Beyond the Highland Mist

Page 61

“Adam! No!” Adrienne pleaded.
Adam seemed to ponder the situation a moment, then with an oddly triumphant look, he shrugged and tossed the piece into the forge.
To Adrienne, lying flat on the ground, everything seemed to happen in slow motion.
She watched in horror as the black queen soared through the air and sank into the glowing coals. Adrienne swallowed a sob as the flames licked greedily at the chess piece. Her only way out had been destroyed.
Hawk sighed his relief. Adrienne collapsed against the earth, staring blankly at the soil. The black queen was gone, the dense African wood no match for the blaze hot enough to forge steel.
No Moonie. No way home.
She was here in 1513—with him—forever.
Adam made a sound a shade too dark to be laughter as he leaned closer to the Hawk. Close enough that only the Hawk heard his low, mocking words. “She will warm my bed in no time at all now, fool Hawk.”
Hawk flinched. The smithy was right. His wife would hate him for what he’d done.
“What the hell are you doing at the forge in the middle of the night anyway?” Hawk snapped.
Adam grinned impishly. “I am ever a merry wanderer of the night. Besides, one never knows what prime opportunity might present itself for the plucking.”
Hawk snarled at the smithy.
Behind him, he heard Adrienne stagger to her unsteady feet. Her breathing was labored from her run, perhaps from shock as well. Bleakly, the Hawk studied the forge in rigid silence. Adrienne’s voice trembled with fury.
“Know one thing, Lord Douglas, and it’s all you’ll ever need to know. Remember it, should you someday think I may have changed my mind. I won’t. I despise you. You took from me what you had no right to take. And there’s nothing you can ever do to earn my forgiveness. I hate you!”
“Despise me as you must,” he said quietly, still staring at the forge. “But you can never leave me now. That’s all that matters.”
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble …
SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth
CHAPTER 19
TWILIGHT CREPT UP FROM THE OCEAN AND OVER THE CLIFFS with purple impatience that stained the walls of Dalkeith a dusky crimson. In his study, Hawk watched the night seep through the open doors on the west end.
She stood on the cliff’s edge, unmoving, her velvet cape tossing restlessly in the wind. What was she thinking as she gazed blindly out to sea?
He knew what he’d been thinking—that even the wind sought to unclothe her. He tortured himself with the memory of the sultry rose peaks he knew crowned her breasts beneath the silk of her gown. Her body had been shaped for this time, to wear clinging silks and rich velvets. To be a fine laird’s lady. To mate a proud warrior.
What the hell was he going to do? Things couldn’t go on like this.
He’d been trying to provoke her, hoping she’d make him angry so he could lose his head and punish her with his body. But time and again when he’d pushed she’d given him only cool civility, and a man couldn’t do a bloody thing with that kind of response. He whirled from the door and squeezed his eyes shut to erase all haunting memory of the vision of his wife.
Weeks had passed since that day by the forge—weeks lush with fragile days and delicate dawns, ruby nights and midsummer storms. And in those passing days, those jewels of Scotia’s summer, were a thousand sights he wanted to share with her.
Damn it! He pounded his fist upon his desk, sending papers fluttering and statues scurrying. She was his wife. She had no way back to wherever she’d come from! When was she going to accept that and make the most of it? He would give her anything she wanted. Anything but to leave him. Never that.
His existence had all the makings of a gilded, living hell and he could find no exit.
As swiftly as it had assailed him, his rage evaporated.
Adrienne, his lips formed the word silently. How did we come to this impasse? How did I make such a mess of it?
“Walk with me, lass,” he said softly, and she whirled upon the cliff’s edge, a breathtaking flutter of silver and cobalt blue. His colors, the Douglas colors. Unwittingly, it seemed, she wore them often. Did she even know that she donned in vivid splashes the very threads of the Douglas tartan, and that no name could have branded her more certainly his lady?
He waved a dismissive hand at his guards. He needed to steal precious moments with her alone, before he left. After hours of struggling, he had reached many decisions. First and foremost being that he was long overdue for a visit to Uster, one of his many manors and the most troublesome. He simply couldn’t keep neglecting his estates in his lovesick idiocy. The laird had to put in the occasional appearance and take an interest in resolving his villagers’ concerns.