Let Me Be Your Hero (21 page)

The right man comes at the right time.

Italian proverb

H
e saw her as soon as he stepped into the dungeon, lying on a pile of straw in the corner of her tiny cell. There was precious little light, but nevertheless, it was enough light for Fraser to recognize the long skeins of fiery red hair that curled about the small form in the corner. Her back was toward him, and bits of straw were tangled in her hair, but it was Claire.

“Claire…lass…” He saw the cross she had chalked on the stones of her prison, and then he saw the words Do Not Forget—the Graham clan motto. He was choked with emotion, both for her faith and in knowing that even when she was faced with the end, she thought of him.

Aye, he would never forget. Fury, white-hot and intense, welled within him. He was sorry he took the time to have papers for Lord Walter’s arrest drawn up, because he would like nothing better than to give him a sword, and then kill his miserable hide in a fair fight.

Fraser came farther into the cell and paused long
enough to shove his torch in the iron receptacle, and then he leaned his sword against the wall. He kneeled next to her, not realizing the wealth of emotion he still had for her until he placed his hand on her shoulder and felt nothing but bone. He turned her toward him and gave her a shake as he called out her name once more. “Claire…lass…”

She did not stir. He pushed the matted and tangled hair back from her face, and saw the sunken places beneath her cheekbones. Even in the stingy light, he recognized the unhealthy pallor of her skin, and the purplish-yellow tint of a bruise across her cheek, and he knew instantly where it had come from.

He was praying intensely,
Dinna let her be dead….

“Claire…”

Her eyelids fluttered and his heart soared. Thanks be to God, she wasna dead. He noticed she kept her left hand tucked beneath her, and when he pulled it from under her body, he saw the gold wedding band he had placed on her finger when they married. He tried to open her fist, and she stirred, then said, “No…dinna…”

He pried her fingers apart and the ring slipped down her bone-thin finger, almost falling into the straw, but he caught it in time. He saw the bit of straw she wound around the band so she could keep it on her finger, and understood why she kept her hand fisted. He held the ring up and turned it as he looked inside and found the inscription he sought. I Will Defend Thee,
Ne Oublie.

He threw back his head and fought the anguish that made him want to let forth with an agonized cry, but not wanting to frighten her, he simply said, “Why, Claire…why?” Why had she denied him the right to
stand beside her, to protect her, to love and honor her as his wife?

Why had it come to this? When he realized how close he had come to losing her… Had it not been for her sister’s determination to learn where Walter was taking her, and Kenna’s brave ride through the night, dressed in the clothes of her dead brother…

Emotion clogged his throat and brought tears to his eyes. Claire…to see her thus.

Her eyes fluttered then closed. He called her name again, and saw her brows rise, as if she was trying to open her eyes and found the task too difficult. He gathered her in his arms and drew her close, then with a gentle shake, he said, “Claire, open your eyes. ’Tis Fraser, lass. I have come to take ye home.”

The brows lifted again, only this time he found himself gazing into the same beautiful hazel eyes he feared he might never see again. He saw the despair and the resignation to her fate in their depths, and he was determined to replace that with a desire to fight and to live. He had lost her once, and God be with him, he would not lose her again.

To find her alive, when he half expected to arrive too late staggered him, and left him bereft of words. He was both overjoyed and overwhelmed with every tender feeling, every emotion he ever felt for her. He buried his face in her hair and whispered her name over and over, like a litany….

Claire…Claire…Claire…

He heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, and he reached for his sword.

“Fraser, where are ye?”

Calum… He laid his sword down.

He saw the parched lips move in a wordless attempt, and he turned and called out to his brother, “Calum! In here.”

The tread of boots, the ring of spurs, announced Calum’s arrival. When he stepped through the open doorway, Fraser said, “I need drinking water…quickly.”

When he looked back at her, he saw she had moved her hand enough that she could clutch his sleeve in her small fist, as if she wanted to be certain he was real, and if so, to hold on to him so he could not leave.

“I have come to take ye home, lass. My brothers are here with me. They are rounding up Lord Walter and his men. He will ne’er bother ye or yer sisters again.”

Calum returned with the water and hovered nearby while Fraser gave her small sips. “She is bone where there ought to be flesh. See if ye can find a kitchen and something for her to eat, and send someone to scout the inside of the castle. I need to know if there is a bedchamber in the wing that is still intact.”

“Would it be better to take her to an inn?”

“Aye, mayhap it would, but she is in no condition to make any more of a journey than to the nearest bed. The bastard has starved her nigh to death.”

