Fairy Tale (8 page)

“He protected me too.” Duncan ran his hand through his long disheveled hair, his mind still reeling from the shock. “Of course I never appreciated him at the time, but you, well, it would break his heart to see you now.”

Guilt crept into the hurt and anger building inside her. “I wouldn’t be whatever it is you claim I’ve become if the heir to the chieftainship had not been off fighting wars for other countries.”

“Banished, lass,” Duncan said, his own voice rising in self-defense. “And don’t fault me for the life you’ve chosen. But all right, Marsali. All bloody right. I’ll accept some of the blame because your loved ones were blown up accompanying my father on his fool’s mission.” He gave her a
chilling smile. “I’ll atone for my past sins and repay my debt to Andrew by assuming responsibility for you.”

Marsali subsided into a brief resentful silence, unconvinced she wanted this dark volatile warrior dictating her future, good motives notwithstanding. “I’m going to have to decline your kind offer,” she said, tossing back her mop of tangled hair to glare at him.

Duncan shook his head, his voice mocking. “But you weren’t given the choice, my dear. We’re going back to the castle together. I’ll have you installed in the turret bedchamber. From now on, I’m going to shadow your every move.”

“The turret is haunted, my lord,” she said in genuine alarm, “by the ghosts of your ancestors.”

“Well, then at least they’re family ghosts, aren’t they?” Duncan looked her over with a cold appraising criticism that made Marsali shiver. “My God, you’re a mess. Your father wouldn’t know you.” He paused, his face reflective. “My betrothed is due to arrive at the end of the month. I didn’t want her to come, but now I think I’m glad of it. She can decide how to manage you. I’m certainly not up to the chore.”

Marsali blinked, incredulous, her brain struggling to absorb
the unexpected blow. “Your…
betrothed?”

“Lady Sarah Grayson. Well, we’re not officially engaged yet, but we will be at the end of summer. The woman is a walking treasure trove of social trivia. If anyone can turn a sow’s ear into silk, it’s—”

Marsali slapped him then, not the light stinging palm across the cheek of a woman insulted, but a forceful crack against the jaw that jerked his head back several inches.

“What the hell was that for?” he asked in astonishment, his hand lifting to his face.

“Your betrothed, my lord,” she retorted self-righteously. “And for calling me a pig’s ear.”

He scowled. “My betrothed is perfectly capable of slapping me herself.”

“And you’ve given her plenty of reason to practice, I’m sure.”

He gripped her hands in his, dragging her toward him, but Marsali refused to budge, digging her heels into the sand and reasoning that Duncan as a friend might turn out worse
for her than as an enemy. A merciless task maker who would shadow her every move. A man in love with another woman—a prissy English noblewoman at that. Marsali cringed in horror at the prospect of being bound up in a corset and shipped off to a boarding school, her speech mocked, her heritage sneered at. Wasn’t she gentry in her own right?

“
Get up, Marsali.” He pulled her to her knees. “My patience is wearing out, and there’s a storm moving inland. I’ll be damned if I’m riding back in the rain because of you.”

She fought a sense of panic, a black terror that if she did not fight to retain her freedom she would never own herself again. She needed help. This man’s power would imprison her. In the course of a day he had forced her through a dizzying gamut of feelings, leaving her wrung out and bewildered. The wild hope of wishing him a hero. Humiliation. The bittersweet stirrings of desire. And now the fear of losing her freedom, the nebulous future he had planned for herself. She needed Uncle Colum more than she’d ever needed him in her life.

“I can’t go back to the castle yet,” she said desperately. “I have something important to do first.”

“Not in the middle of the night.” His face unyielding, he knelt and tightened his hold on her wrists. “From now on you don’t ride anywhere without a bodyguard, and then only on my approval. Now get up. We—”

He heard the faint crunch of a footstep in sand a second before Marsali’s face whitened in startled recognition. He glanced around at the same moment she made a frantic effort to rise, wrenching her hands from his. And something inside Duncan, the same infallible sense of intuition that told him when to charge and when to retreat on a military campaign, told him that his fate had just been irrevocably sealed.

