. Nothing ever would. I knew that, as my sister had before me.”

“Doona speak tae me o’ Edwyna!”

“They killed her ye know. After we left. Raped and murdered her, yer clansmen did. Because of their fear of her ‘kind’ and what she tried to tell them. Should I have stayed and endured the same fate?”

Duncan hadn’t known. It shouldn’t have bothered him, she’d been the cause of Alexander’s death after all. But no woman deserved such a fate. Not even Edwyna.

“I tried tae make ye understand that marryin’ alone would not end the wars, that we had to do more. Ye
wouldna listen to me. Tae you I was chattel. I didn’t expect yer love, yer admiration, or even yer respect. But because I truly wanted to save my clan, I had planned to earn them over time. Together, we might hae saved them, Duncan. But if ye wouldna grant me so much as a second of yer time, how was I tae earn anything in yer eyes? How would we ever forge the bond necessary tae truly end the anger and begin to heal the pain o’ so many years o’ death and destruction between us?

“Marrying me was only an act of faith tae our clansmen. It was wha’ we did wi’ that union that could have changed history. But you made it clear that was no’ tae be. I refused to let you condemn me to die by your side.”

Duncan flung her hand from his arm and stood. He walked a good distance across the field before stopping.

“As it was, ye killed us both anyway,” she said.

She was standing behind him. He could vanish, but he was certain she would follow him through all levels of hell.