“Ye came.”

“Aye, Claire, I ken I would walk barefoot through the fires of hell for ye if ye have need o’ me.”

She clutched his sleeve more tightly and managed a weak smile before she closed her eyes, and it brought tears to his eyes when he tried to move, and saw that even in sleep, she would not relinquish her tight grip upon his sleeve.

“I thought mayhap it would do her good to drink
this,” Calum said when he returned with a cup of warm broth. “Seems Jamie caught Lord Walter when he was about to sit down to a hearty soup of barley and beef.”

“And the bedchamber?”

“Niall is making the rounds now. If ye dinna need anything else, I will go back to help them secure the castle.” Calum paused with a quick glance at Claire. “Do ye need any help carrying her inside?”

“No, thank ye, I can manage from here on oot.”

Calum smiled. “Looks like she has a fair grip on ye.”

“She has always had that,” he said, “only she did not know it.”

“Aye, I ken she wants to make certain ye dinna slip away. Puir lass,” Calum said, and with a wink and a quick salute, he was off to find his brothers.

Fraser raised Claire to a half-sitting position. “Claire, I have some broth for ye.” He held the cup to her mouth, but it took some coaxing to get her to take that first sip. “Try to drink it slowly. And drink it all. You need to regain some of your strength, ye ken.”

She nodded and took another swallow. After that, she took a swallow each time he brought the cup to her lips.

She seemed better by the time she finished the last drop, and he felt a surge of happiness when she said, “How did ye find me?”

“It is a long story. I will tell ye after I get ye safely oot o’ here.”

An orange on the table
,

Your dress on the rug
,

And you in my bed
,

Sweet present of the present
,

Cool of night
,

Warmth of my life.

Jacques Prévert (1900-1977), French poet.

Paroles
, “Alicante”

T
hey remained at Kalder Castle for several days, to give Claire time to regain her strength. Fraser used this time to answer Claire’s questions and to give the real credit for her rescue to her sisters, especially Kenna’s daring ride to Edinburgh, wearing Kendrew’s clothes.

She told him about the changes in their lives after their divorce and he chastised her for not asking for his help. By the night before they were set to leave, they had discussed everything save the one thing that hung in Claire’s mind.

How did Fraser feel about her?

They finished dinner a few minutes before, and Fraser walked Claire to her room. When they stopped
outside her door, he asked her, “What are ye going to do, after ye return to Inchmurrin?”

“Throw Isobel’s arse into the loch, if she isna already gone.”

He laughed. “I ken she willna be there. I told ye I took care o’ that before I left. By now the sheriff has arrested her and she awaits her fate in jail.”

“I hope my sisters are all right.”

“Jamie sent word to Aggie and Dermot afore he left Monleigh Castle, so they should be enjoying a reunion with yer sisters aboot now.”

Fraser was standing with one arm propped against the wall, the rest of his body leaning on it. When they lapsed into silence she took advantage of the lull to study his profile. Like his brothers, Fraser was a good man, with a strong sense of family pride. He was honest and forthright, and she knew that his name would one day be written in the history books, for there was no doubt in her mind that Fraser would be anything but one of the best lawyers Scotland had ever known.

“What are ye thinking?”

“That ye will be a great and verra famous lawyer. What are ye thinking?”

“That ye are showing promise, and one day, yer clan will speak o’ the Countess o’ Errick and Mains with pride in their voices.”

“Ye are making light o’ me,” she said.

He turned and took her in his arms. “Claire Lennox, there is not one little red hair on yer head that I take lightly, ye ken? Why do I have to keep making that point clear to ye?”

She wrinkled up her nose. “Mayhap I simply like hearing ye repeat it.”

He pulled her tightly into his embrace. “I swore to myself that I wouldna do this, but I seem to have a weakness for a lass with violently red hair and a saucy nature.”

“Violently red? Did ye say my hair is violently red?”

“Claire, will ye be quiet long enough for me to kiss ye?”

She snapped her mouth closed and relished in the most beautiful sound in the entire world—Fraser Graham’s laugh. She should have known better. She was, after all, a smart woman, so she attributed it to her lack of experience and her inadequacy when it came to such things as having the ability to discern the sensuality behind Fraser’s slow, lazy smile.

He took both her hands in his and drew them to his lips and kissed them softly—first one palm, then the other. Naturally, it had the appropriate devastating effect, and everything internal collapsed faster than a house made of playing cards. Inside, she felt positively molten.

He pushed her sleeves up, allowing his fingers to caress the sensitive skin of her wrists, where her pulse beat the strongest. “In spite o’ everything, I still miss ye.”