Chapter

8

T
he regally tall figure of a white-haired man in a blue robe stood behind them in the surf. The hawk Eun sat on the man’s shoulder, its hooded yellow eyes fixed keenly on Duncan.

“Oh, dear,” Marsali murmured, going very still. “Now there’s going to be trouble. I do hope you can swim, my lord.”

Duncan ignored her, jumping halfway to his feet, only to freeze with an involuntary yelp of pain. “Damn it,” he said under his breath, sinking back down beside her, “let go of my hair, Marsali.”

“I haven’t touched your blessed hair,” she retorted in an indignant voice, giving it another hurtful yank.

Duncan spared her a glance, aware that the peculiar robed man was rapidly striding through the surf toward them. He got to his knees. “Stop pulling my—”

He saw the problem in an instant; Marsali was trying desperately to stand, unaware that several strands of Duncan’s hair had become entangled in the silver claws of her cross.

“Get my h
air loose, Marsali. And hurry.”

“Do it yourself,” she whispered. But when she gave the necklace a sharp tug to free herself, she discovered that her
own hair had also gotten tangled with Duncan’s, that they were virtually joined at the neck like some sort of mythological Hydra.

“It’s my uncle.” Panicking, she fell back onto her knees to grab a fistful of Duncan’s hair, twisting it this way and that.

“I gathered that, Marsali. Hell, woman, you’re ripping my hair out by the roots.”

A long shadow fell across them. Ominous silence swelled in the night.

Duncan couldn’t remember when he had been caught in such an absurd position. Dangerous ones, yes. Compromising ones—well, there had been more than a few before he’d met Sarah. And it seemed there was nothing he and Marsali could do to gain their freedom besides tearing into each other like a pair of tomcats. Every effort to extricate himself only made him appear more guilty, as if they had been caught in the act instead of an accident of incomparable stupidity.

The man behind them spoke then, his voice cultured and cool with irony.

“I am quite sure there is a perfectly innocent reason for this midnight tryst. I suspect there is even a hidden metaphysical significance to the disturbing juxtaposition of your carnal bodies. However, at the moment, an acceptable explanation for either escapes the workings of my brain.”

“Good evening, Uncle Colum,” Marsali said meekly, leaning as far away from Duncan as possible, a move that only succeeded in dragging his head closer to her chest and making him wince aloud.

“It is morning now, Marsali,” Colum pointed out. “We are in the wee small hours.”

“Yes, well, be that as it may, Uncle Colum”—she gestured to Duncan’s downbent head—“this is our new laird and chieftain, Duncan MacElgin. I gave him a rather rude welcome earlier today, and now I’m—”

“She’s decapitating me,” Duncan said in a muffled voice.

Colum stared down his sharp beak of a nose at Duncan, his expression duplicating the regal hauteur of the hawk on his shoulder. “I’d heard his arrival at the castle this afternoon caused something of a stir. Had I not been in the middle of an important ritual I would have welcomed him
myself. Unfortunately, his rank is not what presently concerns me.”

“It doesn’t concern me much either,” Duncan retorted. “At least not in comparison to the enormous pain in the neck your niece is giving me.”

Colum’s expression did not change. “What exactly are the pair of you doing in such a strange position, Marsali?”

She averted her gaze, mumbling, “Trying to get his damn hair untangled from my cross.”

“Should I ask how his hair became entangled in your cross?” Colum inquired wryly.

“I was admiring her rubies, sir,” Duncan answered, his head forced into a perpendicular angle by Marsali’s attempt to distance herself from him.

“Admiring her rubies.” A humorless smile flitted across Colum’s gauntly elegant face. “May I suggest, my lord, that henceforth you admire my niece’s assets from afar?”

Duncan gave him a dark look. “May I suggest that you discourage your niece from her midnight escapades, not to mention the illicit ways she passes her afternoon hours?”

“I cannot control her, my lord. Obviously you’re not much better at it yourself.”

“Obviously,” Duncan snapped. “And I’ve got the cramp in my neck to prove it.”