Claire’s heart pounded and she opened her mouth to speak, and sneezed instead. Another sneeze followed that one.

“A healthy sneeze for one so small.”

“Size can be deceptive, and some small things can be verra exciting.”

“Careful,” he said.

Tears banked in her eyes. “Oh, Fraser, I am so verra
sorry for everything horrible I did to ye, and I hope ye can forgive me for it.”

Her next words died in her throat when Fraser’s lips covered hers tenderly. With slow languor, he trailed kisses over her skin, drawing her out of herself and into him.

When she leaned into his kiss and their bodies aligned, Fraser opened the door to her room and led her inside. He leaned against the door and drew her to him.

She saw the way his gaze drifted from her face to the bed. Her heart began to pound. If he was contemplating the bed, he just might be tempted beyond himself to make love to her.

So, why was he standing there as if he were a decoration—which he was, of course, because she wanted him to decorate the space on the bed, with her next to him.

She lifted her face to his. He kissed her lightly, then took her hand. “I have a better idea.”

He led her to the bed and lay down beside her. He rolled on his side so that he was lying half across her, with his top leg nestled between hers. While he kissed her, his hand deftly unfastened several buttons to allow his hand to slide inside, where he caressed her breast, then took the nipple between his fingers, before he replaced them with his mouth, alternately sucking and pulling it between his teeth.

She felt the contracting response between her legs and they moved apart at the slightest pressure from his legs. His hand ran over her skirt and pulled it upward, higher, and higher yet.

She gasped when he slipped his fingers inside her.

He kissed her long and hard, while his hand drove her on and on toward the edge. “I want to look at ye,” he said, and pulled her skirt higher.

She was breathing heavily, yet languid and relaxed beneath his warm gaze. She was lost in her own world of mounting pleasure, when Fraser whispered, “Raise yer hips.”

She did as he asked, and realized he was removing her drawers, so that nothing touched the lower half of her body, save his gaze. She felt his mouth kissing her and her legs moved farther apart in an unconscious movement. She heard a groan, half recognizing it came from her. Time and again he kissed her, deeply and tantalizing, until she writhed and begged him to keep going, only to say the next moment, “I canna stand it, Fraser. Stop.”

He raised himself up on one arm, while the heel of his palm continued to torture her, then it moved away. “Ye are so beautiful here, where everything comes together in the colors of a rainbow.”

She seemed to lose herself after that, as time became like beads strung on a chain, stacking against one another. She tried to grasp the moment as dizzy seconds passed, but although she reached for it, she couldn’t quite sort who she was, and where she was, and whom she was with, and what it all meant in relation to the sun, the earth and two people in search of answers. Only jagged moments sliced into her consciousness, and visions of Fraser’s dark, beautiful hair, a glimpse of candlelight, the thunderous sound of a powerful wave crashing headlong against the rugged crags of mountains rising out of the sea.

I love ye, Fraser. I love ye…. I love ye…. I love ye….
And I dinna ken why I canna say that to yer face. Surely ye must ken how I feel. Canna ye see it in my eyes? Canna ye hear it in my voice? Canna ye tell me ye love me? I am so close to ye, and yet so far away.

He remained where he was, with his hand behind her neck, and she thought that any moment now, he was going to kiss her again, but when a rather inordinate amount of time passed, she sighed and closed her eyes.

She heard him chuckle. He lifted her hand and kissed it. “The choice is yers, Claire. Do I go or stay?”

He seemed to be in possession of an inordinate amount of patience, but at last he said, “Claire, do ye have a preference? Is yer silence a yea or a nay? Or are ye afraid to make a decision? I never figured ye for a weakling.”

“Oh, Fraser, I am so verra afraid to ever make another decision. I have made too many bad ones. Sometimes I feel like I must be going crazy.”

His features softened. “No, Claire, ye are not going crazy. Never ye.” His arm went around her, and she flopped against him as if she were stuffed with cornstalks.

He stroked her arm, and neither of them said anything for a while. She inhaled and released a deep breath. Having him here beside her lifted all the weight she felt bearing down upon her. “I am glad ye are here, Fraser.”

She pegged her feelings as a mixture of admiration and gratitude, so she was unaware, at first, of exactly what was going on between them. It wasn’t until she looked into the blue depths of his eyes that she felt the zing of a current of emotional transference between them, and she identified it by its name: awareness.