Marsali sighed loudly. “Could you please just get us free, Uncle Colum, and leave off discussing my sinful nature until a more convenient time?”

Shaking his head in chagrin, the wizard unsheathed a bone-handled knife from his belt and knelt in the sand. His hazel eyes unfathomable, he raised the long curved blade to Duncan’s neck, then hesitated.

“I’ve always known you would return, my lord.”

Duncan grunted, pretending to be unaffected by the keen perception in Colum’s eyes. “Then you must be a true mystic because I had no intention of setting a single foot on this godforsaken land again until the Crown ordered it two months ago. Now, are you going to cut me loose or not?” Colum positioned the knife between Duncan and Marsali, severing the unwelcome bond that held them with one skillful slash.

“There. It’s done.”

“Well, thank God,” Marsali said, springing to her feet in a shower of flying sand.

Duncan straightened, his face dark with embarrassment, and brushed off his tight black trousers. “Thank God is right. What a bloody absurd day this has been from beginning to end. You, Marsali, are to ride directly back to the castle and await my orders.”

“Too late, my lord.”

“What?” Duncan said, looking up with a frown.

“I said you’re too late.” Colum scratched his sparse white beard, his gaze moving beyond Duncan. “My niece is already gone. I’m afraid it will take more than a few harshly spoken words to control her.”

D
isbelieving, Duncan glanced up at the black scowling cliffs, toward the sea, then back into the shadowed orifices of the caves. As impossible as it appeared, Marsali had vanished. Frustration pounded at him like the waves at his feet.

He was horrified at the way he had treated her, shamed her, desired her. In his mind he had always pictured Andrew’s daughter growing up to marry the foreign prince her father had coveted for his only child. But this. Barefoot, bedraggled, incorrigible, and so inexperienced she’d not only let Duncan steal a kiss, but had invited others with her guileless response. He could have taken her with ease; the thought unsettled him.

“Where the blazes did she go?” he demanded of the wizard who stood calmly observing him and who, now that Duncan had risen to his full height of six feet two inches, seemed rather frail and far less threatening than a few moments earlier.

“I cannot say, my lord,” Colum said with a weary shake of his head. “Marsali comes and goes like a cat, at all hours, to unknown destinations. The girl exhausts me.”

Duncan walked farther down into the water, his heart accelerating with anger that she’d slipped away from him again. “You’re her flesh and blood,” he said over his shoulder. “Why have you allowed her to run wild?”

Colum joined him at the shoreline, apparently unconcerned by the waves lapping at his legs. “Am I a shining example of the conventional life, my lord?”

“She’s liable to get herself arrested, or killed,” Duncan said, his voice sharp with accusation.

“I don’t think she cares.”

“That’s ridiculous.” The thought of a young mischievous spirit like Marsali’s headed down a path of self-destruction pierced Duncan’s usual cynical view of the world. “It doesn’t make sense for her to take such risks with most of her life still ahead of her.”

“She has lost so much,” Colum said reflectively. “Her parents, two brothers, her first love. Why should she believe her future holds anything more than heartache?”

Duncan was silent, finally catching sight of Marsali farther down the beach, walking her horse with heartbreaking loneliness through the lacy silver surf, no one caring enough to stop her. He knew what it was to suffer loss and lash out in pain. Perhaps, because he was male, his reaction to life’s assaults had been violent and aggressive; he had struck out blindly in his hurting, and he had hurt others on his way.

For the first eleven years of his life, he had been raised in an atmosphere of ignorance, violence, and neglect. His mother’s love, when she had dared defy her husband to show it to him, had probably saved Duncan from complete emotional annihilation. His older sister, Judith, a victim of her father’s abuse herself, had tried to protect her little brother and save them both with her constant prayers to a God Duncan thought either could not hear them or did not care.

But Marsali Hay had been raised by a gentle loving father, a man who would despair of his daughter’s sad destiny. She was not cursed with the darkness, the wild violence in her soul, that Duncan battled against nearly every day of his life. No, Marsali’s way of denying her grief was to plunge headlong into danger herself while helping others.

“If not for Andrew, I would long ago be dead,” he said aloud, staring at her receding figure until he lost sight of her. “Someone has to help his daughter.”

“Aye,” Colum quietly agreed, his face shuttered.

“You’ve given up on her,” Duncan said, surprised at the anger and dismay he felt.

“She’s almost a woman grown. Saving Marsali would take more time and dedication than I have left on earth, my lord.”

Duncan shrugged his massive shoulders. “Time and dedication are two things I do not have myself.”

“But you have power, my lord.”

“Yes,” Duncan said reluctantly, lifting his face to the eerie blood-red sky. “I have power, for what little it’s worth. The question is how best to use it.”

L
ess than an hour later, Marsali sneaked into her uncle’s cabin in the bowels of the wrecked ship that listed at permanent anchor in a bed of submerged rocks. The smoke of sandalwood incense stung her eyes, and she blinked, her vision readjusting to the candlelit gloom.

Waves battered the ship’s hull at periodic intervals and brought showers of surf through the porthole, only partially protected by the leather targe her uncle had nailed to the wall.

As she ducked to avoid the next saltwater assault, she stumbled over the wooden bucket set in the middle of the floor; she assumed its function was to catch the water leaking through the splintered deck above. To regain her balance she lunged for the desk bolted to the warped floor.

A ship’s bell went clanging over the edge.

“God of all creation!” Half-asleep, Colum exploded from the bunk where he had lain under a pile of quilts with a flannel-wrapped brick between his feet. “Could you possibly make a little more noise when you enter a man’s home, Marsali?”

She giggled, swinging around to face him. “You might consider not placing a bucket of water in the direct path of persons paying you a visit.”

A young woman’s irritated voice cut into the conversation from the doorway behind them, the door itself hanging on the threads of a rusty hinge.

“Och, you’ve gone and knocked over my sacred well water, Marsali, you clumsy thing! I almost broke my back lugging up that bucket.”

Marsali glanced back at her older cousin Fiona, her eyes widening at the woman’s unkempt appearance: a lopsided crown of woodbine on her forehead, wet sand and foxtail burrs plastered to her linsey-woolsey gown, her glossy black hair a bird’s nest of mist-lacquered curls.

Curiosity overrode Marsali’s own urgent reason for visiting. “Whatever have you been doing, Fiona?”

Fiona swept into the cabin like a gust of sea wind and tossed a handful of pebbles onto the desk. “Well, for the past seven evenings I’ve been at the high cairn studying how to get into the Otherworld. In fact, last night I managed to project my ethereal body into the strangest place, but nothing I do so far can budge my physical form.”

“What’s it like in the Otherworld anyway?” Marsali asked casually, helping herself to the silver chalice of water sitting on the desk.

Fiona gasped and bolted across the cabin to knock the chalice from Marsali’s mouth.
“Dhé
Mhor!
You almost drank the potion I brewed to arouse Hughie the shepherd’s lust.”

“I did drink it. Ugh.” Marsali shuddered and swiped her wrist across her mouth. “What a disgusting thought, arousing an old married man with a wen on his nose and whiskers in his ears.”

“It’
s for his wife to use on him, n
inny.” Fiona sniffed the contents of the chalice. “You of all people know I’ll die a spinster before finding a man worth the energy of casting a love spell. Who, I ask you, is worth arousing for a hundred miles?”

Marsali nodded in wholehearted agreement, more than a little disconcerted when Duncan MacElgin’s dark face sprung fully detailed into her mind. Now, there was a man unlike any other she or Fiona were likely to meet in their isolated Highland life. In fact, the MacElgin was larger than life, but Marsali had decided he was a sham, a fortress so tightly guarded against human emotion that a woman would receive more satisfaction from loving a pile of rocks.

And he had shattered her trust using only the truth as a weapon. His betrothed. The length of the summer, he had said. It was clear his sense of commitment lay on loftier goals than a forgotten Scottish castle. To think she had
kissed him, and liked it. Aye, her lips still felt pleasantly bruised with the memory. Worse, she had done his damn laundry, scrubbing his clothes in the cold water of a wooden trough until her knuckles bled.