The teasing banter, the jovial play on words vanished, and taking its place was a fully charged thunderbolt of intense desire. She was melting from the look in his eyes. She did not know where they were going from here, but she knew where they would end up, and she wanted it, had wanted it for so very long. There were no obstacles, or fears, or thoughts of a failed marriage in their past. There was only now. He had come without her asking, at a moment when she needed him most. She loved him so much, her heart hurt.

“Claire…”

The husky raggedness of his voice as he whispered her name sent ripples of exquisite pleasure washing over her. The next thing she knew, he shifted his position so he was leaning over her, his face mere inches above her own. He covered her face with kisses, time and again, as if he had been commanded to leave no place un-kissed.

She was melting again and was barely conscious of him pulling it away. A ripple of excitement followed the chills. Her heart was pounding hard; she wondered if it would stop from pure exhaustion. As if he knew, his hand came to rest on the place between her breasts, where her heart beat the strongest.

“Does yer heart beat for me, Claire? Do ye feel the same excitement I feel when I touch ye?”

“It always did, and it does now,” she said. She groaned when he lay his head between her breasts and listened a moment, before he shifted slightly and began to kiss her breasts, her belly, and lower. His hands were spread across her waist, his thumbs circling and teasing her skin to acute sensitivity, then moving lower to trace the sunken valley beneath the bones of her hips.

She shuddered and sucked in her breath. What he was doing? It was agony. It was ecstasy. She could not remember him taking so much time, and paying so much attention to each little part of her, touching, kissing, loving, until she thought she could spend the rest of her life lying beneath his spell.

After a while she began to think he did it on purpose, that he knew he was driving her wild with wanting him, and yet he continued, touching just the right spot and moving so agonizingly slow that she wanted to scream from the torment and the pleasure of anticipation.

He was so thorough and calculating that she almost smiled, thinking he was a lawyer, and he had to be certain he had everything right before he proceeded to the next point. She never remembered that he kissed her feet before, and never, did she think, did he do so to the back of her knees. Was there a place on her anywhere that he missed? She was doubtful, and vowed even if there was, she was not going to tell him. So ready she was now for the mating, she was growing impatient. Faith, if she had the equipment he had, she would have flipped him on his back and had her way with him, but such was not her role.

She could inspire poetry, but she couldn’t write it.

Claire was at a point she had never reached before, and she wanted him with an intensity that almost frightened her, so strong it was. “Please, Fraser, I want ye.”

“I ken ye do, love, but ye must be patient. We dinna want to leave anything oot.”

He began to kiss a trail from her throat, over her breasts, her belly, and then he was only inches from
the juncture of her thighs. Instinctively, she tried to draw her legs together.

“Oh, no, ye arena going to miss the best part,” he said, burying his face against her.

“Oh…” She could not go on. Her stomach knotted and something inside her felt as if pressure was building and building, and she writhed beneath him, trapped in the exquisiteness of it, until she heard him groan and something inside her shattered.

She dug her fingers into his hair. “No more…I canna breathe….”

“We arena even halfway there yet.”

“I willna live that long, Fraser. Ye are going to kill me.”

“No, but I will in a moment,” he said, and he lifted his body ever so slightly and brought his face up to hers, and took her lips in a deep, plunging kiss that perfectly mimicked the movement of his hips when he thrust himself into her.

She clutched his shoulders. It had been so long, the feeling was foreign to her now, and she was so tight. But after a few thrusts, everything seemed to work perfectly together, like a mechanism so intricately designed and built with precision until the parts functioned together as a whole.

Whatever you called it, he was a master at the execution, and he had her moaning and whispering his name and shamelessly telling him not to stop. And then suddenly, she could not speak anymore, and her body followed the urging of his, until they moved as one.

Her hands stroked the satin smoothness of his back, and down over the hard musculature of his buttocks,
so well sculpted and surging with power. The body was truly a marvelous thing, and the capabilities of it were limitless. She found pleasure both in what he was doing, and what they did together, as well as the little excursions of exploration she made on her own.

And then she was hit with a powerful wave of feeling that made her toes dig into the bed. It was much stronger and more powerful than the shattering-glass feeling she felt earlier. This was a deep and intense wrenching of feeling, where her body felt as if it was pushing away from itself. She wanted to encompass him and draw him into her, and keep him there, for she knew this was the moment of complete and perfect union, when they were truly joined and committed, in agreement, each giving and receiving the pleasure and the joy.

Her wild and frantic breathing finally began to taper off. Her body gleamed with sweat. She was too weak to move, but Fraser’s arm lay along the side of her cheek, and she turned her head to kiss the soft skin there.